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
Jun 21, 2021
Juneteenth, or June 19, became an official federal holiday when President Biden signed it into law. June 19, 1865 was the day that Union troops came to Galveston, Texas and freed the last slaves at the end of the Civil War.
Over the years, some state legislatures recognized Juneteenth, but never as an official holiday—until now. After millions of people took to the streets to protest the murder of George Floyd and to protest against racist police brutality, politicians in eight states decided to make Juneteenth an official holiday.
Now the federal government has followed suit. The politicians in the Senate and the U.S. House passed the law recognizing Juneteenth in a matter of just two days. It was not surprising to see the Democrats vote for Juneteenth. For many years, the Democrats have needed the votes of the black population to get themselves elected. But surprisingly, the Republicans also voted for Juneteenth, unanimously in the Senate and all but 14 Republicans in the House. This is the same Republican Party which has been pushing racist hatred and division during the Trump presidency and after. Even while voting for Juneteenth, this same Republican Party is today passing laws to limit the voting of the black population and to stop schools from teaching the truth about racism in this country. What got into the minds of these racist fools? Who knows? Maybe they see some political advantage. But regardless, Juneteenth does not belong to the politicians of either party. Juneteenth belongs to the black population and their struggle for freedom.
Millions of slaves freed themselves during the Civil War by leaving the plantations and crossing the battle lines into the camps of the Union army. Almost 200,000 black men, most of them former slaves, joined the Union army and helped turn the tide in the war against slavery. Even after the Emancipation Proclamation, the 13th amendment ending slavery, and the surrender of the Confederate army, slavery continued in places like Texas. Some slaveowners had relocated to Texas in order to continue the slave system. The Union army had to go to Texas to enforce the official end of the slave system in the United States.
To celebrate the end of slavery, the freedmen and women in Texas organized their own celebration the following year—June 19, 1866. This is how Juneteenth got started. Ever since then, Juneteenth has been celebrated in parts of the black community. People have organized events, get-togethers and barbeques. They have kept alive the tradition and celebration of Juneteenth for over 150 years.
The Juneteenth holiday belongs to them and to all those who protested last year. They are the reason we have this new holiday to enjoy.
Jun 21, 2021
Juneteenth belongs to Opal Lee and others who stood their ground. On Juneteenth, 1939, white supremacists set fire to her childhood home as she and her family fled. She became a civil rights activist and, for most of her life, has been pushing for Juneteenth to become an official holiday.
In 2016, at the age of 89, Opal Lee walked from Fort Worth, Texas to Washington, D.C. to ask President Obama to recognize Juneteenth as a holiday. She did not walk every step of the way. But she walked 2 ½ miles in the morning and in the afternoon in every city she stopped at, asking other people to join her. During the protests last summer, at the age of 93, she organized a petition for Juneteenth. It’s her holiday.
Jun 21, 2021
The shortage of microchips is hitting all kinds of industries, from car production to cell phones. Businesses need chips to make these products.
But instead of investing their own money to increase production as quickly as possible, the small number of companies that make chips world-wide are taking advantage of the shortage to squeeze every inch of advantage they can. After all, sharks will be sharks.
The U.S. Senate just approved $52 billion in subsidies to these highly profitable companies to induce them to expand production in the U.S. The European Union, China, Taiwan, and Singapore are also competing to see which can throw the most money at these companies, each looking to secure chips for their own businesses.
Of course, the chip makers do not need one cent of this money to afford to build new factories. Just one chip maker, Intel, spent 26 billion dollars on stock buybacks alone in 2018 and 2019—money they could have used to build new factories. But why would Intel invest in production, when they can make more profits by squeezing subsidies out of the world’s governments?
Even while it hurts the capitalist class, capitalism’s own logic created this chip shortage. Each individual company pushes its own interests as far as possible and makes all of its decisions on the basis of its own profitability—the rest of the world be damned.
From creating a shortage of microchips or vaccine doses worldwide to driving climate change, this capitalist system blocks humanity from using the resources and technology we have to meet our basic needs.
Jun 21, 2021
During her recent high-profile trip to Central America and Mexico, Vice-President Kamala Harris warned migrants from that region: “Do not come. Do not come. If you come to the border, you will be turned back.” During his first press conference last March, President Joe Biden had said the same thing, when he told migrants, “don’t come over.... They should all be going back.”
When Harris and Biden had campaigned for office last year, they had denounced the Trump administration’s immigration policy, especially how it had expelled families and unaccompanied children and adolescents seeking asylum at the U.S. border.
When the pandemic hit in early 2020, the Trump administration had invoked an obscure 1944 statute, called Title 42, claiming that barring migrants from coming into the country was for public safety reasons. At the time, Kamala Harris and other Democratic Party lawmakers said that the Trump administration was violating U.S. and international law guaranteeing the right to seek asylum and prohibiting the government from returning persecuted people to harm. United Nations officials said the same thing. And three U.S. federal judges determined that the Trump administration’s policy was unlawful.
Certainly, the medical reasons given for this policy constituted a complete lie. In an open letter to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), leading public health and medical experts at public health schools, medical schools, hospitals, and other institutions urged the Biden administration to rescind this policy. They denounced how the Trump administration had used the pandemic as an excuse to carry out “xenophobic, cruel and unlawful policies ... under the pretext of public health to expel, block and return to danger asylum seekers and children seeking protection at the border,” and that it was possible to safeguard public health, while admitting refugees.
