the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Aug 21, 2017
Trump tweeted that “our history and culture” are being “ripped apart” by the removal of Confederate monuments and statues.
Which history? Whose culture?
These monuments to the “Confederacy” were not erected out of respect to the hundreds of thousands of laboring people, North and South, black and white, who died in the Civil War.
Nor do they commemorate the many poor whites and ex-slaves who joined together to run local Reconstruction governments after the Civil War–establishing medical clinics for the poor population, setting up the first ever public schools for the children of the poor.
The “Confederate” monuments came later, a quarter to a half a century after the end of the Civil War. They were paid for by the same plantation aristocracy whose money supported the growth of the Ku-Klux Klan, which left a trail of blood across the South. The Klan pulled along some poor whites into an unmitigating campaign of terror, aimed at crushing all resistance in a black population that wouldn’t be pushed back into slavery.
In 1893, 186 people were lynched–186 men, women and even children in just that one year. Undoubtedly, there were many times more than that–but 186 could be documented by court records and newspaper accounts written by editors who approved of the lynching and published pictures.
These were horrific deaths. Not only were people hung from trees, they were often sexually mutilated and/or burned while still alive. Thousands of people were lynched since 1882, mostly black, but not only. Anyone who opposed the rule of a moneyed landowning class could be targeted. White sharecroppers who tried to organize the poor were lynched. Populists. Socialists. Union organizers. Jewish people. Sometimes Italians or other darker skin Europeans.
There was unending violence aimed at wiping out all traces of solidarity between poor white and poor black.
So, if Trump wants to talk about history, let’s talk about history. THIS history.
These statues are the concrete face of the myth about an idyllic plantation life when slaves were happy and everyone benefitted from a magnanimous slaveocracy. They are the concrete face of a dangerous, virulent lie, which lives still.
And they exist not only in the South. Dearborn Michigan has its statue of Orville Hubbard, the openly racist mayor who famously declared that he wanted “all niggers out of this town by sundown.” Maryland had statues to Roger Taney, the Supreme Court justice who authored the “Dred Scot decision,” which held that black people have no rights that white people are legally required to honor. And what about all those statues strewn throughout the United States proclaiming “victory” over Indian tribes that were exterminated so that the lands they inhabited could be stolen? No, the South hardly stands alone in its celebration of racist heroes. Nor in its rush to lynch. Mexican-Americans were lynched in the Southwest. Chinese in California and Nevada. Black people in the Mid-west.
No wonder people are outraged by the fact that these monuments still exist, continuing to justify the same violence they were originally erected to justify.
But these statues and monuments are only a symptom–of a class society that was born in slavery, and still suffers from the after- effects of this monstrous evil. They are the symptoms of the conscious effort made by the ruling classes of this country, whether Southern plantation owners or Northern capitalists, to divide the laboring people against each other.
That effort to divide the laboring people has not gone away. Trump is the symptom of it today–but, still, only the symptom. Behind Trump stands the disease: a capitalist system based on exploitation, robbery and plunder of all working people. A system whose accumulation of wealth goes hand in hand with racism.
Getting rid of a symptom is not the same as getting rid of the disease. Those who are appalled by the symptoms need look beyond them to the disease. And capitalism is the disease that must be uprooted, pulled out, destroyed–replaced by a communal system built by the laboring people of all backgrounds.
Aug 21, 2017
Fatal overdoses from drugs made from opium have become a major health crisis in the U.S. And the main cause of the U.S. overdose epidemic is the rapacity of the pharmaceutical industry.
For pharmaceutical companies to make big profits out of dangerous products like opium and its derivatives, they needed to create the medical conditions to enlarge the market. They needed more customers than just the addicts who were the main users until then. This business plan, as the boards of directors of these companies would call it, worked better than imagined–up through the current catastrophe, which is out of control.
A campaign addressed at patients with chronic pain was launched in the early 1990s. More than five million Americans suffering from back pain were given morphine or a much pricier blend of drugs promised not to have the same risk of dependence and overdosing.
