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
Nov 8, 2021
The November election was a big success for the Republican Party. It made inroads into former Democratic Party strongholds. The biggest victory was in Virginia where Republican Glenn Youngkin won the governor’s race.
Youngkin, a super wealthy financier worth 440 million dollars, won the election the old-fashioned way—he bought it, spending 20 million of his own money on his campaign. That lavish sum paid for top-tier G.O.P. consultants and an avalanche of slick TV ads.
Youngkin’s message was aimed at parents of public-school students in Virginia. He claimed that by teaching about this country’s history of racism, starting with slavery and segregation, the schools were dividing people against each other.
Said Youngkin, “…we divide them into buckets—one group’s an oppressor and another group’s a victim—and we pit them against each other, and we steal their dreams.”
What a bunch of lies.
For close to 300 years slavery was legal in this country. That’s two-thirds of this country’s history. For all that time, human beings were bought and sold, like horses or mules. The great fortunes of the very wealthy were built on the backs of the slaves. For three centuries, the slaves’ dreams were “stolen” by their “oppressors,” the slave owners.
That is this country’s history.
Of course, it is clear why very wealthy people like Youngkin don’t want this history to be taught in the schools. Even though the Civil War ended slavery 150 years ago, racism is still very much alive. Racism is a tool, a weapon, that is used by the very wealthy and their political stooges to divide the working population against itself. That way the rich can get richer by robbing the working class and poor. In the past, the slaveowners robbed the slaves of everything they produced. Today, the capitalists continue the tradition of robbing the working class.
Racism is not just an attack against black people. It is an attack against the entire working class, immigrant workers, as well as white workers. When one part of the working class suffers greater unemployment and earns less in wages, it provides an opening for the bosses to push down wages for everyone.
There is nothing new about Youngkin’s racist and reactionary appeals. It is what top Republicans have been doing since Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon in the 1960s.
The Youngkin campaign did strike a chord when it denounced the 13 months of school closures in Virginia starting in March 2020. Keeping the schools closed took a tremendous toll on the students. They not only lost out academically, they also suffered socially and emotionally, with a big increase in children’s mental health emergencies and suicide attempts by teenagers.
Of course, the ultra-wealthy Youngkin’s solution was simply to keep the doors of the schools open, which would have been another kind of disaster, leading to a greater spread of the pandemic, more disease, and more death. What Youngkin ignored was this cruel reality: the authorities couldn’t keep the schools open and safe because the schools were already unsafe … before the pandemic hit. And no capitalist nor government official was ready to move billions of dollars into an emergency drive to renovate them as quickly as possible and hire more staff and teachers.
For decades, in order to boost the profits of big business and the wealth of the capitalist class, the politicians of both parties, the Republicans and Democrats, had joined together to cut back vital spending for public health and public schools, leaving them in complete disarray. The lack of public health services, that is, the prevention of disease, meant that there was little or no ability to test and trace when the pandemic hit. As for the public schools in working class neighborhoods, the schools were already jammed with overcrowding, with not enough teachers and staff, without decent ventilation.
The Democrats may not have the same racist message as Republicans like Youngkin. But they still loyally serve the same capitalist class as the Republican Party and are not a protection for working people. They’ve cut education and social services all during their administrations.
The two-party system with the Republicans and Democrats taking turns being in and out of power has served the capitalist class very well. But it is a trap for working people. We need a workers party, independent from the others, to voice our concerns and organize the power we have as workers to fight capitalism.
Nov 8, 2021
John Deere workers have turned down the company’s latest contract proposal and voted to continue their strike.
The UAW members began their strike on October 14 after voting down the first tentative contract by over 90%. In the 2nd tentative agreement, the company increased their wage offer and said they would drop a proposal to create a 3rd tier of wages and benefits for new hires. But for the John Deere workers, that wasn’t enough and on November 2nd, they voted it down by 55% to 45%.
The 2nd agreement had wage increases of 20% over 6 years, which is more than most workers are seeing today. But that didn’t nearly make up for all the concessions that the John Deere workers have taken over the years. In 1997, John Deere workers were one of the first groups of UAW members to take big concessions, specifically 2-tier wages and benefits. Deere workers hired since 1997, which is much of their workforce, still do not have a full pension and they do not have retiree health care. Meanwhile, the company is expected to make 6 billion dollars in profits this year and the company CEO got a raise of 160%!
John Deere workers said they have been preparing for this strike since the last contract was narrowly ratified. They have shown their determination in voting to continue this strike.
The strike by UAW workers at John Deere follows on a strike earlier this year by UAW members at Volvo. The workers voted three times to turn down tentative agreements and decided to continue their strike. When the Volvo workers finally voted to end their strike, 49% of the workers said they were ready to continue.
After years of giving up concessions, some UAW workers today are showing they are ready and willing to make a fight. The contracts negotiated between the union leadership and the various companies expire at different times and are designed to keep workers’ fights separated.
But workers can see that all workers, union or non-union, are facing the same problems today. We all have the same reason to make a fight. When one group of workers starts a fight, they can find the ways to spread that fight and have others join them.
Nov 8, 2021
Starting in the 1860s, workers in this country began to fight in a big way for the eight-hour workday. In 1886, they launched a giant strike wave with the slogan “eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what we will.” Finally in the 1930s, workers imposed the eight-hour day as the standard in many industries.