But once in office, the Biden administration adopted the Trump administration’s immigration policies wholesale, often using Trump’s same excuse: the pandemic.
In the first four months of the Biden administration, U.S. border officials carried out roughly 350,000 expulsions of migrants seeking asylum, including 50,000 families, according to an analysis by the Los Angeles Times. On top of that, the Border Patrol has been flying many of them hundreds of miles laterally from where they crossed the border, dropping them off in the dark with little warning in some of the most dangerous cities in northern Mexico.
In other words, U.S. officials are turning the migrants into sitting ducks for organized crime. Thousands of migrants returned to Mexico under Title 42 under the Biden administration have been murdered, raped, kidnapped, tortured and assaulted.
In April, after a major public outcry, the Biden administration did stop expelling children and adolescents. But the Biden administration did not stop expelling their parents. Thus, the Biden administration is continuing to separate children from their parents—just like the Trump administration.
And the Biden administration is also following in the footsteps of the Trump administration: continuing to build the wall. In April, there were reports that the administration is considering filling “gaps” in Trump’s construction.
“There is zero daylight between the Biden administration and the Trump administration’s position,” affirmed Lee Galernt, the top lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) that is suing the Biden administration to stop the mass expulsion of asylum seekers.
The Democrats and Republicans may sound different. But they are both enemies of the working class. They both try to divide workers in the interests of the capitalist class.
Jun 21, 2021
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department arrived earlier this month at the famous Venice Beach Boardwalk and gave an ultimatum to the homeless people on the beach: accept services, leave, or be arrested by July 4th. The Sheriff’s Department has already created jail space with 2,000 beds in anticipation of arrests.
As COVID-19 hit last year, the City of Los Angeles, which includes the neighborhood of Venice, imposed a moratorium on encampment sweeps. Formally, this means that the police department (LAPD) is not allowed to conduct such sweeps. However, this city-wide moratorium does not stop the Sheriff’s Department, which also has jurisdiction, from doing the dirty work. The current political jousting between City officials and the Sheriff’s Department only serves to hide how officials are working together to criminalize homeless people.
Historically, Venice was a working-class neighborhood. The vast new boom in tech companies in recent years turned it into “Silicon Beach.” Today, it is one of the richest neighborhoods in the country. The typical cost of a house comes to 2 million dollars. Additionally, Venice Beach is a famous tourist destination that brings in crowds of people from all over the world.
But while Venice is turning into a neighborhood for the rich, it also has seen a large increase in homeless encampments. Second to only downtown, the neighborhood of Venice has one of the largest numbers of homeless people with official tallies at 2,000. As the capitalist class pushes people into these conditions, the growing crisis brings with it all the barbarities caused by these conditions: violence, drugs, and fires that devour entire encampments.
The politicians use the conditions created as an excuse to criminalize the homeless.
At the same time, the worsening of the economic crisis, the growing unemployment, along with ever-higher housing costs, pushes more people onto the streets, even while there are more housing units left empty.
This is the madness of capitalist society. We, the working class, are all a pink slip or an illness away from facing the barbarity of such a reality if we do not change this world.
Jun 21, 2021
Prince George’s County Medical Center closed in mid-June. The 235-bed hospital was in a Maryland suburb outside Washington, D.C. It served a high proportion of Medicaid and poor patients. It had problems, including a bacteria outbreak some years ago that shut down the infant care unit for months. But instead of fixing this much-needed hospital, officials closed it.
Workers and patients were relocated nine miles away to Capital Region Medical Center, newly built in middle- and upper-income Largo. But the new facility has fewer beds, only 204. In order to pay off more than 200 million dollars in bonds, the new hospital is expected to target higher-paying patients. Planners expect the share of Medicaid patients will drop by nearly a third. Officials express no concern for where poorer patients can go for treatment.
But they are quick to say the new facility will help developers investing in Largo. Two new high-end residential developments already opened nearby while the hospital deal was being promoted. Developers plan a big new commercial area right by the hospital, with “upscale restaurants” and other pricey attractions.
Only in the capitalist system do officials use a medical facility as a method for subsidizing commercial investment—while ushering out the neediest patients.
Jun 21, 2021
Martha White, whose refusal to get off a “white only” bus seat sparked a massive bus boycott in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1953, died on June 5 at the age of 99.
Martha White was born in 1922 in southern Mississippi, as one of the seven children of sharecroppers. Martha’s mother died when Martha was in her early teens, and she and some of her siblings were brought to Baton Rouge to live with relatives. After a marriage ended in divorce, she began to work as a housekeeper.
In 1953, the city of Baton Rouge increased the fare on city buses from 10 to 15 cents—a real hardship for the majority of the city’s black population, since one out of three black residents of Baton Rouge was unemployed, and most of those with a job earned low wages as laborers and domestic workers.
At the same time, there was already some agitation against segregation laws and for voting rights in Baton Rouge, organized mainly by the city’s black churches, educated black professionals and black World War II veterans, so the increase in bus fare and segregation on the buses were issues discussed in the black community.
It was against this background that, on June 15, 1953, Martha White got on a bus where the only seats available were those designated “white only.” Martha White, who walked miles every day to her bus stop and worked on her feet all day, sat down anyway. When the bus driver told her she was not allowed to sit there, White first got up, but she sat down again when other black passengers objected to the bus driver. Another black woman came and sat next to White in solidarity.
Cops came and threw the two women off the bus—which drew a quick reaction from the black population of Baton Rouge. At a mass meeting that night, participants decided to knock on doors all night and call on the black community to stay off the buses the next day.
