Hassan Il's 'national union' shaken by riots
MOROCCO Salah JABER Only a few days after the bread riots in Tunisia (1), mass explosions shook a series of Moroccan cities for some weeks. This process was touched off in early January by high-school student demonstrations in Marrakesh, which were quickly followed by mobilizations in the poor neighborhoods of this city.
Then the revolt spread to the cities of Nador and El Hoceima that has been in effect for two years, these decisions set the powder keg alight.
However, this way of proceeding is not a phenomenon strictly limited to dependent countries. It is a practice common to all bourgeois governments, that view the population as an abstract category for accounting and not masses of human beings. These governments, whose technocratic hired hands cannot envisage reducing the privileges of the rich they repreon the Mediterranean coast in the northeast of the country, and sent, always attack the worst off.
then, around January 19 and 20, to Tetouan and the main
As in 1958 in the Rif, and in 1965 and 1981 in Casablanca, the monarchy launched a savage repression. Dozens, perhaps
An outburst of desperation
But nowhere else does this policy assume dimensions as hundreds, of people were killed, hundreds were wounded and dramatic as in the dependent countries, for the simple reason hundreds more arrested.
The arrests were not limited to demonstrators but also hit trade-union and political activists. The Socialist Union of People's Forces (USFP), a petty-bourgeois populist organization that thought having a toehold in the government - its first secretary is a minister without portfolio - would protect it against repression was not spared.
Once again the "national union" around the divine-right monarch, Hassan II, in the war of pillage and annexation that he is conducting against the population of the former Spanish Sahara — a "national union" in which are mired not only the bourgeois Istiklal party and the USFP but also the local Stalinist party (the Party for Progress and Socialism) and the radicalized petty-bourgeois March 23 Group - has proved to be very People's needs come last
In a country where the World Bank itself estimates that 45 percent of the population live under the threshold of absolute that in these countries the real incomes of a considerable part of the population hover around the level of basic subsistence, that is, just above the threshold of starvation and death.
This is why a simple increase in the price of bread, for example, has been sufficient to touch off bloody uprisings in countries such as Tunisia recently or in Egypt seven years earlier.
Neither the leaders of the imperialist countries nor the dependent bourgeois governments want to face these facts. Instead, they insist on looking for "a foreign hand" pulling the strings of these mass revolts. Hassan II launched his
"Marxist Leninists," "Khomeinyites" and the "Zionist secret services" for the mass
Such rebellions, usually spontaneous outbursts of mass exasperation, may force bourgeois governments to retreat. what happened in Tunisia, when Bourguiba postponed the increase in the price of bread, and even in Morocco, when Hassan II went back on January 22 on the decisions he had announced earlier. Such revolts can also disrupt the "liberalization" and "national union" operations these governments are conducting poverty, the government is allotting 40 percent of the state bud- in an attempt to get the collaboration of the petty bourgeois get for importing arms to fight its dirty war in the Western Sahara. And, to deal with the grave economic crisis hitting the country, the regime has found no better answer than applying the recipes of the IMF that call for cutting social spending!
This has become a classical scenario. After Egypt, Tunisia, and other countries dominated by imperialism, the Moroccan government is trying to force the working people to pay the costs of the economic crisis by taking a major cut in their already meagre real incomes.
By decree, the prices of certain staples and necessities were increased drastically. They went overnight from a local price kept low by state subsidies to the "real" prices determined by the mechanisms of the world market. In this way, the government sought to cut its budget deficit, stem disastrous inflation, in a nutshell to restore financial "health," it being understood that financial health is always achieved at the expense of the
On December 27, Hassan II announced the application of the austerity measures, in particular the abolition of the compensation tunds that subsidized the prices of necessities. In January, there was an increase in the price of gasoline, and then a stiff hike in the price of the butane gas bottles used in poor households.
Coming on top of various price raises (for soap, candles, etc.), and increases in the price of meat, as well as a wage freeze International Viewpoint 13 February 1984 and reformist oppositions. But the unorganized nature of these mobilizations also sets limits to them.
More than ever in these times of economic crisis and hunger on a world scale, proletarian revolution is on the agenda in the underdeveloped countries. What other way is there to break free of the imperialist world market that imposes hunger and impoverishment? What other answer is there to soaring national
Every day they grow, in tempo with the appreciation of the dollar, in which they are generally payable, with the debtor countries being obliged to pay back in real value several times the amounts they borrow? (2)
It is the need for breaking with such a system that justifies the perspective of socialist revolution. "caricature of a revolution," such as that proposed by the Islamic currents trying to exploit these mobilizations against hunger and destitution, can substitute for a socialist revolution. The orientaherent in the functioning of the capitalist system. evolution of the situation in Iran is a good illustration of that.
See "After the hunger riots — Solidarity with Tunisian people, " by Rene Massignon, in IV, No 46, January 30, 1984. 2. Thus, the Moroccan foreign debt, which totalled 11 billion dollars in 1983, represented for the same year 90 percent of the Gross National Product of the country. Ten years ago, the foreign debt represented only 17 percent of the GNP.
3