And yet today, few jobs on offer are the old “traditional” eight-hours, five days a week. Some have ten-hour shifts. Others have twelve. Many are six or even seven days a week.
Yes, this means workers will get overtime pay—which is just enough to keep up with what we used to earn, 30 or 40 years ago. Many workers are even happy to take overtime because we need the money.
Then there are all the part-time jobs that only offer five or six hours, and irregular schedules. Many workers have to take two or three of these jobs just to make ends meet.
The bosses today make every effort to try to make us think that we have to work all these hours in order to live. But with all the technology we have, workers should be able to live excellently on 20 hours a week—if we made what our labor is worth. We create more wealth in 20 hours today than workers used to create in 40 hours half a century ago. But accounting for the real cost of living, we earn much less.
In this society, the bosses push to make us work as much as possible, to wring as much profit out of us as they can. Workers have a different interest: to have time to enjoy our lives.
Nov 8, 2021
The twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach in California have still been unprecedentedly clogged. These ports are now facing 30% more than usual traffic with about 28% fewer workers, as reported by an online news organization, Insider.
“We want to work as much as possible, but the employers don’t want to pay the overtime to get these problems fixed. It’s a balancing act, they want to scrape by with just enough workers, but the more ships that come in, the worse it gets,” a dockworker told Business Insider.
But the dockworker shortage leads to failures and delays at every step of the operation of these ports. The manufacturers abroad won’t stop shipping goods as long as importers continue to order and pay for the deliveries. The companies that operate ports don’t turn the ships away because they earn money from docking fees and unloading containers. And once the goods arrive at the docks, some importers do not want to move containers quickly onto trucks because the importers’ warehouse space is running out. As a result, the dockworker shortage is causing a mess.
Because of this mess, these ports, which have been built to handle 30 to 40 ships, are clogged with 153 ships as of the last week of October. And nearly half a million shipping containers are stuck on the docks. This mass of shipping containers causes much longer delays and chaos, as dockworkers have to waste huge amounts of time hunting for the correct containers to put on trucks and trains, leading to greater delays.
But this mess does not prevent manufacturers, shipping companies, companies operating ports, trucking companies, railways, and retailers from reporting record revenues and skyrocketing profits. These companies continue to run their workers into the ground because such messes are another opportunity to increase their profits.
Nov 8, 2021
Hundreds of sailors on cargo ships now floating off Southern California have been stuck on these ships for months, some even more than a year. Most of these sailors are unable to get vaccinated and therefore are not allowed to disembark their ship. And they are unable to return home.
Currently, about 300,000 sailors have been stranded on vessels at sea or in ports around the world for the last year. They live in cramped quarters and only have access to a few dozen shipmates. They live on a food budget that amounts to $7.50 per person per day. Some earn wages as low as $460 a month. Their unions and charity groups describe these sailors’ exhaustion, despair, and suicidal tendencies. The possibility of getting sick with COVID-19 further intensified these sailors’ stress.
Meanwhile, for the capitalist class that controls and owns the shipping companies, this shipping crisis has been an enormous opportunity to gouge the public and fatten its profits. Maersk, the world’s largest container shipping company, recently reported a profit of $5.44 billion for the September quarter, which was higher than Amazon and UPS combined. These companies and their profiteers enjoy their life with impunity.
The poorly paid, miserably treated workforce of the shipping industry is the moving force of the global economy. They move 90% of global trade, worth $14 trillion. Without their work, the world’s economy would come to a screeching stop.
Those who labor to move the goods of the world should own the fruits of their labor. Society needs them! Not the parasites exploiting their labor and the world population to enrich their own bank accounts.
Nov 8, 2021
Merck plans to charge $712 for the five-day treatment of COVID-19 in the U.S. with the experimental drug it is currently commercializing. Considering that the production cost of pills for this treatment is less than $12 and the U.S. government paid for the research and development of this pill, Merck’s pricing is a total rip-off.
Merck, a pharmaceutical giant, announced early in October that this experimental COVID-19 pill, called molnupiravir, reduced hospitalizations and deaths by half in people recently infected with the coronavirus. All COVID-19 therapies now authorized in the U.S. require an IV or injection. So, this medicine, which is a simple pill, is a potentially huge advance in efforts to fight the pandemic.
Emory University researchers originally developed this COVID pill by getting $29 million from the U.S. government. A small Miami-based company, Ridgeback, licensed the medicine from Emory University in 2020 and two months later sold the worldwide rights of this pill to Merck. The only spending Merck did on developing this pill is related to its trial on about 750 human subjects.
Companies in India are planning to price the pill at less than $12 for a five-day course. Considering that these Indian companies also reap a handsome profit from this pill, the manufacturing cost of this pill for the treatment should be much less than $12. So, through the patents and its giant size, Merck will dominate this COVID treatment and derive staggering profits, estimated in tens of billions of dollars each year from the worldwide market.
So, Merck’s owners will get even richer. But, with the price of this pill so high, a lot of people won’t be able to afford it. This dire result is the actual “cost” of the so-called “free market” of capitalism.
Nov 8, 2021
Anne Arundel County, like everywhere else in Maryland, received millions of dollars to help renters during the pandemic. It is now 19 months into the pandemic and only $53,000 has been paid in the entire county. Yet thousands lost their jobs, and undoubtedly got behind on rent.
