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
Jan 17, 2022
Students from Boston, Brooklyn and Maryland, all the way out to Seattle, Oakland and Redondo Beach, organized protests last week over the schools’ failure to protect them from Covid. Young people in Chicago, Denver and Las Vegas added their voices and their feet—as did those in a few smaller Michigan towns.
Some students asked for more or better masks, and regular testing while they are in school; some wanted remote learning re-established for several weeks, while waiting for the Omicron wave to recede. Some wanted both.
The schools have become the arena in which capitalist society’s inability to organize a response to Covid plays out. We are more than two years into this pandemic. But Republicans and Democrats continue to amuse themselves, pretending to battle over mask mandates and vaccine mandates, while the rate of infection and hospitalization spirals. But on one thing they agree. Today, both parties want schools up and running, both want students back in the classroom.
Sure, they both came up with “good” reasons: last year’s remote learning was a disaster for students.
They said it, and it was. Children suffered academically. How could they not? The schools serving ordinary children were not set up to deliver a decent education remotely, and neither party invested the vast resources that would have been necessary to make it work. But children also suffered psychologically and socially, cut off from their peers, cut off from all the activities and human interchanges that allow us to develop. For anyone too dense to understand that reality, consider this: teen suicides increased in 2020, the first year of the lockdown, compared to the year before, and then climbed even higher in the beginning of 2021.
Politicians who were seriously concerned about students’ well-being would not have stuffed students back into the same old unsafe classrooms, with too many students in too little space; with not enough air circulation and filtering; without any attempt to provide every student with the N95 masks that authorities have long known were the most efficient—at least one new one for every student, every week, if not more often. And the CDC—if its concern were “science”—would not have reduced from ten to five the number of days someone sick with Covid needs to stay home. But schools, like other workplaces, were being forced to close because too many teachers and staff were out sick or in quarantine.
Schools were not re-opened for the well-being of the students—despite all the sanctimonious words spouted by politicians like Biden and DeSantis, and despite the “science” cited by Fauci and Redfield. The schools were re-opened because big (and not so big) business wants them open. Business wants its profit machine to go on working, and business can’t make profits unless the workforce is back in place.
Put it in class terms: the capitalist class wants the schools to run. Proposals by their officials for masks and testing and temporary pauses end up being ways to maintain the schools as holding pens so parents can be at work. Their masks are band-aids they paste over the injuries they inflict on students, teachers and parents.
That doesn’t mean that last week’s protest was useless. Far from it. The young students who started the protest, organizing themselves to do it, can be the cutting edge of a new movement, one that grows and involves all the actors who really have a stake in the game: the students, the teachers and the parents. Such movements are the only thing that holds out real promise in the middle of this crisis.
The parents in most of these cities are none other than workers who face the same dangerous risk of Covid in their workplaces that their children face in the schools. The possibility of developing a power that can change the whole game resides in those workplaces when working people pull themselves together as a class.
A struggle by all the working people who have a stake in this game has the possibility to shake this system to its very core. Yes, we are not nearly there yet. But to get there, someone needs to start. And last week, some students did just that.
Jan 17, 2022
The U.S. health care system is still literally flying blind, two years after the pandemic first started.
There is a total lack of reliable information. Health officials still can’t accurately track the virus. Testing is still not widely available. There is no one system to gather the information and analyze the information from the testing … when it is done. Health officials aren’t even able to tell what version of the virus is circulating because that work isn’t being done either. Instead, health officials have to depend upon the work done by scientists in other countries, like Israel, Great Britain, or South Africa—even though the situation in this country is very different and therefore the development of the disease is not at all the same.
This lack of even the most basic information is one important reason why so many of the statements and directives coming out of the CDC are so unreliable and misleading.
And it is one more indication of just how inadequate the public health care system in this country really is. Public health agencies are severely underfunded, and staffing levels have been cut over and over again, with 60,000 jobs fewer public health jobs than there were in 2008.
Since the pandemic hit, there has been no increase in spending in public health. On the contrary, things have only gotten worse, as public health agencies have actually lost 300 more top trained staff, often burnt out or retired under the pressures of the pandemic. And they are not being replaced.
In early January, six top scientists, who had served on the Biden transition team, publicly sounded the alarm, declaring that Covid is not going away, that there will be new variants and new pandemics, and that the U.S. still doesn’t have a way to deal with them. They called for an immediate build-up of the public health system. “The resources necessary to build and sustain an effective public health infrastructure will be substantial,” they wrote. These include a big increase in physical infrastructure and tens of thousands more highly trained staff, so that there are enough people to deal with ongoing health problems, along with emergencies when they come up. They also called for big increases of staffing at the community level to be able reach out to the public, as well as a big increase in the number of school nurses “to address the large unmet public health needs of children and adolescents.”
As these scientists pointed out, scientists can come up with great discoveries, like the new m-RNA vaccines and new anti-viral drugs. But without people working in public health to administer and coordinate everything at the level of the whole society, without society acting in a collective fashion, only a small minority benefit … leaving the door open to more disasters and untold death and suffering.
The scientists went public with these proposals because no politician or public official is proposing to permanently increase public health spending. All because health care is dominated by profit making big business. And for big business, public health care is just not profitable enough.
