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 29, 2018
First Gregory Bush–he sought out and killed two black people at a Krogers outside Louisville, Kentucky, after failing to get into a black church. Then Cesar Sayoc–he made at least 14 pipe bombs and mailed them to prominent people who have criticized the Trump administration. And just this past Saturday, Robert Bowers opened fire in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, killing 11 people while ranting, “All Jews must die.” All these incidents took place in less than a week.
All of these men brag that they are white nationalists. That is, they were driven by the politics of so-called “white nationalism.” In other words–and they say it themselves–they are anti-black, anti-immigrant, anti-Jewish, and anti a whole series of other people–including a large part of white workers who don’t agree with them.
Bush walked right into the store with a loaded gun, targeted two black customers, and killed them. He told an armed white bystander that “Whites don’t shoot whites.” He has a long history of domestic violence and using racist language, and he proclaimed himself a big fan of Donald Trump, Blue Lives Matter and other conservative, far right organizations.
Cesar Sayoc posted his politics all over his van. Pro-Trump. Photos of people who spoke out against Trump depicted with red cross hairs, including Michael Moore. He wants to “make America great again.” Which, according to someone he worked with, included killing all blacks and gays.
Robert Bowers, virulently anti-Jewish, ranted on the internet against HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society). “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people, I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”
These incidents are not isolated. They did not happen in a vacuum. A virulent tone has been set. Violent actions have been given a green light. Political authorization comes down from the very top, from the White House. Trump, who calls himself a “nationalist,” speaks out against immigration, by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and thugs. Trump claims there are terrorists among the Honduran migrants as he sends U.S. troops to the border. Trump re-tweets racist statements from “white nationalists.” He has called dozens of black people “low IQ,” “dumb,” “crime-loving,” “not smart,” “crazy,” “vicious,” “lowlife,” and “dog,” playing on the most vicious of racist slurs. He tweeted a six-pointed star alongside a pile of cash, a typical slur against Jewish people.
Trump spouts rabid ideas to build himself a political base–and he does it consciously. This makes him every bit as responsible for the violence as are terrorists like Gregory Bush, Cesar Sayoc and Robert Bowers, who acted on Trump’s words.
In the face of an economy that doesn’t work for ordinary people, reactionary ideas can find a hearing. This is all the more true since there is no mass organization that speaks to the working class, that provides an alternative. An organization which, in the face of growing disaster, would argue that the problem for the working class is to take back all the stolen wealth from the bosses.
If there were a mass working class party today, it would not only call workers to fight. It would propose that workers organize themselves in their workplaces, in their neighborhoods and churches, to defend themselves from all kinds of violence, especially when they organize to fight.
No one should believe that the Democrats will protect us, nor will the FBI, nor the police. The Democrats, under Bill Clinton, condemned millions of young black men to prison on spurious drug charges. They are part of the problem.
Jay Gould was quoted during the Great Railroad Strike of 1886, saying that he could “hire half the working class to kill the other half of the working class.” Bosses have been trying to do this ever since in one way or another. But the working class can show all of them that not only can we fight to take back the wealth we produce–all of it–we can organize to defend ourselves against the violence that the bosses and all their politicians nourish.
Oct 29, 2018
The migrant caravan that is estimated at 7,000 to 8,000 people began in Honduras and is now making its way through Mexico. Some will stop in Mexico. But most are walking thousands of miles north to the U.S. border. Over the last years, there have been many smaller caravans of hundreds of people that have gotten little or no publicity. And many more are expected in the coming months, U.S. officials admit.
Obviously, for the people making this difficult and perilous journey of thousands of miles on foot, banding together serves several purposes. Traveling together provides a certain security against gangs that regularly prey on migrants. It is also a lot safer and cheaper than hiring a coyote, which can cost up to $10,000 per person. And, it is also a form of protest against impossible living conditions.
Most of the people in the caravan are from Honduras, a small Central American country. These migrants know what’s in store for them if they do finally make it to the U.S. border. Not only arrest and a long detention, but possible deportation. Migrants say they are forced to try to make the journey in order to save their lives; that they are being driven by abject poverty, joblessness, as well as the plague of armed violence. Many making the trip are families with newborns and other children, and pregnant women escaping life-or-death situations or lives of poverty.
