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
Mar 15, 2021
Democratic Party politicians call the 1.9 trillion dollar stimulus that Biden signed into law on March 11 “an anti-poverty measure with few precedents in the U.S. history.”
But this stimulus bill is neither “far reaching,” nor “significant” for working people. Just look at the three key provisions: a one-time $1,400 stimulus check, six months of supplemental unemployment benefits that end in September of this year, and an expanded child tax credit that lasts for a year.
This aid is very, very temporary and very little compared to the depth of the crisis that people face. It cannot rescue tens of millions of working people and their families from the worst economic and social crisis capitalism has dropped us into since the Great Depression. In fact, it is not much different than the two previous stimulus bills that ran out of money in a matter months.
More than 30 million workers are still out of work or not working enough hours to survive on. More than 42 million people face hunger, forced to rely upon charities and food banks to keep from starving. One in six renters are now behind on their rent, and a wave of evictions and foreclosures is about to break once the government-sanctioned moratorium on evictions runs out in the next few months.
U.S. capitalism generates the most wealth in the world, but does not supply even the bare minimum to an increasingly impoverished population. Driving down our standard of living, it has funneled record amounts of wealth and profits to a tiny minority. Corporate profits are now higher than they were before the pandemic broke out. The stock market has hit one record after another. And the top 25 managers of hedge funds, who speculate with big pools of other peoples’ money, made more than a billion dollars each in the last year!
Of the five trillion dollars in relief passed by Congress over the last year, four-fifths of the aid went to the biggest corporations and the very wealthiest layers of society. The 43,000 richest individuals in the country got extra tax breaks worth 1.6 million dollars each in one year! Special corporate tax breaks amounted to more than six times the cost of the child tax credit that the Democrats are touting in this most recent bill.
At the same time, the U.S. Federal Reserve supplied trillions of dollars of credit to the big banks and financial companies ... practically free of charge! And it bought up trillions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities and private corporate debt.
Corporate relief to save jobs? Bull! Big business kept the money and laid off millions of workers anyway, taking advantage of the pandemic and crisis to “cut labor costs,” as they said.
Workers cannot expect a rescue from either the Democrats or the Republicans, or their stimulus plans or rescue plans. We need an end to the pandemic! We need jobs! We need a living wage! We need affordable housing, health care, and education for our kids! But capitalism can’t give us these things.
Designed to dampen the anger of the working population, the government’s small, temporary measures are equivalent to putting a band-aid on cancer. But the cancer of capitalism requires radical surgery—a workers’ fight to get rid of the Wall Street profiteers and corporate billionaires and their front men and women in government.
The working class has the capacity to set up our own power to organize and to run society, free from the parasites of capitalism. This is the rescue plan we need.
Mar 15, 2021
Celebrated now on March 8, International Women’s Day started as a protest of women workers in New York City on February 28, 1909. First organized by labor activists, socialists, and suffragists, the idea of a “women’s day”—an international day of struggle for the rights and demands of women—spread.
Women workers in Germany chose March 8 in 1914 to demonstrate massively against the coming first World War.
And three years later, on March 8 in 1917, striking women workers in Russia massively took to the streets to demand bread and an end to the World War. This became the spark that set off events that led to the Russian Revolution. In recognition of the role of women in the workers’ revolution in Russia, March 8 became an official holiday in the Soviet Union.
That this holiday originated in the workers revolutionary movement is a history worth re-connecting to.
The pandemic has exposed many aspects of the overexploitation of women. Women have had to leave the work force to care for children and elders during quarantine. And of those women who remain in the workforce, the vast majority of workers on the front line in healthcare and in stores are women. The vast majority of part-time workers, often subjected to the worst working hours, are women. And during the pandemic, researchers have talked about a “shadow pandemic” of violence against women during lockdowns.
March 8 is a tribute to the revolutionary role of working women. Under this system, women suffer the lowest wages and are among the most oppressed. Their revolt can be the basis of a needed struggle against the whole social order.
Mar 15, 2021
Thompson’s autobiography lets you into the deep and militant mind of the first black coach whose team won the NCAA national college basketball championship.
Thompson saw potential in young, poor, black men, especially from the Washington, D.C. area where he was raised and where he coached at elite, Jesuit-run, formerly white-only Georgetown University from 1972 to 1999. After all, he himself had been judged mentally disabled by white teachers, before going on to play two years for the Boston Celtics basketball team and getting a master’s degree in counseling. He always said his father, a manual laborer, was the smartest man he knew. His family had lived in many working class neighborhoods, including in public housing.
Thompson recruited youths like Allen Iverson, a star local high school basketball and football player from a poor background, to Georgetown. Thompson told a competing white coach, “Where you come to recruit your kids, that’s where I live.”
From the start Thompson demanded his players develop their minds as well as their bodies. The first staffer he hired at Georgetown was a young white woman he tasked with making the players study for an hour before going to practice.
Thompson constantly had to battle racists trying to hold him and his student athletes back. For example, when he first coached at a majority-black Catholic high school in D.C., his team faced dirty tricks by opposing white coaches to keep them out of tournaments. While at Georgetown, Thompson famously walked out of a game—effectively going on strike—to protest a short-lived NCAA rule that limited poor and black students’ possibilities to become college athletes. “I never had the luxury of just being a basketball coach,” he writes.
Thompson died last August, but he had finished the book. Take some lessons—and some entertainment—from reading Coach Thompson’s book.
Mar 15, 2021
Debbie Lesko, U.S. Representative from Arizona, said that Hispanics “are very good workers.” But she thinks the undocumented should have to wait at the end of the line to be vaccinated, after citizens.