Jan 17, 2022
Nearly a third of U.S. hospitals are experiencing critical staffing shortages, according to data from the Department of Health and Human Services.
Part of the problem is the massive spread of COVID, which this society has shown, once again, that it cannot control. In addition to flooding the hospitals with patients, COVID has been spreading like wildfire among hospital workers, forcing many out sick. But even those who remain healthy have been simply worn out. Many have quit healthcare altogether—and who can blame them, after two years of crazy-long shifts, few days off, and dangerous and exhausting working conditions?
In reaction to the staffing crisis, many hospitals aren’t even testing their own workers for COVID, afraid of the results they might find. As an infectious disease doctor in Memphis reported to Kaiser Health News: “Hospitals don’t want to know. We just don’t have the staff.” In California, Rhode Island, and Arizona, hospitals are asking workers who test positive for COVID to stay on the job. These measures can only accelerate the spread of the disease.
Hospitals in Illinois have reacted to the shortage by suspending “elective” procedures once again, including things like cancer surgery. But this just means non-COVID health problems will get worse.
And, of course, officials are once again blaming the sick: the Illinois Public Health director said, “our health care workers are burning the candle at both ends, and in the middle as well, to care for COVID patients who could have avoided hospitalization if they were up to date on their vaccine.”
Huge amounts of money have flowed into the healthcare system. That money should have been used to train more healthcare workers two years ago—with scholarships—so some would be ready to start now. But that money was swallowed up by pharmaceutical companies, equipment suppliers, insurance companies, drugstore chains, and hospital administrations.
Jan 17, 2022
Protestors plan to gather on Sunday, January 16 outside the state of Michigan’s only prison for women. The prison, 40 miles west of Detroit, is overcrowded, understaffed, and currently has the worst COVID-19 outbreak among the state’s 28 prisons.
Two former State of Michigan employees of the Huron Valley Correctional facility are joining prisoner advocates to draw attention to horrendous conditions at the prison. The former employees describe a culture of retaliation where inmates are denied medical attention if they are seriously ill to punish them for speaking out about conditions. The two believe they were fired in retaliation for alerting authorities in an attempt to get help for prisoners.
The two former workers add their voice to an ongoing fight organized by current and former prisoners and supporters to improve conditions. Back in 2009, the Michigan Department of Corrections paid out 100 million dollars to settle a class action lawsuit about sexual assault and harassment at the Huron Valley prison. Very little has changed. Since July 2018, 146 more women have documented cases of sexual harassment and 12 have documented sexual assault, according to official state records.
The fight has continued. In 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic, a new class action lawsuit was filed by Huron Valley prisoners over poor ventilation, overcrowding, chronic mold and leaky roofs. In December 2021 and January 2022, two state senators called for public hearings about short-staffing. There are allegations of state employees mandated to work 24-hour shifts. Overall, staffing is said to be so sparse, conditions are unsafe for prisoners and staff.
State workers, prisoners and their supporters are absolutely right to keep up the pressure and seek to broaden the fight to reverse deteriorating prison conditions.
Jan 17, 2022
The Supreme Court last week overturned the Biden administration’s requirement that all employers with over 100 employees require vaccination of all their workers.
In doing so, the Court’s conservative majority stated that OSHA had overstepped its bounds: because COVID can spread anywhere, not just the workplace, "permitting OSHA to regulate the hazards of daily life … would significantly expand OSHA’s regulatory authority without clear congressional authorization."
Apparently, the Supreme Court is now saying that OSHA has no authority to regulate any dangers that also exist outside the workplace. Cancer dangers, of course, can be anywhere. But up until now, OSHA has had the authority to regulate workers’ exposure to cancer-causing chemicals. No more? The Supreme Court just gave a blank check to employers on all sorts of workplace dangers.
Of course, though, the Biden administration had not at all forced companies to do anything—except to require something of their workers. Companies were told to require their workers to get vaccinated. NOT to provide full vaccination to their workers, NOT to give workers time off from their jobs to get vaccinated, NOT to give their workers time off if they got sick from the vaccine. Not to mention being required to provide proper ventilation and social distancing and N95 masks for every worker. The full burden of responsibility has been put onto workers, NOT the companies!
Biden’s OSHA has demanded nothing of the companies themselves. Congress has required nothing of the companies either. And now the Supreme Court has put a block on OSHA’s ability to require anything.
Whether the Executive branch, or the Legislative, or the Judicial, workers can expect no help or protection from the bosses’ government. Our only protection can come from ourselves.
Jan 17, 2022
In Denver, Colorado, more than 8,000 Kroger workers walked out on strike on Jan. 12. These 8,000 workers are demanding safe working conditions and higher pay as the Omicron wave rages and inflation is eating away at their wages.
These workers are not alone. The Kroger workers in Southern California are in the same boat. The same union that represents the strikers in Colorado, United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), commissioned a survey of its 33,000 members in Southern California. The survey found 2 out of 3 of these workers struggle to afford their rent, food, and other basic needs due to the low wages and part-time schedules.
The survey revealed many workers facing horrible conditions. Wages have been driven down by more than 10% since 1990. Many workers can’t afford cars and often walk home for miles due to the odd hours and the lack of public transportation. Nearly 14% of the 33,000 workers are homeless. Some sleep in the parking lot of the very store they work in.