The next morning, black people at bus stops turned their backs to approaching buses. Carpools were organized, where black people who owned cars picked up people needing a ride and took them where they wanted to go. Nightly meetings drew thousands of people, and $6,000 was raised in just two days to buy gas for the carpools.
After four days of the boycott, the manager of the bus company, 80% of whose riders were black people, said that a continuation of the boycott would mean that the bus company would have to cease operations. The city moved to settle the boycott, and black negotiators, led by Rev. T. J. Jemison, agreed to a compromise. Some restrictions of segregation on the buses were eased, but this settlement kept bus segregation in place, which many black people saw as a betrayal.
Nonetheless, the Baton Rouge bus boycott had set an example for future battles against legal segregation. Two years later, in December 1955, another bus boycott broke out in Montgomery, Alabama, following the arrest of Rosa Parks. The organizers of the bus boycott in Montgomery had studied the Baton Rouge boycott, and in particular how the carpools were organized. The Montgomery bus boycott, which lasted over a year and ended in the U.S. Supreme Court declaring bus segregation unconstitutional, is of course considered a turning point in the Civil Rights Movement.
While legal victories did not end centuries-old racism in the U.S., the Civil Rights Movement forced the U.S. ruling class to acknowledge the rights of black Americans as citizens. This was the result of the massive mobilization of millions of ordinary, working-class black Americans like Martha White.
Jun 21, 2021
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave “accelerated approval” to a new drug for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, called Aduhelm. The approval was harshly criticized by scientists and others familiar with the evidence from the clinical trials of the drug.
Three members of an advisory board to the FDA who opposed the approval quit in protest. The watchdog group Public Citizen called the approval reckless and for top FDA officials to resign.
Two Phase 3 trials of the drug were ended when a review found that if they were continued they were unlikely to show that the drug benefitted Alzheimer’s patients. One study found no benefit, and the other found the drug “maybe,” might have, some small benefit at a high dosage.
So why did the FDA approve the drug? They say the drug satisfied a “surrogate endpoint” because it reduced the levels of “amyloid” in patients. Amyloid plaques are believed to interfere with transmission of nerve signals in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. However, reduction of amyloid has not been shown to stop the progression of Alzheimer’s disease in people with the disease.
The real reason for the approval is that the drug’s manufacturer, biotech giant Biogen, “collaborated closely” with the FDA. Biogen charges $56,000 per year for each patient receiving the drug. Because Alzheimer’s is primarily a disease affecting senior citizens, Medicare will likely bear most of the costs of treatment with Aduhelm. That means Medicare would pay 57 billion dollars a year to Biogen if 1 million Alzheimer’s patients receive the drug! The FDA’s approval of a broad label for the treatment for patients “in the earliest stages” of the disease means as many as 6 million people with Alzheimer’s could be eligible to receive it.
As Public Citizen pointed out, the FDA’s approval will encourage false hopes in Alzheimer’s patients and their families desperate to stop the progression of a horrible, debilitating disease. Patients without insurance to supplement Medicare would each pay $11,000 a year for the treatment as well, which will likely lead more patients and their families to pile up debts. All for a drug with no proven benefit.
Jun 21, 2021
For Emergent BioSolutions, a drug manufacturing company, the pandemic has been a real gold mine. Over the last year, it made record profits and distributed millions of dollars in bonuses to its executives, as the New York Times reported.
But because their manufacturing processes were so sloppy, much of what they produced was contaminated in its Baltimore plant. They were forced to destroy 75 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine. It led to a two-month-long shutdown of operations in April. Emergent did not deliver any dose of the vaccine after that.
This was a real setback that cost precious time in the fight against the pandemic that cost countless lives.
All this points out how companies get rich from government contracts. In May 2020, the Federal Government promised to pay Emergent $542 million to reserve production space at the troubled Baltimore plant, and at two Emergent facilities nearby to bottle and package COVID-19 vaccines.
At first glance, this contract made no sense. Emergent had never won regulatory approval to mass-produce anything at its main Baltimore plant. And the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had already found that those two facilities had a history of poor manufacturing quality, including the same kind of product contamination that led to the destruction of tens of millions of doses of vaccines. But that didn’t stop the Federal Government from still granting the company no-bid contracts.
So, Emergent was able to announce record profits without the company delivering a single dose, because the Federal Government handed over the money promised to the company.
These companies and their politicians in high places are handsomely profiting from our fight to survive this pandemic. And they are laughing all the way to the bank.
Jun 21, 2021
Donald Trump has complained endlessly about some mysterious “deep state” inside the government that opposed him. But when Trump was president, he himself turned to that same “deep state” to investigate his political opponents. In 2017 and ’18, he ordered the Justice Department to seize from Apple communication records and other data. Spied on were Democratic Party Congress members Adam B. Schiff and Eric Swalwell, and their aides and family members, as reported by the New York Times. Among these family members was a 10-year-old child. These Congress members did not know they were being investigated until Apple informed them last month.
The Trump administration also had the Justice Department seize similar information about reporters for the Washington Post, the New York Times, and CNN.
Not surprisingly, Democratic Party politicians denounced Trump. The current U.S. attorney general, Merrick Garland, declared that the Department of Justice will no longer use legal processes to spy on journalists “doing their jobs.”
Of course, when Barack Obama was president, the Department of Justice didn’t just investigate reporters, it prosecuted them, including the New York Times’ Tim Wiener, who was thrown in jail for not disclosing his sources to Obama’s Justice Department. It is generally accepted that the Obama administration did more damage to the democratic rights of the news reporters than any administration since “I Am Not a Crook” Nixon.