Of course, the vast majority of Hispanics are citizens or legal residents: two-thirds were born in the U.S. But whether they are here legally or not, these “very good workers” are disproportionately working the frontline jobs that put people at highest risk for catching COVID. According to the CDC, Hispanics have been dying of COVID at more than double the rate of white people.
In blunt, obviously racist terms, this Congressional “representative” reflected the attitudes of the capitalist class she serves. Those capitalists have treated workers as disposable ever since this pandemic began—whatever our race or ethnicity.
Mar 15, 2021
The life of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a political prisoner who was framed and falsely convicted of killing a Philadelphia cop in 1981, is in serious danger. He has Covid-19, is diabetic, suffers from congestive heart failure, and is facing organ failure of the skin. He has many sores on his skin, yet is kept in solitary confinement in a prison infirmary, without access to healing salves and ointments he had in his cell. Prison officials deny him access to a phone or tablet he could use to send emails.
Mumia Abu-Jamal is a former Black Panther and a radio journalist. In his radio broadcasts, he exposed police brutality by Philadelphia cops in their attacks on MOVE, a black nationalist organization whose members lived together in a commune in Philadelphia.
In 1981, while driving a taxi, Abu-Jamal intervened when he saw cops had stopped his brother. During an ensuing shootout, Abu-Jamal was shot and police officer Daniel Faulkner was killed. Abu-Jamal was charged and later convicted of Faulkner’s murder and originally sentenced to death.
Evidence later showed statements by witnesses against Abu-Jamal to be false. The judge in the case, Albert Sabo, was overheard making racist comments showing he had a vendetta against Abu-Jamal. Yet Sabo refused to recuse himself from later appeals.
An appeals court later overturned Abu-Jamal’s death sentence due to problems with jury instructions during the penalty phase of his trial. The judge changed his sentence to life without parole.
Demonstrations have taken place around the world in support of Abu-Jamal since his conviction, calling for his release. Keeping him in prison IS, now, a death sentence. Yet he remains in prison, despite all his health problems. No president, Democrat or Republican, has seen fit to offer him a pardon or even commutation of his sentence, while they have found reasons to pardon rich friends and corrupt politicians.
Abu-Jamal’s supporters are calling for people to “call, write, tweet, post and fax to demand ‘freedom, treatment, diagnosis, and access to his lawyers, doctors, and family for Mumia Abu-Jamal at SCI Mahanoy” where he is imprisoned in Pennsylvania. They list the following contact information for the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections:
Phone number: 717–728–2573
Email address: ra-contactdoc@pa.gov
Twitter page: @CorrectionsPA
Facebook: @CorrectionsPA
Mar 15, 2021
Among those who protested against the murder of George Floyd last year were college football players at the University of Texas. In addition, the players raised several issues of racism at the university, including the school song “The Eyes of Texas.”
It was a tradition after every football game for the Texas fans and players to stand while the song was played. Texas football players and some members of the school band asked that “The Eyes of Texas” not be played anymore because the song had origins in minstrel shows at the university with performers in blackface. And it is also believed that some of the lyrics in the song come from a quote about slavery by Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
But the university refused to stop playing the song. So after one game, almost every single Texas football player, black and white, left the field when the song was played.
After the protest, the black Texas players faced the reaction of some racists. Some black players even got anonymous death threats.
But perhaps even more outrageous were the signed emails sent to the Texas athletic department by some wealthy white boosters who contribute to the university. They said, among other things, that black players would never be able to get a job in the state, that black players should leave the university and that the opinion of black students didn’t matter because they are only a small minority at the university.
It is disgusting that people who are so-called fans of a sports team can cheer and brag about the success of “their” teams—teams that often have a majority of black players. And, at the same time, these “fans” are racist toward these very same players they cheer for.
These wealthy white boosters were so brazen in their racism that they didn’t think twice about putting their names on these emails.
It is a sign of how deep-rooted racism is in this country.
Mar 15, 2021
Thousands gathered in front of the White House to demonstrate against skyrocketing unemployment and racial injustice. They carried signs saying, “We demand Work or Wages” and “Fight Police Brutality.” Black and white workers demonstrated together until police broke up the crowd with tear gas and billy clubs.
Sound like something that happened last year? Yes, but this happened back in March of 1930, when the economic boom of the 1920s became a mere memory, replaced by a stock market crash and a severe contraction of the interdependent capitalist economies of the world.
Unemployment became a mass phenomenon on a world scale. Hunger, homelessness, and evictions were features of this Great Depression in the United States. Jobs disappeared and working conditions deteriorated. By 1933, one-third of farm families had lost their farms. Unemployment that year was 25%. The lives of working people were devastated.
The demonstration in front of the White House was part of International Unemployment Day (March 6, 1930). This coordinated, international campaign of marches and demonstrations was organized by the Communist International. It was marked by hundreds of thousands of people in major cities around the world taking to the streets to protest the mass unemployment associated with the Great Depression.
In the United States, full-scale riots erupted in New York City and Detroit when thousands of baton-wielding police attacked tens of thousands of marchers. A total of 30 American cities in all saw mass demonstrations as part of the March 6 campaign, including Boston, Milwaukee, Baltimore, Cleveland, Washington, D.C., San Francisco and Seattle.
During the 1930s there were many battles and protests. This movement led to the passage of unemployment insurance in seven states by 1932 and to President Franklin D. Roosevelt passing the Social Security Act of 1935, providing federal unemployment. While the movement did not go far enough, there are some important take-aways from this time when workers, black and white, across the country, fought together against an unfair and failed system.
Today, the working class faces devastation as well. Twenty-two million jobs disappeared between March and April of 2020. It took three years for a comparable loss during the Great Depression.
