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
Oct 1, 2018
In front of the U.S. Senate, with millions watching from home, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford relived a vicious attack that clearly continues to traumatize her to this day. She described how her attackers “were drunkenly laughing during the attack. They seemed to be having a very good time.”
For millions of women watching, it could have been a story about themselves.
Her attacker, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, tried to dismiss the accusations as an “orchestrated political hit.” Echoing the infamous defense of racists, Kavanaugh said, “I’ve always had a lot of close female friends. I’m not talking about girlfriends. I’m talking about friends who were women.” Dripping with privilege, he acted outraged that someone would dare question him.
Kavanaugh is the abuser of the moment, but he is not alone, not by a long shot. He comes out of the same club of privileged men as Trump, and many more in the government. Kavanaugh’s high school, Georgetown Prep, costs $60,000 a year for boarding students. It was also the high school of Trump’s other Supreme Court pick, Neil Gorsuch, as well as two current congressmen and the brother of Senator Lisa Murkowski. For many senators watching, this was like a family affair.
And these hearings have revealed once again that in this club, dehumanizing attitudes toward women, and toward anyone else not of “the elite,” run rampant. Kavanaugh himself was caught on video saying: “What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep. That’s been a good thing for all of us.”
Then Kavanaugh went to Yale, where he joined the DKE fraternity–the same one that had been headed by George W. Bush. It was eventually banned from Yale after a video emerged of frat boys chanting, “No Means Yes! Yes Means Anal!”
This club of rich men doesn’t just have rotten attitudes in their personal lives. They are part of the elite political class that runs political life in this country. The Republicans may calculate that continuing to back Kavanaugh will help them retain control of the Senate. They even say it. That’s why even after Ford’s accusations, even after two more women came forward to accuse Kavanaugh, Trump and the leadership of the Republican Party continue to back his nomination. The Democrats–appealing to a different electoral base–on this issue appear different from the Republicans. But finally they are part of the same club that protects the interests of the ruling class.
In one way or another, all of them have accepted the government’s “right” to restrict women’s control over their own bodies. They have backed brutal policing of the black population. They have carried out imperialist wars around the world. They have proven over and over again that they are the enemies of working people.
Kavanaugh proved himself useful to this ruling class when, as George W. Bush’s White House lawyer, he wrote memos that gave a legal justification for torture. Then, under Obama, Judge Kavanaugh defended the NSA’s mass surveillance of every U.S. citizen’s e-mails, phone calls, and texts. Kavanaugh has proven himself to be an enemy of ordinary people, women and men, by the policies he has defended–just like the senators who will vote on his confirmation.
The Senate finally agreed to have the FBI launch a “limited” investigation after one Senator, Jeff Flake, was confronted by two women in an elevator, after he said he would vote to confirm Kavanaugh. One woman shouted at him: “You are telling all women that they don’t matter, that they should stay quiet....”
She is right. That is exactly what Kavanaugh, Trump, and the leaders of the Senate are saying. These hearings have pulled the mask off this country’s so-called democracy. They have shown exactly what the Senate and the Supreme Court really are.
But for millions of women, these hearings also touched a deep anger coming from everything that they have endured. No one knows when that anger can boil over–and when it does, what women can do, as part of a social movement to overturn the rule of the disgusting, privileged club that runs this country.
Oct 1, 2018
Sears, which is closing down thousands of stores and laying off tens of thousands of workers, tells the business world it may need to declare bankruptcy.
Why? In reality, it is one more financial scheme to make the rich richer.
Edward Lampert is the chairman and majority owner of Sears Holding. Lampert, originally a banker, bought Kmart in 2004 and then Sears in 2005. Later he started a real estate investment trust company, selling about 235 Sears stores to the new venture. Real estate developers have special tax breaks on their deals, and Lampert even collected rent for his new company from the Sears stores still operating. He is worth more than a billion dollars, putting him on the Forbes list of the richest people in the U.S.