“If I stay here, I will die,” one desperate young mother told a reporter, as she began her journey.
These barbaric conditions are a product of U.S. economic and military domination that dates back more than a century. U.S.-based banana companies first became active in Honduras in the late 1890s. These banana companies bought up land at a dizzying pace. They built railroads, established their own banking systems, and turned all of Honduras into a one-crop economy, whose wealth was carried off to New Orleans, New York and Boston. In the process, these companies drove millions of peasants off the land.
To safeguard U.S. investments, the U.S. military invaded and occupied the country in 1907 and 1911. U.S. aid was mainly centered on building up the most important institution in Honduras: the military. Heads of government came and went, sometimes as military dictators, sometimes as supposedly democratically-elected “presidents.” But the military remained the guarantor of order. It was used to control elections, break strikes, etc.
In the 1970s and 1980s, guerrilla movements broke out, challenging U.S.-imposed regimes in countries bordering Honduras, including El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. In response, the U.S. military used Honduras like its own aircraft carrier. The U.S. built military bases for tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers and mercenaries to fight these three wars. This militarization of the country created economic chaos and widespread misery, thus setting the stage for the first wave of Honduran immigrants into the U.S.
After the wars ended in the early 1990s, conditions did not improve. The civil wars left behind tens of thousands of young people from broken families. That reality, combined with extreme inequality and policies of mass incarceration of youth, led to the build-up of enormous gangs that operate hand-in-hand with the police. One Honduran government commission admitted that 70 percent of the police are “beyond saving.” It concluded: “a series of powerful local groups, connected to political and economy elites ... manage most of the underworld activities in the country. They have deeply penetrated the Honduran police.” The government’s answer to police corruption was just more militarization; the army patrolling the streets.
The violence of the police, the army and the gangs pushed up the murder rate in Honduras to become the highest in the world. And the continuing joblessness has left Honduras one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, with two-thirds of the population living in poverty. All the while, rich coffee and banana plantations, along with factories that produce garments and wiring harnesses for cars, churn out big profits for the capitalist class in the U.S. and around the world.
Under both Democrats and Republicans, the U.S. continues to impose its rule. In 2009, the Obama administration supported a military coup that overthrew an elected president, because he tried to establish economic relations with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. In December 2017, the Trump administration backed the U.S.-sponsored dictator, who openly stole his own election in order to remain in office.
Donald Trump might call the migrants fleeing the country “terrorists” and “gangsters,” but the real terrorists are the ones calling the shots and enforcing the dictatorships–Washington, D.C. and Wall Street.
Oct 29, 2018
The following article was translated from Lutte Ouvrière, the newspaper of the French revolutionary workers’ group.
The heir to the throne of Saudi Arabia, Prince Mohammed Ben Salman, called MBS, is in an awkward position. He launched a disastrous Saudi military intervention in Yemen, which has killed thousands and produced tens of thousands of victims. Now, European and American leaders are fingering him for the recent murder of a journalist.
What a sudden attack of conscience! These political leaders, representatives of the capitalists, at the service of the big arms and industrial corporations, apparently have no more scruples than their big-business masters. Everything they do is just to promote the economic and political interests of the big powers they represent, nothing else!
A commando group sent by MBS to the Saudi embassy in Istanbul assassinated the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who wrote for the Washington Post, on October 2. The Turkish head of state, Erdogan, said as much to the Turkish Parliament on October 23. Erdogan was certainly not defending free speech when he shed light on this murder. He earlier said that “in Turkey, we can put journalists in prison,” even if “we don’t murder them and dismember their bodies, like the Saudis do.” This episode is part of the recent conflicts that set different Middle Eastern powers against each other, with U.S. imperialism looming behind it all.
The U.S. let Iran play the most important role in the war against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. But now the U.S. wants to force a complete diplomatic turn-around to push Iran out of its position of power. To do this, the U.S. has reinforced its longstanding alliance with the Saudis. Very soon after his election, Trump denounced the nuclear accord with Iran, and announced new economic sanctions against the country.