Kroger runs thousands of supermarkets throughout the country. Ralphs, Food 4 Less, and Harris Teeter are other brands owned by Kroger. It is one of the largest grocery chains in terms of revenue, making 135 billion dollars in sales last year.
During the pandemic, Kroger’s profits have skyrocketed. It has seen an additional profit of 6.8 billion dollars in 2020. That is a 98% increase from 2019.
The contract between these 33,000 workers and Kroger expires on March 6. The workers in Southern California have every reason to fight, like their 8,000 brothers and sisters in Colorado. Workers can use the power of numbers to spread their struggle and to bring in other layers of the working class.
Jan 17, 2022
A few hours into the snowstorm on Monday, January 3, a semi truck jackknifed on Interstate 95 in Virginia between Washington, D.C. and Richmond. Accidents cascaded quickly until traffic was jammed for more than 40 miles each way, while a foot of snow fell by early afternoon. But only then did the nightmare begin.
People waited hours—all day and then all night—without hearing anything from authorities. Not updates, not helpful tips, nothing. No one came to check up on them or clear the way. Some drivers with extra water or food gave it out to others stuck near them. But everyone was using up their gas trying to stay warm to sleep or charge their phones. Meanwhile, more drivers kept entering the highway at both ends of the jam. People in their 90s were stuck in the freezing weather, people with babies were stuck, people with dogs were stuck. Even a senator was stuck! Only the next morning did the state transportation department declare the highway closed—the 600 million dollars in freight that usually rolls along the highway each day wasn’t going anywhere anyway. But it took another 12 hours before the final vehicles were dug out and helped to drive away, Tuesday evening.
It was outrageous. The state had no plan. It did not communicate.
Turns out the Virginia transportation department has 500 fewer workers for snow removal this season: 2,500 state and contractor workers now, versus 3,000 state snow removal workers in 2010. And how many are not available because of Covid? Overall, the department has eliminated nearly half its workers since the 1990s: from 14,000 then to only 7,500 now. It’s the lowest level since 1965. And the contractors hire less, to cut costs and increase their profit margins. Virginia has privatized interstate operations and maintenance over 25 years, with a dizzying haze of separate contracts in nine different state regions. Over 200 million dollars was budgeted for snow removal this season, nearly every dollar channeled to private profiteers.
Profits roll on … but traffic is frozen.
Jan 17, 2022
The mostly elderly and poor people who have lived for years in the Foster House Apartments in Washington, D.C. are being forced out by revolting conditions. The eight-story building in the Shaw neighborhood was built in the early 1970s by Bethel Church to give poor people decent, publicly subsidized housing. Reverend Walter Fauntroy was the head of D.C.’s Southern Christian Leadership Council chapter and led local organizing for the 1963 March on Washington.
Since 2010 new leadership in the church has tried to turn the building over to developers to rebuild, while the neighborhood has become much more expensive. Tenants fought off the first attempt. Then, in 2018 the church leased the building to a highly politically-connected local developer, who plans to add more than 200 expensive units without public rent subsidy. But to cut corners—and make the existing tenants leave—the developer and the church have resorted to heinous tricks.
The developer refuses to fix the broken central air conditioning, so tenants have had to pay much more out of pocket to run window units. The city’s attorney general documented over 700 housing violations as of last November. Broken or missing smoke and carbon monoxide detectors and alarms, expired fire extinguishers, rodent and bedbug infestations, mold, peeling paint, cracks in exterior walls….
Some renters who remain are fighting for their right to stay and to have decent conditions. But a system that makes old people have to fight for their housing is a system that needs to be torn down.
Jan 17, 2022
The California State Labor Commissioner’s Office has upheld a 2018 ruling of wage theft for 148 low-wage, elder-care workers in the Los Angeles area. The judgment rules elder care business, Adat Shalom Board & Care, now rebranded as Land of Peace, owes 8.3 million dollars in back wages.
The citation found the company subjected its workers, most of whom were Filipino immigrants, to “oppressive working conditions.” Workers were subjected to 24-hour shifts, six days a week, caring for patients who had Alzheimer’s and dementia, as well as bedridden hospice patients. Often times, workers would find themselves responsible for dozens of patients. The Commission determined that workers were reportedly making $2.40 an hour with no overtime. One worker said, “[It] was like slavery.”
While the Commission ruled in favor of the workers, the company has not paid out a single cent. It is up in the air when these workers will be awarded their stolen wages. Not waiting for the courts, the workers continue their fight to get what is theirs. On October 1, 2021, many of the former workers protested in front of the facility. Joining in on the festive season on December 23, workers went caroling to the company owner’s house. They sang the old classics but with a twist.
Here are some of the lyrics they sang (to the tune of Oh, Christmas Tree),
“Oh pay of us please, our salaries
“The wages that you stole from me.
“We worked all day and into the night
“For little pay and that not right.
“Oh pay us please, our salaries
“The wages that you stole from me.”
Jan 17, 2022
Seventeen people, including 8 children, died in a fire in a New York City apartment building, while more people were hospitalized in critical condition. Nearly all of them were immigrants or family members of Gambian or West African descent.
