G8 Summit: Protesting Against Imperialism And Its Corporate Agenda
THE SOCIALIST Party is taking part in the Committee for a Workers’ International’s intervention in the demonstrations at Evian. We are demanding: No to G8 world domination! Not to imperialism and capitalism! Fight for a socialist future!
THE LEADERS of the seven richest countries in the world and Russia, are in the French town of Evian for their annual G8 summit. They aren’t in Evian to help find health cures and they are certainly not in Evian for the ordinary people of the world.
Bush and Blair, the people who brought war to Iraq, Afghanistan and Chechnya, have come to meet France’s president Jacques Chirac and Germany’s chancellor Gerhard Shr-der.
Chirac and Shr-der, have spoken out publicly against the war. However, they did this out of their own imperialist interests. Now they are snuggling up to Bush and Blair in the hope that the national business interests they represent are not completely left out when the spoils of war are shared.
A vast programme of strategic and commercial negotiations awaits them, from deciding how Iraq and its resources are going to be carved up and which multinationals will get some or all the contracts, to preparations for another round of neo-liberal reforms during the next World Trade Organisation summit. It’s business as usual!
A month after George Bush declared the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime, many Iraqi people are living in fear and destitution under a US occupation. US imperialism has taken control of the oil fields, awarded its multinationals contracts for ‘reconstruction’ and is preparing to plunder the country.
As well as discussing the aftermath of the Iraq war the G8 will also discuss the global economic crisis of capitalism and how to make sure it is workers and young people who pay the price of this crisis.
Savage attacks are being prepared and carried out against our right to a free decent education in France, Portugal and Britain. In Germany, preparations are being made to cut unemployment benefit and social services.
Since Bush took office in the US, two million workers have lost their jobs. The G8 acts as a board of management for global capitalism. The World Bank, IMF and the WTO implement their policies which centre on privatisation and deregulation in the dash for profits.
Global capitalism ruthlessly plunders the whole world, especially Africa, Asia and Latin America. Giant corporations account for 80% of world industrial output. Despite economic growth during the 1990s, 2.8 billion people worldwide survive on less than $2 a day – a greater number than the entire world population in 1950.
The Committee for a Workers International (CWI the international socialist organisation to which the Socialist Party is affiliated) is building an international organisation of workers and young people to fight against global capitalism and imperialism and for a socialist society.