Trump even blocked exports of basic necessities to Iran, causing the standard of living of the population to plummet brutally. But these sanctions also hit Iran’s regional allies, like Turkey, which is afraid it won’t be able to continue to get oil and gas from Iran. And the sanctions are also aimed at the European powers that trade with Iran, unless they officially end their ties. And these sanctions were only the beginning because on November 4, there will be a second round of sanctions against Iran, aimed at blocking Iran’s export of petroleum products.
After all the years of wars and bombardment, fights over reconstruction contracts are at the heart of the disputes among the different actors in the region. Trump recently forced the Iraqi government to make a 15-billion-dollar deal with General Electric for gas turbines, even though Iraq had already signed a contract with the German group Siemens. Trump had a powerful argument: if the Iraqi government agrees, the U.S. will let the pipeline from Iran that feeds Iraq stay open, despite the sanctions.
The U.S. has supported MBS, the Saudi prince, in everything: the violent moves he made in Saudi Arabia to consolidate his authority; his war in Yemen; his blockade of Saudi Arabia’s rival and neighbor, Qatar. Because Qatar, which is splitting a giant off-shore oil deposit in the waters between their territories, found it had interests in common with Iran. But this time, by so openly assassinating a journalist employed by a U.S. newspaper, the Saudi prince has made himself difficult to defend. His U.S. guardians have had to take a step back from him, at least partially. As Senator Lindsey Graham put it: “Saudi Arabia is a country. MBS (the prince) is a person. And I am willing to separate the two.”
This doesn’t change anything about U.S. goals or strategy, which have been the main causes of the bloody chaos of this region. Nor will it stop weapon sales to Saudi Arabia, a source of considerable profit for the big arms dealers of Europe and the U.S.
Oct 29, 2018
The Working Class Party candidates can speak with authority about the problems of the schools. One is a teacher for many years, one is a recent graduate of Detroit public schools and now is enrolled at the University of Michigan. Who better to speak for the teachers, students and support staff of all the schools than people who have labored in those schools for years?
Logan R. Smith has lived in Detroit all his life. He says that he has seen in person the problems of our educational system: students in poor communities are going to schools that have huge class sizes, crumbling facilities and overworked, underpaid teachers. Working class students fortunate enough to go to college often graduate with massive, crushing debt, and then face a world where they have to work two or three minimum wage jobs just to survive. Logan says, “these things can be changed. It’s not impossible. It’s not like saying, we want everyone to be in shape, but not have to go to the gym. All it takes is money, enough money to provide a decent school and a good teacher for every student. And that money is there, but not used for the needs of the population.”
Mary Anne Hering has been a community college teacher for many years in the Detroit metropolitan area. Several generations of people throughout the area have come through her classroom. She has been a long time advocate for students and their families, for the custodians and secretaries and other support staff, as well as part-time teachers, who make up the backbone of the teaching staff of all colleges. She is known by many workers and their families, especially at Ford. She hears every day how the attacks on public education affect their children. She is angered knowing there is more than enough money in this country to provide an adequate education to every child. And this is why she is a socialist militant, committed to the working class, because she knows that the working class can fight not only for enough money for education; it can fight to change the whole society. Mary Anne was also one of the main organizers of the effort that put Working Class Party on the ballot in 2016.
Oct 29, 2018
Mary Anne Hering, running for the Michigan State Board of Education, for Working Class Party, gave the following speech at a Working Class Party meeting:
We say in our campaign literature: who knows better the problems of the schools than those who teach in them, and those who have to struggle to learn in them?
So, as the two candidates for State Board of Education with Working Class Party, between Logan R. Smith and myself, we could be here all night talking about why the working class needs its own party and what it is that has to change when it comes to education in this class society.
I didn’t have to write this speech. It was handed to me in headlines in daily newspapers and told to us as we have been out campaigning in, primarily, working class communities.
I’ll start with some headlines:
Federal judge rules Detroit public school students do not have the constitutional right to literacy.
Threats from state won’t fix decades of school disinvestment.