We have the opportunity to pick up the fights of the ‘30s where they left off, but to take it all the way. The working class has to take power and run society. Anything less leaves us at the mercy of the wealthy class.
Mar 15, 2021
Young people’s mental health is at severe risk as the isolation resulting from the government’s total incapacity to contain COVID-19 drags on.
According to a survey carried out by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), already in June almost two-thirds of young adults reported symptoms of anxiety, depression, or both. Another 25% reported beginning or increasing their use of substances to cope. One in four reported that they had contemplated suicide in the last 30 days. Since then, other more localized studies have reported similar or even more dire results.
And in the midst of this crisis, the U.S. has a severe shortage of mental health care. In many places, it has become nearly impossible to get a counseling appointment—especially if you have less-than-stellar insurance. Many facilities that promise to take Medicaid actually only take one or two Medicaid patients a year.
It should be no surprise then that emergency room visits by young people for mental health problems skyrocketed in 2020. But E.R.s are unprepared to deal with mental health problems. Dr. Rebecca Baum, a developmental pediatrician in Asheville, N.C., reported: “Kids are having to board in the E.R. for days on end, because there are no psychiatric beds available in their entire state, never mind the hospital.”
All this is not just a consequence of COVID-19: young people were already facing a mental health crisis before it hit. By 2019, according to the National Institute of Health, about 1 in 3 adolescents experienced an anxiety disorder as they grew up, with rates increasing rapidly since the early 2000s. Between 2005 and 2017, the rates of youth diagnosed with depression also increased more than 60%.
More young people were also already acting out in desperate ways. According to the CDC, the suicide rate for people aged 10—24 had risen by about 50% between 2007 and 2018, and the rate of hospitalizations for suicide attempts nearly doubled.
Even before COVID hit, when mental health care was less scarce, capitalist society only offered individual solutions to this social problem. For years, younger and younger children have been given stronger and stronger medications—if their insurance would pay. Parents of mentally ill youth were often overwhelmed with advice on how to help their specific kids—as if each individual family might handle its own problems.
But when the rates of mental illness are this high, the problem is not individual: it is rooted in a society that even before the pandemic did not give young people a way to make a place for themselves, to make meaningful connections, and to find a purpose in their lives.
This capitalist society in decay increasingly cannot meet the basic needs of our children. Could there be any greater sign that it needs to be replaced?
Mar 15, 2021
Ten miles north of the U.S. border in California, an SUV carrying 25 migrants was T-boned by a big rig. Nine is the occupancy permitted for this vehicle. So, thirteen died. The ages of the passengers ranged from 15 to 53 years old. These undocumented immigrants were making the crossing into the U.S. from Mexico and Central America.
Vehicles that transport undocumented migrants under similar circumstances are often dubbed “coffins on wheels,” because of how dangerous they are.
Every year, hundreds die making their way into the U.S. They are propelled to flee because of the barbaric conditions in countries under U.S. domination. Large corporations have bled this region dry, only leaving behind mass unemployment, poverty, and gang violence for the population.
Once in the U.S., low-paid, undocumented workers make up an important essential layer of the working class. They staff critical industries such as manufacturing production, agriculture, meat-packing, and construction. They work in health care, helping to take care of the sick suffering from the pandemic. The bosses take advantage of their vulnerable position, forcing them to work for less pay and under worse conditions. The bosses impose these divisions on the working class.
However, we are one working class regardless of legal status. When workers begin to fight back, the same courageous and brave qualities shown by these undocumented workers will shine in the fight against the capitalist class who exploit us all.
Mar 15, 2021
Included in the American Rescue Plan that was passed by the Democrats in Congress and signed by Biden is 34 billion dollars to expand the Affordable Care Act (ACA), known as Obamacare.
About 15 million people have lost their private health insurance since the start of the economic crisis and the pandemic. It is estimated that only about one million people would get insurance through this measure, a drop in the bucket to what is really needed. And for those million or so people getting insurance through the ACA, many of them will still be paying hundreds of dollars a month in premiums, after the small subsidies provided by the government.
What the 34 billion dollars in this legislation really amounts to is a subsidy for the profits of the insurance companies and the health care corporations, just like the original Affordable Care Act.
While most of the wealthier countries in the world have some form of a national health care system, the U.S. health care system is mainly based on making profits for the insurance companies, the hospital corporations and the drug companies. That’s why the health care provided in this country is worse than in many other countries.
Under the ACA, while it did enable some more people to buy health insurance, many millions of people were still left without insurance. The ACA was mainly a big boost for the guaranteed profits of the health care corporations.
During the election campaign, many Democrats and Biden himself talked about improving the health care system, and providing health insurance for people who don’t have it, through some kind of public option, or Medicare for all, or through some other form of government health care.
But this legislation they just passed and signed continues to ensure that profits will come before the health care needs of the population.
Mar 15, 2021
Libraries are starting to open to the public again. And workers at public libraries in Baltimore County, Maryland are campaigning to get a union. Nearly half the system’s 500 or so employees are part-time librarians with no health care, dental, or vision benefits, and no pension contributions. The benefit they do have, accrued sick leave, is so meager that healthy workers have a market set up through an association to give sick workers their few days off.
The county workers are not alone in lacking a union. In Baltimore City and all but three other counties in Maryland, library worker unions are not allowed.
The county library system managed to find money in its budget to hire a big lobbying firm to fight against the campaign. But they can’t find the money for what the workers need? Go figure!
Mar 15, 2021
On the same exact day, February 18, we saw pictures of NASA landing a rover on Mars—and also saw the devastation of the Texas power grid failing in a storm.
Going to Mars is rocket science at its finest. Every imaginable problem is planned for ahead of time. How is it possible that this cannot be done for a power grid supplying 29 million people with basic electricity?
