2023-07-28 15:52:57
The social outbreak is latent
On July 4, a social uprising took place in the city of Bucaramanga by a group of residents who set fire to the motorcycle of a traffic policeman, as a reaction to the death of a young man who did not obey the order to stop for traveling through a exclusive lane for public transport. The initial version that circulated said that the policeman had thrown a traffic cone at him and made him fall, killing him.
Editorial of the Virtual Socialist of the PST – Colombia
The day of indignation only lasted one day, since it was a spontaneous revolt without a leadership to organize the fight. The repression unleashed by the police was brutal, there were arrests and several protest participants were quickly prosecuted, while the murderous police officer was only “opened an investigation”, despite the fact that the homicide was committed in broad daylight and in the presence of witnesses.
The class struggle cannot be denied
This fact has been an alert that the government and the bourgeoisie cannot ignore. The “nobodies” exist and have not forgotten their aspirations to live “tasty”, nor the capacity for collective struggle.
While the corrupt, the murderers of young people and those responsible for torture and disappearances remain free, revictimizing the victims, dozens of young fighters are in jail, and some are on hunger strike due to the appalling prison conditions.
The media allude to “investigations” from which they conclude that the social outbreak did not exist and that it was a “guerrilla takeover or plan” orchestrated by FARC dissidents, according to Caracol.
The media seek to erase the national strike and the dignity of the struggle from the historical memory, muddying it and generating a narrative to falsify history with a version at the service of the electoral campaign of reactionaries like Diego Molano.
Regardless of whether or not guerrilla organizations, youth, workers, residents of popular neighborhoods and all of us who were on the streets participated in the strike in 2021, we know that the process we are experiencing was not ordered by anyone, and we learned a very important lesson: the fight serves and scares the powerful. The class struggle exists, is present and cannot be denied.
If the firefighters can’t, the prairie will catch fire.
The spontaneous and radical uprisings have the same content as the social outbreak of the national strike of 2021. It is the manifestation that social discontent is latent, that it only takes a spark to start the fire, if politicians and union bureaucrats, like firefighters They do not turn it off quickly, channeling discontent into bourgeois elections with promises of change, which was how they dismantled the 2021 strike, saving Duque and his government after having lost two ministers overthrown by the mobilization.
Discontent is international and contagious
In Colombia, in the memory of the dispossessed, it became clear that counter-reforms and ministers who represent the interests of businessmen, cattle ranchers and drug traffickers can be overthrown. Patience has a limit, the social crisis is worldwide and discontent is contagious.
We have already seen that the French people do not want a pension counter-reform and they have expressed it in the streets burning cars in the face of uncontained rage. We must not forget that it is a people that does not have a king or queen because many years ago they were put through the guillotine, and decades later, in 1871, they experienced a workers’ revolution, the Paris Commune.
Real unemployment exceeds 50%
According to the latest government data, “labour informality” exceeds 56%, which implies that more than half of the families in Colombia live by rummaging, and that real unemployment exceeds 60%; hunger lurks and 25% of the population cannot eat three times a day. Without employment, the dispute over bread causes insecurity, criminality and social degradation.
Why study if you don’t have to eat, or insured work
Despite the zero enrollment policy and some subsidies, the directives of the District University of Bogotá point out that in public universities the dropout rate is around 50%. The reason in most cases is simple: students have no way to support themselves and are forced to leave the university to go rummage, because survival prevails over study.
The youth who manage to graduate with an undergraduate degree are not guaranteed a job either, hundreds and hundreds flock to the sheds of the call center, in the best of bilingual cases, subjected to working days of up to 16 hours, because they are hired “for goals and not for hours.” The less fortunate: those who only have a baccalaureate, Venezuelan migrants, and in general the poorest, “search” for survival in informal transport by motorcycle and rickshaw, at home, Rappi and other applications.
Crimes, criminals, corruption and delinquency
The social crisis and despair of the dispossessed is not only expressed in popular fury or mobilizations. Thick layers of the unemployed cross the class barrier, stop being workers and become criminals. Also in the upper layers, crime is rampant, the so-called “good people” owe their existence and well-being to the exploitation of work, to the income from criminal activities and to embezzlement.
The crisis of the system is general, it is not only hunger but the rupture of the social fabric, the crisis of the “capitalist values” of anything goes, the “living being” and the general rot that is expressed among the upper classes with the name of “corruption”, and in casualties with the name of “delinquency”. With the embezzlement of public resources due to corruption, politicians and businessmen pocket more than 50 trillion pesos of the national budget every year, which is equivalent to more than 10%
Armed robberies, even in exclusive sectors of the capital, on buses, hotels and even farms, tickling, chartering and extortion have become a daily occurrence and a constant threat. Every day we see in the news that a worker or worker dies assassinated for stealing a cell phone or a bicycle. In Bogotá, Cali, Medellín and cities in the coffee region, people live in fear of going out for fear of criminals. Some say that Bogotá has become a “Gothic city”, in the hands of criminals and with a population plagued by crime.
The extreme right sells the two goods: the discourse against security and as a remedy, more insecurity and crime
Now that the elections are approaching, the issue of insecurity is traditionally used by the right-wing bourgeoisie to campaign, blaming the Petro government or the “left”, promoting xenophobic and racist discourses, and taking advantage to sell their “democratic security”. , that is, taking advantage to promote policies to strengthen the police and the armed forces, construction of prisons and criminalization measures against youth.
The extreme right of the Centro Democrático and Uribismo have both goods: the terror of paramilitaries, drug trafficking and the political regime that guarantees insecurity, and the “remedy” against that: the speech and promises to end insecurity, which in the past was: more paramilitarism, false positives, assassination of union and social leaders, population displacement, disappearances and drug trafficking with criminal consequences.
The measures that the ultra-right agitates are not only useless against crime, but are not really aimed at combating it. The true objective is to strengthen the repressive apparatus to respond with all violence when the masses can’t take it anymore, as in Bucaramanga, and they go out to “turn everything on.”
The security that the extreme right promises is to continue criminalizing the youth and thus continue to maintain the privileges of the capitalists, and “white collar” criminals who continue to commit crimes, from all political parties and from all private companies, as demonstrated by the facts of the Odebretch scandal, where all the bourgeois factions are involved.
The problem is not the economy, it’s the system.
When in Bucaramanga the policeman cowardly murdered the young “biker” worker, fury took over the city for a whole day; young people and precarious workers, workers and immigrants staged a day that filled the traditional bourgeoisie and government with terror and it seemed as if we were in the national strike of 2021: barricades, blockades of streets and highways, vandal actions to destroy cars and infrastructure, product of despair and indignation, and in the midst of all these actions, the fire that symbolizes the conscious or unconscious desire for everything to burn, for something to change.
Government and state security policies are useless for the poor and useful for criminals. The vast majority of reported cases go unpunished. It is normal that this is the case because the system cannot be reformed. You have to change it at the root. It is not making employment precarious and reducing jobs, reducing wages and punishing the unemployed and the youth.
The capitalists and their media repeat to us every day that the problem of the crisis is the fault of the economy, implying that it is not a problem of the class that dominates, controls, and benefits from it. But the problem is the capitalist system that is based on the division of social classes, where one of them produces wealth and the other appropriates it. The remedy is not increasing inequality and misery while a small sector accumulates wealth irrationally. The remedy is to distribute wealth, beginning by distributing work among the entire economically active population, radically reducing the working day, socializing the means of production and eliminating the profit of a few so that it becomes a “profit” for the whole of society.
PST Executive Committee
July 15, 2023
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