WEEK OF CONVERGENCE IN WASHINGTON
Protests target IMF, World Bank, prison-industrial
complex
By Sarah Sloan
From April 9 to 17, young people from schools and workplaces
all over the country will fix their eyes on Washington as
months of planning culminate in major actions to say, "Shut
down the International Monetary Fund and World Bank and cancel
the debts of poor nations."
Another target of the D.C. protesters, on April 15, will be
the Justice Department, which oversees the vast
prison-industrial complex in the United States.
The demonstration there has been called by the International
Action Center to focus on the oppression and exploitation
inside the United States that is organically linked to the
plundering role of U.S. corporations and banks abroad.
Workers World Party, which has a 40-year history of fighting
U.S. imperialism at home and abroad, is preparing to
participate in these actions.
"We salute and join with all those taking to the streets in
the next week to demonstrate against these institutions, which
have wreaked so much havoc around the world. It has always been
young people who have led struggles of the working class around
the world," said Gloria La Riva, the party's vice-presidential
candidate.
"In this week's demonstrations and beyond, we have to be
more than an activist movement fighting the IMF and World Bank.
They are agents of a system, capitalism. And they are tools not
just of capitalism in general, but of U.S. imperialism. We must
fight the leading imperialist power that displays the most
aggressive tendencies of capitalism, which is the U.S. Our main
enemy here at home is the main enemy of working people
everywhere.
"That is why it is so appropriate that these historic
actions are taking place in Washington, D.C. This is home to
the Pentagon and the CIA," La Riva pointed out.
"How many times have they intervened against governments
that resist the aims of U.S. capitalism? Whether it's the
austerity 'structural adjustment' programs imposed by the IMF
and WB, or plain old-fashioned economic expansion cloaked in
humanitarian disguise, the Pentagon is there to club countries
that resist back into line."
'Shut down
prison-industrial complex'
Monica Moorehead, WWP's presidential candidate, will be
helping to lead the April 15 march at what she calls the "U.S.
Department of Injustice." The goal of this demonstration--to
say "Shut down the prison-industrial complex"--is important
because "the PIC in the U.S. is the domestic component of
capitalist globalization and structural adjustment," says
Moorehead.
A 3 p.m. rally on April 15 at the Department of Justice, 9th
St. and Pennsylvania, NW, will be followed by a march. For
details see the Web site www.iacenter.org; or look for the
banners and placards in D.C.
Moorehead explained the connections between this
demonstration and those directed at the IMF and World Bank.
"The April 15 demonstration is a remarkable act of solidarity
with those in prison, especially Black and Latino people. The
destructive role played by the PIC in the lives of poor people
in the U.S. mirrors what the IMF is doing to destroy poor
people throughout the world, especially in the developing
countries," she said.
"Here in the U.S., 'structural adjustment' has taken the
form of slashing welfare, food stamps, health care, job
training and all other social programs. To enforce this, the
police forces have been built up to unprecedented levels and
given a license to kill, especially in the African American and
Latino communities.
"At the same time, there has been a monstrous growth of the
prison-industrial complex, so that today more than 2 million
people are in prison on any given day, the highest rate of
imprisonment in the world. More than 6 million people, a
majority of them people of color, are in the criminal injustice
system--jail, probation or parole," Moorehead concluded.
Prisons mirror slavery
The prison system is one of the grossest expressions of the
institutionalized racism that has been a fundamental feature in
the growth of capitalism in the United States for the past 400
years.
The unpaid labor derived from African slavery for nearly
three centuries provided the platform for the accumulation of
capital by a tiny segment of the U.S. population. U.S.-style
apartheid continued legally for another 100 years after the
abolition of slavery in 1863-65.
Today the prison system is the institutional legacy for
extreme racist repression.
The prisons are not only an instrument of terror against
working class communities. They are a source of super profits
for some of the biggest corporations in the United States,
including American Express, Starbucks, and TWA.
The prison-industrial complex cannot be separated from the
epidemic of racist police brutality sweeping the country. Nor
can it be separated from the killing machine called death row.
Almost 4,000 people are scheduled to be executed in the coming
years. There are no rich people on death row. Just as police
brutality and murder never affect affluent communities, the
death penalty is an instrument of terror inflicted by those who
hold power against working class and poor people.
Spreading poverty amid wealth
In the age of super-profits and corporations that spend tens
of billions of dollars just to buy each other up, 1.3 billion
people lack access to clean water and 2.6 billion people have
no access to basic sanitation. (United Nations Human
Development Report for 1999)
Untold wealth has been created, but not for the masses of
poor and working people. The world's 200 richest people more
than doubled their wealth in the four years prior to 1998 to
more than a trillion dollars. The assets of the three top
billionaires in the world are more than the gross national
product of the 48 least developed nations--with a population of
600 million people.
The other side of this enormous accumulation of wealth is
mass poverty. Some 1.3 billion people live on two dollars a day
or less. Some 880 million people have no access to any medical
services. For them a simple infection can result in death.
It is an obscenity that a few have so much when there is
such great human need. The reason for this is that the
resources of the planet have been hoarded by the few.
A graphic human illustration of this obscenity is this fact:
Africa's public debt service to Western banks equals four times
Africa's entire budget for health and education. Africa
shouldn't owe a single penny to imperialist countries.
Countries in Africa are poor because of plunder and
enslavement, which is the bloody history of capitalism.
Nearly a hundred years ago the U.S. labor leader and
socialist Eugene Debs said that property is theft. He meant
that a few people--the capitalists or ruling class--become
wealthy off the stolen labor of others by laying claim to what
is produced socially.
Though the ruling class can sometimes seem insurmountable,
the pursuit of communist revolution still burns bright because
it is the only solution to the impoverishment of the masses.
The working class and oppressed people must ultimately struggle
because they have no choice but to do otherwise. As Karl Marx
said, capitalism creates its own gravediggers.
Sarah Sloan, 19, is an organizer
with the International Action Center.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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