We have more than enough applied rocket science. What we need is applied social science, to lift us to a better way of organizing the fundamentals of our society.
Mar 15, 2021
The only thing worse than low wages for restaurant servers is no wages. This is what happened at Tank Noodle, a large Vietnamese restaurant on Chicago’s North Side. They made some servers work for tips only—no wage! For others, they would pool the tip money at the end of a shift, which was then partly stolen by management. And they refused to pay overtime.
Workers filed a complaint. After an investigation, the Department of Labor made Tank return 697 thousand dollars in back wages. After stealing almost one million! If that’s the punishment, do you think they’ll ever stop?
Mar 15, 2021
Translated and excerpted from Lutte de Classe, the journal of the revolutionary workers’ group Lutte Ouvrière, active in France.
In September 1870, the Empire of Napoleon III of France collapsed after 20 years in power, when news spread of the Empire’s defeat in the war the Emperor himself had launched against Prussia. The people of Paris responded by arming themselves against the threat of German occupation and by organizing themselves by city district into National Guard battalions. When the government of the bourgeois republic, which had replaced the emperor, tried to disarm them on March 18, 1871—in the words of novelist Victor Hugo, this “touched off the fuse to the powder keg”—the proletarians rose up. They proclaimed the Commune, which was a reference to one established by the French Revolution 80 years earlier. The bourgeoisie and their political leaders were frightened and took refuge in suburban Versailles, with tens of thousands of soldiers and officers.
This first workers’ power, as embodied first by the Central Committee of the National Guard and then by the Commune’s Council and by activists such as Eugène Varlin and Léo Frankel, lasted a little over two months. Emergency measures were adopted, aiming to concretely improve the living conditions of working people: particularly, a moratorium on rents, a reduction in work hours, increases of the lowest wages, the prohibition of night shifts for women and children, and the establishment of cafeterias for ordinary people.
But most significantly, the Paris Commune began to destroy the state apparatus of the bourgeoisie. It put in place changes that foreshadowed what could become a democratic working class government, such as abolishing the standing army and replacing it with the armed people, and electing and recalling public servants and bringing their salaries in line with workers’ wages.
The wealthy had to re-establish their order, since they risked seeing the working-class power extend over the rest of the country and beyond. Government chief Adolphe Thiers launched the Versailles army into an assault on the Communards. Despite a heroic defense, the Communards were defeated. At least 20,000 were massacred during the “bloody week.” Tens of thousands of others were hastily sentenced and thrown into prison, executed, or, like Louise Michel, deported to New Caledonia. The bourgeoisie then could hope, according to the words of writer Edmond de Goncourt, “such a purge, by killing off the combative part of the population, defers the next revolution by a whole generation.” After that it was in Russia, first in 1905 and then in 1917, that the working class would again victoriously take up an assault on the bourgeoisie and its state. This opened up the way for a new wave throughout all of Europe. At its head was the Bolshevik Party, which knew more than all the other parties to learn the militant lessons of the Commune.
Karl Marx was writing The Civil War in France at the same time as the Commune was unfolding. He and Friedrich Engels saw in it an impressive demonstration of the revolutionary power of the working masses.
Marx was aware of the unfavorable balance of forces and of the isolation of the proletariat’s revolutionary elements in a France marked by the influence of the small farmers. In September 1870 he had written an “Address” in the name of the International Workingmen’s Association (the International) warning its militants against a premature insurrection. But as soon as the Commune was announced, he hailed the “flexibility,” “historic initiative,” and the “capacity for sacrifice” of the proletarians of France’s capital.
And even before the destruction of the Commune, he wrote, “However that may be, the present rising in Paris—even if it be crushed by the wolves, swine and vile curs of the old society—is the most glorious deed of our Party since the June insurrection in Paris.”
As Vladimir Lenin emphasized, Marx upheld above all in the working class’s struggles “the historical initiative of the masses” and their capacity to find in their struggles the energy to engage in the fight against bourgeois society and even to invent the form of that fight. A step forward in struggle is always better in this regard than any program. In Lenin’s struggle to build a revolutionary party in Russia and lead it to the assault on the ruling power, he relied constantly on this fundamental aspect of the class struggle. Lenin was in a good situation to know that many militants like Plekhanov, who had worked for the proletarian revolution, would later renounce the revolution because they did not really have confidence in this capacity of the working class or in the “intuitive genius of the masses.”
This is why Lenin understood first and most deeply the importance of the appearance of the Soviets in Russia during the revolution of 1905. This perspective also guided his whole approach during the year 1917 and then in the construction of the workers’ state. He was convinced that if workers made mistakes, they would also be able to learn from them. Along this line, as he emphasized in a text in 1908, “The Commune taught the European proletariat to pose concretely the tasks of the socialist revolution.” Lenin never failed to admire in the Commune “initiative, independence, freedom of action and vigor from below [combined] with voluntary centralism free from stereotyped forms.” He fought for the Soviets to follow the same path. And the hopes of activists who want to contribute to the emancipation of the working class and of humanity today must be based on this same confidence.
The Paris Commune saw the proletariat brought to the head of a state—and of a great power—for the first time. The proletariat hadn’t chosen the timing or the conditions, but it vowed resolutely to tear down the state stone by stone. This is why, as Lenin emphasized in State and Revolution, the only “correction” that Marx deemed necessary to make to the Communist Manifesto was drawn from the experience of the Commune. During the revolution to come, the workers could not be content to operate the state apparatus for their own benefit, they would first of all have to take it apart. The Communards had partially understood this by starting to dismantle the state apparatus and by organizing the arming of the proletariat, an indispensable lever for successfully overthrowing the social order.
