BY JONATHAN STRAUSS
PORTO ALEGRE Cuban National Assembly president Ricardo Alarcon reaffirmed the internationalist and socialist perspective of the Cuban Revolution in a speech from the chair of a thematic panel at the World Social Forum on January 28. On the anniversary of Jose Marti's birth, Alarcon quoted the Cuban national hero:We will conquer injustice.
Alarcon said capitalism begins the third millennium with a series of lies. The global village promised by new technologies is dominated by a few corporations and inequalities that are greater than ever. The US proceeds with an arms race without reason, inventing new enemies: people abroad are threatened by nuclear and conventional warfare and invasion, while US workers are tricked by armamentism.
Perhaps the biggest lie, Alarcon said, is that with neo-liberalism politics would retreat and the market would provide for the community's welfare. Political intervention in the interests of corporate profits has strengthened.
The new international order is imposed by government, specifically the United States government. This government exercises a historic concentration of power over both allies and adversaries.
US workers are also affected: they suffer a high rate of exploitation, a lack of health care and education, and poverty. Their alienation is evident even in relation to the internet, where the desire to access it far exceeds ability to do so, especially among Latinos and African-Americans.
The US also uses its position to benefit from the United Nations. While benefiting from the presence of the UN headquarters in New York, the US both pays less to the UN than it should and uses the UN to pursue its foreign policy. The UN is not able to implement its decisions, such as those on aid levels and the environment, if this contradicts US positions.
The US, Alarcon said, is trying to impose its model on the whole world. Its model of representative democracy, however, is emptied of substantive content. The domination of money has made a farce of democracy.
The US government serves the richest of the rich. The international financial institutions are its tools, dismantling any other authority by demanding privatisation and government spending cuts.
The rest of the population are not citizens but consumers, Alarcon said. Abstention among them is increasing rapidly and corruption is inevitable. But this is not a rejection by the politically aware.
Alarcon accused the US electoral system of scandalous fraud, lacking the independent electoral commission the US government demands of other nations. Holding elections on a working day meant only a part of the population was expected to take part.
Alarcon noted the court battles over the US presidential election had only been about recounting the vote, not those who were denied it. A new vote would have recognised the popular prerogative, but in the US the people have no more rights than to vote once every four years. Plutocratic rule is the norm.
Then there are those who are not even citizens. The US had erected a Berlin Wall on the Mexican border. More than 750 people have died trying to reach California from Mexico. The chief role of the Mexican consulate in San Diego is the collection of cadavers.
Migration between jobs, if not countries is becoming a way of life, Alarcon noted. Job security and full-time work are disappearing.
Citizens retain the illusion of representation. But all the propaganda about the end of history tries to convince them not to have aspirations. The dream of those who rule in the US is ideological cloning and to make US society one in which human beings don't count.
Alarcon said there is a need to move from the domination of profit to a socialist society. Even some capitalist ideologists had predicted this, but capitalism will not fall on its own.
A fight is needed for a truly human order, Alarcon said. He pointed to the experience of the campaign against corporate tyranny, which has united workers, environmentalists and supporters of democracy in a broad front: a new international, opposed to sectoralism, is possible.
The future will be socialist, or there will be no future, Alarcon said. This socialism will be different, the heroic result of each people's struggle: it will realise people's ideals and be the apex of democracy.