The fire was in a 3rd floor apartment, started by a space heater that people were using to stay warm. When the people fled that apartment, the self-closing door did not work and failed to close behind them, which allowed smoke to escape into the hallway and up the stairwell. Another self-closing door on the 15th floor stairwell also was not working, which drew the smoke into the stairwell and throughout the building. The fire department arrived quickly and the fire itself was mostly contained within that one apartment. But many people died, not from the fire itself, but from smoke inhalation in other parts of the building.
Any fire in a large apartment building can be very dangerous. But this horrible loss of life in New York was completely preventable. People died because the wealthy owners of the apartment building neglected safety and cut corners on costs.
The apartment residents had long complained about the lack of adequate heat and they were forced to use space heaters to stay warm. The owners were required, by city housing codes, to have self-closing doors that would help contain a fire and smoke. But these owners previously had been issued several citations because self-closing doors were not working properly.
Besides self-closing doors, there are many other things that are available to make buildings safer. An automatic sprinkler system can help contain and even put out a fire. A pressured stairwell can stop fire and smoke from spreading throughout the building. There are building materials that are fireproof. But the city housing codes did not require any of these protections, especially in the older apartment buildings where working-class people tend to live. And the apartment owners chose not to spend money on any of these safety protections.
This apartment building was owned and managed by a joint venture of 3 investment firms and large housing corporations. The owner of one of these companies is a supporter and campaign donor to the new-elected mayor of New York City, Eric Adams. This joint venture received millions of dollars of state and federal government subsidies. The government justifies giving public money to wealthy investors by saying that the owners agree to accept a lower rent payment in the sky-high housing market in New York City. But the owners are still making a large profit. And what they don’t make in the form of higher rent, they turn around and decide to make by cutting costs, especially when it comes to safety. And the consequences of that decision are deadly.
Under this capitalist system, the owners and the bosses and the wealthy make decisions like this every day, putting the profits for a tiny group of rich people before human lives of the rest of us. That’s why it is a system that is no longer fit for human beings to live under.
Jan 17, 2022
Excerpts from Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.
In December 1991, the leaders of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) announced its dissolution. Western commentators portrayed the event as the failure of communism. But even though the USSR was a workers’ state resulting from the 1917 October Revolution, the Stalinist bureaucracy which seized power in the 1920s no longer defended the interests of the world revolution….
The end of the USSR was the culmination of a long process. The proletariat’s attempt to take control over society failed to spread to the rest of the world and was made sterile by the bureaucracy which took power.
The USSR came into being at the end of 1922, after the young workers’ state won the civil war imposed by the bourgeoisie and imperialism. Most of the parts of the former empire of the Russian Tsars formed a federation of independent republics sharing equal rights. Some did not join, as the Bolsheviks had proclaimed the right of peoples to self-determination. But the USSR included more than 100 nationalities…. For a long time in the eyes of the world working class, it would embody the hope of an alternative to the capitalist system, despite the Stalinist dictatorship.
Because of the abolition of private ownership of the means of production, the planned economy which developed throughout the USSR opened up immense possibilities, despite its being cut off from the world market. In 1936, in The Revolution Betrayed, Leon Trotsky hailed the successes of the Soviet economy in pulling the USSR partially out of economic and social backwardness. He did not hide the limits to its development or the fact that it had nothing to do with socialism yet, contrary to what Joseph Stalin claimed.
However, the bureaucracy’s dominance grew stronger in the 1920s and 1930s as revolutions abroad were defeated. Stalinism established a regime oppressing workers and perpetuating inequalities between the Soviet republics. During World War II, Stalinism also forcibly integrated several territories in Eastern Europe and the Baltic States.
Until Leonid Brezhnev’s death in 1982, the different layers of the ruling caste remained cemented together by necessity, confronted with contenders for power domestically and a new war against imperialism externally. The bureaucracy thrived like a parasite on society as a whole, but it had to hide its privileges. The terror regime aimed at stifling any criticism from workers. At the same time it tried to prevent the conflicting interests and ambitions of the leading clans and major state bodies … from weakening the government’s power.
In the 1980s, this screen of unity finally shattered…. Each group of bureaucrats sought to use every shred of power for their own sake, slaking their own thirst for enrichment. This looting ended up leading to a practical stoppage of the economy. This led Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev to want to restart the economy in 1985, with a strategy called perestroika. But the discussion around which reforms to promote weakened his authority and opened the floodgates for an avalanche of demagoguery. Finally, it led to the USSR’s implosion.
Gorbachev sought support in public opinion to counter his opponents in the upper echelons of the bureaucracy. But he quickly found himself overwhelmed by the demagoguery of those contesting his control over the central state. The authorities of the various republics demanded their independence. A petty bourgeoisie favorable to capitalism also found spokespeople among very senior bureaucrats. These included Boris Yeltsin, who was elected president of the Republic of Russia in May 1990. To weaken the central power, he encouraged other local powers to “take as much sovereignty as they could swallow.” The working class also showed its force, particularly miners, who led big strikes. Unfortunately, the only political leadership addressing them was Yeltsin and the other demagogues.
