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
May 24, 2021
May 25, 2020, one year ago, George Floyd was murdered. In the days that followed, a social explosion quickly transformed into a vast outpouring of anger. The mobilization extended, despite the lockdown of society imposed by the American state in response to a new virus. And it broke through decades when the population had seemed unable to express and organize itself. All those people in the street gave the lie to the old myth, “no one will ever do anything,” repeated so often, many people had actually come to believe it.
People did things. Every big city, and almost every medium-sized one saw people in the streets. So did the suburbs, so did rural areas very far removed from the big cities.
Black people came out, once more reminded how easily their own or their child’s life could be taken away by a cop too quick to pull a trigger—or too ready to murder at an agonizingly slow pace. But this time, Blacks were joined by tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of other people: Native Americans, Latinos, Asians, Whites.
It wasn’t just because the murder of George Floyd was so horrific—although it was. Nor that the full nine minutes and 29 seconds of its horror had been recorded on video. There had been horrifying murders before, murders recorded on video before.
In fact, the murder of George Floyd, as horrible as it was, was normal, every-day normal, standard-operating-procedure-for-the-police normal. This is what made the murder so truly horrifying.
This is what pulled people into the streets, what gave voice to their moral outrage. Moral outrage imbued their demands for justice.
If there ever was a time when people might have hoped that moral outrage—expressed by a large majority of the population—could force capitalist society to change, it was in those days and weeks and months following the murder of George Floyd, when social protests engulfed the country.
Capitalist society did not change. Its police continued to act as they always had. Despite the outpouring of outrage, there was no let-up. The long list of people killed by the police continued to get longer, more names were added, men and women, old and young, White and Black and Latino and Native American and Muslim, but above all, out of all proportion to their numbers in the population, Black.
Oh, yes, for a short while, even police chiefs and sheriffs around the country had mouthed words of support for those who protested.
But moral outrage was not enough to put an end to violence by cop. It could not, because the violence carried out by the police, widely against the poor population and specifically against its black vanguard, does not stem from individual, particularly vicious police officers, and certainly not from the fact they carry guns, nor from the military mentality inculcated in police departments as part of their training. All of those things—which have become the focus of attempts to “reform” the police—are only consequences.
The every-day violence which the police inflict stems from the writ which police are charged with, that is, not to “protect and serve” the population, but to protect “private property,” and serve the capitalist class that drains ever larger shares of wealth out of the whole economy.
Today, we continue to live under this system where “private property” and enormous accumulations of wealth are guarded by the police, just as they were before the movement broke out.
But one thing is enormously different. Millions of people went out into the street. Millions expressed their outrage at what the police have done. Millions discovered that they were millions, that is, that they were not alone, that others could be counted on.
It’s with such experiences that the black population has long developed an awareness of its own capacities. May 25 was a turning point for very many people. Now the problem is to become conscious not just that people, other human beings, have capacities to do so many things. We need to become aware that the glue that holds this whole repressive system together—its racism, its violence, its exploitation—is capitalism itself. When capitalism is rooted out, the police will crumble to pieces like the tin soldiers they have long been.
May 24, 2021
During the war on Gaza, U.S. President Joe Biden, representing the U.S. ruling class, made it clear that the government of the United States stood on the side of Israel. When the Israeli military bombed heavily populated Gaza, killing over 240 Palestinians, including 65 children, and destroying or damaging 17 hospitals and medical clinics, wiping out much of the water and sewage infrastructure in an already impoverished land, he did not change his position. He simply kept saying that “Israel has the right to defend itself.” As if that explained away the air strikes by Israel.
Biden’s support of the Israeli government followed the support of the Trump administration, which stood by while right-wing Jewish settlers attacked Palestinians and stole their land and took their houses! In fact, Biden’s and Trump’s policies are one and the same, and have been followed by the U.S. government since 1948.
The state of Israel was founded on the massacre and displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from the lands they had lived on for centuries. Wars by the Israeli government and land takeovers by Israeli settlers have further pushed the Palestinians to live as refugees without a homeland. Israel did this with the approval of the U.S. government, and with weapons and money provided by the U.S.
Why does the U.S. government continue to provide this support to Israel? Why have they bankrolled the building of one of the most technologically advanced militaries in the world?
U.S. imperialism pays this military state to be its policeman in the Middle East, using Israel as a hired cop to help it keep its hands on the resources of the Middle East and to protect the profits of U.S. corporations, first of all, for the big oil companies. Israel helps U.S. imperialism to continue its political and economic domination over the Middle East, a key region at the crossroads of three continents.
U.S. domination of the economies and resources in the Middle East has meant poverty for most of the people who live in this region. Many millions are living lives of desperation.
U.S. imperialism maintains its domination over these populations, using strategies to divide populations in the Middle East along ethnic and religious lines. They make deals with the rulers of Arab states, as well, to control their own populations. For example, they support the alliance between Israel and Egypt to enforce the blockade around Gaza. They pit one Arab state apparatus against another when convenient. But when all else fails, U.S. imperialism has its own personal “policeman” to maintain order.
U.S. imperialism is not all powerful. The Palestinian population has never accepted their displacement and oppression. Since 1948, time after time, Palestinians have protested, they have fought “intifadas”; they have fought wars against the Israeli military; they have fought wars in the street against the Israeli police and right-wing Israeli settlers.
This current war on Gaza was sparked by continued protests of Palestinians against the displacement of more Palestinian families in Jerusalem. Hamas leaders in Gaza, trying to promote themselves as the leaders of the developing revolt, fired rockets at Israel. And as Israel bombed Gaza, Palestinians organized a general strike of Palestinians on the West Bank, in Jerusalem and in Israel itself.