The industry knew that these claims were not based on fact. They were even ready to pay when they were caught making false claims in advertising. Purdue did so with its product Oxycontin. A few hundred million dollars paid in fines means little when these drugs bring in billions!
The industry systematically and insistently pushed American doctors to prescribe painkillers. Revenue from these sales quadrupled between 1999 and 2010. In 2012 there were over 259 million prescriptions, roughly one for each adult in the country. In some states and especially in the Rust Belt states devastated by the economic crisis, there were more prescriptions than people, adding all age groups together.
The number of new addicts exploded. Now there are 25 million, and 90 percent do not have access to drug rehabilitation because they lack the right medical coverage. Opioid overdose became the leading cause of accidental death: 52,000 per year, many more than the 38,000 fatalities in traffic accidents.
Mafias get colossally rich drowning the world in hard drugs. The fact that capitalists do the same under the legal cover of the pharmaceutical industry makes them no more respectable–and no less dangerous.
Aug 21, 2017
The recent 50th anniversary of the Detroit rebellion sparked a rash of documentaries and discussions about its history. A movie about the rebellion and the torture and murder at the Algiers Motel, called Detroit, was released shortly thereafter.
The various presentations and the movie acknowledge that the working class and particularly the black population of the city of Detroit had reasons to protest. They show something of the poverty and segregation experienced by the black population of the city, and particularly the frequent brutalization of the black population by the police.
Ultimately, however, they show the sole outcome of the rebellion as a victimization of black people and the working class.
It’s a false picture of what actually occurred. Many of those who participated in the events felt buoyed by them.
In his book, “A Fighter All My Life,” Sam Johnson describes how he and others felt. “I’ve been through different things, been discriminated against and saw how the cops treated us. So to me 1967 was a big thing. I really felt good. I saw that here all the cops in Detroit couldn’t much deal with it. They couldn’t deal with us. So that makes you get a bigger picture. That’s why I was if there are enough of us together, they can’t deal with us. I saw that way back then. That’s what really made me feel good.”
In addition, the rebellion forced the wealthy ruling class to sit up and take notice: For a period, the economy of the city was improved when black and other working class people in the city gained greater opportunities and decent paying jobs. Johnson says, “Afterwards, they opened up places for people to put in applications for the auto companies. Right away. There was one right there on 12th Street ... and Grand Boulevard. They set up a little office where they’ve got Martin Luther King Park now. You could put in an application right there for jobs at General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, all three of them. I guess they put that little office right in the neighborhood, so people could come right in to sign up. You didn’t have to go to one of the plants. They did that to get those black people off the streets.
The auto plants went on hiring from 1967 until about ’69 or ’70. The corporations were thinking they had too many blacks in the street. They didn’t want another riot–better give them jobs.
The sense of power people gained from the rebellion carried over when they hired into the auto plants. Johnson describes the situation at his Chrysler plant: “We would get off the line. We’d be acting so crazy, they thought we were fixing to riot again. Workers had the radio in the cars coming down the line turned up to the last notch, the music on. James Brown. The ones on this end hollering with him, ‘Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud, Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud!’ Someone on that end would answer back, ‘Say it loud, goddam it, I’m black and I’m proud!’ Sometimes we would jump off the line to the side, be dancing. Those white supervisors, they’d just stand there looking like they didn’t know what to do, what was going down. They acted like they were scared. It didn’t take Chrysler long after that to get a lot of black supervisors.
However well intentioned some of the broadcasters and film makers may have been when
putting together their versions of the history of Detroit ’67, they avoided discussing how the population felt at the time: They had a strong sense of their power.
Aug 21, 2017
Maryland state attorneys are dismissing dozens of cases in Baltimore after reviewing a video that shows a Baltimore city cop planting evidence at a crime scene. The video shows a cop who places a bag of white capsules in an alleyway before walking toward the street, as two other cops look on. He then turns on his body camera and returns to the alley to retrieve the capsules.
The body cameras used by Baltimore city police retain footage of the 30 seconds prior to police activating the cameras. So the cameras are continuously running, but not saved until the unit is turned on. It is possible the cops were not aware of this feature.