The Baltic and Georgian republics declared themselves independent in 1990. Months of political clashes led to a failed coup attempt by those who supported maintaining the USSR. Then Gorbachev resigned, and Yeltsin won. On December 8, 1991, flanked by his Ukrainian and Belarusian counterparts, he signed the act dissolving the USSR.
The bureaucrats’ haste to grab wealth knew no bounds. They seized factories, mines, and means of transport, sometimes contenting themselves with breaking them up and selling off the pieces. Workers encountered unemployment, unpaid wages and pensions for months, inflation reaching 2,000%, with health care and education unfunded. The 1990s were years of economic, social, and cultural collapse. Mafias developed along with armed clashes between ruling clans. Populations were suddenly torn apart in wars in the Caucasus and Central Asia. The newly rich—the oligarchs and their ruling patrons—could finally openly show off the fortunes they accumulated on the spoils of the Soviet economy.
As for re-integrating the former USSR into the capitalist system, that was a more complex problem. The republics had developed economically as parts of a whole, organized nearly on the scale of an entire continent. The allocation of production provided the populations with housing, electricity, heating, public transportation, and education, despite the limits imposed by bureaucratic management.
Since then the countries of the former USSR have become mostly suppliers of raw materials to the world market. The economic development promised when these new states were born never materialized. Thirty years later, the former USSR has seen the rise of Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian regime and Ukrainian oligarchs and the dictatorships of Ramzan Kadyrov in Chechnya and Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus, among others. We witness growing poverty in Russia, extreme poverty in Tajikistan, and wars which go from latent to open between Armenia and Azerbaijan or between Russia and Ukraine, and so on.
The USSR’s end brought about an appalling social, political and human setback. It runs parallel to the damage caused by the current crisis of the capitalist system. Faced with this impasse, the communist perspective which guided revolutionaries in 1917 and led to the creation of the USSR remains the only valid approach for the future of the working class and all humanity.
Jan 17, 2022
Excerpts from Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.
The leaders of Kazakhstan confronted a nationwide uprising the first week of this year. This former Soviet republic in Central Asia has 19 million inhabitants as well as much of the world’s known reserves of uranium, crude oil, natural gas, and coal.
Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev’s propaganda needs resulted in a made up story of “thousands of terrorists and bandits” orchestrated by a “center from abroad”. But after a third day of growing protests, he was forced to recognize the mass, working-class character of the movement. Tokayev declared a state of emergency that effectively banned strikes, which were on the rise. He also rolled back for six months the big price increases, including for fuel, which took effect the first day of the year.
Tokayev threw the blame on the rest of the government, which he fired. And he seized the opportunity to get rid of his mentor Nursultan Nazarbayev, who had ruled the country since the days of the USSR….
Ordinary people despised Nazarbayev, seeing him as the regime’s godfather, in the mafia sense, who embodied the bureaucracy that enriched itself by the billions through corruption. Having become a hot potato, he was ousted from his president-for-life position on the Security Council. Some of his relatives lost key positions at the summits of power to Tokayev’s clan. But nothing fundamental has changed for the people.
The outpouring started from the shores of the Caspian Sea, where oil and coal fields concentrate tens of thousands of workers, and reached both the north and the south, where economic capital Almaty is located (formerly Alma-Ata). There, clashes pitted the army and police against protesters, some of whom looted armories and succeeded in burning down the former presidential residence.
In several cities, at times, demonstrators won the friendly neutrality of police and soldiers, who let them take over government buildings. As the situation increasingly escaped his control, Tokayev ordered troops to shoot to kill and called out to be rescued by Russia, his neighbor to the north, represented by Vladimir Putin.
The day before Russian paratroopers were sent to Kazakhstan, the Russian government insisted that no one should interfere in the country’s internal matters. But at the same time, to prepare Russian popular opinion for military intervention, the Kremlin flooded the media with fake news intended to prove the involvement of Islamist terrorists, looters, bandits from other countries, rapists, and anti-Russian nationalists (in Kazakhstan, one in five people is Russian). When Tokayev denounced a “destabilization operation” run from an “organized center” abroad, Putin finally had his pretext to send troops and tanks to Kazakhstan.
The Russian president’s hands were all the more free as Western governments did not even make a pretense at supporting people standing up against a tyrannical regime. Even after Kazakh authorities announced 160 killed and 6,000 arrests—official and provisional figures only—the European Union dared to call for “resuming dialogue”! The U.S., after all their denunciation of the Kremlin over Ukraine, called for “restraint in the restoration of order” in Kazakhstan.
The imperialist powers preferred for Putin’s soldiers to take charge of bringing back in line the population whose emergence on the political scene hampered the operations of American, British, and French giants of gas, oil, metallurgy, and nuclear production. British Gas, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, TotalEnergies, Arcelor, Oreno (formerly Areva) and leading Chinese companies look at Kazakhstan as an Eldorado. They expect the local or Russian authorities to do everything possible to let the plunder continue. And the prospect of Kazakhstan’s oil, gas, or uranium being tainted with the blood of protesting workers is no concern of theirs, as long as their profits continue to flow.