The irony is that these two Democrat representatives, Schiff and Swalwell, in addition to many others, joined the long list of politicians who ardently defended and enabled spying on ordinary citizens, even under Trump, as well as Obama. Now, these two representatives angrily object when they themselves are targeted by their own making.
This is democracy at its best under capitalism. The task of capitalist administrations and the congresses, whether under Democrats or Republicans, is to suppress dissent and information among the public so that the rich they represent continue to rule. So, such spying is not unusual anti-democratic activity. It is the norm. As Malcolm X said, "You and I have never seen democracy—all we’ve seen is hypocrisy."
Jun 21, 2021
This article is excerpted from one by James P. Cannon, published in The Militant on July 16, 1951. Cannon had been in the Industrial Workers of the World, then the American Communist Party, and was one of the founding members of what became the Socialist Workers Party. We are publishing excerpts from this article, commemorating the first American Revolution, which broke out 246 years ago.
I’m a Fourth of July man from away back, and a great believer in firecrackers, picnics and brass bands to go with it. You can stop me any time and get me to listen to the glorious story of the greatness of our country and how and when it all got started. The continent we inhabit has been here longer than anyone knows—but as a nation, as an independent people, the darlings of destiny favored above all others, we date from the Declaration of Independence and the Fourth of July.
The representatives in Congress assembled 175 years ago were the great initiators. When they said: “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” they started something that opened up a new era of promise for all mankind. That’s what I am ready to celebrate any time the bands begin to play—the start and the promise. But nobody can sell me the Fourth of July speeches which represent the start as the finish and the promise as the fulfillment. I quit believing in them a long time ago. As soon as I grew old enough to look around and see what was going on in this country—all the inequality and injustice still remaining—the beneficiaries of privilege, claiming the heritage of our first revolution, struck me as imposters. I recognized the standard Fourth of July orators as phonies, as desecrators of a noble dream. They didn’t look like the Liberty Boys of ’76.
But that never turned me against the Fourth of July, as was the case with so many American radicals and revolutionists in the past. I thought the Fourth of July belonged to the people. I always regarded its renunciation as one of the biggest mistakes of American radicalism. It is wrong to confuse internationalism with anti-Americanism; to relinquish the revolutionary traditions of our country to the reactionaries; to let the modern workers’ revolutionary movement, the legitimate heir of the men of 1776, appear as something foreign to our country....
Marx sketched the whole broad outline of American capitalism as it is today in advance of its development. In return for that, American capitalism in all its main features is the crowning proof of Marxism....
Marxism [which is today 173 years old] is not a dogma to be studied for its own sake, but a theory of social evolution and a guide to action in the class struggle. It is not a substitute for the knowledge of concrete reality, past and present, but a theoretical tool for its investigation and interpretation....
We have nothing to do with jingoism, or any kind of vulgar national conceit and arrogance. We are internationalists, and we know very well that our fate is bound up with that of the rest of the world. The revolution which will transform society and bring in the socialist order is a world-wide affair, a task requiring international cooperation to which we contribute only a part. But our part in this international cooperation is the revolution here at home. We must attend to that, study it and know it. And we can’t do that properly unless we know our country and its history and traditions. They are, for the greater part, good. The country itself is good, and so are the great majority of the people in it. Their achievements are many and great. There is nothing really wrong with the USA except that the wrong people have usurped control of it and are running it into the ditch.
The cure for that is not to throw away the country and its traditions, but to get rid of the usurpers by the process popularized by our forefathers under the name of revolution. This new revolution will have to complete the work started by the men of 1776. They secured the nation’s independence. The Second American Revolution of [1861—65], known as the Civil War, smashed the system of chattel slavery, unified the country and opened the way for its unobstructed industrial development. The task of the Third American Revolution is to take this great industrial machine out of the hands of a parasitical clique who operate it for their own benefit, and operate it for the benefit of all.
That’s the general idea. But it is not quite as simple as it sounds. There are complications and complexities. The workers have to make their way through a jungle of traps and deceptions. They need a map and a compass. They need a generalization of the experiences of the past and a theoretical guiding line for the future. That’s what Marxism is. The American workers will come to Marx, and with him they will be invincible. “Marx will become the mentor of the advanced American workers,” said Trotsky. We have the same opinion, and we are working to realize it.
Karl Marx, the German Jew, who lived and worked out his profound theory in England, is native to all countries. The supreme analyst of capitalism is most of all at home in the United States where the development of capitalism has reached its apogee. Marx will help the American workers to know their country, and to change it and make it really their own.
Jun 21, 2021
The following article is excerpted from a letter that the Russian revolutionary, V.I. Lenin, addressed to American workers, in the period when a large number of imperialist countries, including the United States, were attempting to crush the newborn Russian Revolution. In calling on the help of American workers, Lenin reminded them of the revolutionary tradition of which they were the inheritors—including the anti-colonial revolution of 1776 and the Civil War of the 1860s.
Comrades! A Russian Bolshevik who took part in the 1905 Revolution, and who lived in your country for many years afterwards, has offered to convey my letter to you. I have accepted his proposal all the more gladly because just at the present time the American revolutionary workers have an exceptionally important role to play as uncompromising enemies of American imperialism—the freshest, strongest and latest power joining in the world-wide slaughter of nations for the division of capitalist profits. At this very moment, the American multimillionaires, these modern slaveowners, have turned an exceptionally tragic page in the bloody history of bloody imperialism by giving their approval—whether direct or indirect, open or hypocritically concealed, makes no difference—to the armed expedition launched by the brutal Anglo-Japanese imperialists for the purpose of throttling the first socialist republic.