Even after the cease fire was declared between Hamas and Israel, young Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank fought in the streets against the Israeli police. Their fight continued.
The Palestinian population today is dispersed throughout the Middle East, including in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and other countries. The Palestinians live among the millions who are oppressed by their own regimes and who live in poverty enforced on them by U.S. imperialism. The fight of the Palestinians for a better life provides a hope for other peoples who are oppressed, a fight that one day could spark a revolution in the Middle East.
As for the working class in the United States, we live in the home base of imperialism. The U.S. corporations and the U.S. government that dominate and impoverish the Middle East are the same corporations and government that attack the working class of this country. When the Palestinians fight for a better life, they fight the same enemy that oppresses us here in the U.S.
The fight of the Palestinians is our fight.
May 24, 2021
On May 8, three more people were killed, adding to Baltimore’s death toll of over 100 people murdered since January 1.
This time the shooter was known to police. Three times, neighbors had taken out a peace order against him for his many threats. Others in the neighborhood also knew the man had problems. He set his own house on fire, before killing three neighbors. Police ended up killing this man.
It is clear in this case that the man suffered mental health issues. He had called the police over and over, with so many unbelievable complaints and accusations that the 911 dispatchers asked their supervisors if they could advise him they could no longer take his calls.
This is not a society with a solution to mental health issues. Millions go untreated or end up in jail, still untreated. In fact, every jail in the country and most hospitals end up holding people who need psychiatric treatment because there is an acute shortage of psychiatric beds and psychiatric personnel in the U.S.
One organization estimates there is only 1 psychiatric bed for every 10,000 people in the U.S. population, and that number keeps dropping. In 2010, there were 43,000 psychiatric beds, but in 2016, there were 5,000 less.
No one seemed able to solve this Baltimore man’s problems, including the police. After all, it is not their job, not what they are trained for. They are trained to kill and they do so, repeatedly.
May 24, 2021
In March, California gave a major health insurer, Blue Shield of California, a $15-million, no-bid contract to take over the state’s vaccination effort against Covid-19. Public health experts questioned putting an insurance company in charge of the vaccination program, which had already been underway for a couple of months. And sure enough, if anything, switching to Blue Shield added another layer of bureaucracy to the effort and slowed down the rate of vaccinations.
Another private company California officials tapped for the vaccination effort was Salesforce, which created MyTurn, California’s online vaccine scheduling system—with similar results. The system proved inadequate to handle the volume of appointments. By late April, only 27% of vaccinations in the state were booked by MyTurn, which had already cost the state $93 million. Most Californians booked their appointments through local clinics, medical centers and universities anyway.
Governor Gavin Newsom has brought in about 30 private companies as a part of the state’s pandemic response, granting many of them no-bid contracts. Many of these companies have nothing to do with health care. They include Silicon Valley tech giants such as Google, Facebook, and Apple; electric car maker BYD; as well as Amazon and Doordash.
While shoveling multi-million-dollar, no-bid contracts to big private companies, Newsom and the other top officials in California have starved the state’s public health system. After the last recession, for example, they slashed local health budgets by 30 to 40%. Even in the middle of the pandemic last year, Newsom and his fellow Democrats, who control the California legislature, turned down a funding request of 150 million dollars to support California’s local health departments. And once again this year, Newsom has denied a request of $200 million for local public health services, despite a budget surplus of $76 billion.
Public health officials say the funding Newsom denied could help hire nurses and epidemiologists, rebuild outdated data systems, and restore some of the 11 public health laboratories the state lost in the last 20 years—all of which are essential, and missing, in the fight against the current pandemic. But instead, Newsom and his fellow California Democrats want to save that money for the big, enormously profitable tech companies.
This gutting of California’s public health system has proved catastrophic for the people of California in the face of the pandemic, with 3.77 million cases (nearly one out of 10 Californians) and nearly 63,000 deaths.
This is the enormous human price we have to pay for still living under this capitalist system, which puts profit above everything else, including human life.
May 24, 2021
More people in Washington, D.C. with mental or physical disabilities have been homeless for at least a year now compared to last year, according to the report from the annual count of homeless people.
Still, local politicians congratulated themselves that the homeless count showed fewer families on the street and in shelters. But it was the federal eviction moratorium, limited as it is, and stimulus spending, which temporarily slowed the spread of homelessness during the pandemic. And city officials don’t count over 2,500 families getting short-term housing vouchers as homeless people, when the reality is these families don’t have long-term homes.
May 24, 2021
A federal judge in Los Angeles made headlines when he imposed a 180-day deadline for Los Angeles officials to offer shelter to all 6,000 homeless people living in Skid Row, an enormous concentration of homeless people living in downtown L.A. In his decision, the judge excoriated government officials for mishandling $1.3 billion budgeted for homeless services, stating, “All the rhetoric, promises, plans, and budgeting cannot obscure the shameful reality of the crisis.”
But behind the judge’s rhetoric is a great big gift for real estate developers and the local officials who serve them. For the ruling states that as soon as Los Angeles officials have demonstrated to the judge that they have offered homeless people some form of shelter, the police can move in and remove any and all homeless persons still living on the streets of Skid Row. This does not mean the officials have to actually provide permanent subsidized housing, rather, they only have to be able to point to available space in shelters or sanctioned tent encampments.
Over the last couple of decades, big parts of downtown Los Angeles have been transformed, as block after block of formerly run-down warehouses, factories and apartment buildings are being turned into trendy new office and apartment buildings and complexes. This boom is far from over. Currently, there are 51 active construction sites of high-end office and luxury apartment buildings going up all over downtown, all of it heavily subsidized by tax breaks and other public giveaways.