But Lampert blames workers, like every other boss. The real reason, he claims, that Sears may have to go bankrupt is its pension liabilities. “Sears has been significantly impacted by its long-term pension obligations. In the last five years, we contributed almost two billion dollars ... to fund our Pension Plans.”
Yes, the boss can make a fortune by paying workers as low wages as he can get away with. Then he can make money by laying people off. He can talk about the “business climate,” and certainly blame Amazon. But the truth is that the only obligations bosses recognize are the ones that make them more money. Now after agreeing to fund a pension plan for workers, they are maneuvering to get out of their obligations by using the bankruptcy courts–just like so many bosses did before Lampert.
His investments are a good deal for Lampert and the rest of the Wall Street crew. For the working population, it costs thousands of jobs, that once were full-time with benefits. And the closure of Sears stores and others like it means working people have fewer choices to buy the goods and services they need. It’s a scheme for rewarding the rich, without regard for society’s real needs.
Oct 1, 2018
Richard Warren started Sears in Minneapolis in 1886, as a mail order watch business. He shipped products to every corner of the U.S. The Sears catalogue went out all across the country, selling sewing machines, cookware, musical instruments, bicycles, sporting goods, even automobiles. After the company began opening retail stores in 1925, it became the largest retailer in the U.S. until 1989.
It’s a reminder that Amazon, which began by selling books, finally changed into a company like Sears, with enormous numbers of products–but sold on the Internet.
Oct 1, 2018
The Fourth International was born on September 3, 1938, with the Transitional Program as its founding document. It was drawn up by Leon Trotsky, who was leader of the Russian Revolution, alongside Lenin. Trotsky was the uncompromising opponent of Stalin, who eliminated his adversaries, especially those in the Left Opposition. Trotsky was the only leader capable of giving a revolutionary perspective to working class militants and workers of all countries.
Not that the revolution seemed imminent. Things were going downhill in France after the June 1936 strikes; Franco had achieved victory in Spain; fascists and Nazis were in power in Germany and Italy. Working people were under attack, or even crushed. None of the parties basing themselves on the working class had anything to propose except uniting with bourgeois parties, creating illusions for the Popular Front. The German Communist Party was defeated by Hitler in 1933 without it so much as proposing a fight. This showed that it was no longer possible to rebuild the Third International nor its national sections. It was necessary to create new organizations.
In a world suffering from the economic crisis of 1929, plunged into economic and political chaos, headed for another world war, Trotsky tried to bring militants together on the basis of a program that considered the principles and experiences of the Bolsheviks, the only ones to have led their revolutionary policy up to the very end. “Starting from the consciousness of large parts of the working class,” this program and its transitional demands aimed to connect the daily struggles of workers and the fight to take power by the whole proletariat.
Today, the capitalist world is again in crisis: wars, growing misery or galloping inflation that forces entire peoples to migrate. Even in the richer countries, the wealthy classes maintain themselves only by putting more pressure on working people. The transitional demands remain pertinent today: for a sliding scale of wages to resist inflation; for a sliding scale of hours of work to combat unemployment; for workers’ control of the workplaces; for the abolition of secret banking and commercial agreements in the affairs of a bourgeoisie unable to control its own system.
The Transitional Program of the Fourth International remains the only revolutionary, Marxist program that proposes, not a list of economic demands, but a perspective for political struggle based on the belief that only the working class can overturn capitalism and transform society at the level of the entire world. It is this program that revolutionary militants must continue to defend and that workers need to have in front of them when they go down the path of struggle. As it says in a text from the first meeting of the Communist International, “the working class is conscious of this truth, that if it wants to live, capitalism must die.”
Oct 1, 2018
At least 2,000 cubic yards of toxic coal ash–enough to fill 180 dump trucks–from a closed power plant may have flowed into flood waters in North Carolina during Hurricane Florence in September. This is what Duke Energy, the company that was responsible for cleaning up that ash, has admitted to–which means the actual level of the contamination may be even higher.
This is a big threat to people living in the area. The ash from a coal-burning power plant contains highly toxic substances such as arsenic, lead and mercury. And the Sutton plant, where the spill happened, is only one of many coal-fired power plants in the storm region that have similar ash pits.