Teacher shortages: From the UP to Metro Detroit.
Michigan school funding getting “more unequal.”
Those headlines reflect the reality that parents, teachers, students, school employees face in Detroit and in a number of working class, and even middle class communities.
Then, listen to just some of the stories we have heard on the campaign trail.
A woman from Livingston County: “My daughter is a teacher, who quit, and waitresses to pay back her student loans.”
Places like Waterford and Birmingham: “no wage increases for teachers in 10 years.”
Another teacher, “I have a master’s degree. 16 years of experience, work two extra jobs and donate blood plasma to pay the bills. I’m a teacher in America.”
Here is an example of the school supplies list parents are given—to be purchased and brought when school starts: 1 pack baby wipes; 1 bottle hand sanitizer; 2 rolls paper towels; 2 boxes tissues; 1 box gallon size zip lock bags; 2 boxes #2 pencils; 1 box crayons, and 10 more things.
Ninety-two percent of teachers pay out-of-pocket for school supplies.
One preschool teacher that I know personally spent $400.
So let me try to take on some of these issues—like the fact that Michigan school funding is becoming more unequal.
First, we live in a class society. What is paid for each child per year by the government reflects your class. The per pupil foundation allowance given by the state to poorer districts is less than to wealthier ones. For example, Detroit gets $7,900 per pupil, Ann Arbor, $9400 and Grosse Pointe, $10,100. And poor rural districts get even less.
Not only is there a higher per pupil grant given to wealthier districts, those districts can spend still more educating each student because they benefit from higher property taxes.
And what are considered the “successful” Michigan school districts? No big surprise that Michigan’s top SAT-scoring high schools are in places that spend more money like Ann Arbor, Northville, and Bloomfield Hills.
For every dollar spent on the lottery by Michigan residents, only 29 cents goes to the schools. So there are billboards on I-94 that say in 2017, $900,000 went to the schools from the lottery. But to BE HONEST, there should be a billboard there that admits while some money goes into the schools from the Lottery, money is taken away from the schools. According to the Michigan League for Public Policy, Michigan has shifted a total of 4.5 billion dollars intended for K-12 public schools to universities and community colleges since 2010. This cut was not done for the benefit of the universities and the community colleges, but to make up for part of what the state didn’t give them and to let the state give out tax cuts to businesses.
So this leads me to some of the other headlines I was referring to:
Dan Gilbert wants to use school money to fund his new downtown projects
Ford seeks $238.6 M in incentives for train station project in Corktown
Pfizer gets $11.5 M in Michigan incentives for major project near Kalamazoo
So here are those tax cuts—to Gilbert, to Little Caesar’s Arena, to Pfizer, to Ford Motor Company, to Marathon Oil—to name just a few.
Year after year, governor after governor, state school superintendent after state school superintendent, the state funds study after study to supposedly find out what it is that kids need.
WE KNOW what our kids need. We know that every school should be staffed with credentialed and well-qualified teachers.
Class sizes should be small so teachers can give every student individual attention.
Every school should offer a full curriculum, including the sciences, literature, arts, history, foreign languages, not to mention IT programming.
Every school should have a library and media center staffed by a qualified librarian.
Every school should have fully equipped laboratories for all the sciences.
Every school should have a nurse and a social worker.
Every school should be in tip-top physical condition.
Students should have a program that includes physical education and sports, dance, music, robotics, dramatics, arts, videography, and other opportunities for intellectual and social development.
Well, the working class can’t wait on lawmakers to give these things. They made and will continue to make decisions for the class they serve: the wealthy people who are the bankers, the owners of corporations, the real estate speculators.
Their answer to poor performing schools is to close them. Their answer to problems in the public schools is to steal one billion dollars a year from public funds and give them to private, for-profit charter schools. Their answer to why children of the working class have lower test scores shouts the same anti-working class and racist prejudices and lies of decades if not centuries—as if working class children, black children, are intellectually inferior and that is why they don’t perform well on standardized tests. Their answer is for parents to pay more out-of-pocket for everything ranging from school supplies to sports and cultural events. Their answer is for homeowners to pay more in millages, after they have been taxed every year for more money for the schools because state aid has been cut because the state has given these exorbitant tax breaks to corporations. Their answer is to increase college tuition and indenture young people to exorbitant loan debt until they are middle aged!