All this is happening amidst record amounts of homelessness, poverty and misery that is concentrated in the 50-block downtown neighborhood known as Skid Row. Visiting U.N. officials have even found that Skid Row has worse sanitary conditions than refugee camps in war-torn countries.
The business community in the downtown has long pressured city officials to force all those homeless out. But up until now, the police have been constrained by the courts, because the courts say there are few if any facilities or shelters for the homeless to go to.
This may all soon change, if the ruling by the judge, which is now being challenged in a higher court, is allowed to stand. If that happens, Los Angeles, which has some of the worst homelessness of any big city, may serve as the model for the rest of the country of how public officials manage the worsening crisis, by simply removing homeless people from urban centers which have become desirable for business interests.
In fact, the homeless crisis is simply a part of the much-worsening economic and social crisis that is gripping big parts of the working class, as the corporate drive for profit leads to ever greater poverty and misery. Unable to even make some kind of progress in dealing with homelessness, capitalists and their officials are simply looking for ways to keep all those impoverished people away from their shiny, gleaming neighborhoods.
May 24, 2021
The following two articles were reprinted from the newsletters distributed at the MTA in Los Angeles and the Maryland State Offices in Baltimore.
Over the last four months of this year, food prices have skyrocketed. Prices of prepared food increased by 9%, doughnuts, rolls and buns, and fruit by 8%, processed meat by 7%, and seafood close to 20%.
Our wages should keep up with the increase in prices. Otherwise, it is pure highway robbery in the grocery store.
The price of gasoline is up. Meat prices are up. Vegetable prices are up. The price of diapers, toilet paper and cereal, all are up.
Rents are up. Prices are up for home buyers. The price of lumber is way up for anyone doing home repairs.
Vehicle prices are up. In fact, one researcher said used car prices went up more quickly in April than any time in the last 68 years!
If the bosses want to raise prices, then why should workers suffer because of it? The sensible thing to do is raise wages whenever prices go up.
May 24, 2021
At this year’s Preakness Stakes horse race in Baltimore, Maryland’s governor brunched with corporate executives at a fundraiser for the Republican Governors Association. The usual taxpayer-funded governor’s tent where state politicians traditionally entertain executives from Amazon to AstraZeneca was closed because of the pandemic. But the Stronach family billionaires are galloping along, after receiving their share of the State of Maryland’s whopping subsidy of the horse racing industry.
Last year, state legislators committed to borrow nearly 400 million dollars to pay for a proposed rebuilding of the Pimlico racetrack in Baltimore and the Laurel racetrack in Anne Arundel County, both run by the Stronachs. To repay the principal and interest for 30 years, the state pledged to cut 3.5 million dollars from Baltimore city-funded community programs each year. Another 13.5 million each year will come from revenue from slots machines in Maryland.
In fact, for well over a decade, millions of dollars of slots revenue each year has already paid for supposed reconstruction at those racetracks, which seem to get more rundown the more money is spent to rebuild them! This subsidy has simply let the Stronachs pocket that much more income from horse racing year after year.
Profit is always “first past the post!”
May 24, 2021
A recent National Academy of Sciences study confirms what many people already suspected: Cook County Jail was a primary incubator of COVID-19 in Chicago’s black and Latino neighborhoods.
More than 100,000 residents cycle through Cook County Jail each month, and 89% are black and Latino in a county that is 56% white. In the one month of 2020 studied, a staggering 86% of new COVID cases were in ZIP codes of predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods. A primary cause of this increase was inmate release from Cook County Jail. Each inmate released during that month infected an average of five people in their neighborhoods.
Cook County Jail is just a piece of the barbaric system of mass incarceration that falls most heavily on the black population and magnifies all the other inequalities of society including health. Prisons and jails incubate and distribute diseases of all kinds. Humans are herded like cattle in overcrowded conditions. Every day they suffer the humiliation and indignities of cramped quarters, deplorable sanitary conditions, and unhealthy food.
Prison health facilities are far short of adequate because they are severely underfunded and poorly maintained. U.S. prisons have always been a breeding ground for disease. HIV and tuberculosis spread massively there over the years.
This is just one more reason COVID—like every other problem—has fallen most heavily on black people and Latinos in Chicago, and around the country.
May 24, 2021
The State of Michigan recently disclosed figures for where new and ongoing COVID-19 outbreaks began.
Of 1221 outbreaks for which they gave numbers, the greatest numbers occurred as follows: 364 at K-12 schools and colleges, 244 at manufacturing and construction sites, 180 at long-care facilities mostly for the elderly, 111 at retail businesses, 73 at child-care centers or youth programs, 55 in office settings, 14 at agricultural workplaces and food-processing plants.
In other words, over 88% of recent outbreaks in Michigan were at workplaces, schools and care facilities for kids and the elderly.
Only 72 were at bars and restaurants, which incidentally are actually workplaces for some, 25 linked to social gatherings, 14 to personal services and gyms, and 14 to religious services, for a total of only about 10%.
Yet throughout this pandemic very little attention has been directed by politicians, health care officials, and the news media to workplaces, schools and care facilities as sources of COVID-19, while way more has been directed at individuals “being careless” at social gatherings and the like. Exactly the opposite of what the data show!
The State of Michigan only recently began releasing this kind of data, and the news media have given it even less attention, so the vast majority of the public likely still has never seen it.
It’s no wonder corporate bosses, politicians, and officials keep this information hidden. It shows the blame for the COVID-19 pandemic lies with them, not with “careless” individuals! If the public understood that, they might demand that bosses and officials spend money on whatever measures were needed to keep people in those settings safe.
May 24, 2021
Big hospital chains received 178 billion dollars through the Provider Relief Fund that was part of the Covid stimulus package. They have used this money to gobble up smaller, less financially powerful hospitals.
