What is the problem? Big-business politicians will talk for hours to explain it away. But this problem has a name: it is capitalism.

The pictures of skeleton-like children in Tucumán province and other rural areas is not the result of a natural catastrophe like a flood or earthquake. The rise of child malnutrition is a direct result of how capitalism works. There is plenty of food, but with massive layoffs and social cutbacks in recent months, two-thirds of working people in the province cannot afford to purchase food to meet basic human needs. When kids fall ill, parents cannot find basic medicines because of the virtual collapse of the public health system--part of the country’s economic meltdown.

Argentina is a semicolonial country in a world divided between a large majority of oppressed nations and a handful of industrialized, imperialist powers.

This setup reinforces unequal terms of trade. The prices of agricultural goods and raw materials tend to decline, while prices for industrial equipment purchased from imperialist countries tend to go up, pushing semicolonial countries deeper into debt.

Through debt bondage, Washington and other imperialist powers plunder the economies of the semicolonial world. Oppressed nations in Latin America, Asia, and Africa shell out tens of billions in interest payments to imperialist creditors, yet the foreign debt continues to grow. A huge proportion of the national wealth of Argentina and other Latin American countries is used to pay this tribute to the imperialist powers.

To pay these billions to the imperialists, the Argentine government does its best to obey their instructions: it slashes social programs, chops retirement pensions and wages of government workers, and raises utility rates and taxes. Bosses are shutting plants and laying off thousands. With the devaluation of the peso, workers’ wages have shrunk by 70 percent. Imperialist trade pacts, such as the Free Trade Area in the Americas, reinforce the crisis by giving protectionist advantages to U.S. companies that devastate industries and agriculture in semicolonial countries.

Not one of these moves, however, is made without resistance by workers and peasants. In Argentina there are protests on a daily basis, from marches by unemployed workers to student actions, and plant takeovers; and similar conditions are brewing in other countries throughout the continent.

The labor movement in this country should join in the demand to cancel the Third World debt--now more than $2 trillion--and add its voice to the calls to remove tariffs and other protectionist weapons used against semicolonial nations. We can fight together with workers in other countries against a common enemy--the handful of billionaire families who make up the U.S. ruling class, and the government that serves their interests.

The pictures of emaciated children with bloated stomachs--in Argentina as well as in Africa--are an indictment of the capitalist system. This is a strong reason to join a revolutionary movement of workers and farmers, one that can take power out of the hands of the exploiters and reorganize society so that the abundance of natural resources and labor power in the world can be used to meet human needs.  
 
 
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