Duke Energy closed down the Sutton plant back in 2013, but has obviously been dragging its feet about moving the ash to safer, lined landfills, as the company was supposed to do. And Duke has a history in such spills. A massive spill from a waste pit at another old Duke plant in Eden, North Carolina, coated 70 miles of the Dan River in gray sludge in 2014. Duke pleaded guilty and paid a fine of 102 million dollars, but federal regulators gave the company until 2029 to move the poisonous ash from unsafe dumps!
Another type of industrial pollution spread by flood waters is animal waste. There are at least 45 large pig and chicken farms in the flood region, which keep the waste of the animals in huge pits. Watchdog organizations have been warning for decades that these pits are not safe from flooding during storms, which then spreads disease to large areas afterwards.
Those affected are poor, working-class communities. First, because industrial plants producing the pollution are always built in or near poor communities in the countryside, or working-class neighborhoods in cities. And secondly, because poor and working-class people don’t have the means to flee flood areas, and don’t have access to health care when disease hits.
All this is avoidable, both before and after a flood. But capitalist society is organized to enable capitalists to maximize their profit, not for the collective good of the whole population.
Oct 1, 2018
A Baltimore city pension fund director spent $220,000 on renovating her office. Since she used pension funds without permission, she was fired.
How did someone imagine it was okay to spend that kind of money for an office at work? Perhaps she was inspired by an IT director at Baltimore City Public Schools headquarters, who spent $250,000 of taxpayer dollars in renovating his office a few years ago? Perhaps she got the impression that anything goes, like the Baltimore city employees in the mayor’s office, who spent city funds for their own benefit, as shown by a recent audit.
In Baltimore, for more than 50 years, it has been Democrats in office. Elsewhere, the exact same thing is found among Republicans: like Dr. Ben Carson who spent more than $30,000 taxpayer dollars on some furniture for his office. Or Nikki Haley, U.S. representative to the United Nations, who spent $52,700–on new curtains!
These officials serve the interests of the wealthy every day. Of course they think they’re entitled to all the “perks.”
Oct 1, 2018
The fire destroying 162 apartments for seniors in Washington, D.C. apparently killed no one. But it raised many questions about negligence by the for-profit developer managing the publicly subsidized Arthur Capper Senior Homes, and by city officials.
Five days after Mayor Bowser announced that residents were all accounted for–having been told so by Edgewood Management–engineers evaluating the ruins pried open a door and found a hungry 74-year-old resident sitting on his couch in the dark. His neighbor said she had called Edgewood, worried she had not heard from him.
During the fire, neighbors seeing smoke rushed into the building–later joined by 100 Marines from a local barracks gym and 125 firefighters from D.C. and Maryland–to rescue the residents, over half of whom can’t walk. They pulled fire alarms in the hallways, but no alarms sounded. Authorities say the alarm system was last tested in April.
The developer built the apartments a decade ago, after renting the land from the city for one dollar a year and demolishing the public housing project there. Edgewood is guaranteed well over one million dollars a year in rental income from HUD by way of the city. With all that money to transfer into their pockets, how big a concern are maintenance and safety to these greedy developers?
Oct 1, 2018
The Working Class Party held a “meet-and-greet” the candidates event in Detroit on September 23, with an enthusiastic audience.
In 2016, the Working Class Party had only two candidates for Congress, this time it has five, covering large parts of four counties in the Metro Detroit area, as well as the Flint-Saginaw-Bay City area. They are:
Kathy Goodwin—for the 5th Congressional District, covering Arenac, Bay, Genesee and Iosco counties, and parts of Saginaw and Tuscola counties.
Andrea Kirby—for the 9th Congressional District, covering parts of Macomb and Oakland counties.
Gary Walkowicz—for the 12th Congressional District, covering parts of Wayne and Washtenaw counties.
Sam Johnson—for the 13th Congressional District, part of Wayne County.
Philip Kolody—for the 14th Congressional District, parts of Wayne and Oakland counties.