This consolidation process means they keep what is profitable and get rid of what is not. This leads to fewer hospitals and fewer beds. And all this during a pandemic where hospital space has been at a premium and is absolutely necessary.
CommonSpirit Health, one of the biggest hospital networks with about 140 hospitals in 21 states, received well over a billion dollars in federal aid to counter any financial losses caused by the shutdowns of lucrative elective surgeries and higher COVID-related costs. In January, one of its divisions merged with Virginia Mason health system in Seattle. It also picked a small hospital network in Arizona and helped start a company to analyze patient data across 40 states.
Many of these big chains that received the federal grants are in better shape than they were before the pandemic. In fact, many are sitting on billions of dollars.
And none of this aid was used to prevent hospital closings.
And at the same time, this consolidation or “growth” has brought price gouging. Big chains normally charge the highest prices, like twice what Medicare pays for the same procedure, according to RAND. CommonSpirit is among the most expensive hospital systems, with rates sometimes three times Medicare’s rates.
When the hospitals accepted the federal bailout funds, Congress supposedly barred them from “balance-billing”—the practice of seeking additional payment beyond what the insurer has paid. But, in reality, people have been saddled with ridiculously enormous bills that are impossible to pay.
Multiple bills show that some hospitals are clearly not complying with the ban on balance billing and some are incorrectly coding visits, meaning the special coronavirus protections that insurers put in place are not applied. Others are going after the debts of patients who died from the virus, pursuing estates that would otherwise go to family members.
Once again the big corporations, big hospital chains get bailed out when they absolutely don’t need it AND they use the money to enrich themselves and screw everyone else. Meanwhile, the actual victims of Covid are left twisting in the wind with bills they can never pay.
May 24, 2021
The following four articles are reprinted from Lutte Ouvrière, the paper of the revolutionary group active in France.
Since the expropriation of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and the exile of a whole part of them during the war which followed the proclamation of the State of Israel, a wall of hostility rose between this despoiled population and the hundreds of thousands of Jews who thought they would find a land of refuge there.
The Zionist leaders have locked their people in a dead end, choosing to make their state play the role of guardian of order in the region, to have the unwavering support of imperialism. They have thus transformed the Israeli population into guardians of this order.
The Six-Day War was started in 1967 by Israel, under the pretext of the nationalist rants of Arab rulers like Nasser in Egypt, the King of Jordan and the rulers of Syria. In particular, it led to Israel’s conquest of the West Bank and the eastern part of Jerusalem.
It was then that the Palestinian resistance movement became a popular force, shining thanks to its radical, even revolutionary image. It saw the entry of women on an equal footing in the struggle. Some of its political branches proclaimed themselves Marxist-Revolutionaries. This momentum, which also had repercussions in Israel, was squandered by the Palestinian leaders, who preferred to sacrifice this mobilization of their people to the alignment behind the Arab leaders.
It was the Palestinian people, and especially their youth, who sought to break the deadlock into which their leaders had thrown them by triggering in the West Bank, occupied by the Israeli army, the “war of stones", the Intifada (the “uprising” in Arabic), from 1987 to 1991. It was a massive uprising of hundreds of thousands of young people who faced bullets from soldiers for four years. This popular uprising, outside the traditional control of the Arab rulers, worried the Zionist rulers of the State of Israel, as well as the Palestinian leaders. And to regain control of the Palestinian masses, the Oslo accords of 1993 promised the creation of a Palestinian state. But this was limited to the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in part of the West Bank, under the surveillance of the ever-present Israeli army.
As part of this pseudo-normalization, carried out under the aegis of American imperialism, the colonization of the Palestinian territories has continued, encouraged by the Israeli governments. It has fostered the development of a nationalist and religious far right.
This development has had its counterpart on the Palestinian side, with the rise of the reactionary Islamist current. The growing disregard of the Palestinian Authority allowed Hamas to seize power in Gaza and install a religious and police regime there.
In this month of May 2021, the spontaneous uprising of part of the Palestinian youth was the response to the attempt to expel Palestinians from East Jerusalem to replace them with Israeli Jewish families. This frequent practice this time caused an explosion. This popular uprising could worry the Israeli leaders, but also those of Hamas, who above all fear the popular initiative. It can indeed call into question their power and their dream of extending it to the entire Palestinian population.
The Hamas leaders therefore launched their rockets at Israel, claiming to come to the aid of Palestinian youth. In reality, it is attempting to use events by presenting itself as the spokespersons of the revolt. It is also wanting to shift the popular revolt toward a disproportionate military confrontation, of which Hamas knows the consequences.
This situation risks further strengthening the most reactionary currents both in Israel and on the Arab side. Part of the Israeli population ends up feeling hostage to what it calls “the fascists of the settlements of the Occupied Territories". This extreme right is asserting itself more and more openly in Israel itself, which has resulted in the lynching live on television of an Arab pulled out of his car.
At the moment when the revolt is once again born out of injustice, oppression and exploitation, the absence of a proletarian revolutionary communist policy is sorely felt. It is the only one, if it finds the ear of the masses, which can make it possible to overcome the oppositions knowingly maintained for decades by imperialism.
May 24, 2021
Since the beginning of the Israeli bombardments on Gaza, many commentators have lamented the alleged inability of the international community to end hostilities. In fact, this is a deliberate choice by the great powers, starting with the United States, to leave a free hand to the Israeli leadership.
The United States has thus repeatedly opposed the adoption of a U.N. Security Council declaration, even only to call for an end to the violence. By simply declaring that Israel has the right "to defend itself against rocket attacks by Hamas and other terrorist groups in Gaza," U.S. President Joe Biden argues for the Israeli government, endorsing the continuity of the policy pursued by all its predecessors for decades. The alleged paralysis of American or European diplomacy in fact testifies to their complicity with those who bombard and massacre the Palestinians today.