The history of modern, civilized America opened with one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few compared to the vast number of wars of conquest which, like the present imperialist war, were caused by squabbles among kings, landowners or capitalists over the division of usurped lands or ill-gotten gains. That was the war the American people waged against the British robbers who oppressed America and held her in colonial slavery, in the same way as these civilized bloodsuckers are still oppressing and holding in colonial slavery hundreds of millions of people in India, Egypt, and all parts of the world.
About 150 years have passed since then. Bourgeois civilization has borne all its luxurious fruits. America has taken first place among the free and educated nations in level of development of the productive forces of collective human endeavor, in the utilization of machinery and of all the wonders of modern engineering. At the same time, America has become one of the foremost countries in regard to the depth of the abyss which lies between the handful of arrogant multimillionaires who wallow in filth and luxury, and the millions of working people who constantly live on the verge of pauperism. The American people, who set the world an example in waging a revolutionary war against feudal slavery, now find themselves in the latest, capitalist stage of wage-slavery to a handful of multimillionaires, and find themselves playing the role of hired thugs who, for the benefit of wealthy scoundrels, throttled the Philippines in 1898 on the pretext of liberating them, and are throttling the Russian Socialist Republic in 1918 on the pretext of protecting it from the Germans.
The four years of the imperialist slaughter of nations, however, have not passed in vain. The deception of the people by the scoundrels of both robber groups, the British and the German, has been utterly exposed by indisputable and obvious facts. The results of the four years of war have revealed the general law of capitalism as applied to war between robbers for the division of spoils: the richest and strongest profited and grabbed most, while the weakest were utterly robbed, tormented, crushed and strangled.
The British imperialist robbers were the strongest in number of colonial slaves. The British capitalists have not lost an inch of their territory (i.e., territory they have grabbed over the centuries), but they have grabbed all the German colonies in Africa, they have grabbed Mesopotamia and Palestine, they have throttled Greece, and have begun to plunder Russia.
The German imperialist robbers were the strongest in organization and discipline of their armies, but weaker in regard to colonies. They have lost all their colonies but plundered half of Europe and throttled the largest number of small countries and weak nations. What a great war of liberation on both sides! How well the robbers of both groups, the Anglo-French and the German capitalists, together with their lackeys, the social chauvinists, i.e., the socialists who went over to the side of their own bourgeoisie, have defended their country!
The American multimillionaires were, perhaps, richest of all, and geographically the most secure. They have profited more than all the rest. They have converted all, even the richest, countries into their tributaries. They have grabbed hundreds of billions of dollars. And every dollar is sullied with filth: the filth of the secret treaties between Britain and her allies, between Germany and her vassals, treaties for the division of the spoils, treaties of mutual aid for oppressing the workers and persecuting the internationalist socialists. Every dollar is sullied with the filth of profitable war contracts, which in every country made the rich richer and the poor poorer. And every dollar is stained with blood from that ocean of blood that has been shed by the ten million killed and twenty million maimed in the great, noble, liberating and holy war to decide whether the British or the German robbers are to get most of the spoils, whether the British or the German thugs are to be foremost in throttling the weak nations all over the world....
The American people have a revolutionary tradition which has been adopted by the best representatives of the American proletariat, who have repeatedly expressed their complete solidarity with us Bolsheviks. That tradition is the war of liberation against the British in the eighteenth century and the Civil War in the nineteenth century. In some respects, if we only take into consideration the destruction of some branches of industry and of the national economy, America in 1870 [after the Civil War] was behind 1860. But what a pedant, what an idiot would anyone be to deny on these grounds the immense, world-historic, progressive and revolutionary significance of the American Civil War of 1863—65!
The representatives of the bourgeoisie understood that for the sake of overthrowing Negro slavery, of overthrowing the rule of the slaveowners, it was worth letting the country go through long years of civil war, through the abysmal ruin, destruction and terror that accompany every war. But now, when we are confronted with the vastly greater task of overthrowing capitalist wage-slavery, of overthrowing the rule of the bourgeoisie now, the representatives and defenders of the bourgeoisie, and also the reformist socialists who have been frightened by the bourgeoisie and are shunning the revolution, cannot and do not want to understand that civil war is necessary and legitimate.
The American workers will not follow the bourgeoisie. They will be with us, for civil war against the bourgeoisie. The whole history of the world and of the American labor movement strengthens my conviction that this is so. I also recall the words of one of the most beloved leaders of the American proletariat, Eugene Debs, who wrote in the Appeal to Reason, I believe toward the end of 1915, in the article “What Shall I Fight For,” that he, Debs, would rather be shot than vote credits for the present criminal and reactionary war; that he, Debs, knows of only one holy and, from the proletarian standpoint, legitimate war, namely: the war against the capitalists, the war to liberate mankind from wage-slavery....
Jun 21, 2021
Translated from Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has set up a program called Covax to immunize one billion people in poor countries by the end of 2021. But so far, less than 40 million people have been.
The leaders of the great powers have made big statements about the necessary global fight against the virus, but they are leaving these countries to be ravaged by the epidemic. Covax lacks everything, first of all money. Billions of dollars have been pledged by rich countries, oil emirates, companies or private foundations. These donations were highly publicized but were only promises.
