 If you believe what you hear in the news today, you'd be forgiven to think that in fact the less advanced countries are a gigantic burden on the more advanced part of the world. We're told that the era of imperialism and colonialism is over and in fact what's happening is that the West or the advanced capitalist countries are sending aid to develop the less advanced countries. But if you just scratch a little bit on the surface, you'll find that the reality is quite different. According to official figures alone from 2012, we see that the less advanced countries in the world received a total of $1.3 trillion in aid and investments and so on coming from the West. But in the same period, $3.3 trillion flowed out of the less advanced countries. So far from the advanced part of the world financing and supporting the poor countries, it's the poor countries which are financing and supporting the rich in fact. And for every $1 of aid that is sent to the poor countries, $24 are pulled out. And of course, this is just the official figures. But this is a source of immense inequality. In 11 countries, United States, Japan, Germany, the UK, France and Australia, Australia and Canada, which comprise about 13% of the world's population, they hold 45% of the income in the world. And that's income according to purchasing power parity, which is actually a really bad way of calculating income. The real figure is much higher than 45%. Meanwhile, 45% of the world's population living in some of the poorest areas only gain about 9% of the income throughout the world. Now, it's been 50 years since we first put a man on the moon. And since then, science and technology has reached amazing new heights. You have unmanned vehicles and airplanes. You have automation and technology reaching new heights. It means that all of the major problems of humanity can be solved. And yet for the vast majority of the world's population, things such as roads, running water, electricity, housing and so on, it's not a given. Not to even talk about three meals a day. Education and healthcare, these things which are just the basic foundations of having a life, an ordinary life and to survive, are seen as luxuries in these countries. And under capitalism, they're left alone to rot away in a state of backwardness and barbarism and ignorance. Now, the crisis of the ex-colonial countries or the poor countries show really the impasse of capitalism as a whole. It's a system that's not even capable of carrying out the most basic tasks which are posed to it. In fact, the ruling classes, in particular the ruling class of the most advanced countries depend on this backwardness and on this inequality. And the exploitation of these billions of people, of poor people and the super-profits which are extracted through that exploitation, forms a fundamental pillar of modern capitalist society today. Now, the argument is always put forward that imperialism or Western intervention, as it also is called sometimes, or aid or whatever they call it, brings civilization to the backward nations. And this is an idea which has been spread throughout the media, the education system and all of the main means of propaganda of the ruling class. That, you know, what was once called the white man's burden, that's what the British called it when they colonized the world. But today, you know, they talk about Africa as an area where tribalism is chronic and people are just good for playing drums. In the Arab world, people are backward and just only think about religious extremism. And they have a certain quality that makes them need a strong leader and a strong man, and that's why you have all these dictatorships and so on and so on. And they claim that the intervention of the rich countries in these areas are civilizing and democratizing them, bringing them out of barbarism. But that argument doesn't hold in reality. If we look at the Middle East, for example, now just the Ottoman Empire, which was obviously a long time ago. The Ottoman Empire was almost throughout its existence an extremely rotten entity, extremely backward, extremely barbaric and based on pre-capitalist forms of society. But the Empire was still kept alive by British imperialism for centuries as a means of holding back the expansion of other European imperialist countries basically. And the British fought every single attempt at modernizing and developing Ottoman society and removing the pre-capitalist relationships which existed there. And even after the Empire collapsed after World War I, the Brits supported the Ottoman sultan against the Turkish bourgeois revolution, the Kemalist movement of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who led a revolution for basically modernizing Turkey and bringing it into the modern era, but the Brits supported the sultan. And when the sultan had used up all of his means and didn't really have anything like an elect to stand on anymore, they even supported him as he reached out to the tribes and the clergy, the former clergy and officials of the Ottoman Empire by issuing a fatwa, which was, we can say, the first act of modern Islamic political Islam and this was carried out with the support of British imperialism in a fight against a national revolution led by the Kemalists. Now the sultan was unsuccessful, he was overthrown by Ataturk and then the British swung over to support the Kurdish movement. But not the nationalist Kurds, the bourgeois nationalist Kurds or the democratic Kurds, but the tribal chiefs and the clans and the traditional institutions in the Kurdish areas to form a resistance movement or an army to fight against Ataturk in order to reestablish a caliphate. And again, that was the British who were supporting this, whereas the masses, the millions of masses in what's called Turkey today were fighting for emancipation from these institutions. It was the imperialists at the most modern capitalist power in the world, which