At a news conference, Baltimore’s police commissioner, Kevin Davis, said the idea that officers might plant evidence at a crime scene was “as serious as it gets.” Yes, it is serious–and everyone knows that it happens all the time.
Another video surfaced that shows a different set of officers “working together to manufacture evidence,” according to an emailed statement from the state’s attorney’s office.
Body cameras were deployed in Baltimore in 2016 after the killing of Freddie Gray. “This is kind of a learning and a trial period, right?” explained Marilyn Mosby, the state’s attorney for Baltimore. “I think we are going through growing pains.” Yes. From the point of view of the police and the state’s attorney, Baltimore cops need to learn what the Minneapolis, Minnesota cops who killed Justine Damond already know: If they want to get away with a crime, they don’t turn the cameras on!
Aug 21, 2017
Seventy years ago, on 15 August 1947, former “British” India gained independence. But fearing that a sense of victory would allow India’s future regime to resist Britain’s continuing economic domination, while boosting the then-growing rebellion of other colonized people against their colonizers, the British government ensured that independence came at an exorbitant price for the Indian masses. It played a cynical game of divide and rule which led in the end to the partitioning of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, thereby causing one of the largest, bloodiest refugee migrations in modern history and a toxic legacy of warfare and religious bigotry.
The Proletarian Masses Against Colonial Domination
The very basis for this artificial division was laid by colonial policy. The British created an electoral system based on religion and cultivated the loyalist Muslim League against the larger nationalist party, the Indian National Congress. This INC, although it espoused an all-Indian nationalism, also had ties to Hindu nationalist groups.
The end of WWII saw a mobilization of the Asian poor masses against the colonial powers. In China, the peasantry rose against the landlords and threatened to set the towns alight. After the collapse of the Japanese occupation in Malaysia, Indonesia and Indochina, the proletariat rose against the return of the old colonial powers. In India, a mutiny of 20,000 sailors of the Royal Indian Navy, in February 1946, sparked off a wave of strikes involving hundreds of thousands.
Bankrupted by the war, the British state could not afford to maintain its presence in India. But, since it had to leave, it was determined to do it on its own terms, so as to retain its political influence and preserve the economic interests of British companies. To this end, the mobilization of the masses had first to be crushed.
For this, the British authorities used the services of the Indian Congress and the Muslim League, both of which represented the propertied classes. Both had proved their willingness and ability to keep a lid on the poor masses in their past positions in local governments, and neither could afford to come to power on the back of their mobilization.
Jawaharlal Nehru, soon to become India’s first Prime Minister, later described the Congress position in these days as “sitting on the edge of a volcano”–a proletarian volcano that could blow away both the colonial power and the weak Indian capitalist class at once.
Had the proletarian masses had a party of their own, they could have bid for power in the name of the working class and poor peasants. However, there was no such party. Despite the willingness of the working class to fight at the barricades in the face of British bullets, this opportunity to assert its own interests was squandered. Class unity drowned in communal violence.
By May, 1946, the mobilization was receding. But the masses could rise again. The British hurriedly set about making arrangements to leave this explosive situation to the Indian elite. They proposed a power-sharing plan by which the Congress, the League and the princely states would counterbalance each other’s influence in a Federation entrenching the religious divide (“Hindustan” and “Pakistan”).
The Congress, however, opposed this scheme. In their struggle for power, both parties began to fan the flames of religious violence. In August 1946, communal riots were orchestrated, with the worst killings in Calcutta. Thus, the class unity of January-May was drowned in the blood of religious fratricide. Once again, the proletarian masses paid dearly for the absence of a party standing on a class policy, in the name of the defense of the whole proletariat, against its exploiters–colonial and indigenous.
A Bloody Legacy
Failing to get a power-sharing agreement from the Congress Party, the League demanded a religion-based Pakistan. This suited the British, both because a divided subcontinent would be easier to control and because this would prevent the emergence of a giant independent state in Asia.