At the end of May, the WHO announced that it needed two billion dollars before June 2 to be able to secure its vaccine supply contracts from laboratories such as Pfizer, Moderna or Johnson & Johnson. Funding needs are such that UNICEF launched an appeal to the general public, explaining that 3 euros can buy a dose of vaccine at cost.
In reality, the cost price relates only to doses intended for the poorest countries. For those intended for so-called developing countries, Covax is only entitled to a reduction, the laboratories still preserving a profit margin.
To this were added the consequences of the explosion of the epidemic in India. This country is the world’s largest vaccine producer, and it was supposed to deliver half of its production to Covax. But since March, all production has remained in India. So since then, all vaccination plans in other poor countries have been suspended. However, the turn taken by the epidemic is as catastrophic in those places as in India, especially in South Asia and in certain countries of Latin America.
Faced with the emergency, the director general of the WHO has just asked the rich countries to deliver to Covax the doses they had promised. The United States, the country that has bought the most doses in the world, more than the country’s population, has so far delivered none, and has just announced that it will donate 80 million by the end June. The WHO has also asked laboratories that Covax recover 50% of the doses produced which have already been paid for.
In these countries where health systems are almost non-existent, where the number of recovery beds is extremely low—when there are any at all, the vaccine is the only solution to prevent deaths. But even caregivers cannot be vaccinated. And there is other collateral damage. The lack of investment by large pharmaceutical companies has created a shortage of so-called routine vaccines, such as those against measles or polio. Eighty million children under the age of one have not received their vaccinations. And already there are measles outbreaks in Pakistan, Congo and Yemen.
The WHO begs the leaders of the great powers and pharmaceutical companies, reminding them that borders do not stop the virus, but to no avail. In fact, hundreds of thousands more deaths are already predicted. Not only because of a virus and its mutations, but also because of the greed of the shareholders of the pharmaceutical trusts, the carelessness of the leaders of the rich countries—and the underdevelopment, the result of decades of imperialist domination.
Jun 21, 2021
Following a cease-fire negotiated on May 20th, Israeli aircraft dropped bombs on Palestinian areas in Gaza on June 16 and June 17. Why were they bombing?
Palestinian young people periodically “send a message demanding respect” via balloon. They attach flammable devices to helium balloons, and wind carries them over the Gaza border into Israel. They cause small fires in vacant fields. The bombing of buildings in Gaza by Israeli fighter jets was retaliation for this.
When far-right Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu recently stepped down, a new far-right government stepped up. The military response allowed the new Israeli government that had been in power for a few days to put to rest any propaganda that things will change in Israel with a new government.
In Washington, D.C., a 3.8 billion-dollar-a-year package of military assistance to the state of Israel is in the pipeline. This shows the U.S. government supports the right-wing policies of the Israeli government. President Biden stated on May 21, “There is no shift in my commitment ... [to] Israel. Period.”
For as long as capitalist interests in the Middle East maintain this barbaric equation of funding Israel to repress poor people’s struggles in the region on behalf of U.S. imperialism, the Palestinian people will be faced with no other choice than to languish or fight. They have chosen to fight. Despite being met with police brutality, ordinary Palestinian people have protested non-stop since the cease-fire.
Near the West Bank city of Ramallah, Palestinian protests have faced tear gas and rubber bullets. East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah district has seen continued demonstrations by Palestinian activists fighting forced evictions. They view themselves as protesting the ethnic cleansing of their neighborhood. They continue to fight despite violent attacks by Israeli riot police.
For years, Palestinians have been subject to geographic and political divisions that have created differences in experience. Current unity in the struggle is bringing new hope to Palestinians.
An activist recently explained that Palestinians from all regions can relate to the fight for equal rights going on in East Jerusalem against forced evictions. They see themselves in Israel’s attacks on this neighborhood.
In the words of one observer, “What Israel did recently was its biggest strategic mistake: It showed Palestinians the reality, that it deals with all of us this way … that we’re all unequal.”
“Israel created a hierarchy for Palestinians from different places. But the way it dealt with us in this time, there was no difference. It showed us the cause is one.”
Jun 21, 2021
Translated from Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.
The discovery of the remains of 215 children—most likely Native—in the Canadian province of British Columbia shook the country.
The gruesome discovery was made in Kamloops, a city in the Rockies. The site had housed one of Canada’s 130 so-called residential schools. The government set up this “educational” network in 1870, and the last school was closed in 1996.
These residential schools were meant for the children of the Native tribes that once populated Canada from the shores of the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific and the Arctic. The government claimed to provide the children an education by entrusting them to Christian congregations. In fact, this took them away from their parents and their tribes and cut them off from their native languages and cultures.
In 2015, an official commission investigated child abuse. The commission confirmed that 51 children had died at Kamloops between 1914 and 1963. The Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc tribe suspected there were many more victims and kept looking for them. Their findings were finally made public on May 27. The commission identified more than 4,000 children who died at these schools, and possibly as many as 6,000. The commission’s president even raised the possibility of 15,000 victims.
For over a century, the Canadian state barely funded these residential schools. The children went hungry and were punished for speaking their native languages. Beatings and sexual abuse were rampant. The youngest victim was three years old.
On news of the Kamloops mass grave discovery, tribes across Canada expressed their anger. Provincial governors and mayors responded by lowering their flags. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau assured the tribes he was “doing the right thing” to alleviate their suffering. But Canadian authorities cannot claim they were unaware of the consequences of the racist policies the state pursued, first as a colony and then as an independent country. As early as 1909, a doctor sent the government a report alerting it to the very high death rates at these schools. The ill-treatment continued—as did the oppression and plunder of Native tribes more generally.