In 2016, the Working Class Party had no candidates for State Senate. This time it has four, three in the Detroit Metro area, and one in the far western part of the state, Grand Rapids. They are:
Hali McEachern—for the 3rd District, Michigan State Senate, in part of Detroit, plus Dearborn and Melvindale.
Larry Betts—for the 5th District, Michigan State Senate, in Redford Township, part of Detroit, Dearborn Heights, Garden City, Inkster.
Thomas Repasky—for the 18th District, Michigan State Senate, Ypsilanti, Ann Arbor and Saline.
Louis Palus—for the 29th District, Michigan State Senate, part of Grand Rapids and nearby villages, townships and unincorporated areas.
In 2016, the Working Class Party had only one candidate for State Board of Education. This time it has two. They are:
Mary Anne Hering, a teacher, and Logan R. Smith, who just graduated from the Detroit public schools. Who better to speak about the problems of the schools than someone who works in them and someone who tried to study in them?
Gary Walkowicz opened the meeting with a speech reinforcing the political lines of the campaign, which is that the wealth working people create through their labor has been stolen from us, and that the working class could take it back, use it to create jobs, raise wages and provide services needed. (Gary’s speech is on these pages.)
Mary Anne Hering encouraged everyone to use the next month to talk to everyone they know and ask them to talk to everyone they know. It was this kind of network that got the Working Class Party its votes in 2016—nearly a quarter of a million—and it is what will get the votes in 2018, but this time for 11 candidates, instead of three.
Finally, Sam Johnson concluded the meeting, by challenging the new generations to “get the bigger picture and come on.... If we bring our forces together, we can have a better life, we can run the country for what we need.” (All of Sam’s speech will be reproduced in the next issue.)
Oct 1, 2018
We have reprinted this speech from the website workingclassfight.com
We want our campaign for the Working Class Party to be the beginning of something, something that is necessary for the working class.
In 2016, when we petitioned to get the Working Class Party on the ballot in Michigan, we said that the bosses have two political parties, and that the working class needed its own party. We are now on the ballot, and people in Michigan can vote for us. But this is just a beginning step of building a working-class party, because a real working-class party will be a mass party across the whole country.
And most importantly, a real working-class party will be a party that can lead fights of the working class. We know that elections will not make any real changes. The working class is going to have to make a real fight to deal with the problems we face.
And the working class can make a fight, a fight so that everybody can have a decent standard of living. We live at a time when the technology and wealth exist so that everybody could have a decent life. We live at a time when the resources exist so that everybody could work, but work fewer hours and have enough money to live comfortably.
All of this could be possible today. The problem is, almost all of the wealth and resources today are owned and controlled by a few people, that is, by the capitalist class. We all know and we can all see the disparity in wealth between the top 1% and the rest of the population. And every statistic shows that this disparity in wealth is increasing.
The rich have so much money that they can’t spend most of it, so they use it to speculate on Wall St. or currencies or commodities. The fastest computers in the world are used, not for any social need, but instead are used to manipulate stock trading to make even more money for a few people.
Corporate profits are at an all-time high. But corporations don’t use this money to invest in production and make things that people need. They don’t use this money to pay their workers more, they’re paying them less. Corporate bosses use these profits to lavish CEO’s with multi-million-dollar salaries and enrich a few stockholders through dividends and stock buybacks.
There are many billions of dollars that could be available to society based on all the taxes we pay. Think about it. We pay federal income taxes, state income taxes, city income taxes, gasoline taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, phone taxes; we pay millages of all types. There is plenty of money from these taxes that could be used for all the public services we need. And working people pay a bigger share of our income to taxes than do the wealthy. But instead of getting the public services that we pay for, these services are being taken away from us. Instead of public money going to fix the infrastructure that the population needs, the infrastructure is falling apart. Instead of using tax money for what we need, much of this tax money goes to benefit a small class of wealthy people. The corporations and banks get corporate welfare in the form of tax credits, tax breaks, tax subsidies, tax giveaways. Much tax money is also spent on military weapons and wars, in order to protect corporations’ profits around the world. And the money that corporations make in profit goes right back out to the same wealthy class that owns everything.