was supporting the most backward pre-capitalist relations which existed in this area. Of course later on they dumped the Kurds as they would do many, many times after that and made a deal with Ataturk, but that was only in order to stop the expansion of the influence of the Russian revolution in fact, which was having reverberations throughout the world and in the Middle East. And this is the point that capitalism in its initial stages came on the stage fighting against backwardness and obscurantism, but as it develops it becomes itself the biggest feather for development. And in imperialism it rests on all that is rotten and decaying in society, it destroys the livelihood of the peasantry, it sabotages any attempt of modernizing society. And we see in reality the complete impasse of the system at a ten-time strength in the colonial world and the ex-colonial world. Now in its ascendancy capitalism as I said played a very, very progressive role. It came to power sweeping, especially in Europe where it came to power first, it swept away this very complex web of classes in feudal society which formed an extremely conservative force holding back society. It destroyed the previous land relations, it freed the peasantry, it crushed the landlord class, it united whole nations and for the first time destroyed the feudal particularism which was, there wasn't any such thing as a nation before capitalism. People were more connected to their own village or town or immediate region, but the capitalist united whole nations and this was an enormous step forward for humanity. And along with free competition these things laid the basis for the rapid development of the productive forces as we have seen in the past few hundred years. Now Marx also explained how once the system had saturated the domestic markets it immediately starts to, is forced to go beyond it basically because of the internal contradiction between the capitalist themselves. And it creates a world in its own image. And Lenin explained how this process in the period of imperialism which is the highest stage of capitalism is transformed and all of the progressive traits of capitalism basically turn into their opposites. Instead of free competition you have monopoly, instead of the liberation of the nations you have the oppression of the national liberation struggle and so on and so on. And this period is signified by the fusion of monopoly capital and finance capital along with the state and the concentration of capital, extreme concentration of capital on a world scale and the struggle for the division and the re-division of the world markets between the main capitalist powers. And with this struggle and this process which was the basis for the two world wars that we've seen and it's also this process which is the basis of the conflicts that we see today in the Middle East and beyond. Now Lenin argued that capitalism was a necessary stage in the development of capitalism and that it was caused by the inner contradictions of the system itself. And this theory he developed against Kowski who was the main theoretician of the second international who believed that imperialism was basically a political choice. That it was possible to reform imperialism and that imperialist wars and bloodshed and violence wasn't necessary but a political choice. And he suggested that there was a possibility of reaching a stage of ultra imperialism where all powers basically connected in one massive trust and there is basically a harmonious development, a peaceful development of capitalism at this stage without the inequalities and the contradictions that we see on a world scale today. This is an idea which is also echoed today when we see a lot of left people appealing to the UN or to bourgeois democracy or to human rights when they oppose imperialist wars such as Iraq, Afghanistan or the interventions in Syria and so on. But what these people really mean is what they really are saying is that a peaceful capitalism is possible, a peaceful imperialism is possible. And in reality what they're doing is that they are rallying behind their own ruling classes of each of their particular countries. And instead of exposing the interests of the ruling classes in the oppressor nations, they try to justify it. But say look, it's okay to go and dominate the world, it's okay to intervene and dominate other markets but do it in a nicer way. And they basically try to sell the basic premise of imperialism which is the need to expand its markets. But try to sell it and patch it up and only criticize the symptomatic parts of it while accepting de facto the essence of it. So in reality they call for a more humane imperialism with less blood and less killing. And here we see the second role besides the purely economic role that imperialism plays for the ruling class. Now Lenin quotes a very nice quote by Cecil Rose who is a famous British capitalist and colonialist. And Rose was reported to say, I'm going to read out the whole quote. He says, I was in the east end of London a working class quarter yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches which were just a cry for bread and bread. And on my way home I pondered over this scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism. My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem i.e. in order to save the 40 million inhabitants of the United Kingdom from this bloody civil war we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines. And the empire as I've always said is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war you must become imperialists. Now this shows how the bourgeois basically use the super prophets achieved from the oppressed nations to buy social peace at home. In particular at the tops of the labour movement. And it's this privileged position which ties the labour leaders and the labour bureaucracy to the ruling class and makes them basically an agent of the