In July 1947, the British government decided to withdraw, having hastily drawn up an artificial border between India and an unviable Pakistan formed by two territories over a thousand miles apart. Riots broke out, sparked off by gangs from both sides. There were horrific killings, looting, arson and rape. People on the “wrong” side of the border were forced to flee. Leaving everything behind, 10 to 12 million people crossed on foot this British-made border, in long columns. At least a million were killed. An estimated 75,000 women were abducted and raped.
Britain handed over power to the Indian and Pakistani wealthy and their gangs; it defused the proletarian powder-keg and gave an ominous warning that independence came at a bloody price. It kept both new states under its influence, with its own civil servants and military top-brass at the head of both state machineries until 1950. The bloody legacy of Partition was to be borne by both populations for decades, through wars, the 1971 breakup of Pakistan, and the on-going use of religious demagogy and riots by nationalist parties in both countries.
Aug 21, 2017
This article continues our series on the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution.
By August 1917, the ruling classes and the main military officers, notably the commander-in-chief Kornilov, no longer hid their desire to crush the revolution once and for all. At the head of the government, Kerensky shared their hopes. He had sent the Russian armies into a new offensive, reestablished the death penalty at the front, and reassured French and British imperialism of his faithfulness to the war aims of Czarist Russia. Now he tried to keep himself in power by pretending to maintain an equilibrium between the revolutionary aspirations of the working masses and soldiers and the counter-revolutionary goals of the generals he relied upon. The working class, who wanted to hear no more vain promises and talk of war, regained hope. It turned towards the Bolsheviks and continued to learn by doing. In Ten Days that Shook the World, the U.S. socialist and journalist John Reed, who was then discovering the situation in Russia, wrote an account of this ferment:
“At the front, the soldiers fought their fight with the officers and learned self-government through their committees. In the factories, those unique Russian organizations, the Factory-Shop Committees, gained experience and strength and a realization of their historical mission by combat with the old order. All Russia was learning to read, and reading–politics, economics, history–because the people wanted to know. In every city, in most towns, along the front, each political faction had its newspaper–sometimes several. Hundreds of thousands of pamphlets were distributed by thousands of organizations, and poured into the armies, the villages, the factories, the streets. The thirst for education, so long thwarted, burst with the Revolution into a frenzy of expression.
From Smolny Institute [the general headquarters of the Bolshevik Party] alone, during the first six months, tons went out every day, car-loads, train-loads of literature, saturating the land. Russia absorbed reading matter like hot sand drinks water, insatiable. And it was not fables, falsified history, diluted religion, and the cheap fiction that corrupts–but social and economic theories, philosophy, the works of Tolstoy, Gogol, Gorky...
Then the talk... lectures, debates, speeches–in theaters, circuses, school-houses, clubs, Soviet meeting-rooms, Union headquarters, barracks... meetings in the trenches at the front, in village squares, factories. What a marvelous sight to see the Putilov Factory pour out its forty thousand to listen to Social Democrats, Socialist Revolutionaries, Anarchists, anybody, whatever they had to say, as long as they would talk! For months in Petrograd, and all over Russia, every street-corner was a public tribune. In railway trains, street-carts, always the spurting up of impromptu debate, everywhere...
And the All-Russian Conferences and Congresses, drawing together the men of two continents–conventions of Soviets, of Cooperatives, Zemstvos [country councils started under the Czar], nationalities, priests, peasants, political parties; the Democratic Conference, the Moscow Conference, the Council of the Russian Republic. There were always three or four conventions going on in Petrograd. At every meeting, attempts to limit the time of speakers voted down, and every man free to express the thought that was in him.
We came down to the front of the Twelfth Army, back of Riga, where gaunt and bootless men sickened in the mud of desperate trenches; and when they saw us they started up, with their pinched faces and the flesh showing blue through their torn clothing, demanding eagerly: ‘Did you bring anything to read?’”
The counter-revolution would smash itself to pieces against this incredible force and this growing consciousness in the weeks to come, before being swept aside by the working class in October.