The head of the Annapolis public housing authority recently informed the city council that renters are behind almost $800,000. She says certain regulations get in the way of helping renters. Meanwhile the lawyer overseeing the assistance program, which covers Annapolis renters, says there is enough money to assist everyone who needs it.
What if a housing authority employee knocked on every door where they already know someone is behind on rent? If they offered assistance, wouldn’t the housing authority gain back some rent money?
This fiasco is not the first time during the pandemic that assistance is not getting through to those who need it.
Nov 8, 2021
First it was 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave that was supposed to be a “centerpiece” in President Biden’s “Build Back Better” portion of the budget bill. Then it got whittled down to 4 weeks. Then it got taken out altogether, and then put back again. And now it has been put on hold, along with a whole host of other “human infrastructure” measures—for Congress to decide upon, allegedly, sometime in mid-November.
The U.S., the richest country in the world, is one of six countries in the world of 193 countries with no national paid family leave. It’s the only industrialized country that doesn’t guarantee workers paid leave.
And for months the public has been presented with the perspective that there are either a few Democratic Party politicians or that it is the Republican Party that have sabotaged this legislation from passing.
False. The real reason why paid family leave, or ANY HUMAN SERVICE, is first to be cut from this system’s budget in this wealthiest country in the world is that its price tag is one that the REAL decision-makers in this capitalist system—the corporations, the banks, and Wall Street have no intention of paying. After all, they can’t make a profit off workers staying home and caring for their newborns or elders. And get paid to do so from public money, which the capitalist class wants all for itself. No, they are not about to come up off any of the wealth they obtain by exploiting workers’ labor.
The working class itself is the only class that has the power, when it is organized, to guarantee that the wealth workers produce goes for what is needed. Like quality family care. Like paid family leave.
Nov 8, 2021
Fresh from their losses in the elections last week, Democrats in Congress decided to show that they could pass an infrastructure bill.
Moderates in the party convinced progressives to drop a demand to pass social legislation in favor of a much narrower bill that supposedly will address the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. In return, they received a promise to “consider” the social legislation once the price tag comes in.
Biden called it a “monumental step forward.” The media made much of its supposed one trillion-dollar price tag. But in truth, it’s not one trillion dollars. It’s only 550 billion dollars in new spending—and that is over the next ten years. Five hundred fifty billion dollars—to fix roads and bridges, water systems and electrical grids, to expand high speed internet access, and begin addressing climate change. At that rate of spending, the country’s infrastructure will be worse after ten years, not better.
The fact that this is the largest infrastructure spending bill in more than a decade just shows how paltry that spending has been in the past decade!
One thing is for sure, though—this will be a money gift to the private contractors who will be given the contracts for that work over the next ten years. And because they will be sure to take their cuts in profit, that will be even less money that will actually go to fixing the infrastructure.
So—Biden and the Democrats will get their photo ops; private companies will get their contracts; and the rest of us will still be living with crumbling roads and bridges a decade from now.
Nov 8, 2021
Throughout the pandemic, the Illinois state government enabled nursing home owners to abuse and neglect its most vulnerable citizens.
By June 2021, nursing homes accounted for nearly half of Illinois’ COVID-19 deaths. While their owners said they were doing all they could to prevent COVID spread, the patient to nurse ratio and overall staffing levels were dropping, and conditions for residents were steadily worsening.
Previously hidden information was uncovered under a Freedom of Information Act and multiple investigations. They exposed complicity of the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) with the nursing home operators. While IDPH’s job has been “to lead the fight against COVID,” behind the scenes it was looking the other way when nursing homes jacked up profits by reducing staffing levels and increased room occupancy, at precisely the time residents were in most need of care and protection. Thousands of COVID deaths were a direct result.
Nursing home workers remain overburdened, exhausted, and stressed. In 2019, Illinois ranked last in nursing home staffing. It had the second highest number of substantiated complaints per facility compared to similar states. Twenty percent of long-term facilities had the lowest (1 star) rating.
COVID deaths and complaints are worst in working class areas, especially those with large numbers of Medicaid patients. Nursing home residents who rely on Medicaid are 40% more likely to die from the coronavirus because they occupy the most poorly staffed facilities and most crowded rooms.
All the while owners were scheming behind the scenes and showering Illinois lawmakers with hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to access a $486 million handout. This they demanded despite three funding hikes for nursing homes since 2014 which supposedly were to improve staffing coverage. Taxpayers already cough up $2.5 billion annually to the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services, supposedly earmarked for these expenses.
Investigations showed how these corporations routinely hide their profits by paying themselves huge fees through vendor and real-estate firms they control. Complicated ownership structures allow them to cry poor while deal-making with the government for more taxpayer dollars.
In the process, the old, the sick, the poor, the vulnerable are grist for the profit-mill.
Nov 8, 2021
Working class residents of Dixmoor, a village neighboring Chicago’s South Side, have been without water for over two weeks.
A decrepit, over-100-year-old underground system of water pipes and valves, including a critical supply pipe from the adjoining village of Harvey, burst open around October 16th. Initial reports described a valve failure and water main pipe break. Then, as water pressure shifted in the system, multiple other pipes burst, and the system effectively crumbled. A massive leak of 720,000 gallons gushed out in 24 hours.
