Version imprimableMedia and meetings relay the dominant discourse that these elections will produce a new parliament and government which will resolve all Morocco’s problems. They relay the programmes of the various parties which are contesting the elections, promising thousands of jobs, a high growth rate, the elimination of marginalisation and exclusion in the countryside and will emancipate women. These dishonest discourses have been heard for more than 30 years, since the elections of 1977.
Indeed since then, we have seen not only a strengthening of a policy of austerity, which has mortgaged the future of Morocco through policies of indebtedness and structural adjustment imposed by the big international financial bodies.
These policies have only benefited the big capitalists, the big corrupt predators who have dilapidated and diverted the public funds to the detriment of a population increasingly impoverished every day in greater numbers
The consequences of these policies have been the dismantling of the public sector, health and education while privatisation has only produced unemployment, super-exploitation, insecurity and poverty. Meanwhile public liberties are still stifled. The multiple repressions which have crushed all popular uprisings in the various towns and villages continue today and sinister prisons like Tazmamart continue to haunt all those whose who rise up against these policies.
At every new electoral campaign, we hear miraculous slogans about the improvement of our living conditions which have incessantly got worse.
After these 30 years of parliamentary democracy, Morocco has destroyed the slightest social infrastructure, reducing its youth to seeing as their last recourse flight and clandestine immigration. All their promises have only broken the hopes of the young generations.
This parliament and the pseudo-democratic institutions which will emerge from the ballot boxes stem from a constitution granted after a fraudulent referendum. This constitution concentrates all power in the hands of a single person. This democracy, far from giving power to the people, is only a de facto absolute power, a dictatorship in the full sense.
This parliament is only a democratic masquerade serving to apply anti-popular policies decided by a minimal layer of the well to do in the service of the interests of international capital to pursue the pillage of our wealth and natural resources.
In reality, the numerous parties who contest the elections will only be the voice of a single party which will apply neoliberal policies which are dictated to it
.
Since the formal independence of Morocco, their "democratic process” or “democratic alternation” has only served to underpin the domination of a minority.
Change will not come from parliament, it will take place through the popular struggles which have been pursued for decades by the workers, poor peasants, and all the oppressed.
What are our tasks for a real change?
– To develop, rally and unite the workers and popular struggles
– Enlarge the national and international solidarity networks
– To restore hope to the struggles and revive hope for a change
– To strengthen the tools of struggle through the trade unions, youth, women, the oppressed and the exploited.
– To rally the combative forces in the construction of a revolutionary party
The final road for all the oppressed is freedom from dependency on imperialism, to build a real social and economic democratic power which passes through their self-organisation. This cannot be done without a total break with capitalism.
Only a revolutionary party can accomplish this task.
In the context of bourgeois democracy, elections are only a means to raise the broader consciousness of the toiling masses as to their class interests.
Real changes will take place in their workplaces, in the neighbourhoods and in the street around these demands:
– Cancellation of debts, a break with the international financial institutions: WB, IMF, WTO
– Cancellation of US and European free trade agreements
– A real economic and social policy in the service of the people, for an equitable redistribution of goods and resources while preserving our ecological environment
– A broad democratisation of the whole of economic and social life in the service of the people and not in the interests of capital.
Our main demand remains a national constituent assembly for a democratic constitution allowing another Morocco to be rebuilt in the service of popular aspirations.
The emancipation of the oppressed is the work of the oppressed themselves. Our liberation will take place through the construction of organisations of
mass democratic struggle and social movements and through the construction of a revolutionary party which will give a new breath to the young generations to organise society in another way on anti-bureaucratic, anti-capitalist, socialist and internationalist bases.
August 29, 2007