The Commune also represented the end of the hope in a “social republic” based on bourgeois electoralism which was still held by many proletarians and some socialists in 1848. The workers of the Commune had opposed their own domination to this bourgeois regime in which, as Lenin wrote, paraphrasing Marx, “the oppressed classes enjoy the right to decide once in several years which representative of the propertied classes shall ‘represent and suppress’ the people in parliament.” They did not have time to really implement it, and they did not dare to seize and manage the Bank of France, which left the bourgeoisie the financial resources to secretly reorganize its army and prepare to crush the Commune.
When that particularly violent and murderous assault came, it showed that workers will be able to truly free themselves from the exploitation and dictatorship of the bourgeoisie—in other words, from its power and control over the economy—only by exercising their own power, their dictatorship over the propertied classes. This is true regardless of the form the domination of the bourgeoisie takes, whether a republic, a parliamentary monarchy, or an outright dictatorship.
This does not mean that revolutionary communists are indifferent to so-called democratic freedoms. To the contrary—if only because they allow militants to defend their ideas more openly. So, the Bolsheviks always were the first to fight for the victory of democratic rights in Tsarist Russia, where those rights were flouted. But the Bolsheviks did not lose sight of the fact that only the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and the collectivization of the major means of production could guarantee real equality and therefore real democracy.
Despite all its shortcomings, such as renouncing to engage in a military offensive when the wealthy in Versailles fled in March 1871, Engels concluded in his 1891 introduction to The Civil War in France that the Commune “was the dictatorship of the proletariat.” It was a new type of proletarian state, in which Lenin saw “the autonomous organization of the working masses,” with no “distinction between legislative and executive powers,” and an armed organization capable of preventing any counter-revolution coming from the old ruling classes and their supporters in the petty bourgeoisie.
The Commune’s tragic end showed that the owning classes and their respective states—in this case the French bourgeois republic and the German empire—knew how to get along perfectly when it came to crushing proletarians. The Commune’s defeat is also a reminder that workers are one class, regardless of their origins and across all borders. This is not only so because many of the Communards were themselves Poles, Hungarians or Germans, but also because the Commune resonated on every continent. And it is above all so because the working class can only fully emancipate itself on the scale of the capitalist world.
Moreover, one of the criticisms that Marx had formulated against the French workers’ leaders in 1870 was to warn them against the sirens of national unity and against nostalgic memories of the French Revolution—a period when the bourgeoisie had carried out this policy of national unity on its own account. While Lenin admired Auguste Blanqui’s combativeness and dedication to the proletarian cause, he also emphasized the extent to which the title of Blanqui’s newspaper Our Country in Danger! was detrimental to this cause.
In September 1870, through the intermediary of the very small minority of militants who claimed to support his ideas, Marx above all advised the workers of Paris to “calmly and resolutely improve … the work of their own class organization.” They did not have enough time, and some did not understand the need for this work. So with the Paris Commune the proletariat found itself in power without having been able to organize itself and without having had the possibility to decide between the different political currents existing within it: communists, anarchists, and supporters of Proudhon and Blanqui in particular.
The fumbles and even the mistakes of the leaders of the Commune in financial and in military matters, and their difficulty in conceiving and implementing a policy directed toward the poor farmers, could not be overcome, because of the absence of a real party. What was lacking was an organization and leaders who concentrated the experience of the workers’ movement and who could have made the link with the masses in the period before the Commune. Nor could the Commune’s leaders exclude certain patriots who claimed to be socialist but who, as Trotsky writes, “did not really have any confidence” in the working class, and worse, “shook the proletariat’s faith in itself.”
In May 1871, when the reaction drowned the workers’ insurrection in blood, Thiers reportedly exclaimed: “Socialism is over now, and for a long time!” Quite the opposite! The socialist movement grew mightily before the end of the century and then led to a victorious revolution in Russia. It took betrayal by the main leaders of the socialist parties and the unions, and later by the Stalinist leaders, to save the bourgeoisie. One hundred and fifty years after the Commune, the rage against capitalist society which still animates many exploited people must be combined with the sharpest consciousness of the interests of the proletariat and the knowledge of its false friends and its true enemies, in order to prevail. Transmitting the experiences of the past, such as those of 1871, and learning both from past successes and failures, remain essential tasks for revolutionary communist militants. This conclusion of Lenin remains ours: “The cause of the Commune is not dead. It lives to the present day in every one of us. The cause of the Commune is the cause of the social revolution, the cause of the complete political and economic emancipation of the toilers. It is the cause of the proletariat of the whole world. And in this sense it is immortal.”
Mar 15, 2021
Translated from Lutte Ouvrière, the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.
At least 18 demonstrators were killed by the military in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, on February 18th. Despite more and more violent repression, the popular opposition to the military coup on February 1st has continued to grow.
The generals have overturned the civilian government, arresting Aung San Suu Kyi, the head of the National League for Democracy, the party that had just won in the legislative elections. They did so in order to maintain their hold on the country’s political institutions, and through them, a large portion of the economy. Their coup set off an unprecedented mobilization in this country of 54 million.
For the past month, the opposition, started by the League for Democracy, has taken the path of civil disobedience—holding daily meetings and rallies, and setting up roadblocks. On Monday February 22nd, hundreds of thousands marched under the slogans: “Free Our Leaders”, “Respect Our Votes”, “Reject the Coup d’Etat.” The call for a general strike was heeded in Rangoon, the economic capital, as well as in other important centers, with a large portion of businesses closing their doors, and a great many workplaces brought to a halt.