The money is there in this society for what the whole population needs. But under this system, all this wealth is owned and controlled by a few people. And the politicians of both major parties work to uphold this system, and ensure that the rich get richer.
All the wealth in this society is produced by the labor of working people. This is wealth we created. We deserve to use it for what we need. But the capitalist class will not willingly give it up. The only way that the working class will get its hands on this wealth will be by fighting for it.
This is what the working class is faced with. The working class needs to discuss these issues. This is why we put the Working Class Party on the ballot. We want to use the elections to discuss our situation as workers, with other workers.
We want to discuss with workers that we could fight for everyone to have a job. Most of the jobs lost have been due, not to trade deals or outsourcing to other countries, but rather due to the actions of the bosses here. Look at how many millions of jobs have been eliminated over the years by the bosses speeding up some workers and laying off other workers. Put all those jobs back. Put millions of people back to work and we could all work at a slower, human pace. Look at all those millions of jobs lost to automation. All in society should benefit by new technology, not lose our jobs to it. Put those millions of people back to work, and we could all reap the benefits by working fewer hours.
All of this is possible. But it will take a fight by the working class. This is what we want to discuss with workers in our campaign.
We want to discuss with workers that it is possible for everyone to have a comfortable standard of living. The money is there. All of our work, the work done by the working class, produces this wealth. If the workers’ needs came first, then every working person could be paid a decent wage, a livable wage.
The money is there, so that workers would never have their standard of living reduced by inflation. It’s very simple; when prices go up, then our pay should automatically go up by the same amount. It’s not that difficult. Computers could be used to adjust our pay every week.
All of this is possible. But it will take a fight by the working class to impose it. This is what we want to discuss with workers in our campaign.
We want to discuss with workers that we can rebuild the crumbling infrastructure of our society. The roads and bridges can be repaired. The water and sewer systems can be rebuilt. The electrical grid and gas lines can be upgraded. New schools and hospitals can be built. Libraries and recreation centers can be re-opened. And, doing these things, will create millions more jobs. The money is there. But the working class will have to take this money out of the hands of the capitalists, and use it for our needs.
All of this is possible. But it will take a fight by the working class, a fight to put our hands on the money controlled by the capitalist class today. This is what we want to discuss with workers in our campaign.
During our campaign, when we discuss these ideas with people, there are many people who say—“it sounds good, but it can’t happen.” Some people will say, “we wish we could do this, but it won’t happen.”
That may be true today. When the working class is not fighting, and has not fought for several generations, then everything seems impossible to many people.
But what seems impossible today can become very possible tomorrow. The history of the working class shows this. When the working class begins to fight, the fight can spread very quickly. When the working class begins to move, it can move very fast. When the working class begins to use its power, it can change the world.
The things that we need to fight for, the things that seem like “pie in the sky” today can become something very realistic to fight for tomorrow.
In our campaign, we also have to say that the working class cannot make a strong fight, if we are divided. Those people who are enemies, are always trying to divide us. They try to pit white workers against black workers, native-born workers against immigrant workers, men against women. They always try to divide us, and our enemies do so today, starting with the White House. And every company, in their own way, tries to put these divisive ideas in our minds. The working class cannot allow itself to be divided, if we want to use our power to fight for what we need.
That’s why it’s important for us to discuss these ideas. Someone has to say these things.
That’s why we are doing this campaign for the Working Class Party. And that’s what everyone in this room can do.
Oct 1, 2018
September 15 was the ten-year anniversary of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. When that big Wall Street bank declared it couldn’t meet payments on its own debt, it owed over half a trillion dollars. It was the largest bankruptcy ever.
The collapse of Lehman threatened to bring with it the collapse of the whole financial system, starting in the U.S., rapidly spreading around the world. The world’s biggest banks were linked with each other. They held each other’s debts. Many had pushed mortgages they knew could never be repaid, and then turned the mortgages into speculative instruments, which they sold to other banks–right up to the day before Lehman declared bankruptcy.