Beyond the indifference they currently display, the leaders of the imperialist powers are mainly responsible for the inextricable situation which has opposed the Jewish and Arab populations for nearly a century. Because the permanence of this conflict, and others, allows them to better establish their domination over this strategic region in their eyes.
Inaugurating this policy during the First World War, the United Kingdom promised the creation of a large Arab kingdom to Bedouin tribes of Arabia whose military support it sought against the Ottoman power, which then controlled most of the Middle East.
At the same time, in November 1917, by a famous declaration to which he gave his name, the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Balfour, promised the Zionist movement to support the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. Seeking the patronage of an imperialist power in order to succeed in establishing itself against the will of the local Arab populations, this Jewish nationalist movement therefore initially proposed to make itself the auxiliary of the British colonial power. None of the promises made to each other were really kept: by claiming to play the role of arbiter between the Jews and the Arabs whose opposition it had sharpened, the United Kingdom mainly took control of the territories concerned.
Until World War II, however, the overwhelming majority of Jews in the Diaspora did not identify with the Zionist movement and its demand for a Jewish state. But the victory of Nazism in Germany led to the massive deportation of the Jews, often with the active help of the police forces of the occupied states, as was the case in France, and the extermination of six million of them, pushing many Jewish survivors to flee Europe and join Zionist organizations. This is what enabled them to impose the creation of the State of Israel both on British imperialism and on 700,000 Palestinians whom they forced into exodus. The refugee camps then set up by the U.N. continue to host a large part of the Palestinian people.
Unconditional support for Israeli governments provided the United States with a privileged ally who depended on it for its existence, economically and militarily. In a region where the Arab states often had to face popular protest, the Israeli state offered guarantees of stability, because it could mobilize its population behind it in every military conflict, making them believe that it was necessary for its survival. By his current positions or by his silence, Biden shows himself to be the faithful continuator of this policy.
The Jewish and Palestinian populations are paying the price, victims both of their leaders who lead them to the dead end of an endless conflict, and of those of the imperialist powers, who profit from these clashes and all the divisions in the Middle East—to perpetuate their domination over this region.
May 24, 2021
A settler country—so Israel has sometimes been described by commentators. This label might be inexact, but it captures the permanence of the policies of all of Israel’s administrations following the Six-Day War of 1967, regardless of their political affiliation.
Since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took office, both the building of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and the spreading of Jewish families to the eastern area of Jerusalem through driving out Palestinian families by armed force accelerated. But the colonization of Palestinians’ land is the result of a consistent policy of Israel’s governments.
Since 1967, the conquests of Sinai, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem have led to the occupation of these territories by settlements. Pressure from nationalist and religious groups played an important role in this trend. Governments of the Labor Party and its allies, led by Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, and then Shimon Peres, encouraged these settlements. Starting with only five, they now number several hundred, officially recognized or otherwise, and include several entire cities. They completely fragment the territory of the West Bank and now make any independent Palestinian state geographically impossible.
Blocking Palestinians from roads, factories, and universities, the settlements form real obstacles within the Palestinian territories. Militant right-wing settlers establish further outposts. They are armed and form militias prepared to suppress the inhabitants of surrounding towns—with the support of Israel’s official army.
This colonialist policy has accelerated since the right-wing Likud party’s rise to power in 1977. Likud generally favored the settlers and the far right. Netanyahu, who has held office since 2009, has played the colonialist card even more, because he needed the help of ultra-nationalist, racist, and religious far-right parties to form a majority in the legislature. With only one exception they supported the spread of armed Jewish settlers onto Palestinian land. Driving out the owners of this land in the West Bank has become a way of providing new possible terrain for settlers.
Netanyahu has struggled for several months now to form a coalition government. He has stepped up this pro-settlement policy even further—if only to try to distract people from the various court cases involving him! His criminal policy is largely responsible for the unbearable plight of millions of residents—Jews and Arabs—increasingly making Israel look like a land of apartheid.
May 24, 2021
For the first time on a large scale, Palestine’s ongoing clashes broke out in the middle of Israeli territory and between Jews and Arabs sharing the same Israeli nationality.
Extremist Jewish militiamen attacked Arabs outside a mosque and launched punitive operations in the mixed Jewish and Arab towns of Lod and Bat Yam, near Tel Aviv. They killed a 25-year-old man and beat a driver into a coma—a lynching broadcast live on television. Clashes between Jews and Arabs took place in Jaffa and Acre. Police arrested more than 700 Israeli Arabs during the protests.
Israeli Arabs are Palestinians. They are descendants of those Palestinians who managed to stay when Israel was founded in 1948. They now make up 20% of the country’s population. They have the right to vote but they are considered second-class citizens. They are systematically suspected of not being loyal to the state, excluded from military service, and barred from many public positions associated even remotely with national security. On the other hand, they significantly ensure the functioning of health care. Half the country’s pharmacists, one quarter of nurses, and one in five doctors are Arabs. Their numbers are even greater in the lower-skilled and lower-paid jobs in hospitals. Along with Palestinian “border workers” who cross every day from the Occupied Territories, they make up the most exploited part of Israel’s working class. The average wage of Israeli Arabs is only 70% of the country’s average wage. Many are unemployed or underemployed.
This economic situation is made worse by the everyday racism encouraged by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. To hold power, he has systematically favored Jewish supremacist and religious fundamentalist parties. So, fascist, racist, violent, and homophobic parties are associated with his government.
