The Algiers festival was stamped overwhelmingly by the thousands of young people who hailed from countries oppressed by imperialism--from Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia. The discussions largely concentrated on struggles they were directly part of against the brutalities and indignities of imperialist domination.

Leaders of the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST) of Brazil provoked quite a bit of discussion about peasant struggles for land. The MST has mobilized tens of thousands of peasants and farm workers to occupy huge landed estates and are demanding a thorough-going agrarian reform to grant land to all rural toilers.

Participants from Cuba spoke about the advances working people there have won through their socialist revolution, including the two land reforms in the opening years of the revolution, when both the foreign and domestically owned capitalist estates were expropriated and title to the land was given to every peasant who worked the soil.

Other fighters for national liberation, from Palestine to New Caledonia to Western Sahara, campaigned to broaden solidarity for their struggles. The Korean delegation raised the demand for U.S. troops out of the Korean peninsula and reunification of their nation. These examples of resistance imbued the festival, from breakfast discussions over coffee and a croissant to the hours-long workshops and solidarity meetings.

There was unanimous agreement in Algiers for the demands to cancel the Third World debt and to abolish all imperialist military and economic alliances such as NATO and the International Monetary Fund used by the rulers in the United States and other imperialist powers to assert their domination over the semicolonial world and suck billions of dollars of value produced by the world's toilers.

However, this is a separate question from support for the "anti-globalization" protests like those in Seattle, Quebec City, and Genoa, Italy. Participants at the festival expressed differing opinions about these actions. Many who came from Western Europe presented these protests as a new progressive movement to confront "global capitalism." Others, including the Palestinian delegate mentioned by Fritz and members of the Young Socialists, raised disagreement with this assessment.

The protectionist demands that dominate these protests--"no dumping" of steel and other imports from China, Russia, or Brazil; "fair trade, not free trade"; and "no more sweatshops"--give support to the trade restrictions imposed by Washington on semicolonial countries and its imperialist rivals: trade weapons that have devastating effects to working people in nations oppressed by imperialism. This is why, under the broad umbrella of combating global capitalism, ultrarightists like Patrick Buchanan and his supporters felt comfortable in Seattle during the protests against the WTO two years ago. He used the protests to rail against the WTO as "an embryonic institution of world government" and called for defense of "American sovereignty." Anticommunist "free Tibet" groups that call for economic sanctions and other measures against the workers state in China have also been part of these actions.

What was striking at the world youth festival was how seldom the antiglobalization protests were raised for discussion. The fact that basic anti-imperialist demands are absent from these protests--NATO troops out of Yugoslavia, support for the Palestinian fight for self-determination, and defense of the Cuban Revolution, just to name a few--helped me to see why so many youth from semicolonial countries did not orient toward the Seattle or Genoa protests but rather drew strength from the battles being waged by workers, farmers, and oppressed people against imperialist domination today.

The most important conclusion to draw from the anti-imperialist festival in Algiers is the necessity to join those forces that are working to rebuild a communist international. Those who are in the United States have a special responsibility to build a communist party here that champions progressive struggles around the world and that will join with other vanguard workers and farmers to forge the leadership and mass revolutionary movement needed to take on and overthrow the strongest and most rapacious imperialist power on earth.

Jack Willey was one of the delegates from the United States to the 15th World Festival of Youth and Students.  
 
 
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