Lehman’s declaration of bankruptcy was also a declaration of capitalism’s bankruptcy. The collapse of the banking system pushed the productive economy right into a nose dive.
The bankers had no answer for the catastrophe that their own mad drive for profit had created. Governments around the world had no answer other than to prop up the same banks that had created the disaster. They gave the banks wide access to credit–with governments themselves going trillions of dollars in debt to do so.
The banks that were rescued did not put government money into productive investment. That was the only rational thing to do–on the level of society as a whole. It would have created jobs, increased wages and started to repair the basic infrastructure that has been left in bad repair for decades: roads, water systems, schools and so many other necessities.
But to do that would have required planning for society as a whole. And the big banks–like capitalism itself–don’t consider the good of society as a whole. Each acted individually to maximize its own profit. Financial speculation promised more rapid profit than productive investment, so each bank poured its government handout into new fields of speculation.
Today, the stock markets are in the stratosphere–almost double where they were before the crash of 2008. Computers, with their ability to calculate faster than any human, are used to make profit at warp speed–and to create “virtual money.” Vast sums of money whip around the world, searching for even bigger profit. The wealthy classes, the parasites who benefit from our work, live in super luxury. And the banks have so much money they don’t know what to do with it. What they did do is create a new house of cards, awaiting a new collapse.
Today, we pay for the government’s rescue of the banks, while we face the threat of a future catastrophe.
The public services that a humane society would necessarily offer and maintain continue to degrade. Roads, public transit, schools, bridges, drinking water, sewer lines, dams, levees to protect against floods–they are all starved for funds. Schools throw out generations of people without even a basic education, not to mention the skills needed in a modern world. The money needed for social necessities has gone to bail out the banks.
It’s not just the banks. The whole capitalist class lives on wealth stolen from those of us who do the work. That’s why wages today are lower than they were in the 1990s. It’s why only 63% of the working-age population has a job today, compared to 67% at the end of the 1990s. It’s why so many more jobs today are temporary, or part-time, or contract work, or under the table.
Capitalism is a worn-out system. The growth of capitalism once meant an increase in the standard of living of the working class. But that time is long past. The capitalist class has no way to increase its profit today without pushing down the standard of living of the whole working class.
Capitalism is a decrepit system. It needs to be thrown out. The working class, which has every reason to get rid of capitalism, has the power to do it. And the workers’ position in society, in the heart of production, gives them that possibility.
The problem is for working people to become aware of the power their own class holds. We could get rid of capitalism and build a new collective society. But to do it, we need to see the big picture–far different than what we see today.
Oct 1, 2018
The U.S. government is today incarcerating about 13,000 immigrant children, an all-time high. And the numbers keep growing.
These numbers are not going up because the Trump administration is arresting more kids. They are going up because fewer parents and other relatives are stepping forward to claim their children. So the children arrested by ICE remain in custody for longer and longer periods of times.
Parents are staying away from their own kids because ICE has arrested dozens of undocumented immigrants when they came forward to take care of their children. Trump even brags that his administration is “vetting” people who claim to be these children’s parents more closely. But this vetting isn’t really about ensuring children’s safety–ICE admits that the vast majority of these arrests are for simply lacking documents.
The goal of these latest decisions is not actually to get rid of undocumented immigrants, who number 11 million. It is to terrorize them, by holding children, separating families, and arresting parents. All so the undocumented immigrants will stay in the shadows and keep working.
This terror won’t make immigrants leave the country, but it does make it even easier for the bosses to use them to lower wages paid across the U.S. These attacks on immigrants are attacks on us all.
Oct 1, 2018
On Monday, September 24, the Trump administration appeared to take a step toward a trade war with China. It began to impose a 10% tariff on 200 billion dollars worth of Chinese goods coming into the United States, spanning thousands of products, including food seasonings, baseball gloves, network routers and industrial machinery parts. These tariffs are on top of tariffs that the Trump administration imposed earlier this year on 50 billion dollars worth of Chinese goods. Taken together, it means roughly half of the products that China sells to the United States each year are now being hit by American tariffs.