ruling class into the working class movement. And at the same time it also gives an avenue to permeate society and racist ideas which is on the one hand the racist propaganda that we hear is on the one hand a need by the bourgeois to justify the imperialism to justify their plunder and bloodshed and so on. But at the same time it's equally an attempt at using imperialism as a political tool to galvanize reaction and counter-revolution at home by whipping up nationalism and imperialist chauvinism. Now Marx wrote about the question of Ireland. He explained this process. He said, for a long time I believed that it was possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working class ascendancy. But deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never achieve anything unless it has got rid of Ireland. The English reaction in England had its roots in the subjugation of Ireland. So here we see that the key role of imperialism, maybe even in some ways more important than the purely economic role of imperialism for the ruling class, is to allow it to divide the working class on an international scale, whip up nationalism and rally the working class behind themselves. And therefore serious struggle against capitalism can only take place at the same time as a serious struggle against imperialism. Capitalism is international and so is the working class. And a defeat for the imperialism abroad is equally a defeat for the reaction and the ruling class at home. And vice versa. And the struggle of the oppressed nations is therefore also at the same time the struggle of the workers in the imperialist countries. And this also means that the workers in the imperialist countries have an extra duty in being extra uncompromising in the stance against imperialism, against their own ruling classes, in order to bridge this enormous mistrust that the nationalism and the imperialist plunder has imbued into the colonial and ex-colonial world and to the oppressed nations. And by that to forge the strongest possible working class unity on an international scale. Now in the oppressed nations, the bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations is not capable of carrying out the most basic tasks of the bourgeois revolution. Because they came onto the stage of history far too late and were far too weak in relation to the major capitalist powers to play a role. That means that the land question, the removal of the pre-capitalist relations, industrialization, bourgeois democracy, national liberation, all of these things is not capable of carrying out. And insofar as these tasks are carried out in the oppressed nations, it's only ever done as a concession to the revolutionary movements which threaten to go beyond the capitalism. For example, in Turkey where the British had to give concessions to the Ataturk regime because they were afraid of the spread of Bolshevism basically. And even then this is only carried out in an incomplete manner. And we see here that it's imperialism and capitalism itself that becomes the problem and the only solution is to go beyond the system and overthrow the system as a whole. And that defines the main tasks of the communists, of revolutionaries of the oppressed nations which stand in front of a very complicated task. Extra complicated because the class composition in the oppressed nations are quite complex. Because on the one hand you have the modern bourgeoisie, the modern working class which has been more or less built up by the intervention of the imperialists and by the spread of capitalism. But at the same time you have the tribes, the nobles, the landlords, the clergy, peasant communities, even nomads and so on which are from pre-capitalist periods but as I explained remain there because of the effects of imperialism. Throughout the Middle East and Africa you see millions of people living in tribal societies and even some people as I said as nomads. Tribal links in countries such as in the Arab Peninsula. There's a huge role, in fact there's a couple of tribes who have power in this area. In Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Sudan and many other places tribes still play a huge role and millions of people live in tribal societies. And meanwhile the working classes are relatively small compared to the rest of society. At the same time having an extremely oppressive, a massive imperialist power can overshadow and blur the class contradictions within the oppressed nation itself. Now for example in Egypt in 1919 there was a massive revolutionary movement. Now this was a country at that time with more than 100 years had been oppressed by the arbitrary rule of the British and the Ottomans. And during World War I the British drafted one and a half million Egyptians into the labor corp. They also arbitrarily seized crops, agricultural land, properties, basically did whatever they wanted to in order to support the British war effort and to buy social stability at home in Britain as well. And at the same time they brutally oppressed any kind of opposition coming from Egypt. But in exchange there was kind of a promise dangled in front of the Egyptians that after the war they would be given some form of independence. But of course after the war as it happened to all, more or less all of the other oppressed nations none of them were given independence, they weren't even invited to the negotiations. And this led to enormous anger within society. Now the main opposition party, the only real party existing at that time in Egypt was the Waft party which was a liberal party composed of the upper layers of the middle classes and the bourgeois, the domestic bourgeois and the landlord class. And they started, typical of a middle class organization, they started a petitioning campaign to collect signatures for basically in support of independence. Now little did they know this would become the spark of a mass revolutionary movement. Millions of