We have a different answer! Working Class Party WILL put a price tag on the cost of implementing the changes that are really needed—higher than the highest funding that goes to the wealthiest districts, and then some, should go to our children’s schools. Unlimited resources for our children.
Working Class Party WILL spell out how Michigan can come up with the extra money—take the money the government now spends on those corporations and banks. Take the money the government wastes on wars and prisons, and use it for schools that would give every child a chance to develop fully.
The money is there. The forces of the working class are there. And the working class is going to take the money!
Oct 29, 2018
At the end of July, the state of Maryland announced a budget surplus of 504 million dollars.
At the same moment, every single jurisdiction, every county and Baltimore City, all are running deficits in funding their pensions, in part because the state has cut back on what it contributes. Maryland’s state employee pension fund is only funded to 68% of what is needed; the city of Baltimore is only funded to 65%; Baltimore County is only funded to 61%.
These shortages mean either pension benefits could be cut, as was done already with teachers’ pensions under the O’Malley administration. Or else the jurisdictions could ask everyone, not just the public employees, to pay higher taxes. Already state workers, teachers and Baltimore city workers were asked to pay a higher percentage of their earnings into the pension system.
If the state is running a surplus, why aren’t the politicians making good on their pension promises?
Oct 29, 2018
The Illinois race for governor pits a Democratic billionaire, J.B. Pritzker, against Republican incumbent, Bruce Rauner, who is “only” worth several hundred million dollars.
Each has attacked the other for how they have handled their business affairs. Republican Rauner pointed out that the Democrat Pritzker took the toilets out of his Gold Coast mansion to qualify for a $330,000 tax break! Rauner said that “I am being challenged by an individual who inherited billions, has never had a real job in his life, has cheated the tax system to dodge taxes....”
Pritzker fired back that “Governor Rauner, in his business, he fired people to make money, to get a better profit. The truth is that people have been abused under Governor Rauner.” Pritzker also pointed out that Rauner has taken advantage of every “tax avoidance” strategy under the sun himself.
Both are right, of course. That’s how they became billionaires! One more reason workers can’t count on these billionaires to address our needs, and one more reason we need our own party!
Oct 29, 2018
The top three elected officials in Washington, D.C. could get $20,000 raises next year. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser would get $220,000 a year, while D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson and Attorney General Karl Racine would make $210,000 a year.
These top officials want a pay raise? Most workers would get written up or fired for the lousy jobs these guys are doing. They certainly wouldn’t get a pay raise!
Oct 29, 2018
It’s that time of year when politicians tell us they care about us, they have programs for us.
Governor Hogan, the Maryland Republican running for re-election, points out he saved drivers money by lowering some E-Z pass fees. Meanwhile, he proposed to spend more of our tax dollars on widening some roads.
Hogan’s administration can find five billion dollars in special deals to bribe Amazon to bring its new headquarters to Maryland, but it cannot fully fund schools so that every child has a good education.
Ben Jealous, the Democratic challenger, promises pre-K education for all children. His proposal to pay for it is casino revenue, gambling money that never arrives as additional funding for education. The casino money simply did NOT go to add funding to education, under either Democrats or Republicans. The politicians found a way to put these funds to other uses.
No matter which of the big parties wins in November, only the wealthy will benefit.
Oct 29, 2018
Translated from Workers’ Voice (La Voix des Travailleurs), the newspaper of the Belgian revolutionary workers’ group Workers’ Fight.
Older diesel cars were outlawed in June in Belgium. Newer models will be outlawed on a schedule until 2030. There has also been an ad campaign pushing people to exchange their old cars for new, supposedly less polluting ones.
Except that the production of electric car batteries causes a lot of pollution. So does making the power to charge them in Belgium, which imports coal from Germany and has nuclear power plants.
Well-planned public transportation would be better ... but not as profitable for the auto companies!