What is behind this escalation in trade tensions is hard to know. Is Trump simply upping the ante in his usual spectacular fashion in ongoing negotiations with the Chinese government, on behalf of the American bourgeoisie? And how much are these tariffs part of a xenophobic appeal by Trump and the Republicans, aimed at voters in the upcoming mid-term elections?
What is clear is that these tariffs aimed at China carry all kinds of dangers. As history has shown over and over again, what starts as a seemingly small trade war could develop into a real shooting war. Capitalists around the world are in a never-ending fight over not just terms of trade, but control of resources, markets, territories and wealth.
Trump, who repeats the same kinds of lies as other politicians, often says that China is taking advantage of the U.S. But the reality is that the U.S. capitalist class has been able to extract enormous amounts of wealth from investment, production and trade from the growing Chinese manufacturing sector. The U.S. capitalist class even takes advantage of the trade deficit with China that Trump always talks about, since the Chinese government and bourgeoisie put many of the dollars that they gain in trade back into the U.S. financial system, helping to boost the profits of U.S. banks and other financial companies.
But U.S. capitalists don’t like the fact that they cannot impose their terms on the Chinese bourgeoisie in the same way that they can impose on other big countries with comparable levels of development, such as India or Brazil.
What makes China different is not just its enormous size, but the fact that in 1949, there was a successful revolution. It was a revolution that served the interests of the Chinese capitalist class, but it was a revolution nonetheless. And because the Chinese revolution was able to resist the pressures of the U.S. and other imperial powers, the Chinese economy developed somewhat independently for several decades.
So when the big imperialist powers, with the U.S. at the head, decided to begin to slowly reintegrate the Chinese economy back into the world economy, starting in the late 1970s, the Chinese bourgeoisie kept some small level of that independence.
The business press in the U.S. is filled with complaints of “conditions” that the Chinese government and businesses put on U.S. business, starting with the transfer of some technology and the sharing of profits in joint ventures.
In the future, a worsening economic crisis that shrinks markets and profits for the capitalist class could very well bring the U.S. imperialists to take a bigger share of the profits produced in China, and to re-divide the world by force, by igniting a big new war. The potential exists for a war that could plunge the peoples of the world into new depths of barbarism and terror, absent an intervention by the working class to take power away from the imperialists.
Oct 1, 2018
Translated from Lutte Ouvrière, the newspaper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
The situation of the people of Yemen has kept worsening since March 2015. That’s when a coalition backed by Saudi Arabia started a war with Houthi militias there. “Misery causes more deaths than the war itself,” a French newspaper wrote in September.
From its start until this August, this war killed between 10,000 and 14,000 people and displaced another two million. But famine might kill even more, because the war is aggravating the economic and social crisis ravaging Yemen.
Of its 28 million people, 22 million need humanitarian assistance; five million children go hungry. The blockade by Saudi Arabia prevents most humanitarian aid from arriving at the main port of Hodeida. But nine tenths of necessary food, gas, and medicine have to be imported. The World Health Organization says the lack of clean water threatens more than a million Yemenis with cholera. The country is one of the poorest in the world and its economy is collapsing. Government workers are not paid. The national currency, the rial, has lost a third of its value since January.
Add to this the chaos caused by the clash of armed militias everywhere!
Situated at the edge of the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen borders Saudi Arabia along more than 1,000 miles. This location makes it strategically important. Yemen faces the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, the shipping channel for one quarter of the world’s oil and one tenth of international commerce. This is why the Saudi royals see Yemen as their zone of influence—with the blessing of the United States. The Saudi monarchy intervened during the demonstrations in 2011 against Saleh, the dictator at the time. And Saudi Arabia supported the current president, Hadi, in order to put an end to fiery demonstrations. Then in March 2015, Saudi Arabia began its offensive against the Houthi militias, which had threatened Hadi’s power.
The country is mired in conflict and the U.S. has let this happen. And while civilians die of hunger or from bombs made in the U.S. and France, the UN hosts meetings to mobilize the “humanitarian response”—bringing together the rich countries responsible for this chaos!