Some things to remember on July 4th.

US capitalism keeps the international capitalist system in place with its military and economic power. Every three year this system kills as many people of preventable disease and hunger in the world as died in World War two. To keep their system in place the US is continually at war. As in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan at the moment. The best remembered of these wars in the last decades is Vietnam and South East Asia. US capitalism killed four to five million people in these wars in defense of its system.

Every capitalist power raises itself up initially on the basis of what Marx called the primitive accumulation of capital. This is a simple concept. If you or I did not want to work we could try and get enough capital together to buy property and machines and raw materials and labor power and put these together and produce products and live on the profits from this capital. Where did US capitalism get a lot of its initial capital. First it stole the land from the Native American people who to this day are in the main left to live in poverty and segregation. That was primitive and brutal enough. Then it imported millions of people from Africa against their will, forced them to work and paid them no wages for over 200 years. That was pretty primitive too. And of course it exploited to the extreme all the working class, repressing and where it felt necessary, killing workers who tried to organize to get better wages and conditions.

US capitalism would like to have us forget these realities today. It would like us to stand round a grill cooking meat and drinking beer with its brands prominently displayed for all to see on labels. It would like the males in the family to feel all macho and superior and to take over the grilling when for the rest of the year most of us males do not cook a thing.

It is better if we think a bit about our real history today and reject the lies and propaganda we are fed by capitalism. This way we could get into shape where we could fight for our own interests and not be conned by the bosses and their capitalist system. Without a sense of our real history we are powerless to fight for our own interests.

Sean.