Oct 29, 2018
The following is a speech by Gary Walkowicz, Michigan candidate of the Working Class Party for Congress in the 12th district.
November 6 is election day. But for many working class people, election day has been a day to stay home. Facing the choice between two parties who have not done anything to represent our interests as workers, about half of the working class typically does not vote. For the half of the working class that does vote, people might choose to vote for “the lesser of two evils”; or choose to vote for candidates who might seem different than a typical politician; or choose to vote for candidates who touch on a particular social issue that they are concerned about. And some working people go out to vote, just to vote AGAINST.
For years, working class people have not had any candidates to vote FOR because the working class does not have its own political party, a party which speaks for our interests as working people. But this year there is something to vote FOR. Working Class Party is on the ballot in Michigan.
Now, a real working class party will be a mass party throughout the whole country. A real working class party will be a party that tries to lead fights of the working class. We are not there today.
But in Michigan on November 6, working people can use their vote to say something. We can say that the two major parties do not represent us. We can say that the interests of working people and the interests of our bosses are not the same. We can say that the working class needs its own party to speak for our interests.
The working class in this country has been in an economic crisis for more than 40 years now. Our standard of living continues to deteriorate and get worse. There is a reason that this is happening. The corporations and the banks behind them, who only care about more and more profits for themselves, have been cutting full-time jobs and taking concessions from the workers, reducing wages and benefits, hiring only for part-time jobs. Compared to 40 years ago when I started, the average autoworker is working twice as hard, for barely more than half the wages, adjusted for inflation.
The wealthy are grabbing public money, paid for by our taxes, and using it to enrich themselves. The Gilberts and the Illitchs and Ford Motor Company, among others, are handed this public money by the politicians of both parties. Meanwhile, in the schools for the working class, our children don’t have enough books, sit in over-crowded classrooms and can’t even have clean drinking water.
Public services are falling apart and social services are cut because the wealthy are taking the money that we need.
But on November 6, working people can vote FOR something. We can vote for a working class program.
We can say that the working class needs to put its hands on all the wealth that we created and that the capitalists have stolen from us. We can use this wealth to benefit everyone. Divide up the hours of work, reduce the pace of work, creating more jobs, so that everyone who wants to work can have a job. Pay a decent wage to everyone. Make sure that wages, pensions, social security all go up immediately when prices go up. There is enough money in this society to do all of this, and more.
We can use that money to hire more teachers and fix the schools. We can use that money, our money, to repair the roads and bridges. We can use that money, our money, to make sure that we have clean water and functioning sewer systems. We can use that money, our money, to ensure we have a reliable electrical grid and safe gas lines. Doing this would benefit all of our lives. And doing this would also create millions of jobs.
On November 6, people can say that the working class has the right to these things. People can vote for the Working Class Party. No one else will say these things. The Republicans and the Democrats will never propose that the working class has the right to take back what has been stolen from us by the capitalists. Both parties represent and work for the very capitalist class whose drive for profits is a disaster for all of society.
But on November 6, we can vote FOR a Working Class Party.
Now, we know that elections themselves won’t change things. The corporations and the banks and the wealthy are never going to willingly give up what they have taken from us. It is going to take a fight by the working class to put our hands on the wealth produced by our labor and use it for our own needs.
The working class has not made a massive fight for years. But the working class has the power to make that fight. We do all the work, we build everything. We make everything run. We know where the money is and how to put our hands on things to run everything ourselves. When the working class decides to fight, we have the power to change society.
Our goal today must be prepare for that fight. We must bring our forces together. The bosses try to divide us, in order to make us weaker. They try to pit white workers against black workers, native-born workers against immigrant workers, men against women. Those who try to divide us are our enemies, and we must push THEM aside. That is a working class program that we can fight for.
We must ask people to vote for us on November 6. For working people who usually vote, we can give them a reason to vote FOR the Working Class Party. For working people who don’t usually vote, we can tell them they have the chance this year to vote FOR a party that speaks to their class interests.
For everybody from the working class, we can ask them to vote this year FOR what they want: a party built by the working class.
Vote FOR the Working Class Party.