Malala Yousufzai speaking at the Marxist school in SWAT
The youngest-ever winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, the Pakistani education activist 17 years old Malala Yousafzai While she was recovering in England after the gun shot, she sent a message to a meeting of Pakistani Marxists in Lahore. She wrote, “I am convinced Socialism is the only answer and I urge all comrades to take this struggle to a victorious conclusion. Only this will free us from the chains of bigotry and exploitation.” But there wasn’t much reference to this quote.
Kshama Sawant talking:
I am so humbled and just absolutely stunned and impressed by how courageous this very young woman has been, against all the odds and, you know, fighting not only for her own right to education and her right to an identity as a woman, but using her platform to bring about attention to the many, many children, young children, especially girl children, who are struggling for survival and for their rights. And I think that she might be—I mean, I’m not sure, but it seems to me she might be the first socialist who has been given a Nobel Prize since Albert Einstein. He won a Nobel for physics, and I think very few people know that he was a socialist. Same with Helen Keller, she was a Socialist. And these stories are not told, because most of the media is dominated by the very system which needs to keep these stories buried, because it will end up empowering people. I mean, imagine how empowering this is going to be to young people everywhere to know that Malala Yousafzai has expressed solidarity with the idea of socialism.
And I think she’s right on the mark. If you look at the extreme suffering that is being meted out to the people in Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Middle East, all the places which have been the target of the brutal imperialism from the West, the bloodbath that Iraq is going through, where is the solution to all of this? The only solution can be on the basis of rejecting capitalism, the system that, you know, means that a few billionaires and a few ruling-class politicians at the top get to decide how they’re going to divide up the world’s resources and go to war in that process. And who fights the wars? It’s the poor of the United States. Who dies in the war? It’s the poor of those countries. So I think she brings a message of solidarity that we need to recognize, that our solidarity lies not only as American working people, but as working people globally against a system, against a billionaire class that is continuing to exert such brutality and really miserable conditions for most of us.
I think the fact that the Nobel committee the people who run these committees, they are understanding that things have gone so far to the point that they’ve gone too far—meaning that for decades people all over the world, but especially in those countries, especially in the neocolonial countries, have been pushed lower and lower and to the brink—and the whole process of neoliberalism, that was visited on countries like India, which is where the public services, the funding for public education, all of this was cut in the name of the structural adjustment program that was brought to these countries by the IMF and the World Bank. And the fact that they’re now honoring genuine activists and fighters for justice, as opposed to, say, Obama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize and then carried out a troop surge, that shows that they are also realizing that there’s is a shift happening, not only in terms of how miserable the conditions have become for the majority of the world’s population, but the fact that the people who are at the receiving end aren’t going to be quiet. I mean, look at the amazing movements that have happened all throughout this world, especially in the less developed part of the world.
— source democracynow.org
Kshama Sawant, Socialist Seattle city councilmember in Seattle. She is a member of Socialist Alternative, a nationwide organization of social and economic justice activists.