For 30 years since the USSR collapsed, the ruling clans of the Kazakh bureaucracy have undertaken to make money from the country’s mineral resources by delivering them up to the appetites of big multinational corporations. They defend this parasitic profiteering and the interests of the giants of capitalism—if necessary, with help from Putin. In Kazakhstan, Putin has found a way to show that Russia remains an international power. In this way he acts out the historical role of “Great Russia” that his propaganda never ceases to evoke. Stalin played the same role at the end of World War II in preserving the world order by crushing any chance of workers’ revolution in Central and Eastern Europe.
But even if it is blessed by the world bourgeoisie, nothing says Russian intervention will suffice to destroy the protest movement. The Kazakh regime already carried out a bloodbath against oil and gas strikers a decade ago and imposed heavy sentences against workers and trade unionists who defied them. This happened in Janaozen, the same city which launched this recent fight against price hikes and the regime. In recent months, oil, gas and transport workers have refused to be bound by laws against strikes, and have won wage increases and improvements in their working conditions.
Jan 17, 2022
On top of the destruction caused by twenty years of war, the U.S. has strangled Afghanistan’s economy by harsh sanctions and frozen the Afghan government’s funds ever since the Taliban took over. The country’s resulting economic crisis has reached the point that, on January 11, the U.N.’s emergency aid coordinator said that eight million people in Afghanistan face a “march to starvation” without 5 billion dollars in immediate humanitarian aid.
But despite U.S. responsibility for the food crisis, the Biden Administration has promised just 308 million dollars—or about 6% of what the U.N. says is needed to avert this “full-blown humanitarian catastrophe.” By contrast, according to a study by Brown University, the U.S. spent over 2 trillion dollars on the war in Afghanistan—or 400 times what the U.N. now asks for.
Trillions for destruction, pennies on the dollar for food. They show the real priorities of U.S. imperialist policy in Afghanistan.
Jan 17, 2022
On October 21, during the shooting of the movie Rust, a gun drawn by the film’s star, Alec Baldwin, discharged a live bullet, killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and wounding the film’s director, Joel Souza. As the media reported more in detail about the incident, long-standing grievances of film crew workers also came to light. In fact, on the day of the deadly incident, seven members of the film’s camera crew had walked out in protest of poor on-set safety, including gun and Covid safety—in addition to other complaints such as low pay, delayed payments and lack of adequate accommodations.
Behind its image of luxury and glamor, Hollywood is in fact an industry like any other, organized to maximize profit for the studios by squeezing more work out of its work force. Many of the jobs are not steady, and during the making of a movie it’s common for workers to toil long hours under poor working conditions for many days, and sometimes even weeks, on end.
Hollywood workers have fought against these conditions throughout the history of the movie industry. During these fights, workers have had to confront not only the studios, but also union leaders who colluded with studio bosses.
In the 1930s, as today, movie studios employed a very diverse work force—machinists, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, truck drivers, office workers, cartoonists, writers, publicists, story analysts, tailors, kitchen staff, set decorators, camera operators, sound engineers, editors, lab workers, and so on. These workers were represented by a myriad of small “craft unions,” each organizing workers in only one particular classification. These craft unions were brought together into the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE). In theory, this would allow workers to better defend their interests against the big and powerful movie studios, but IATSE itself presented a serious problem for the workers: it was a company union run by gangsters!
Studios paid off the gangsters, and the gangster-controlled IATSE made sure workers continued to produce movies under bad contracts. As workers tried to organize against the studios and IATSE, some of the carpenters, painters, cartoonists and several other crafts working for Hollywood studios left IATSE and formed the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), which affiliated itself with the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners.
In 1943, 77 set decorators broke away from IATSE and joined the CSU. As IATSE fought over the right to represent the 77 decorators, studio bosses stalled the negotiations for the decorators’ contract for 14 months. When the studio bosses also refused to acknowledge the ruling of a federal arbitrator in favor of the CSU, the CSU called a strike in March 1945.
Even though the original dispute involved only 77 set decorators, more than 10,000 studio workers walked out in solidarity, turning the walkout into a major confrontation—not only between the CSU and IATSE, but also between the workers and bosses in the whole movie industry.
The strike was driven by the fighting spirit of rank-and-file studio workers of all kinds of classifications, who were fed up with the studio bosses, as well as union leaders, especially those of the gangster-controlled IATSE. Every day, strikers picketed studios and movie theaters; some of the pickets numbered several hundred people.
IATSE leaders ordered their members to cross the picket lines and go to work—although many did not. The IATSE leadership and studio bosses also launched a campaign of red-baiting to attack the strike, claiming that the strike was led by communists.
Some of the other studio employees, including some movie stars, did not cross picket lines, but many of them did. One of the movie stars who crossed the picket line was Ronald Reagan, the future U.S. president. As for the red-baiting of the strikers, which was common in that time period, Reagan took it up after the strike—in the late 1940s, when he was embarking on a political career.
The strike shut down much of Hollywood’s film production, but the big studios had already been preparing for a strike by producing movies at a break-neck pace during the months leading up to the walkout. The bosses also calculated that they would be able to count on a steady supply of strikebreakers, since the war industries had already begun to lay off workers. In any event, the big studios were determined to break the militancy of the workers, and the strike went on for months.
