Just a few centuries ago in the so-called West Indies, the British and French confronted each other to control the sea routes as well as the booming industries related to sugar cane.
The plantations of sugar cane were naturally worked by slaves.
To produce RUM, sugar cane was introduced first in grand presses of mills made to extract the juice of the sugar cane. It sometimes happened, however, that the arms of the slaves were trapped by the strong dams taking them away completely.
For such eventualities, the large landowners, with a naturally evident entrepreneurial spirit, assigned other slaves the mission of cutting off with a machete the arm that was trapped. This technique had nothing to do with the worry of the landowners for the health of their slaves.
The reason was more simple: an excess of blood in the sugar juice impoverished the quality of the product (making it less “competitive”, naturally).
Today however the grand financial and industrial oligarchies are more refined and in consequence they have sophisticated their tendencies: today they use Governments and Parliaments as a machete to cut the rights of the workers… because an excess in the rights of the juice of their rates of profit impoverishes the quality and competitiveness of their products… and above all in the accounts of their results.
Also today the council of human rights says that there are more than 12 million slaves in the world. For that (and for many other reasons) the Left needs to return to reconsider the essential questions to find again the adequate responses.
Arnaldo Otegi, from the Logroño prison.