Dixmoor, with a population of 3,500, experienced a full-blown crisis, as officials declared a “state of emergency.” The village, lacking adequate resources from the state and federal government, was totally unprepared, especially since five of the six of Dixmoor’s public works employees had been laid off several days before the crisis began. Virtually no water was available for seven full days. Residents were notified that if any small amount of water was delivered within the damaged system, it must be boiled before using it for drinking or cooking. Personal cleanliness was nearly impossible given the contaminated water. Bottled drinking water became available for those who could get to the Village Hall. Those who couldn’t had to fend for themselves.
West Harvey-Dixmoor public schools closed entirely for seven days. Since then, their education has been limited to a hasty and disorganized system of remote learning with computers in short supply. A sixth grader told the media: “I was pretty good at remote learning, but I don’t want to do it again!”
Dixmoor is only one small example of the ravaged, outmoded, and quickly disintegrating infrastructure in this country. For this richest country in the world, one with a system where profit of a few billionaires is the only thing that really matters, repairing the systems which bring essential services to the population remains among the lowest priorities.
Nov 8, 2021
On November 2, Minneapolis voters rejected a measure that would have “defunded” the city’s police department, with about 56% of those who went to the polls saying “no.”
This ballot measure was proposed after the protests against police violence that broke out after George Floyd’s murder, starting in Minneapolis and sweeping the country in the summer of 2020. In June of 2020, while those protests were at their peak, a majority of the Minneapolis City Council pledged to defund the city’s police department. In negotiations with activists, the city council eventually agreed to put a measure on the ballot that would have replaced the Minneapolis Police Department with a new Department of Public Safety, though what exactly that agency would look like remained quite vague.
Many of the areas that voted most heavily against this proposal were the majority-black neighborhoods, most afflicted by police violence, but also by crime. In these areas, crime has gotten worse over the last year and a half. And there are few choices in the face of crime other than calling the police. As a result, many Minneapolis residents reported feeling trapped between two bad options. One black resident interviewed by the Washington Post said she was no fan of the police, but she still voted against the measure. "It’s a no-win situation … We need someone to call, and if it’s not the police, who will it be? We already don’t have enough police on the street."
This ballot measure was based on the idea that police violence can be reformed away, as if the problem of violent police is separate from the problem of violence more generally. In reality, the violence of murderous cops and everyday violence on the streets are deeply entwined, both essential by-products of the basic functioning of U.S. capitalist society. And a proposal like this gives no way out of the trap expressed by many in the neighborhoods.
It can certainly make a difference when masses of people push back against police violence. George Floyd’s killer, Derek Chauvin, is today in prison, unlike the vast majority of killer cops. If the police are a little more cautious about inflicting violence on the population today, it’s because people stood up. But the idea that police violence as a whole might be reformed away is a pipe dream.
Police violence is an integral part of this capitalist system, as much as the violence in the poor neighborhoods. The only people who can solve this violence are the people who live in the neighborhoods where it is part of their everyday reality, which means the working class and the poor population. They are the only force that can eliminate this capitalist system that creates poverty and violence as its necessary by-products.
Nov 8, 2021
The trial of three white men charged with the murder of Ahmaud Arbery has finally begun in Cobb County, Georgia, over a year and a half after the fact. The trial is once again putting his horrific lynching in front of his family and the general public.
The three men literally got in their trucks and hunted Arbery down while he was out running in his own neighborhood. They attempted to stop him at gunpoint and one of them, Travis McMichael, fatally shot him when he tried to defend himself by wrestling McMichael’s gun away from him.
The defense team is using the same approach as local prosecutors originally employed to defend their two-month delay in charging the defendants, claiming the defendants were carrying out a “citizen’s arrest.” In typical fashion, the defense is trying to put the victim, Ahmaud Arbery, on trial.
These men were only charged in the first place after the release of the video showing Arbery’s killing and outspoken statements by his mother and attorney sparked protests and support around the country and the rest of the world.
So now they are charged. The defense rests on Georgia’s citizen’s-arrest laws which date back to 1863, when the KKK was beginning to form, to round up escaped slaves during the Civil War. During the period of Jim Crow segregation in the South, states also passed laws making vagrancy and loitering criminal acts. Police used these laws to selectively arrest black men and they were used to justify lynchings.
It remains to be seen whether or not any modicum of justice will be served in this case. But the fact that the judge allowed the defense to remove all potential black jurors but one, from serving, doesn’t give much hope that the lynchers will be convicted. Ahmaud Arbery’s killing is yet another in a long line of lynchings that are part and parcel of the racism which forms the foundation of U.S. capitalism.
Nov 8, 2021
These facts are undisputed: Kyle Rittenhouse brought his rifle across state lines to confront “rioters” in Kenosha, Wisconsin, who were protesting the police shooting of Jacob Blake. At the protests, Rittenhouse shot three people, two of whom died. And yet, he might still be acquitted based on his claim of “self-defense.” The judge in his trial even barred the prosecutor from calling those he killed “victims,” while allowing the defense to call the victims “looters” and “rioters.”
