The “New” Oil and Gas Law is Against the Interests of the People of Iraq

 

The Islamic and nationalist militias in the "government" of Iraq and its "parliament" are seeking to pass the “new” oil and gas law. This law prepares the ground to grant, for long terms, foreign private companies, broad powers to control the oil of Iraq, a country considered to be one of its most important natural reservoirs in the world.


The oil and gas law serves the interests of the Dark Scenario forces – Islamic and nationalist, seizing power. This law is against the interests of the masses. It means the handing over of well-being of millions of workers and people to the will of private companies by granting them contractual powers to explore, produce, and market this commodity, and thus the ability to manipulate the prices of commodities according to market fluctuations and the requirements of competition among capitalists. This means the tightening of exploitation on the working class and the destruction of livelihood, education, hospitalization, medicine, and social welfare benefits for millions of workers and toilers. The law of oil and gas would strengthen the powers and hegemony of the ruling Islamic- nationalist groups and cause more disasters and tragedies through further insecurity, terrorism, destruction of society, expansion of sectarian and nationalist wars, and inflict further retreat on the rights and freedoms of the people at large, and workers in particular.

 

The rivalry between forces of the bourgeois parties, Islamic, nationalist, tribal, Arab, Kurdish, and others, over this law, has nothing to do with protecting the interests of the masses, but to secure the shares of those parties and reactionary forces from oil sales. Those parties misinform that they care about the prosperity of people and create so-called "equality in the distribution of wealth", and maintain "nationalization" of oil, as the "property of people". These are all but lies aiming to cover up the widespread looting and sharing the spoils among themselves and to bury the fact that they protect and defend the capitalist system, a system based on the exploitation and theft of labor power. They also aim to cover up the reality that capitalism, in all its forms and shapes, national or foreign, represents the cause of exploitation, impoverishment, and deprivation in society.

 

The political forces, which shed crocodile tears over the oil as “our national property" that must return to the people, are in fact, defend state capitalism and the local bourgeoisie they represent, exactly as the defunct Ba’ath Party used to raise its slogan "Our Oil is for Us."  At the same time the more rightist and reactionary wings in the puppet-government seek to pass the law, because it represents their interests embodied through their alliance with the international bourgeoisie.


Our party stands firmly against this law, and from the position of working class and criticism of the worker to capital, thus denounce the law and struggles within the masses and workers to expose the aims of those who seek to pass it, and attempts to mobilize social and political forces against it. Our party affirms that the ultimate salvation from exploitation, deprivation, and misery, and achieve prosperity for all people will only be realized by the elimination of the waged-labor system - Capitalism, and the establishment of the Socialist Republic.

 

 

The Left worker-Communist Party of Iraq

23-7-2007