Saddened speeches by modern authorities can’t erase the crimes of the past.
Jun 21, 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic is raging in Africa. The number of new cases increased by 30% in one week.
All the while, the countries of Africa face a drastic shortage of vaccine doses. Though the continent, with 1.3 billion people, is home to 18% of the world’s population, its people have received only 2% of the vaccine doses administered globally to date!
This is not surprising given that Africa is home to many of the world’s poorest countries. Through much of the pandemic, African countries appeared to have escaped the worst of it. It’s hard to know for sure the extent of COVID’s spread, given the high cost of being tested. It costs $22 to $65 to be tested, which is out of reach for most of the working class, considering that 85% of people in sub-Saharan Africa live on less than $5.50 per day. The cost of medical care for those contracting COVID-19 is even more out of reach for most Africans.
Politicians and the media in the imperialist countries admit “No one is safe unless we are all safe.” Yet until now, African countries have faced a severe shortage of vaccines while the wealthier countries have hoarded them. Governments of the imperialist countries have protected the patent rights of pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer that prevent the poorer countries from producing the vaccines on their own.
U.S. President Joe Biden recently made a big pronouncement that the U.S. would purchase 500 million doses to donate to 92 lower-income countries through the United Nations’ COVAX program. But even by Biden’s predictions, these will not be fully distributed until June of 2022 and Africa alone has 1.3 billion people! How many millions of people will catch the disease and die or be sickened for the rest of their lives before they can get a vaccine?
It would certainly be in the interests of even the capitalists to end this pandemic, including in the poorer countries. It interferes with the ordinary functioning of an interconnected worldwide economy. Yet the same system of profit prevents the politicians from making the new vaccine technology available to all who need it across the globe, and therefore, it remains true, no one is safe!
Jun 21, 2021
The following article is the editorial from The SPARK’s workplace newsletters, for the week of June 13, 2021.
“...and the rich got richer still.” That’s a line in a very old song. But it’s also the reality of what happened during this last year when most of the rest of us were struggling through the pandemic crisis.
In the course of the pandemic year, chief executives of the 200 biggest companies enjoyed another big increase in their income. Their haul grew nine times faster than did the wages of the average employee in those same 200 companies. These were the findings of a survey commissioned by the New York Times, which concluded that the gap between the wealth of executives and almost everyone else got even bigger last year than it was the year before.
The fact the rich kept getting richer and the poor kept getting poorer shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone.
Still, given the pandemic, given the fulsome declarations that “we are all in this together,” we might have hoped that executives who run these big companies would have made an extra effort to bring workers’ wages up during the pandemic.
Foolish hope that was. The fabulous income of top executives comes very directly from the exploitation of the workers—workers in their own company, and in all the other companies in which those 200 big American companies have sunk their claws. The fortunes amassed by the top executives come directly from the productive activity of the workers: from wages that are kept abysmally low, from the constant push for more production, the constant push for longer hours, the constant push to violate health and safety standards.
Executives were not the only ones to benefit from the exploitation of labor. So did the bankers linked with these companies. So did the corporate raiders who run the private equity companies that control a big chunk in most of these 200 companies. The whole interlocking financial system runs off the profits run up in the companies which actually produce goods and services. The executives are not the only ones to live off the proceeds of workers’ labor. They’re just a symbol of the whole capitalist class, including those who do nothing but own the corporations, the very large shareholders, many of whom simply inherited their wealth.
In the same week that the New York Times released the survey on executive income, another news service, ProPublica, released a report drawn from the income tax records of the 25 wealthiest Americans. That also showed what we already knew—that the wealthy pay a much smaller share of their income in taxes than everyone else.
This tax system favoring the wealthy serves as an indirect exploitation of the working class. The money taken out of workers’ wages by the state apparatus is funneled through a deliberately skewed tax system into more income for the already very wealthy.
No, we are not “all in this together.” A very tiny, tiny share of the population exploit the vast majority, those of us who carry out the productive activity that society needs to survive.
It was true in 2019, the year before the pandemic, it was true in the pandemic year, it continues to be true this year, it will be true next year, and the year after next, and the year after, etc.
It will continue so long as the capitalist class is left in place, free to run the economy; so long as the political class installed in the two big parties is left in place, free to run society in the interests of the whole capitalist system.
Workers—as exploited as we are—are not victims. Our place in the very center of production gives us the capacity not only to throw out this old, used-up capitalist society. It gives working people the means to build up a new one in which we truly will “all be in it together.”
What’s lacking is not the capacity of the working class: what’s lacking is a profound confidence in our class, an understanding of the truly revolutionary capacity our class embodies.
Jun 21, 2021
This pandemic school year has been an unmitigated disaster.
Even for the most prepared high school students, five hours or more on the internet every day was an exercise in frustration. For those already behind, without reliable internet access, good computers, a quiet place to work, and someone to help, it was much worse.
And forget about elementary school. How many five-year-olds did not learn to read or do basic arithmetic, as they would have in a normal year?
For many students this year was also a total loss for their personal development. Cooped up in the house, away from friends and social contact, students suffered from record levels of depression and anxiety.
All that is not even to mention the stress this school year put on parents. How many mothers left the workforce to watch their kids? How many more couldn’t afford to, and watched their kids fall further and further behind?