Aug 21, 2017
Doctors working together internationally seem to have found a way to prevent sepsis in newborn babies. Every year, sepsis kills hundreds of thousands of newborns worldwide, and also leaves hundreds of thousands of surviving babies with lifelong repercussions.
Doctors in India and the United States worked together in a recent study of 4,000 infants. Preliminary results found a probiotic bacteria that fights off the harmful sepsis bacteria. After examining hundreds of such bacterias, they found out that a bacteria in fermented pickles worked when combined with a bonding agent, sugar. One dose could protect a baby for months, all for the cost of $1, and increase the chance of the baby not getting sepsis by 40 percent. It also has the beneficial side effect of decreasing the chance of getting a respiratory infection.
Much more needs to be studied about this, including the long-term effect such treatment might have. But big pharmaceutical companies haven’t been rushing in to look at the results. Of course not–a dose, good for months, costs only $1!
Aug 21, 2017
This article was translated from the July 14, 2017 issue of Das Rote Tuch, a paper published by Bund Revolutionaerer Arbeiter (Revolutionary Workers’ Federation) in Germany.
Eight thousand workers of the VW (Volkswagen) plant in Bratislava, Slovakia won a 13.5 percent wage increase after a six-day strike.
At this plant workers build the Audi Q7, the VW Touareg, the Porsche Cayenne–all expensive cars. And they do this for a monthly wage of 1,800 euros (about 2,100 U.S. dollars) before deductions, not even half as much as a VW worker in Germany makes.
This was the first strike since the plant opened in 1991. But as one auto plant after another has been opening in Slovakia, and as Jaguar is building another one nearby, workers got slowly fed up, and refused to keep being exploited for such low wages.
VW tried to scare the workers, saying that if it paid higher wages, it would no longer be able to afford the plant in Slovakia. But the workers did not let themselves be intimidated. For six days, almost no car rolled down the assembly line. So the VW leadership gave in.
The strike drew much attention in all of Eastern Europe, and the bosses are worried that it may give ideas to workers at other auto plants.
The VW workers have shown that workers are not condemned to stay quiet in the face of exploitation. To the contrary, workers have a means, a powerful weapon, with which to oppose the capitalists. That weapon is the strike!
Aug 21, 2017
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have showed up at several California state offices where labor dispute proceedings were ongoing, looking for workers who had brought claims against their employers, according to state officials. ICE also contacted the officials, asking for details about the state’s investigations into labor violation cases related to several construction sites.
In California, about 35,000 workers a year file claims for back pay. Many of those complaints come from people in industries that are heavily dependent on immigrants, such as garment manufacturing, car washing, and trucking, according to the Los Angeles Times.
In many cases, the workers in these industries get less than minimum wage and work very long hours. Big retailers like Forever 21, Ross Dress for Less, Macy’s and Nordstrom benefit from low wages at the garment workshops. Last year, the U.S. Labor Department investigated 77 California garment companies and found labor violations in 85% of the cases. The companies paid a $7 an hour average wage to their workers. Some garment workers were paid as little as $4 an hour.
"The reason why employers pay such low wages is because workers are undocumented. It has a lot to do with the perception that they won’t speak out and they won’t file a claim," according to Mariela Martinez, the director for the Garment Worker Center.
But, when these workers file claims at state offices against these very exploitative work conditions and go to the state offices to defend their cases in a meeting, ICE agents show up before the meeting, with the workers’ names in their hands!
The companies are using a Federal government agency, ICE, to scare and intimidate the workers, and to impose low wages and miserable work conditions on them. ICE is nothing but a tool of the companies getting enriched on the back of the working class.
Aug 21, 2017
Cook County’s “pop tax” just went into effect, adding a penny an ounce to any sweetened beverage. This adds $1.44 to a 12-pack.
The County says they’re doing this for our health. But that’s already a lie: they added the tax on to diet pop too. And the city recently added a five cent per bottle tax for bottled water! But you don’t have to pay on sweetened coffees richer people love, like those $5 Starbucks drinks. The County’s real motive is obvious–to squeeze more money out of ordinary people.