people taking to the street fighting with the British going on strike. And the revolution basically ended with Britain giving formal independence to Egypt and also making a deal with the Waft party basically to come to power. But the Waft party, it was itself a party of bourgeois which was directly connected on the one hand to the imperialists themselves and to the landowners and to the landlords. They had no interest in changing the actual setup and the deal that they made with the British was basically that the British had bases throughout Egypt. They maintained control of all the main state, in the most important state institutions as well as the main parts of the economy. Essentially nothing changed. And this, the actions of the Waft party and the Waft party themselves embodies the colonial bourgeois democracy. That as long as there is this imperialist oppression they can kind of hide behind that because it blurs the class contradictions in society between them and the workers and the poor peasants and they can rally the whole nation behind them. But at the same time being tied to landlordism and imperialism themselves have no interest at abolishing any of these things but what they really want is to sit, they want to place at the table along with the big bourgeois. Now meanwhile the largest class by far in Egypt was the impoverished peasantry which lived in extremely backward and desperate conditions and its main demand was land distribution which is something that at once would have wiped away all of landlordism and all these pre-capital layers in Egypt and it would lay the basis for an actual bourgeois democratic revolution and modernize Egypt basically from the ground up. But the peasantry by its own nature because it's atomized, it's competing against each other, living at far distances can never play and also being dominated by the cities can never play an independent political role. It always rallies behind one of the major urban classes. Now this inevitably means that it would either have to follow... the revolution would be decided by which way the peasantry swung either behind the bourgeoisie and the urban petty bourgeois or behind the working class and therefore the main struggle became the struggle between the working class in the cities and the bourgeoisie there. And this is the main task throughout the oppressed nations and in the colonial and ex-colonial world even to this day that the essential struggle comes down to the proletariat fighting to win over the leadership of the peasantry and of all the middle layers and in doing so having the duty to expose the differences in the interests of those classes. Explain to the peasants that these people have no interest in actually carrying out the revolution that you want. That the working class led by the communists must expose this illusion of national unity which exists and break the movement on class lines. That's the only way they can carry out the revolution of the peasantry. That's the only way they can carry out the bourgeois democratic tasks of the oppressed nations. But here just like in the Russian Revolution which is exactly the same process the working class cannot stop at bourgeois democratic tasks. They cannot stop just by expropriating the land laws and introducing formal bourgeois democracy. It needs to continue to overthrow capitalism itself and implement a dictatorship of the proletariat which means what a Soviet state and a planned economy. On a capitalist basis, independence in itself cannot solve any of the problems facing the masses. And this was brilliantly summed up by James Connolly. He was saying to the Irish Revolutionaries he said if you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle unless you said about the organization of the social republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. England would be capitalist through her land laws through her financiers through the whole array of commercial and individual institutions she's planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs. And in the post-war period we saw a whole wave of revolutions erupting in the ex-colonial world billions of formally stagnant layers who were brought to political life by being mobilized into the imperialist armies by the shocks of war and also seeing an opportunity in the decline of British imperialism came to the fore in one revolution after another. And in these conditions, US imperialism which was the rising power at that point understood that direct colonial rule was no longer a viable option. But where these movements stopped short of overthrowing capitalism as in Zimbabwe, in Argentina, or even in Egypt the US used the financial and industrial power it had and it leaned on the local elites to create a sort of a crumper-door bourgeoisie a crumper-door capitalist class backed by US finance capital and this kind of rule through these and this indirect rule actually proved to be far more profitable and stable for US imperialism because governments could come and go but they would still dominate as long as the main pillars of capitalism remain the US could still dominate the country and fundamentally the relationship didn't change and we can see here that on a purely capitalist basis national liberation cannot be achieved. Now after World War II the colonies were bursting with revolutionary anger the authority of the Soviet Union reached new highs because of the defeats the victory of the Red Army over Hitler and this led to the rise of a huge leftist and socialist movement throughout the colonial world and especially in the Middle East in Egypt the betrayal of 1919 revolution radicalized society the vast majority of workers and intellectuals moved sharply to the left towards Marxism and communism unfortunately this didn't materialize in a communist party because of the mistakes of the Comintern nevertheless mass protests started to mount and in 1952 not having found an expression