It’s an understatement to say that the end of the school year comes as a relief. But what does this society offer moving forward?
Authorities crow that schools will be fully open, come fall—except nothing has been done to address all the problems that were already there, let alone the losses suffered during this pandemic year.
Just like the pandemic has used up a generation of hospital workers, it has used up a generation of educators. The superintendents of schools in Chicago, L.A., and New York are all leaving. State after state faces a teacher shortage. According to one poll, more than half of all teachers now say they’re considering leaving the profession within two years, compared to 34% in 2019.
Working class schools were already underfunded, short of teachers and staff, in run-down buildings, lacking in extracurricular activities. And now their students are even further behind the rich, who hired private tutors, or sent their kids to private schools that could stay open by spending the necessary money.
Workers do not have to accept this future for our children. We have created more than enough wealth to give our children what the rich get today—small class sizes, all kinds of art, music, languages, sports and other programs, individual attention when they need it. But to get that, we will have to make a determined fight against the capitalist system that discards our children.
Jun 21, 2021
The states are opening up and telling us to return to normal, as if the pandemic were over. In many places, they are closing mass vaccination sites because too few people are showing up. But Covid is not finished with us. It keeps changing and spreading rapidly among the unvaccinated.
There are many reasons people are not getting vaccinated. Some people don’t understand the science, they are scared, and they don’t trust the system. Many workers, mostly low-wage workers, are worried about their job, getting the time off. And it isn’t just the time to get the shot, it is also the time to recover from the side effects. Some might have transportation or childcare issues.
These problems are not insurmountable. Bring the vaccine to people—workplaces, neighborhoods, churches, and the like. Give people paid time off from work not only to get the vaccine but time to recover as well. Provide more information, easy to understand, about the vaccine.
No, they don’t do anything. Then when people don’t show up, they shut the Covid vaccination sites down. They shut them down even when many people in several states aren’t even vaccinated. This is completely crazy and unacceptable. This policy will ensure that Covid is a permanent fixture on the landscape, like TB, diabetes, flu, AIDS and on and on.
Jun 21, 2021
Loudoun County, a suburb of Washington, D.C., thanked their teachers for all their hard work and extra efforts over the pandemic. Yes, they all got a heartfelt letter and a commemorative “challenge” coin. At the same time, Loudoun County divvied out 1.6 million dollars to all the school administrators and school principals.
Nothing new here. Bosses got big bonuses and the workers got a coin they can’t spend anywhere.
Jun 21, 2021
The country is “getting back to normal” this summer, according to government spokespersons and the news. After nearly a year and a half of Covid lockdowns and other restrictions, mask mandates are being lifted. Restaurants and bars are opening to full capacity. Concerts and festivals are being scheduled.
But those of us who do the work have little to celebrate. No, we’re the ones left holding the bag, still paying the price while our officials pretend that it’s all over.
First of all, who says lifting the mask mandate makes it easier? How are we supposed to know, when we go into work, or into the grocery store, who is sick, vaccinated, and so on? Since they did a sad, ineffective vaccination process, in many places, the population is wide open to the virus. They’ve all but given up on vaccinating the population, doing nothing to truly reach all those who are not yet vaccinated. They’ve taken to saying that we may just have to accept that Covid will be with us forever, like the flu. Even while talking about the more contagious and more deadly variants we are facing!
Many workplaces say they are short of workers. Yes, because workers are still getting sick—or don’t want to take the risk of getting infected, especially when mask requirements are gone. So, supermarkets are packed, with checkout lines stretching down whole aisles for the few registers that are open and going out to eat is often disrupted and not that enjoyable.
Women have been especially hard hit during this time. Faced with closures of in-person teaching, and with zero childcare options, 2.3 million women left the workforce to stay home in the past year to care for and teach their kids and try to keep it together without a regular income. Many still can’t return, because trusted childcare is hard to find.
Many workers have not been able to pay their rent or their mortgage this past year. They limped along with an eviction moratorium in place—but those debts were not wiped away, and they are about to become due when the moratorium lifts at the end of the month. So, all of this on top of the bad situation workers were in even before the pandemic hit.
Finally, the $300 a week extra for unemployment compensation is slated to disappear—states are announcing that they will be shutting down those payments. And the federal program shuts them all down, in any case, by September.
When they tell us that we’re getting “back to normal” they’re telling us to accept all the ways that we are still paying for this intolerable situation.
Meanwhile, corporate profits and income for the wealthy has taken no hit, in fact it skyrocketed.
So, we need to make their normal our normal. They are living protected lives and investing their profits on grander and grander schemes. Maybe they will buy a yacht or even a whole country! In any case, they have money to burn.
We don’t have to accept these gross inequalities. The working class can set these billionaires on the run when we organize and fight. We are the ones who produce all of their wealth, and they can’t have it if we don’t give it to them.
Meanwhile, in the short run, we should put the lie to the BS they are talking and let the world know that we are not falling for their “back to normal” strategy.
Jun 21, 2021
Just a few days after announcing that Baltimore City public schools were opening for in-person instruction, many schools were closed due to excessive heat (over 90 degrees). Thirty schools were closed on June 7, 33 on June 8 and 28 on June 14.
Most of these schools have no air conditioning, while a few have their air conditioning under repair.
An updated plan released in February estimated it would cost at least $67,650,000 to provide air conditioning and improved heating in all Baltimore public school buildings. But the funding to do all this work has not been appropriated.
In the meantime, thousands of city students will lack in-person classes whenever temperatures are high. And this is just the beginning of summer....