On the picket lines, company guards and thugs, and police, attacked the strikers. The bloodiest of these attacks happened on October 5, 1945, known as “Black Friday,” at the gates of Warner Brothers’ studios in Burbank near L.A. After some early-morning clashes, about 1,000 strikers and their supporters had gathered at Warner by noon. The picketers countered the chains, pipes, clubs and brass knuckles of thugs, the tear gas of Warner security guards, high-pressure water from the fire hoses of Warner firemen, and the batons of 300 police and sheriff’s deputies with stones, bottles and overturned cars. After two hours of battle, about 45 injuries were reported. In the following week there was more fighting at Warner, even if not as violent as on Black Friday, and hundreds of picketers ended up in jail during what the strikers called “the War for Warner Brothers.”
After Black Friday, the bosses agreed to settle the dispute. Not only had they been losing millions of dollars, but they worried that the brutal attacks on picketers, widely publicized in the media, would generate public sympathy for the strike. The strike ended one month later, with the studios recognizing the strikers’ right to return to their jobs.
The militant struggles of the 1940s, carried out by rank-and-file Hollywood workers, had a real chance to succeed, because so many workers participated in them and because they were supported by many others in the industry, including many IATSE members. And also because these struggles were not isolated in one industry—they happened in a time period that saw the highest number of strikes in U.S. history. In 1946 alone, there were 4,630 strikes in the U.S. involving 5 million workers. The average length of the strikes was 24 days, pointing to the militant mood among workers, who demanded better pay and working conditions after a general wage freeze and speed-up during the war years.
In the movie industry, the 1945 strike pushed back the studio bosses’ attack. But a year later, the bosses went on the offensive again, just like the whole capitalist class was doing in the whole country. In September 1946, the studios locked out the workers represented by the CSU and replaced them with scabs organized by IATSE.
The red-baiting in the movie industry continued in the following years. Studios attacked those whose actions or opinions ran counter to the bosses’ agenda. Many writers, directors and actors were denied assignments, and this de facto Hollywood blacklist lasted well into the 1960s.
Today, the companies that produce content for movies, television, the internet and streaming channels are among the richest and most profitable in the world. But that means the vast army of the workers who actually do the work are exploited to the max. They still face the same basic conditions that workers throughout the economy face. The only way to change things is to organize together and fight.
Jan 17, 2022
Actor and director Sidney Poitier died this January, after a long career in Hollywood. He won the Oscar for best actor in 1963, the first black man to do so and one of only four black actors to win up to the present. Poitier found ways to challenge the racism against black people in the movie industry and in U.S. society in general.
Poitier was born on an island in what later became the Bahamas, then a colony of Britain. The island had no electricity and no running water. His father was a tomato farmer, ruined by Florida tomato growers so that the crop from the Bahamas could not compete with theirs. His formal education was only a year or so.
He did not understand about U.S. race relations, but learned quickly in his first job in Florida at age 15. The Ku Klux Klan visited his brother’s home to threaten the family because Sidney, as a bicycle messenger, had delivered a package to the front door of a white person’s home, not to the back door.
He learned that black people were expected to have only a few jobs in the U.S., which offended him. When he finally got to Hollywood in the early 1960s, black actors were allowed very limited roles. They were stereotyped as poor people working as laborers or servants, like Hattie McDaniel had been in the 1939 film “Gone with the Wind.” From the start, Poitier had no illusions about Hollywood’s attitudes toward black people. As he said in a 2000 interview, "Hollywood never really had much of a conscience … it was always only a handful of men…. This town never was infected by that kind of goodness."
Poitier got his Oscar for best actor in 1963, as part of what was going on in the streets—the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. Poitier had met Harry Belafonte at the American Negro Theatre in Harlem in the 1950s. Poitier only got to study acting there because he pushed to work as a janitor, to follow up his fascination with acting.
It was Belafonte who made it a point to use his position as a prominent black singer to raise funds for the civil rights movement in general and the Southern Black Leadership Conference and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in particular. Poitier, like other prominent black artists, was a donor.
In 1964, for the summer involving the Freedom Rides, Belafonte asked Poitier to accompany him to deliver cash for the movement to Jackson, Mississippi. They found themselves in a car chase with gun-waving white men they assumed were KKK supporters. They survived to continue to push against racism, especially for black artists.
When the black actor Denzel Washington accepted an Oscar in 2002, he thanked Sidney Poitier for "opening up doors for all of us that had been closed for many years."
Jan 17, 2022
What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters during the week of January 10, 2022.
For three days last week, the Chicago public school system was effectively shut down. Declaring that the rapid increase in Covid infections made schools unsafe, the teachers’ union announced on Tuesday evening that teachers would not be in the classroom on Wednesday morning, offering to carry on remote instruction instead. Chicago’s mayor, who heads the schools, declared there would be no instruction unless teachers were in the classroom. Teachers’ school Emails and remote learning accounts were blocked.
Parents were left at the last moment to find a way their children would be cared for.
As in many other big city school systems, Chicago schools were shut down starting in March 2020, when the first lockdowns were imposed on the country, in a failed attempt to stop the virus. Excepting a few periods, when schools sporadically went back to in-person instruction, instruction was “remote” until the beginning of fall, 2021.
In other words, children had a very large chunk ripped out of their educational lives in Chicago and all over the country. Academically, many children regressed. Cut off from their friends, cut off from social activities, many also suffered in their psychological and social well-being.