through a revolutionary party this was expressed by a coup carried out by a group called the Free Officers Movement in Egypt led by Gamal Abdel Nasser who overthrew the old Farouk monarchy now the Free Officers were kind of a mosaic of different types of people but they were basically nationalists and they weren't socialists they weren't leftists when they came to power at least not that much obviously they would have been affected by these ideas but on the one hand they were better educated than most of the Egyptians in their positions relatively high up in the state they had direct access on the one hand to European countries and to the more modern parts of the world and at the same time they could see the enormous incompetence of the colonial rule and of the ruling elite in Egypt and they wanted to restore Egypt's honor basically I think that's a basic kind of impulse they wanted to restore Egypt's honor and free it from backwardness and colonial oppression but after seizing power at each stage every time they try to carry out anything we don't have time to go into the details and the nuances of this but at each stage they faced the brutal oppression of the imperialist powers in 1956 Nasser wanted to build the Aswan Dam which would be an enormous source of electricity for the modernization very important element for the modernization of Egypt but Britain and the US pulled the credit line for Egypt and basically bankrupted the project so Nasser instead said ok well if that's the case then we're going to nationalize the Suez Canal which is built by Egyptians run by Egyptians and only the prophets are going to the British and this was an enormously powerful signal which sent reverberations throughout the world and Nasser was met with enormous enthusiasm by mass revolutionaries movements everywhere especially in the Middle East but everywhere in the world and he would do this continuously in the next period leaning on the mass movement to strike blows against the bourgeois and against the imperialism nationalizing many companies and building a national industry in effect for Egypt in fact at one point it's reported that he asked Stalin if he should just expropriate the whole abolish capitalism as a whole but Stalin said no it's better just to wait you know we don't want to disrupt things too much anyway he didn't do that in the end he didn't abolish capitalism but the similar process and similar movements took place many where in Syria it was a place where in the Middle East the process went the furthest there you had a series of coups where in effect expropriated the bourgeoisie and you had a system similar to the Soviet Union with a nationalized planned economy but run by a very tight dictatorship and again you had Afghanistan, Ethiopia, China and many other places these movements moving towards socialism in effect now this was a reflection of the conditions in the world because on the one hand you had the revolution in the west being delayed by the betrayals of the Stalinists and the social democrats and at the same time you had an overripe colonial revolution which in the absence of a leadership by the working class was forced nevertheless to go down the path of a worker's revolution because the basic test of modernizing society essentially a bourgeois democracy could not be solved on the capitalism and the results speak for themselves if you go to Egypt today you can say whatever you want about Nasser he was in effect a dictator but if you go to Egypt today basically nothing has been built since the time of Nasser you look at the trains, the factories the basic infrastructure of Egyptian society was built during the time of Nasser or Syria before the civil war was by far the most advanced country in the Middle East it was true that it was actually opening up going the Chinese way, opening up to capitalism and so on but the planned economy actually allowed Syrian society to get rid of unemployment and give healthcare free education and relatively compared with the rest of the region good living standard for the majority of the population all living layers in society were actually moving to the left moving towards socialism also obviously encouraged and impelled by the example of the Soviet Union now in Egypt this also left fewer and fewer layers for the imperialists to lean on and in Egypt the only movement that they could find was the Muslim Brotherhood which became the main opposition movement to the Nasserist movement now the Muslim Brotherhood was based around the layer of urban middle classes such as lower state employees like teachers and so on the lowest layers of state bureaucracy which was recruited from the bankrupted middle landowner class which enjoyed relative stability for many many centuries but with the rise of imperialism and capitalism their position became completely untenable they were verging on bankruptcy many of them had to move into the cities or face just going completely bankrupt in the villages and in the cities because they were in the big landlords they didn't have access to higher layers of the state they could only come into the bottom layers there was a ceiling above which they couldn't go over and being coming from this privileged position in effect from the villages where they were someone where people would come and ask them advice and so on they saw their position collapse they hated the imperialists they were jealous of the big landlords and the national bourgeois but at the same time they felt threatened by the rising working class movement the ideas of the Bolshevik revolution which all threatened its own insignificant traditionally based privileges and they concluded that the struggle was in effect a cultural struggle between the imperialist the European based modernizers and this was the imperialists as well as the communists and at the same time the domestic Islamic culture which was being colonized in the beginning these