The generals have been resorting to force as a way to discourage demonstrators, deploying tear gas, water cannons, rubber bullets and live ammunition. An independent organization for political prisoners has tallied thirty deaths among the protestors in the first month. They’ve counted over a thousand arrested and indicted or sentenced since the coup. Among those arrested are railworkers, government functionaries, and bank workers, who stopped work to demonstrate their opposition to the military junta.
The coup d’état of February 1st ended the brief civilian government that began when Aung San Suu Kyi rose to head the government in 2016. Aung San Suu Kyi never ceased to bend before the demands of the military, all the way up to justifying the massacres among the Muslim Rohynga population. This paved the way for the army to bring the so-called “transition to democracy” to an end. If the National League for Democracy now calls for demonstrations, it has shown in the past that it would not challenge the base of the military’s power.
The only true hope resides in these mobilizations, especially if the workers take hold of them for their own purposes and do not remain content to serve as a strike force for different bourgeois parties.
Mar 15, 2021
According to the U.N.’s World Food Program, 1.7 million people in the countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Honduras urgently need food aid right now, and the situation is getting worse by the day. By mid-summer, the non-profit group CARE says that one third of the people in Honduras alone will face severe hunger.
These countries have experienced five years of drought that experts link to ongoing climate change. Food production plummeted, as did the production of commodities like coffee that farmers could sell to raise a little money to save for a crisis.
Then these countries imposed COVID lockdowns. Even survival strategies like colleting cans to recycle became impossible—all as food prices rose.
In the middle of the lockdowns, two hurricanes hit Central America in the fall of 2020. In many places, they ruined the already-reduced harvest and flooded towns, destroying homes and the few possessions people had left.
The droughts, lockdowns, and hurricanes pushed many over the edge because they were already living in extreme poverty. And behind this region’s poverty lies more than a century of U.S. domination of the region. Yet the main U.S. policy in the midst of this human disaster is to protect U.S. interests and push the governments of all these countries to keep their people from leaving, with armed force when necessary.
The world produces more than enough food to feed everyone. Growing hunger in the midst of plenty—that is 21st-century capitalism in a nutshell.
Mar 15, 2021
Pfizer, the pharmaceutical giant, is making a killing out of the manufacture and sale of its COVID-19 vaccine. It expects that the vaccine will generate more than $3 billion in profits in 2021, according to Bloomberg. And Pfizer stands to make even more from the vaccine in coming years, since the COVID virus will most likely be around for a long time.
Pfizer did not do most of the work that went into the development of this vaccine. No, that work was done by hundreds of scientists working in universities or government institutes over many decades in many countries with funding supplied by governments, using taxpayers’ money.
All Pfizer did was to take the vaccine research and development done by others and privately commercialize it. Pfizer then carried out clinical trials to get the approval of the medical regulatory agencies. Pfizer used human subjects at 150 different sites in the U.S., Germany, Turkey, South Africa, Brazil, and Argentina. Once the vaccine was approved for use, not all those countries got Pfizer’s vaccine, because Pfizer decides who gets what, based on its own profit targets.
To reach such greedy profit-driven goals, Pfizer is taking whole populations of countries hostage. For example, the Israeli government is currently boasting that they are achieving the highest vaccination rate in the world. Fifty-four percent of Israelis had received the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine as of March 9, 2021.
This “success” was a result of the political calculations of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Faced with a hard-fought and close election campaign coming up in March, as well as myriad corruption charges that are going to trial, he has touted the high vaccination rate as a way of saving himself.
Of course, Pfizer was ready to collude … for a very high price. It got the Israeli government to agree to an exclusive deal to buy only Pfizer’s vaccine, and to pay Pfizer about 50% more than the U.S. government paid, doubling Pfizer’s Israeli profits. Israel also agreed with Pfizer to share countrywide data on the vaccine. That is, Pfizer exploited millions of “lucky” Israeli vaccine recipients as experimental human subjects and generated an important set of data to understand the effectiveness of this vaccine on large populations, data with which Pfizer solidified its market lead and its skyrocketing profits.
But not every group in Israel got vaccinated. Migrant workers, refugees, and some 4.5 million Palestinians in the occupied territories did not get the Pfizer vaccine or any vaccine at all in Israel, thus reinforcing the Israeli government’s repressive policies.
So, this collusion between Pfizer and Israel came with huge consequences to the Israeli population.
On the other hand, some countries, such as Brazil and Argentina, did not get the vaccine because those governments did not fully abide with Pfizer’s vaccine imperialism. Pfizer demanded that the Argentine government compensate Pfizer for the cost of any future civil lawsuits. So, if someone filed a civil lawsuit against Pfizer in Argentina and won, the government of Argentina and not Pfizer would pay the compensation, even for Pfizer’s own negligence and mistakes. As if this was not enough, Pfizer also demanded that the government put up sovereign assets, such as bank reserves, military bases and embassy buildings as collateral against the cost of any future lawsuits. Argentina refused to go this far and could not get the Pfizer vaccine.
This is how companies turn the scientific work and development funded by others into their own skyrocketing profits, and how a simple vaccine that should be used to uphold peoples’ health is turned into a disgusting and barbaric political tool to further the power of despots and their billionaire friends.
Mar 15, 2021
The coronavirus causing the pandemic is mutating.
In the late fall, distinctive new versions of the virus led to alarming surges in Brazil, South Africa and the United Kingdom. These variants carry not one, but a slew of mutations. They appear to have worrisome new abilities, better at spreading or slipping by aspects of our immune system. All these variants have been detected in the U.S.
Scientists suspect these three variants are more contagious for three reasons: these variants are rapidly replacing other versions of the virus; they have mutations (changes to genetic make-up) that affect a part of the virus likely to be important; and some mutations have already been shown in the lab to increase the ability of the virus to infect cells. Together, these three factors build a case for a variant that spreads more easily.