In East Jerusalem and the West Bank, all of this strengthens the settlers who occupy land and procure buildings inhabited by Palestinians. The extreme right wing often holds armed marches near Israeli Arab neighborhoods. To flatter the right wing, Netanyahu proclaimed Israel the “National State of the Jewish People” in July 2018 and made Hebrew the only official language of the country—to the detriment of the Arabic language, and making Arabs more into sub-citizens.
May 24, 2021
Translated from Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.
Women in France 150 years ago had no rights or legal recognition. Poorly paid, with some forced into prostitution or oppressed in the factory and inside their family, women from working-class backgrounds took their place in the seat of working class power known as the Commune.
Women were not allowed to vote, nor did they, so none were elected. But they did help to establish this workers’ state. They were very much present in demonstrations on September 4 and March 18 in Montmartre, where they succeeded in convincing soldiers, ordered by Thiers to seize the rebels’ cannons, to shoulder their rifles.
From the Commune’s start, women revived political clubs and appropriated churches to hold their meetings. The Ambroise club in the city’s 11th district brought together 3,000 women. The Boule Noire in the 17th district was founded and chaired by Sophie Poirier, seamstress. Louise Michel, a teacher who followed Auguste Blanqui and then became an anarchist, often chaired the Revolution club in Saint-Bernard de la Chapelle. Blanche Lefebvre, a milliner, spoke almost every evening at the Social Revolution club wearing a red scarf and with a revolver at her hip. Articles, political leaflets, and declarations were often written by women like André Léo, who created the newspaper La Sociale.
The women of the Commune served as ambulance and cafeteria workers but also as combatants. Women were on duty 24 hours a day in each district’s town hall, where volunteers were recruited to organize defense, supplies, and education. Women stood armed guard at the gates of Paris. In the 12th district, a squadron of women was formed under the command of Colonel Adelaïde Valentin, worker, and Captain Louise Neckbecker.
They took part alongside men in guard committees, for example in Montmartre where there were two committees, one of men and one of women. Louise Michel went to both. “We didn’t really care what gender we were to do our duty. This stupid question was over,” she wrote in her memoirs. In her newspaper The Social Revolution she wrote: “Women must not separate their cause from that of humanity, but must be a militant part of the great revolutionary army.”
In the field of education, women set up free elementary education courses and vocational schools. They organized public readings for full-time moms and classes for young people who worked during the day and had never gone to school. Marguerite Tynaire was the first woman to hold the post of school inspector in Paris. Paule Mink opened a free school for girls in a former church.
In April, Karl Marx asked a woman militant of the International Workers’ Association, a woman of Russian origin, Elisabeth Dmitrieff, to be his correspondent in Paris. On April 11 and 12, she and others launched an appeal to the citizens of Paris to participate in the uprising by joining a newly formed revolutionary association of working women, the Women’s Union for the Defense of Paris and Care of the Wounded. Its first objective was the defense of Paris, but the appeal affirmed: “Moreover considering that in the social order of the past, the work of women was the most exploited, therefore the immediate reorganization of work is of the highest urgency ... we want to work, but to own the products.… No more exploiters, no more masters!… Live free while working, or die fighting!”
The Women’s Union, mainly made up of female workers, turned to Léo Frankel, head of the Labor and Exchange Committee. They proposed to operate workshops abandoned by their owners, in order to fight against unemployment, especially that of women, and to give orders for military equipment to workshops taken over by the workers themselves. The leaders of the Commune were obviously in favor of this idea, which was immediately carried out.
Women workers also made their own demands. The Commune instituted the rights to legal separation and to alimony. It prohibited prostitution as a form of “commercial exploitation of human creatures.” It decreed equal pay for teachers, considering that “in education, a woman’s work is equal to that of a man.” As apparently an unmarried companion of a National Guardsman did not have the same rights as a wife, who received a supplement to her husband’s pay, the women demanded the same treatment for all. In practice the Commune recognized civil unions, then very common in the working class, and it recognized all children born out of wedlock.
In May during the Versailles offensive, women defended the new government that had been a liberation for them. They helped erect the barricades. The Women’s Union drew up a manifesto: “No, it is not peace but rather all-out war that the working women of Paris demand.… The women of Paris will also know how to give their blood for the defense and the triumph of the Commune.” And most women involved militarily were workers.
During the Bloody Week, the repressive armies of the republican government led by Thiers made the combatants pay dearly for the place they had dared to take in the Commune, by means of summary executions, convictions, and deportations. To discredit them, Versailles propaganda even invented the image of the firebomb-throwing woman.
Whether on the barricades during Bloody Week, in prisons, or in exile, these combatants always held true to the role they had played during the Commune. Thus Louise Michel during her trial declared to the judges in the pay of Versailles her pride in having been a member of the revolutionary power: “It seems that every heart that beats for freedom has no other right than a bit of lead, so I claim mine! If you let me live, I will not stop crying out for revenge.… If you are not cowards, kill me.”
May 24, 2021
Translated from Lutte Ouvrière, the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.
The attack on May 8 outside a girls’ school in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, left at least 50 dead and 100 injured. Most were teenage girls trying to flee the school after a car bomb and then two other bombs exploded.
Which terrorist faction is behind this attack? None has claimed it yet. The Taliban denies any involvement. This attack could have been the work of any of the groups clawing for power: the Taliban, ISIS, warlords, or even what remains of the nation’s army. All have similar methods, terrorizing the population with attacks that become massacres. And the choice of target, the girls’ school, is not an accident. All these groups—each more violent and reactionary than the others—agree on maintaining women in a state of ignorance, absolutely dependent on men. It is intolerable to all of them that young women could emancipate themselves by getting an education.