layers were part of Nasser's movement but as Nasser swung to the left and also he didn't want to really share power with anyone it was very brutal their classes intensified and they found that in the Islamic movement which was kind of left over from the Ottoman Empire they found a way out they formed a type of revivalist movement which called for a return to an era of re-establishing the privileges of the middle class and re-establishing the traditions and so on which would basically give them their all position back and in every way you can say in every sense of the word this movement was a reactionary movement and for this exact reason the imperialist, US imperialism could lean on these and began to develop them as a key ally in the region and along with the Wahhabi movement in Saudi Arabia which was similar although developed differently they used this Islamic fundamentalism as the most efficient tool to organize and to galvanize all these backward layers the tribal layers, the landlords all the pre-capitalist layers in society which all saw a danger in revolution and in communism in Afghanistan they had the first success with the rise of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda which fought against the pro-Soviet regime but this use of these kind of movements have continued as we can see right up until today now supposedly Islamic fundamentalists are against US imperialism the fact is that as a movement as a mass movement they could never survive a single day without the support of US imperialism so when they talk about bringing democracy to the Arab world and civilization to the Arab world we have to remember that in fact Western imperialism is the biggest backer of all that is backward and all that is barbaric throughout the Middle East now the crisis in the colonial countries reveals the complete dead end and the rottenness of capitalism and all of the barbarism and cruelty of capitalism is really at its full display here and so it's not surprising that a lot of young people are beginning, you know, waking up to political life and seeing this injustice they are attracted to these ideas such as post-colonialism which is very prevalent in universities and in academia today but in our opinion from Marx's point of view there's nothing progressive about the ideas of post-colonialism which is why in fact they are so prevalent in academia which is why they are pushed in every single university as the main and dominant political theory today because while it's true that the post-colonialism point out imperialism and racism and the oppression that the rich countries carry out and have carried out although they don't point out all of that oppression but they don't link this with the class nature of western capitalism instead they blame imperialism on western culture and in doing so they lump the workers and the capitalism into the same category and for them Marxism is an equally reactionary ideology or movement as that of imperialism because it's Eurocentric because it's imposing the European imperialist culture as you can see this is very similar in fact parallel to what the Islamic movement in Egypt started as and basically they claim that the national background your national background or your cultural background define how correct your ideas are obviously when you put it like that everyone can see that it's pure nonsense and instead of arguing for international working class unity against imperialism they struggle for increased representation of oppressed nations in the state and educational institutions and so on essentially this is nothing but identity politics which is the same as nationalism in the oppressed nationalism not the revolutionary nationalism of the masses but the counter-revolutionary nationalism of the middle classes in those area now these the people coming up with these theories they like to present themselves as very very radical but they only highlight the symptoms of imperialism and even then only some of these symptoms and never really pose any real threat to the system as a whole never pose a criticism of the essence of the system of class oppression of one class after another on an international scale now South Africa I think is the greatest example at least a great example because there are many of a result of this type of policy of the final conclusion of what this leads to here you have in South Africa a liberation movement the African nation congress coming to power on the basis of a revolution in the early 90s but then the ANC betrays the masses who are actually fighting for socialism they agree with the ruling class not to abolish capitalism but nevertheless they take over the state apparatus in South Africa they put black South Africans throughout the state apparatus through universities, schools, media all the way to the top to the presidential post they even introduce something called black economic empowerment which is a program which means that it's basically creating business opportunities for black people so all the big companies have to have a certain representation of black South Africans in their boards and through this you have a layer of people including Sila Ramaphosa who is now the president of South Africa and who was the leader of the mine workers union a very powerful movement with hundreds of thousands of people supposedly a revolutionary and the socialist and he amasses huge amounts of wealth by being on the boards of these mines and different companies through the BE through this well increased representation so to say and you have in 2012 where the workers of London and Marikana go on strike, on peaceful strike demanding higher wages that Sila Ramaphosa is on the other side of the barricade along with the rest of the capitalist class the state and the police they carry out a massacre of dozens of workers and wounds hundreds more i.e. the exact same methods that the apartheid regime used to oppress the