It’s not unexpected that these new variants have developed. All viruses mutate as they make copies of themselves. These are accidental and random changes in the genes. Most of these differences are inconsequential. A few can even be harmful to the virus’s survival. But some changes are advantageous to the virus. They could allow the virus to infect us more efficiently, for example, or replicate more efficiently or defeat our own immune system defenses.
The genes that are helpful to the virus, or at least are not harmful to the virus, keep getting replicated. This process is called natural selection. Together, natural selection and random mutations drive evolution. All living things evolve. This is a normal, observable, and continuous process. And we are observing it right now with COVID-19.
Some scientists assumed that because the virus has a proofreading mechanism to correct errors when it multiplies, it wouldn’t mutate rapidly. But many of the changes in the virus weren’t typos in the genetic code. They were missing swaths called deletions. The virus couldn’t proofread what wasn’t there.
The virus that was first detected in Wuhan, China, is not the same one circulating today in most places around the world. There are many thousands of different versions, or variants, of COVID circulating. The three variants mentioned above are of concern to scientists because they are more contagious, and some may evade antibodies. This could make the current treatments and vaccines less effective against the virus. While the genetic code for each of these variants is slightly different, they do share some of the same mutations. These same mutations happened independently—most likely because they are so useful to the virus.
All three variants, the U.K., the South African, and the Brazilian, share the N501Y gene. This gene may help these variants spread more easily. The South African and Brazilian variant both have the E484K mutation which may affect how our antibodies respond to the virus. From the studies, it looks like it makes our antibodies less effective.
These variants have been found in the U.S. Additionally, the U.S. has its own homegrown variants: two found in California and one detected in New York. These variants are of concern, just like the other three, but more study is needed to confirm the concern of scientists. Even though variants were completely predictable, the U.S. has not spent the money or resources in searching for and studying new variants.
These variants don’t stay in one city or one country. They travel around on planes, trains, cars, buses, and cruise ships, with the often unaware host they have infected. The U.K. variant, for example, went from being non-existent to spreading to over 80 countries around the world, including the U.S.
These variants show that this global catastrophe requires global solutions. Leaving one country behind will leave us all behind.
Mar 15, 2021
The following is the editorial from SPARK’s workplace newsletters, for the week of March 8, 2021.
“It is now time to open Texas 100%”—so said Governor Greg Abbott, ending the state mandate to wear a mask in public, lifting all state restrictions on business, and calling for schools to open throughout Texas. “Texans will do the right thing themselves.”
“Not so fast,” said President Biden. His new head of the CDC, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, put it this way: “I know people are tired; they want to get back to life, to normal, but we’re not there yet.”
That encapsulates the way the issue has been debated in this country for the past year.
There is a reality to both sides of the debate, independent of the many politicians who used it to make a name for themselves.
On the one hand, our health: This virus has been deadly. Over half a million people died in little more than a year. Put this on a human scale: at least one third of the people in this country knew someone who died. Some, more than one.
The risk to our health has been and continues to be worse for “essential” workers, the ones who worked from the beginning to keep society going: nurses, janitors in hospitals, packinghouse workers, grocery store workers, transit workers, and more.
It’s true, all the statistics in recent weeks have shown steady improvement: fewer cases, fewer deaths, fewer hospitalizations and a lower rate of positive reactions on the tests. BUT this downward trend seems to be stagnating. The numbers are as high as they were in the peak last summer, when infections first spread all over the country. So no, we’re not back to normal yet.
On the other hand, the lock-down: Capitalist society responded to the spreading virus by locking down as much human activity as possible, fencing us off from each other.
That lockdown has been brutal. Seniors were isolated, cut off from families and friends. Many lived—and died—alone. Children were tossed out of school, losing academic formation, social development, perhaps even development of their own immune systems, since exposure to others may be what primes it. With “non-essential” businesses closed, tens of millions of families lost a steady income. The threat of eviction hangs over millions of families. Millions more face hunger. Domestic violence shot up. So did murder and teen suicides—attesting to an intolerable existence.
People who continued working were cut off from each other: “masks required” and “socially distanced.”
Those rules hit us in the face everywhere. They may have had a medical function, but they were also symbols of the lockdown’s human cost. We were cut off from normal daily human contact, an essential part of what makes us human. To be deprived of it is not a small, incidental thing.
So, open up or mask up? Put that way, the debate is false because it avoids the basic problem.
Medical science has long known how to contain viruses. Public health has the tools to track and isolate them. Vaccination is not new. Scientists even predicted that we would soon face a virus like this Coronavirus. Yet, nothing was done to prepare. That’s why we are in this mess today.
The public health system was left without resources. Money was drained out of it. Along with money for all the other public services, it flowed into profits for a predatory capitalist class. Tools needed to confront the virus were left to rot, unused. Governors like Abbott and all those before him, Republican and Democrat alike, share in this responsibility. So does Congress, going back years. So do presidents, Biden, Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, etc.
The responsibility to contain the virus was thrown on us. Up to us to wear a mask. Up to us to fight for a vaccine. Up to us to stand six feet from each other. Up to us to internalize all these rules, to be a moral police with each other. Up to us to wait.
No! If we don’t want to repeat this inhumane and unhealthy choice with the next epidemic that comes along, we have to think now about how to get rid of a profit-oriented system that caused this one. Consider the kind of system we need, the system we could build. Communism.
Mar 15, 2021
The media made a big deal of Meghan Markle’s interview with Oprah. The details were shocking—but who’s surprised?
This royal family claims to have “blue blood” and be above the rest of humanity. We are the ones they call “commoners.” Of course, that doesn’t stop them from taking millions in tax money from those English “commoners” every year.