On August 25, 2020, seventeen-year-old Rittenhouse joined a group of right-wing “militia” members who had appointed themselves defenders of property in Kenosha against protestors. Wearing camo gear and carrying rifles, they set up at a mechanic’s shop, some on the roof, posing as snipers. Rittenhouse attached himself to these older men, preening and bragging to a cameraman that he was there to protect people.
Joseph Rosenbaum, the first person Rittenhouse shot, was not part of Antifa or any Black Lives Matter organization. He was clearly mentally ill, having been released from a psychiatric hospital just a few hours earlier. While he shouted incoherently at the armed men, one of them, a former Marine named Jason Lackowski, testified that "I didn’t really see him as a threat at all, to be honest with you." After, Rittenhouse pursued him into a used car lot, Rosenbaum lunged at him, and Rittenhouse fired four times and killed Rosenbaum.
Demonstrators who had seen the shooting then attacked Rittenhouse and tried to disarm him, and in the ensuing melee, he shot two of these demonstrators, killing one and almost blowing the arm off another.
And yet, almost immediately after he shot three people, Kyle Rittenhouse became a hero to the far right for being willing to stand up to “Antifa” and Black Lives Matter. Tucker Carlson declared on Fox News: "How shocked are we that seventeen-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?" Shops began selling T-shirts showing Rittenhouse and his gun. Right-wingers on the internet began calling for protestors to be “Rittenhoused.”
After the Kenosha County D.A. charged Rittenhouse with murder, right-wing lawyers promised to defend him and launched a foundation, #FightBack, that had raised 2.1 million dollars—supposedly for Rittenhouse’s bail—by October 1, 2020, when it stopped publicizing how much it had raised. He has been seen at a bar with far-right militia members, and he met with Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the far-right Proud Boys. His family insists that Kyle Rittenhouse is not himself a white supremacist—but whatever he believes, he has been successfully turned into a far-right symbol.
Certainly, much of the praise for this teenage killer is just posing. But the fact that he is held up as a hero after going to confront protestors and shooting three people is dangerous enough. Whatever Rittenhouse is eventually convicted of, this fact alone should serve as a warning of what the far-right really stands for: support for murderous violence, especially aimed at those who would stand up against racist police.
Nov 8, 2021
On October 24, 1871, Los Angeles witnessed its most deadly incident of racial violence. A small sidewalk plaque was installed in Downtown Los Angeles in 2001 to commemorate the victims of this massacre. Members of the Asian-American community, who started a campaign to create a proper memorial to the victims of the massacre, point to the fact that up until recently the event had been completely erased from the history books.
This deadly silence shows the depth of the terror the massacre planted. On that notorious night in 1871, a mob of about 500 men (about eight percent of the city’s population at the time) attacked the 200 or so Chinese immigrants in their own neighborhood, lynched at least 18 people, looted businesses and set the neighborhood on fire. And they did it with practically complete impunity. Only eight men were tried and found guilty, but their convictions were overturned on a technicality. The message for Chinese immigrants was clear: it can happen again, so keep your mouth shut.
And it did happen again, over and over. Besides Los Angeles, several other massacres took place, the biggest one in Rock Springs, Wyoming, where in 1885 white miners murdered at least 28 Chinese people and wounded 15. The federal government enacted laws that attacked Chinese immigrants as well—the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned immigration from China and stayed in effect until 1943.
The lynching in Los Angeles in 1871 against Chinese workers came at a time of economic crisis and mass unemployment. After the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, the California economy crashed, with widespread bankruptcies and mass unemployment. These layoffs coincided with the migration into California of former soldiers from the Civil War and former slaves, as well as small farmers and workers, who had hopes of finding good jobs and prosperity. Those laid off included the 10,000 Chinese immigrant workers who had been largely responsible for building the railroad in the first place.
But the bosses and politicians pushed propaganda that blamed Chinese immigrants for the unemployment of the other groups and used it as the excuse to drive down wages for everyone. This set the stage for one of the ugliest episodes of racist mass violence in American history.
The parallels to today are obvious. We are in the midst of an economic and social crisis in which politicians, and notably wealthy right-wing sponsors, blame Chinese people and immigrant workers for the pandemic. This has provoked a big increase in violence against Asian Americans. In L.A. County, for example, violent attacks on Asian Americans increased by 76% during the last 12 months alone.
Dividing the working class along lines of ethnicity and nationality is one of the oldest tricks the capitalist class has up its sleeve. The consequences can be horrible—and the massacres of Chinese Americans is only one example of it. The capitalists, politicians and government officials that represent them work to hide the bloody history of the divisions they sow.
Nov 8, 2021
Translated from Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.
According to a study in the scientific journal Global Environmental Change, the directors of French oil conglomerates Total and Elf, which merged in 1997, knew for nearly fifty years that their operations exploiting fossil fuels were “potentially catastrophic” for global warming.
A geographer wrote as much in 1971 in an internal Total document. But, as you might imagine, for years the leaders of the corporation preferred to keep this information and all that it entailed quiet, as it was against their interests.
Then, from the late 1980s, when the threat of global warming began becoming a hot topic and could no longer be ignored, these oil companies changed their strategy.
Then they actively participated in “the strategic effort of manufacturing doubt,” a policy pursued at the global level by the big oil companies in rich countries, such as ExxonMobil, BP, and Shell. This policy aimed to delay any action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, by systematically supporting work and investigations concluding that it was not absolutely certain that carbon dioxide has an impact on global warming.
