By James Petras and Robin Eastman-Abaya (Counterpunch.org)

Friday 17 March 2006

Since President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo joined the US global "War on Terrorism", the Philippines has become the site of an on-going undeclared war against peasant and union activists, progressive political dissidents and lawmakers, human rights lawyers and activists, women leaders and a wide range of print and broadcast journalists. Because of the links between the Army, the regime and the death squads, political assassinations take place in an atmosphere of absolute impunity. The vast majority of the attacks occur in the countryside and provincial towns. The reign of terror in the Philippines is of similar scope and depth as in Colombia. Unlike Colombia, the rampaging state terrorism has not drawn sufficient attention, le3t alone outcry, from international public opinion.

For an Anti-imperialist Front: let's realize the proposal of the President!

Report on the WSF in Caracas and the anti-imperialist gathering International Bolivarian Camp

Those who searched for clear answers within the usual multitude of the Social Forums – this time "polycentric" with Caracas as the point of Latin American reference – had to wait for the closing speech of Hugo Chavez, president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela:

Capitalism and Slavery, Eric Williams.

When in 1492 Columbus, representing the Spanish monarchy, discovered the New World, he set in train the long and bitter international rivalry over colonial possessions for which, after four and a half centuries, no solution has yet been found. Portugal, which had initiated the movement of international expansion, claimed the new territories on the ground that they fell within the scope of a papal bull of 1455 authorizing her to reduce to servitude all infidel peoples. The two powers, to avoid controversy, sought arbitration and, as Catholics, turned to the Pope-a natural and logical step in an age when the universal claims of the Papacy were still unchallenged by individuals and governments. After carefully sifting the rival claims, the Pope issued in 1493 a series of papal bulls which established a line of demarcation between the colonial possessions of the two states: the East went to Portugal and the West to Spain.

Theodore Allen
Volume 2 The Invention of the White Race: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (Verso Books, 1997). pp 3-13.

The Labor Supply Problem: England a Special Case

In 1497, within half a decade of Columbus's first return to Spain from America, the Anglo-Italian Giovanni Caboto, or John Cabot as he was known in his adopted country, made a discovery of North America, and claimed it for King Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch of England. The English westering impulse, after then lying dormant for half a century, gradually revived in a variety of projects, schemes and false starts. By the first decade of the seventeenth century, an interval of peace with Spain having arrived with the accession of James I to the throne, English colonization was an idea whose time had come.! In 1607 the first permanent English settlement in America was founded at Jamestown, Virginia. By the end of the first third of the century four more permanent Anglo-American colonies had been established: Somers Islands (the Bermudas), 1612; Plymouth (Massachusetts), 1620; Barbados, 1627; and Maryland, 1634.

Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Howard University Press, 1982
pp. 135-146.

The Coming of Imperialism and Colonialism
In the centuries before colonial rule, Europe increased its economic capacity by leaps and bounds, while Africa appeared to have been almost static. Africa in the late nineteenth century could still be described as part communal and part feudal, although Western Europe had moved completely from feudalism to capitalism. To elucidate the main thesis of this study, it is necessary to follow not only the development of Europe and the underdevelopment of Africa, but also to understand how those two combined in a single system-that of capitalist imperialism.

Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Howard University Press, 1982
pp. 82-91

Africa's Contribution to the Economy and Beliefs of Early Capitalist Europe
The kinds of benefits which Europe derived from its control of world commerce are fairly well known, although it is curious that the recognition of Africa's major contribution to European development is usually made in works devoted specifically to that subject; while European scholars of Europe often treat the European economy as if it were entirely independent. European economists of the nineteenth century certainly had no illusions about the interconnections between their national economies and the world at large. J. S. Mill, as spokesman for British capitalism, said that as far as England was concerned, "the trade of the West Indies is hardly to be considered as external trade, but more resembles the traffic between town and country." By the phrase "trade of the West Indies" Mill meant the commerce between Africa, England. and the West Indies, because without African labor the West Indies were valueless. Karl Marx also commented on the way that European capitalists tied Africa, the West Indies, and Latin America into the capitalist system; and (being the most bitter critic of capitalism) Marx went on to point out that what was good for Europeans was obtained at the expense of untold suffering by Africans and American Indians. Marx noted that "the discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the turning of Africa into a commercial warren for the hunting of black skins signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production."

A&S Members in Toronto are organizing an anti-imperialist reading group,
which will be meeting over the coming year. The aim of the reading group is to grapple with questions surrounding the development of capitalism, racism and imperialism, and what these mean for our organizing today.