The U.S. had decided to withdraw its troops on the symbolic date of September 11, after 20 long years of war waged in the name of fighting terrorism, and claiming to want to establish democracy. Then the U.S. announced the withdrawal would be advanced to July. But nothing is settled. The government in place is corrupt and holds no authority outside the capital. The Taliban, while driven out of the government in 2001, are still the dominant political faction. Meanwhile ISIS is gaining ground and al Qaeda is re-establishing itself.
The Afghan population pays a heavy price for the chaos that U.S. imperialism leaves behind. The war destruction further impoverishes a country, over which fight vultures from enemy clans. Their battles turn into massacres of the population, and these massacres continue—attacks have become daily occurrences. The attack on May 8 confirms that women might be among the main targets of any future government.
May 24, 2021
The U.S. Supreme Court said on May 17 that it will hear a case arising from a Mississippi law that bans most abortions after 15 weeks. Legal experts—whether for or against abortion—agree it is a case deliberately picked by the court to rule on Roe v. Wade. This was the 1973 court case legalizing abortion everywhere in the U.S.
The case taken up by the Supreme Court, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, allows a state to ban abortion 2 months earlier than Roe. The Supreme Court is using this case to take up the issue of “fetal viability,” a term used to describe when a fetus can survive outside the womb—with or without medical assistance. The U.S. Supreme Court has put Roe itself on the table.
Previous laws restricted abortion, over-regulating women’s healthcare and forcing providers to close.
This case is different. It is asking for a re-determination on whether fetal viability is the dividing line for abortion rights. The Supreme Court aims to set a new standard for when to criminalize abortion.
No matter what the final ruling is, the Supreme Court is flattering the far-right by even accepting this case!
Arguments will be heard in the fall of 2021 and the ruling will come by summer of 2022.
The Supreme Court may hollow out Roe v. Wade even more. Or it may completely take down Roe v. Wade and leave it up to the states to decide.
Look at the measure signed into law by the Governor of Texas on May 19. It shows what state control of abortion can be. The new law bans abortion after 6 weeks of pregnancy. It contains no exception for rape and incest. Most women do not yet know they are pregnant at 6 weeks, so this is an abortion ban.
This law is sinister because it is something new. It absolves state government from enforcing the law. It makes it legal for male supremacists to bring a civil lawsuit against an abortion provider. It opens the floodgates for bullying, harassing lawsuits to flood the state and shut down clinics and shut down courts.
It is not just those who provide abortions who can be sued. Anyone who stands up for abortion rights can be sued for a minimum of $10,000. It is a broad attack.
Said one female lawmaker in Texas, “This forced pregnancy act will drive women back into the shadows out of fear of harassment through lawsuits that anyone in this country can file.”
Those who support women and oppose the far-right will need to mobilize to meet this attack.
Before the Roe ruling of 1973, thousands died from abortions in the shadows. Working class women were the ones who died. They were the ones who gave birth to more babies than they could safely raise. Wealthy women have always had access to abortion under safe conditions. Working class women are the ones who will die again.
The same right-wing forces pushing the attack on women’s access to abortion also push the attack on workers’ rights, and also push to maintain an unjust legal system that criminalizes the black population.
It makes no sense to wait around for the U.S. Supreme Court to rule. Capitalist governments are not neutral. What is “neutral” about a ruling between the rights of women for healthcare and the “right” of wealthy men to control women?
Better to take off the blinders and figure out what to do next to mobilize and fight!
May 24, 2021
The following is the editorial from SPARK’s workplace newsletters for the week of May 17, 2021.
As of May 16, Israel has unleashed over 1,000 bombing and artillery strikes into Gaza, home to 2 million Palestinians, leaving over 181 dead, including 52 children. The current fighting started after 300 Palestinians were attacked and injured by Israeli police outside a mosque in Jerusalem. Hamas, the governing body in Gaza, responded by firing rockets into Israel, killing some Israelis. There has also been fighting in the streets of some Israeli cities as Palestinians have been attacked by right-wing Jewish settlers and the Israeli police.
The current fighting is a continuation of the war against the Palestinian population that has been going on for 73 years. In 1948, the state of Israel established itself by going to war against the Palestinian people. Thousands of Palestinians were killed and over 700,000 Palestinians were thrown off the land they had lived on for years. The land was then given over to Jewish settlers, many of them refugees and survivors of the Holocaust during World War II. The displacement of the Palestinians went on with the approval of the major imperialist powers—the U.S., Britain and France.
In 1967, using weapons supplied by the U.S., Israel went to war against the surrounding Arab states. As a result of that war, Israel expanded its borders and took more land, displacing hundreds of thousands more Palestinians.
Today the Palestinian people are forced to live in terribly desperate situations. Many live in Gaza, which is little more than a concentration camp, where electricity is on for only 3 to 6 hours a day, 97% of the population has no clean running water and almost 50% are unemployed. Other Palestinians live in the West Bank and in Jerusalem, where they are continually having their homes and their land stolen away and handed over to Jewish settlers. Many hundreds of thousands more Palestinians live as refugees in the neighboring countries of Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. Some Palestinians live inside Israel itself and are treated as second class citizens, under what the Human Rights Watch organization calls Israeli “apartheid.”
The Palestinian population has, time after time, fought against their oppression, with many protests, and major uprisings in 1987, 2000, 2008, 2012 and 2014. Each of these uprisings has ended with many Palestinians killed, at a rate 20 or 50 or 100 times higher than that of Israeli soldiers and civilians.
Today the U.S. government is defending the actions of the Israeli government, while also calling for “peace” in the region. But there is not “peace” and cannot be “peace” in the Middle East because of the actions of the U.S. government itself. The Israeli regime could not have survived and maintained its oppression of the Palestinians without the sophisticated weapons and the massive military aid that the U.S. gives to Israel, about 250 billion dollars since 1948, much more than any other nation gets.