Not only were they the heads of the state that built up the wealth of the British bourgeoisie by the harsh exploitation of the British working class—children included. They were also the figureheads for the British bourgeoisie’s conquest and looting of the peoples of Africa, South Asia, China, the Caribbean, North America, and Australia.
So why are these medieval holdovers still around? Hundreds of years after the British bourgeoisie stripped them of any real power, it continues to find them useful as a nationalist symbol. And the media of the whole world continues to play along.
Mar 15, 2021
Two environmental groups plan to file a lawsuit against AK Steel alleging that the steel plant at the Ford Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan, has been far exceeding air pollution limits.
This pollution has been going on for a long time. And, at most, whoever has owned the steel division has had its wrist slapped with small fines. And yet it continues to pollute Southwest Dearborn, and impact the health of the steel division workers themselves.
Residents and community leaders in the area have stayed vigilant in fighting against this corporate pollution.
Mar 15, 2021
Kaiser Permanente, the biggest health care provider in California, is punishing frontline health care workers for using sick time during the pandemic—including the mandatory quarantine that many workers had to observe because of contracting COVID-19 virus—by reducing the “performance sharing” bonus for workers who took “too many” sick days in 2020.
Kaiser has always used the performance bonus to punish workers for taking sick days, even though formally, the contract says the workers have a right to take them. Kaiser just continued this policy in the middle of the pandemic when so many workers were falling ill or having to quarantine. Kaiser used all that time off due to sick days as another excuse to increase its profits. No wonder 2020 was one of Kaiser’s most profitable years ever, raking in $6.4 billion in profits.
Mar 15, 2021
In this year of pandemic, millions have suffered all kinds of loss. An estimated five million women left the U.S. work force, a number much higher than the number of men leaving.
Most women work in the public sector, in areas most exposed to the pandemic, like school and health care systems, or in service industries, in restaurants, hotels, bars, and the travel industry.
And in these kinds of jobs, women usually have the lower paid ones. There are more home health aides than doctors, more teachers’ aides than principals, more servers than owners of restaurants.
These jobs also tend to be part-time, without benefits. Fifty years after wage discrimination was supposedly made illegal, women still only make 80 cents to every dollar men make. And half of women working full time today earn $11 an hour or less, a poverty-level wage, making it hard to keep food on the table.
Women face three kinds of exploitation. First, when women work, they are almost always working for lower pay and fewer benefits than men doing similar jobs. Second, women do an enormous amount of the unpaid labor needed to raise children and keep a home going. Women report 30 or more hours per week on cooking, cleaning, shopping, childcare, and of course love and support. Men report 20 hours per week on similar tasks.
And finally, in the midst of this pandemic, many women are trying to help their children learn at home, acting as teachers because so many children are unable to accomplish online learning without an adult present.
For centuries women have been treated as inferior to men by class society. Some religious teachings even insist on this inferiority. For centuries laws have been written by men to keep wealth within families by making women and children the property of men, with English common law a well-known example.
Said the famous abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe after the Civil War, “... the position of a married woman ... is similar to that of the Negro slave. She can hold no contract and hold no property ... in English common law a married woman is nothing at all.”
Susan B. Anthony, also famed as a suffragist, staged one of her first protests when she had to find work. She discovered that women teachers were paid half of what male teachers were paid in the state of New York!
It took decades of struggle for women to gain changes in the laws, to keep their own property when married, to control their own wages when they worked. And up to the 1960s, U.S. laws made it almost impossible to obtain a divorce. A woman who divorced risked separation from her children. Men did not have to support their former wives or children until recent decades.
When manufacturing and capitalism developed, first in England, capitalists were pleased to have women workers, in order to pay them less than men workers. The wool and cloth trade was among the first industries to enrich capitalists in England. Men were hired to work the new steam-powered looms by the middle of the 1800s, and women and children were brought in to the factories to do other, lower-paid labor.
The development of capitalism in the U.S. was first based on the wealth gained through slave labor, a system which not only oppressed the slaves, but also kept down the wages of white workers as well. As the U.S. expanded and developed after the Civil War, immigrants flooded in, enabling capitalists to keep down all wages and to keep workers from organizing against their extremely bad working conditions.
The First World War caused the deaths of perhaps ten million soldiers and 20 million more were wounded. The shortage of workers across Europe caused an influx of women into the workplaces. The same occurred following WWII, when women remained in the workforce, in the face of U.S. state propaganda pushing women to stay home and raise children. At that point, a third of women had entered the U.S. work force. In 2020, the figure had reached 55 to 60% of women in the work force.
In the late 19th century, when factories were getting up and running, 76 million were in the U.S. work force, of which one in five, or 20%, were women. For poorer women, it was more than one in three who had to go out to work, at wages usually half those of men.
Socialists had written years earlier that women would not be free until they earned their own wages, so that they could leave abusive situations. August Bebel, a leader of the German socialists, in his 1869 book Woman under Socialism pointed out: “There can be no emancipation of humanity without the social independence of the sexes.”
In this society of dog-eat-dog capitalism, every step forward for social justice has taken decades of struggle. Decades to end slavery, decades to allow all men and women to vote, and more decades of struggle over livable wages and women’s rights to control their own bodies. Every bit of legislation passed in favor of such rights was fought against by those in control, those who obtain their millions (and now billions) off the labor of others, and fought against by those elected, who represent the interests of capitalism while pretending they govern for the benefit of all.
Certainly the exploitation of the majority rests on a foundation of unpaid labor by women to raise the future generations. If this unpaid labor were rewarded, women could play a different role in society. But such changes will happen only when the capitalist system is upended once and for all by the working class and replaced with a communist society.