black South Africans before that and continues exploitation of them and since then Ramaphosa has become he's also one of the richest men in South Africa by the way and he's become the president of the country as well now his fate is similar to a very slim layer of black South Africans but for the vast majority of black South Africans was changed before they didn't have access to electricity or water or housing well you have access now but the majority of people can't afford that education and healthcare is in an extremely dire state unemployment is around 50-60% amongst the youth and racism has by no means actually ended unemployment I think for white South Africans is about 67% but as I said for black South Africans is around 30% 25-30% if not more before you used to have small townships guarded by barbed wire where black people were in well now you have small townships guarded by barbed wire in which white people mainly and rich people live and where the majority of the populations do not have access the land question has not been solved there's hundreds of thousands of extremely poor peasants living in very very backward situation and this is essentially this but this movement nevertheless fulfills all of the aims of the post-colonial movements the decolonized movements and whatever they call themselves essentially what this theory represents I think is the interest of the Petit Bourgeoisie which is far more afraid in fact of the revolution that it is of the of the imperialists what they want to say is let us God the rest let us sit on the table they want to be the Ramaphosa's or if you want the Obamas of this world they want to sit at the same table as the capitalists not to overthrow them and instead of fighting for modernizing oppressed nations and bringing them out of the backwardness they fetishize backwardness in India they defend the caste system this is a natural way of life but obviously they would never want to spend a single day in one of the lower castes in the Middle East they defend religious obscurantism and political Islam in one way or another and in doing all of this they actually put themselves in the same camp as imperialism who they claim to be criticizing and against the revolutionary masses because in the past 70 or 100 years we've seen again and again that masses in the colonial world have been struggling against backwardness and against barbarism, against obscurantism against all of these things and it's been held back by the imperialists and on all fundamental matters therefore we can see that the philosophy of the post-colonial crowd is actually parallel to the religious fundamentalist groups that we see in many places around the world and we have to expose this we need to expose this everywhere and explain that the struggle against oppression and exploitation cannot be disconnected from the struggle against capitalism as a whole now look at Egypt today Nasser never abolished capitalism completely and therefore after his death there was a counter-revolution from within the regime with the help of U.S. imperialism U.S. finance capital which basically undid all of the gains of the Egyptian revolution and undermined them in one way or another and in the end fundamentally nothing has changed Egypt's independence is only in words the Egyptian capitalism cannot appease the basic needs of Egyptian society and Egyptian masses and the ruling class can only rely on the most brutal forms of dictatorship in order to maintain its grip around on power of course again backed by imperialist capital the 2011 revolution was in a way a continuation of the unfinished bourgeois democratic revolution in Egypt over the course of three years you saw five uprisings and two revolutions a whole series of governments came and went representing different factions of Egyptian capitalism but as long as Egypt is tied to capitalism and to the world market they couldn't do anything and they all followed the same policy in fact they followed the exact same policy in that the main policy of all of these governments is in order to carry out the IMF packages which was being negotiated in that whole period which is finally been implemented by the CC regime now the only solution to actually achieving in Egypt a lot of people the Petit Bourgeois were saying no let's just fight for democracy and then later on we can look at all things yes but why is it there's no democracy in Egypt because capitalism cannot afford democracy in Egypt on a capitalist basis of a deep crisis of capitalism you cannot achieve even bourgeois democracy and the only way to achieve the main demands the basic demands of the Egyptian revolution is to expropriate not to support one part of the ruling class or another but to expropriate the ruling class as a whole and for the masses to take power into their own hands and of course this is not an easy thing having done so immediately the socialist revolution in Egypt would be isolated economically the imperatives would isolate economically they would send probably also military detachments one way or another to oppose it and that just means that it's extra important again equally important for the revolution to expand and appeal to the international working class in the region as well as in the oppressed nations to form the strongest international class alliance what we see here is that capitalism on a world scale has outplayed its role the same parasites who perpetuate barbarism in the less advanced countries carry out austerity and attacks against living standards in the advanced countries and the struggle for the liberation of the oppressed nations is the same as the struggle for the liberation of the working class in the oppressed nations by overthrowing the whole system on an international scale that's the only way to achieve true liberation and lay the basis for harmonious development of society in the interest of the vast majority of the population thanks