The U.S. government supplies money and weaponry because it uses Israel as its “policeman” in the Middle East, a cop to defend the interests of U.S. corporations, especially the big oil companies.
To maintain their economic control, the U.S. government, helped by Israel, also uses policies to divide the populations of the Middle East along ethnic and religious lines. The results for the people of the Middle East have been constant war, millions of refugees and extreme poverty.
The population of Israel also is victimized by the role played by the Israeli government. The working class in Israel is weakened and kept divided along religious lines, between Jewish workers and Palestinian workers. The Israeli population is constantly told to prepare for war, told that they are surrounded by enemies on all sides.
But the real enemy stands behind the scene. It is U.S. imperialism, pulling the strings and fostering divisions in the Middle East, all to maintain the profits of U.S. corporations. The same U.S. government and corporations that attack the working class in this country are responsible for the bloodshed in the Middle East. They are the enemy of the working people of all countries.
May 24, 2021
A Detroit Free Press article discusses the history of the polio epidemic in the U.S. and draws parallels to today’s COVID-19 pandemic. As they point out, of course the numbers of polio cases were much smaller than those for COVID. In the worst year for polio in the U.S., 1952, there were only about 52,000 cases and 3150 deaths, compared with over 30 million cases and 550,000 deaths in the U.S. in COVID’s first year.
Nevertheless, polio struck similar fears in the population due to it more often occurring in children and its ability to cause lifelong paralysis.
The trial for the first vaccine against polio was completed in 1955; and after the vaccine became available to the public, cases in the U.S. began to drop dramatically. Yet there were still places where large outbreaks occurred, particularly in Chicago in 1956 and in Detroit in 1958.
It turns out there were clear similarities between the two outbreaks. The two cities were important destinations during the Great Black Migration from the South. In 1956, health officials noticed that all of Chicago’s cases were among residents of the city’s low-income areas, with 157 out of 287 cases, more than half, striking black residents. The most heavily affected black neighborhoods had high numbers of people who were recent arrivals to Chicago. This finally led health officials to make clinics with free vaccines easier to get to.
Detroit’s experience two years later was similar, with the number of cases jumping from 11 in 1957 to 111 by late 1958. Researchers point out that it was not only hesitancy to get the vaccine that contributed to Detroit’s outbreak. It was also the consequence of poverty and overcrowding. The city was highly segregated. Many landlords refused to rent to black people. Consequently, the black population was restricted to living in segregated, overcrowded areas.
A final point the Free Press article makes is quite telling. The city finally increased its vaccination efforts by offering the polio vaccine for $1, and free to those who didn’t have a dollar. After that, Trinity Hospital, a black-owned hospital, vaccinated 2,000 people in the first week.
Recent data showed the city of Detroit’s COVID vaccination rate was at 31%, compared with 68% for the most highly vaccinated county in the state. Only around the time that information became public did the city start offering $50 incentives to people who brought others in to be vaccinated, and open up more vaccination clinics around the city.
With the lessons from Detroit’s 1958 polio outbreak, health officials should have made greater efforts to get people vaccinated sooner. This experience also shows, unfortunately, how little has changed since then.
May 24, 2021
Over 120 retired U.S. generals and admirals published an open letter echoing many of the same conspiracy theories and far-right talking points as Donald Trump. All those generals and admirals repeated the claim that the 2020 election was stolen. They also say that the Democratic Party had been taken over by Marxists and “socialists” and that the lockdowns and business closures during the pandemic were part of a Marxist and progressive plot against America, etc.
After the letter was released on May 11, a number of former high ranking generals and admirals denounced it for being “anti-democratic,” and insisted that people in the military should stay out of politics.
But many of those military officers who signed were already well-known for their far-right-wing, racist and bigoted ideas. One signatory, retired Army Lt. Gen. William Boykin, had been exposed as a “three star bigot” and “religious fanatic” on the 60 Minutes television show, when he was still a top Pentagon official back in 2004. Retired Vice Adm. John Poindexter, who was the deputy national security adviser for President Ronald Reagan, was convicted in the Iran-Contra Affair back in the 1980s. And only recently, retired Army Brig. Gen. Don Bolduc ran for the U.S. Senate in New Hampshire on a platform denouncing “liberal and socialist pansies.”
This shows that the ideas that Trump represents were not erased or pushed to the side even though he lost the 2020 election. That is because racism, bigotry and ultra-right-wing ideas existed long before Trump came around, especially inside the U.S. military.
This is because of what the military’s role actually is, all the dirty wars that it has fought against peoples around the world in order to impose the interests and profits of the U.S. ruling class, wars from Viet Nam and Korea, to Panama, Iraq and Afghanistan. At home, the U.S. military has been the boss’s iron fist that has been used to break strikes, break up protests and demonstrations, and attack urban rebellions. In the past, it fought wars to exterminate Native American populations.
All this was done while resorting to racism, bigotry and the most reactionary ideas as a justification. Barbaric words are used to spur on and make acceptable barbaric, inhuman actions.
There can be plenty more of that in the near future: “Our Nation is in deep peril. We are in a fight for our survival as a Constitutional Republic like no other time since our founding in 1776,” warn the generals and admirals in their letter—which is what military officers usually say when they are preparing a military takeover, coup or putsch in order to crack down against the population. The letter stops short of actually calling for that. Instead, it calls for greater participation in elections. “We urge all citizens to get involved now at the local, state and/or national level to elect political representatives who will act to Save America.”
But of course, that could change very quickly, if the U.S. ruling class deems it necessary to unleash massive violence as a last resort to preserve its interests and maintain its order.