If the facts exposed and denounced by this study are appalling, they are not surprising in this society where the engine of the economy is profit. After asbestos, leaded gasoline, diesel, tobacco, dangerous pharmaceuticals, and so on, these facts only add to the long list of scandals where capitalists knowingly sold toxic goods while funding campaigns and publications claiming the opposite—when they haven’t outright bought scientists.
This scandal is enough to raise your temperature even higher!
Nov 8, 2021
Excerpts from Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.
The G20 meeting in Rome at the end of October gave a green light to the global taxation of multinational corporations at 15%. Have the leaders of the most powerful capitalist states on the planet become supporters of making the rich pay? Not really.
Behind the attempt to institute this world tax—which is still far from being successful—there is first of all a maneuver by the imperialist governments to take in as much as possible of the tiny share of profits that big corporations agree to pay in the form of tax.
When it comes to taxation, capitalists are believers, but not practitioners. They want governments to levy taxes to fill public coffers, which companies will draw from while managing to pay as little as possible themselves.
And in this game between the capitalists and their own governments, the richest are the most powerful. In France, the corporate tax rate is officially 26.5%, but the effective tax rate of France’s stock market giants is less than 10%. This figure is still far from the reality, as the largest groups such as TotalEnergies negotiate their taxes in secret with the government.
Today, the average corporate tax rate around the world is 22%. In 1985 it was 50%! By introducing a minimum general tax of 15% globally, even though governments claim that they will get more money from multinationals, overall they have moved further in the direction of an average lowering of this tax rate.
Globally, the rivalry between capitalist governments also plays a role in recovering tax money from these companies. Above all, with this reform, the governments of the richest countries, and first of all the United States, have pulled quite a caper on the others. According to one study, of over 200 billion dollars in additional tax revenue expected due to this global agreement, 95% would fall into the coffers of the governments of the developed countries, including 40% for North America (United States, Canada, Mexico) and 40% for countries in the European Union.
This makes it easier to understand why the leaders of the G20 welcomed their “historic agreement.” German Chancellor Angela Merkel even specified that it is a “clear signal of fairness.” The representatives of the great powers were all satisfied with their share of the loot!
Nov 8, 2021
Over half of the people of Afghanistan are facing acute hunger this winter, according to a U.N. report. Almost 23 million people will be severely hungry, a 35% increase from just last year. Only five percent of households have enough to eat every day.
The U.N. World Food Program director, David Beasley, said, "Afghanistan is now among the world’s worst humanitarian crises—if not the worst—and food security has all but collapsed. This winter, millions of Afghans will be forced to choose between migration and starvation … we are on a countdown to catastrophe."
For the first time, urban residents are experiencing similar rates of hunger to rural communities. The numbers of beggars in the cities, including children, are rising. The malnutrition ward in the major hospital in the city of Kandahar is packed with women and children. The U.N. says that if humanitarian aid doesn’t come soon, more than a million children will die.
This extreme hunger is due to drought, conflict—and above all, to an economic collapse caused by sanctions brought by the U.S. and other countries against the Taliban regime. Billions of dollars in foreign aid payments, amounting to 40% of the country’s gross domestic product, have been halted, and almost 10 billion dollars of Afghan central bank assets have been frozen. Money is severely lacking; many government employees and other workers have stopped drawing a paycheck. That means that even when there is food on supermarket shelves, people do not have money to buy it.
In effect, after inflicting decades of war on the country, the U.S. is now punishing the population of Afghanistan for not supporting the puppet government it had put in place. It’s a humanitarian crime of epic proportions, done in the name of U.S. domination.
Nov 8, 2021
Translated from Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.
The military coup on October 25 and the accompanying crackdown did not bring Sudanese workers to their knees. They took to the streets en masse on Saturday, October 30 to stand up to the forces of repression, which once again did not hesitate to open fire.
Dictator Omar al-Bashir was forced out in April 2019 by the army after five months of mass protests, the repression of which failed to stop them. The military leaders then chose to share the leadership of the country with civilian figures associated with the protest movement. Behind the facade of that shared government, the military retained all real power, both through absolute control over the forces of repression and through direct control of the country’s major businesses. This lasted a little over two years. But on October 25 the leaders of the army decided to put an end to this fiction and openly take over the leadership of the country. They imprisoned the civilian leaders, including Prime Minister Abdallah Hamdok.
They didn’t factor in resistance by workers and the Sudanese people. On the day of the coup, many demonstrators took to the streets, blocking roads with burning tires and braving the forces of repression. They did not want the return of a military dictatorship as in the days of Omar al-Bashir. Some even went to the army headquarters in the capital Khartoum, where the army opened fire and killed several people. In the evening, barricades were burning in the city. During the following days, rallies were held in major cities across the country, until the climax on Saturday, October 30.
The Sudan Professionals Association (SPA), which led the movement two years earlier, the unions, and the Sudanese Communist Party called for a general strike and a mass demonstration that day. Groups gathered that morning and then were joined by a massive crowd that marched through Khartoum. They defied roadblocks set up by the repressive forces, with cries of “Close the roads, close the bridges, we are coming through!”
