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Response to President Obama's Announcement on Troop Escalation

by American Party of Labor
Statement from the American Party of Labor on President Obama’s Announcement on Troop Escalation in Afghanistan
Dec. 1st - The American Party of Labor expressed today its sincere and principled opposition to the latest announcement by President Barack Obama to escalate the United States' military presence in occupied Afghanistan by more than 30,000 US soldiers.

Today’s announcement represents the administration’s renewed investment in waging a costly, long-term and indefensible colonialist war against the people of Afghanistan, who have suffered unfathomable hardships, misery and privation after more than eight years of foreign military control.

Washington's escalation of the war in Afghanistan constitutes a grave threat to the countless innocent civilians who will die as a direct result of today’s decision. But even more, the President’s so-called strategy for “finishing the job” in Afghanistan will only further destabilize a region gripped by instability, while concurrently inhibiting local development and progress for generations to come. In effect, the President’s decision to deploy tens of thousands of additional US soldiers to occupied Afghanistan aims to ensure that the region remains completely powerless to develop itself along its own lines, with the ultimate aim of providing newly opened markets for American and Western exports as soon as conditions are favorable.

But the Obama administration's failures, just like its predecessor's, rest in its sheer arrogance - blinding it to the realities of the situation as they currently exist. Once again, these developments have shown the government's shortsightedness and inability to learn from its own failed history. Not unlike US military intervention in Vietnam, the United States government finds itself today confronted with a quickly degenerating situation in Afghanistan:

* Faced with a growing insurgency proving itself capable of inflicting heavy losses against the foreign invaders;

* Stuck in a politically compromising position while providing near limitless support for an utterly corrupt collaborator-regime;

* And now deploying thousands of US military men and women to fight and die in an unwinnable and unnecessary war.

Moreover, the President's decision today is at odds with the majority of the people in this country that currently oppose the escalation of so-called "Operation Enduring Freedom." The steady decrease in public support for US adventurism and imperialism in Afghanistan reflects the rapidly declining situation on the ground, compounded by reports of more and more American soldiers coming home in body bags or severely maimed on a near daily basis.

From the very beginning, the American war against Afghanistan and Iraq has been based on the purported claims that the war of absolute necessity in ensuring the US’s national security. These claims, unsubstantiated by any evidence whatsoever, provided the precedent for the previous administration under George W. Bush, and abetted by a shamelessly complicit mainstream media, to wage a war of aggression against the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan in order to expand US material interests in the region while providing the economic consumption necessary to satisfy the insatiable greed of this country’s military industrial complex.

The American Party of Labor declares itself in strong opposition to the continuation of the war in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Somalia and demands the unconditional and immediate withdrawal of all foreign military forces abroad—coinciding with the restoration of sovereignty into the hands of the peoples currently under siege by US militarism abroad.

About the American Party of Labor:
Founded in 2008, The American Party of Labor is a revolutionary working class organization. Our aim is to abolish the capitalist system and all its horrors by replacing it with socialism, a system based on the principle laid out by Marx, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his work.”
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by reality check
from the APL website:
"The cornerstones of our Party are the works of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Enver Hoxha."

OK, you lost us at Stalin and his protege Hoxha. No thanks. And of course the website does not name any current party leaders, or any known activists. And the misnamed sect has no affiliation with any known Labor organization or unions.
by A Marxist-Leninist Scholar
Reality Check wrote:

"OK, you lost us at Stalin and his protege Hoxha. No thanks.'

And just what exactly is wrong with Stalin? A through investigation of Russian/Soviet history reveals that he lead the country through some of the worst times of the 20th century and brought a country that was at least a century behind the west into the modern era. In fact compressing a century and a half of development in the Soviet Union into a decade.

Were there excesses? Certainly, every country experiences them in the course of its industrialization whether it occurs under a socialist economic system or a capitalist economic system. However, this doesn't get into what this party is founded on which is the ideological works of Stalin and Hoxha.

Now, those who have not studied or at least read these works might scoff but the works of Stalin and Hoxha are incredibly important to Marxist-Leninists today. Stalin's works from "Marxism and the National Question" to "Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR" provide a good basis for the examination of construction of socialism under the First Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

Hoxha's work provides necessary criticism of events and historical movements in the world from 1953 to 1985, when Hoxha died. Hoxha expanded on the existing works of Marx, Engles, Lenin and Stalin and contributed to the discussion of revisionism and its definitions principally the revisionisms of Khrushchev-ism, Brezhnev-ism, and Maoism.

"And of course the website does not name any current party leaders, or any known activists."

Actually this is not uncommon for revolutionary parties. Experience has shown that in pre-revolutionary countries (like the United States) that the publication of who is the leadership and their activist memberships is counter-productive to their (the revolutionary party's) aims. In fact doing so will do nothing but lead to the arrest of the leadership of the revolutionary party and their activists.

This makes me wonder if "Reality Check" has ever heard of Operation Chaos and Cointelpro which were so effective in the 1960s and early 1970s against the anti-war movements and organizations. Granted Barack Obama is not Richard Nixon but the fact remains that if the bourgeois dictatorship (which is what the US is) feels threatened it will resort to any means necessary to disperse and/or destroy revolutionary and even progressive parties and organizations.

"And the misnamed sect has no affiliation with any known Labor organization or unions."

That probably has to do with the fact that the mainstream labor organizations and unions in the US have been co-opted by the bourgeois dictatorship of the US. Furthermore most unions in the US actively seek to expel Marxist members from their own body. As such it would only make sense that if they did have ties to Labor Organizations and/or Unions they would not publish that information for everyone to see.
by Batu Khan
Every party must start somewhere.
by Andy
Reality Check, what does Stalin have to do with opposing the war?
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