Aug 21, 2017
The following speech was given at the Spark summer festival by Gary Walkowicz, one of the 2016 candidates of Working Class Party.
Today the president of this country is a rich businessman, who got rich by ruthlessly exploiting workers and small businesses. A rich businessman who accumulated wealth at the expense of others. A rich businessman who was bailed out by taxpayers, while he himself didn’t pay any taxes.
Trump is trying to use the presidency to hide his financial dirty laundry. But because Trump can’t keep his mouth shut, now we are seeing investigations into his family’s dealings with Russian oligarchs, and possibly money-laundering for Russian gangsters.
Not only is Trump a gangster, he is also a racist who doesn’t even try to hide his racism, as we saw when Trump equated the white supremacists who killed a woman in Virginia with those who opposed their racism and calls to violence.
Trump, with his approval rating dropping weekly, is making Obama and previous presidents look good by comparison. But only by comparison. Remember where we were a year ago, before Trump. For working people, there was nothing to be happy about. Working people had paid all the costs of the economic crisis, we were working for lower wages, 2nd-tier wages, working part-time jobs, or without any job at all.
What does it say for the system we live under that we can have a gangster for president and he makes previous presidents look good, only because they weren’t gangsters?
It is the same thing with the Affordable Care Act, called “Obamacare” by the Republicans.
A year ago, many people sitting here would have agreed that the ACA wasn’t working. Health care certainly wasn’t affordable for many people, medical costs were too high. And many people still didn’t have medical coverage. Many people wanted the ACA changed.
The health care system in this country is a disaster. Yet, with all the money that is spent, we should have the best healthcare in the world. The fact that we don’t is criminal.
The reason we don’t is that in this country, more so than in other countries, the healthcare system is run totally for profit. Profits for the insurance companies, profits for the hospital corporations, profits for the drug companies. Much of the money spent on healthcare goes into the pockets of a few rich owners of these companies.
The ACA, produced by Obama, while it gave medical care to more people, was written mainly to increase the profits of the insurance companies.
But all Trump and the Republicans could propose is to take away medical coverage for millions, increase what people pay for healthcare and make medical care even worse.
The only choice the two parties offer us is between bad and very bad.
It’s the same in education for our children. This country ranks behind many other countries. In this country, those running it won’t spend money to educate our children and find jobs for them. But they will spend billions to put young people in prison and keep them there. This country is badly lacking in education, but has almost the highest incarceration rate in the world.
The educational system has been getting worse under Obama and previous presidents. And Trump proposes to devastate public schools even more by turning the money over to for-profit charter schools.
Between the Democrats and the Republicans, they offer us the choice between bad and very bad.
The two political parties have no solutions to offer working people. Certainly they don’t speak for working people. Working people would have different answers to the problems that we face, radically different answers.
It is because the working class has no party of its own, that is why some of us here today worked with others to get the Working Class Party on the ballot last year. And even though we had little money, no media coverage and only a small number of people to campaign, the WCP was able to get almost a quarter million votes for a statewide office. We got enough votes to stay on the ballot for the next election, in 2018.
Many of us who were active think we should run candidates next year. We could say to working people that we need our own party. We could show people that the working class has answers to the problems of jobs and wages and health care and education. We must say to people that the only way we can make real changes is not by voting, but that the working class can only make real changes by making a fight for what it needs.
For those of you here today, those of you who were part of last year’s campaign and those who weren’t, if you agree with this, then I ask you to join in spreading the idea that the working class needs its own party, the working class needs its own voice.
Aug 21, 2017
Executives of some of the biggest companies bowed out of Trump’s executive councils after Trump’s news conference on Charlottesville.
Does anyone really believe that the executives are appalled by racism? They have long presided over big financial empires based in a capitalist society whose every pore exudes racism.
They aren’t appalled by that; nor by the conditions under which workers toil in the companies they direct; nor appalled by the poverty-level wages they pay; nor appalled by the unemployment their drive for profit creates.
No, the CEOs have no “social conscience.”
They were just worried about their bottom line, their profit. If tomorrow, they believed their profit could be increased by stoking racism, they would do it.