The demonstrators chanted “On October 30, al-Burhan will be in Kober,” promising the military president a cell in Kober prison near deposed dictator al-Bashir. The same day, demonstrations took place in all the major cities of the country: in Omdurman and Bahri as well as in Khartoum. Protesters protected their neighborhoods behind barricades of tires, bricks, and uprooted trees. Resistance committees organized the resistance. Calls were made for the movement to continue.
The demonstrators have experienced the military’s duplicity and are calling for a government made up entirely of civilians. The method called for by the SPA to achieve this is civil disobedience: that is, peaceful demonstrations, regardless of the extent of the repression. It was such protests two years ago that forced the army to accept the compromise of shared government—after mercilessly slaughtering protesters surrounding military headquarters. Hamdok and the SPA leaders put their hope in these peaceful mobilizations—combined with pressure from the world’s great powers—to force the military to a new compromise. But the military leaders will only agree on a new power-sharing combination if it leaves them the real power—even behind the facade of an administration made up only of civilians.
All the heroism and sacrifices of the Sudanese people run up against this military apparatus, ready to carry out fierce repression again. The military does not lack support. It enjoys the direct financial and military support of the leaders of Egypt as well as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—who in fact are only the intermediaries of imperialism. Maintaining imperialism’s domination in this region of the world requires political stability in the governments there. Faced with peoples mired into poverty, the surest means of maintaining order is dictatorship, and sometimes bloody repression.
The leaders of the great powers who speak time and again in favor of democracy, and to whom the SPA appeals, are the same leaders who have a vital need for dictatorship to maintain their order. So, if workers and the Sudanese people seek support, it is instead on the side of their exploited sisters and brothers from neighboring countries and from the whole region that they can find help in putting an end to imperialism and its watchdogs.
Nov 8, 2021
The following article is the editorial from The SPARK’s workplace newsletters, for the week of November 1, 2021.
"We can’t hire enough workers.” That’s the excuse when a store or the post office keeps you waiting in long lines. That’s the excuse restaurants give when your meal comes to the table barely warmed in the microwave.
Every time you are put on hold and wait for a customer service representative to come on the line, it’s the same thing: “We can’t hire anyone. People don’t want to work.”
September was supposed to be the end of this supposedly unreasonable attitude. September 1 brought the end of supplemental and untraditional unemployment benefits. Without benefits, people would have to work. September was also the magic month when schools reopened and women, freed of childcare, must rush back to work.
But September came and went. October has now come and gone.
Instead of more people, there were 200,000 fewer people in the workforce this month than a month ago. So, all the evening news can do is repeat the same tired line: “Where are all the workers?”
Yes, where are they? What happened?
What happened is that during the Covid shutdown, bosses didn’t keep paying people if they couldn’t squeeze profit out of them. Seventeen million people were cut, and bosses didn’t hire new people. And what does this show? Only that this is a system based on profit, not on human need.
During the last two years, some people died, more people than usual because of Covid. Some people retired, as they always do. Maybe more. Some people, whose meager Social Security check kept them working, may have decided, at age 78, they wouldn’t do it anymore. Whatever the reason, people were gone.
So, when bosses whistled for people to come back to work, some didn’t come. Today, according to the Wall Street Journal, there are still “five million missing workers.”
The workers aren’t missing. The bosses didn’t hire to make up for those they knew would leave. They didn’t hire, and they didn’t train new people. Schools and institutes didn’t train new people. Nurses weren’t trained or hired. New carpenters weren’t, new electricians, new plumbers, new teachers. New truck drivers weren’t trained and hired. And assembly lines went on as they always have, running too much overtime, pushing work at too fast a pace, out of too few people.
When the bosses brought people back, they tried to do what they always do: push them to pick up the work of those not there. Wring more profit out of fewer workers.
Maybe some workers reached a point they wouldn’t do it. Maybe the five million “missing” workers are the quiet measure of a new resolve by workers to resist. Wouldn’t that be a good thing!
As for the schools: children may have gone back, but things aren’t regular yet. There still isn’t decent, reasonably priced childcare. With senior centers unsure and nursing homes risky, people are taking care of more elders in their homes. So, yes, people, mostly women, as usual, are still staying home to take care of others.
What do the bosses want them to do? Kill off their children and their wheelchair-bound aunt?
The workers aren’t unreasonable. The bosses are, the bosses and their whole system. It’s called capitalism, this unreasonable system.
It’s a system that turns around the bosses’ theft of the value workers create with our labor. A constant struggle goes on, with bosses pushing to see just how much they can steal. But what happens finally rests with the workers. We are the ones who do the work, produce the goods, provide the services. That puts a power in our hands when we begin to mobilize. Our class can bring the bosses’ system to a crashing halt. We have the possibility, because there are so many of us and because we do the work, we have the possibility to create a new system, more humane, based on our needs.
Does it seem like a far-off dream? Maybe. But that’s how things change: people who dream, tired of the way things have always been, begin to act.
Nov 8, 2021
This is a book primarily for young adults, ages 9 to 12, though adults enjoy it too. The main character is Amal, a 12-year-old Pakistani girl who has to leave her home and school and serve as an indentured servant to the area’s corrupt and powerful landlord. He has power over the population by tying them to him through high-interest loans.
Though this system is illegal, authorities look the other way. He enforces the loan payments through brutality, even death, or by forcing a family to put one of their members in involuntary servitude to him. Amal (which means hope) is one of those forced into these modern slavery-like conditions. She finds a way to unite with her fellow servants and the community and they successfully fight back, even defeating the corrupt landlord.
The author says she depicted Amal’s life as better than most. There are 35.8 million people worldwide who are, according to the latest Global Slavery Index, still in servitude without any rights, liberty or freedom of movement, people who are forced to work for inadequate pay with the threat of violence. In Pakistan alone there are over 2 million people working in these conditions.
Amal and her fellow workers and her community find a way to get free in this hopeful book. It shows the power of a dream.
This Netflix miniseries is based on the excellent book “Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive”, 2019, which tells the true story of the author Stephanie Land and her struggles with poverty, single-motherhood, abusive men and little or no safety net.
The actress Margaret Qualley does a powerful job as the single mother Alex as she battles the welfare system, the rental market, inadequate day care and the poor support system for abused women, all while working as a maid to support herself and her daughter.
All the actors in the series are excellent, including the mother of Alex who is played by Margaret Qualley’s actual real life mother Andie MacDowell. This series shines a needed light on the millions of everyday heroes just like Alex!
Nov 8, 2021
Excerpts from Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.
The 26th Climate High Mass began October 31 in Glasgow, Scotland. As always, heads of state with their hands over their hearts and with tears in their eyes will promise and swear to do better tomorrow. But the reality is that they are leading us to disaster.
At the 15th COP in Paris in 2015, they recognized the need to limit global warming at no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. Apart from the tiny African nation of Gambia, no country kept its commitments—not France either. So, President Macron has nothing to show off!
Heads of state have been meeting for almost 30 years to fight global warming, and for 30 years greenhouse gas emissions have kept rising. Financial commitments to help countries in the global South cope with climate change were not kept, even while hundreds of billions of dollars were swallowed up by speculation and fat cats’ fortunes.
Commentators call for “from words to deeds.” We also hear, “We share the planet, so we need more international cooperation.” All true.…
In the service of the capitalists, all governments place the interests of their industrialists, their race for profits, and their trade war above everything else. They place them above the wages, rights, and living conditions of workers. And they put them before climate considerations.…
In other words, we should accept decisions made in the secrecy of the boards of directors of the big capitalist groups—the main polluters—even though they are harmful to people and the planet!
As long as the interests of big business prevail, sacrifices will weigh on ordinary people and on workers. All day long we are told that “we are all responsible” and that we consume too much and too many bad things. But this means excusing the officials who run over us.
Most of all this is a way to make us pay for the climate crisis, with measures as unfair as the ban on driving for cars classified as “Air4,” the carbon tax, or the increase in energy prices.
To be responsible requires questioning the capitalist organization of the economy. Any environmentalist policy runs up against the madness of this system and of speculation. One example: with the current surge in gas prices, burning coal to generate electricity is becoming more competitive. The big powers, which blame China for opening new coal-fired power stations, are themselves reviving the exploitation of coal. This year, coal’s share in European electricity production jumped from 14% to 19%.
Politicians boast about low greenhouse gas emissions in France. But we cannot trust them to safely control nuclear production, which is also subject to the laws of profitability more than to safety regulations.
We will not save the planet without stopping the race for profit and without putting an end to this system based on private ownership of the big means of production, on competition and the market—a source of anarchy and incredible waste.
This struggle corresponds to the interests of all workers, who are the first victims of this system. The climate crisis and the need to respond to it can only confirm for us the perspective of expropriating the big capitalist groups, managing them collectively, and planning the economy on a planetary scale. This is the only way to meet the present and future needs of humanity.
Nov 8, 2021
President Biden made big pronouncements at the COP26 meeting in Glasgow. He urged the world to “answer history’s call,” stating action on climate change is needed now, and vowing the U.S. will “lead by example.”
There are some telling examples. The United States is the second largest contributor of CO2 emissions in the world. And now under the Biden administration coal is rebounding. Coal consumption plunged 36% under Trump largely because utilities shifted to natural gas, which was far cheaper at the time. Now, with natural gas in short supply and the prices surging, coal is making a comeback. U.S. power plants are on track to burn 23% more coal this year, the first increase since 2013.
In the first 6 months of the Biden administration, about 2,500 new oil and gas permits were authorized. A figure that took the Trump administration a year to reach.
Biden’s administration is also giving the go-ahead for a huge Alaskan oil drilling project, set to produce more than 100,000 barrels of oil each day for the next 30 years! The administration recently filed a brief in U.S. District Court for Alaska defending the Trump administration decision to greenlight the project. The Interior Department said the Trump Administration decision complied with environmental rules.
The Biden administration did not explain how its position on this project aligns with its climate change policies. Over the past 60 years, Alaska has warmed more than twice as fast as the rest of the United States. Arctic ecosystems are suffering as a result, sea ice is disappearing, sea levels are rising, and the ground is thawing.
Biden claims he wants to fight climate change. But his own administration’s actions do just the opposite. This is because Biden and his administration represent the interests of big capital, including oil and gas companies. This means he will do what is good for business. It means the big companies will not have to pay for the damage they have caused or for cleaning it up or for preventing more damage.
If the administration does anything to mitigate climate change, the cost will come from public money, taxpayer money. In other words, the working class will have to pay for the mess the bosses created. This is what it means to live under capitalism.