Now, it’s 2022, and classrooms were once again shut. As of this Sunday morning, it appeared that Chicago schools will still be shut Monday.
The union is right: the schools are unsafe, just as large parts of society today are unsafe. But it’s also true that children have suffered under the nearly year and a half of so-called remote learning—which Chicago’s mayor tries to play on.
Ask the right questions. Why can’t the schools be organized to provide both for the students’ education and for everyone’s safety? Or this one: why, nearly two years into this pandemic are there still not enough masks, still not enough tests so that everyone in the whole society can have what is needed? Why aren’t the masks and tests completely free?
The mayor certainly doesn’t raise the underlying issues. Like Democrats and Republicans elsewhere, she’s too busy siphoning money from schools and public health, handing it over to expand profits of big corporations.
For money to be put into measures for the population’s health and for the education of its youngest generation, the public-money faucet that flows directly into the accounts of big corporations has to be shut off.
For the schools to be made safe and enabled to provide an adequate education to all children, public money must be used for public purposes.
The teachers have every reason not to let their interests seem to be counterposed to those of the children. The teachers, in fact, are the only ones who really can have the same interests as the parents and as the children do.
A fight for a decent education, carried on in safe schools, is a fight that could mobilize a large part of the working class: all those parents and grandparents worried about their kids’ health and education; all those teachers worried about their own health and the health of their own families.
The problem that Covid raises in the schools is one of the big problems of our day. It will be addressed only by a social mobilization of all those concerned.
The unions today could play a role to bring about a wider social fight, not restricted only to the narrow interests of their own members. But they won’t be able to do that if—like the Chicago teachers’ union—they are ready to sacrifice the interests of others, each one thinking foolishly that it can thus protect the well-being of its own members. That’s not possible in a capitalist system that sinks from one crisis into another.
Teachers who face problems of working conditions in the schools can be a nexus between the problems workers face in their own workplace and the problems workers’ kids face in the schools.
"Solidarity” should not be only a word. It is both a vital necessity and a real possibility.
Jan 17, 2022
A book chosen by the New York Times as one of ten “Best Books of 2021”.
The events told in this book takes place roughly 20 years ago in an unnamed African country, unnamed because it could have happened (it does happen and continues to happen) in many countries, all over the globe. An oil company with a made up name, “Pexton”, has been drilling for oil in the valley next to their village. The American company cuts back on any safety precautions in their race for the quick buck, so, their river turns green, acid rain falls from the sky, rusty pipelines burst and spill on their farms, their well water and air becomes toxic, and many people, mainly children, die from the poisons. But this is only the beginning of the story. The entire book is the story of the villagers and how they try first one strategy after another to fight back and restore their village and their lives to the beauty that was. The writing in the book carries incredible respect for all the villager’s different voices, and every sentence conveys the beauty of the human spirit and even in their darkest times, their hope for the future.
Women of the Movement is a 6-part miniseries that premiered on January 6, 2022. Episodes 1—4 can be viewed at abc.com or on Hulu. Episodes 5—6 will be shown Thurs. Jan 20 on ABC. Created by Marissa Jo Cerar, and based on the book “Emmett Till” by Devery S. Anderson, the series centers on Mamie Till-Mobley, played by Adrienne Warren, who devoted her life to seeking justice for her 14-year-old murdered son Emmett, played by Cedric Joe. Emmett was murdered in 1955 in Mississippi while visiting from Chicago for whistling at a white woman, in the midst of tense civil rights struggles in Mississippi. His mother spent her life fighting for justice for her son, laying bare the violent racist system for all the world to see.
Jan 17, 2022
The following is a speech given by Lita Dahomey at a rally in front of the government hall on the island Guadeloupe on January 4th. For weeks, workers in Guadeloupe, organized in a collective of unions and political organizations, have protested first the vaccination mandate, more recently the high cost of living. The text is translated from a video available on the Combat Ouvrière website.
Good evening to the large crowd out there!
The government has chosen force and repression rather than dialogue. But we know French colonialism, it seeks to scorn us, to humiliate us, before it will discuss with us. That is French colonialism.
In Algeria, further back, during the Algerian war, when confronting the fight for independence, they massacred the Algerian people. That is the true face of the French state.
We must also be careful not to fall into the trap of division that Macron has laid for us. If we allow ourselves to be divided, we walk right into the dead end where they want us. Whether we are vaccinated, or unvaccinated, let us unite, as one.
In this collective, neither comrades who are against, nor for masks, neither comrades who are unvaccinated, nor those who are vaccinated must think any less of the other. Whether one has no shots or three, there must be strong ties of comradery among all in the entire collective, united, otherwise we are playing Macron’s game. And if we do that, it is we who stand to lose, and we would allow Macron to climb upon our heads.
The real problem is a political problem, a real political problem. Because all the governments that have preceded Macron’s have had the same policy: to oversee the deterioration of the health care system. In France, they close hospitals, and create healthcare deserts. There are not enough personnel at our hospitals, not enough material—that is the policy of their government.
They use the unvaccinated as scapegoats, when it is their policy that does not allow us to save some Gaudeloupeans. The unvaccinated are not the real problem, the fault is not theirs.
We must think on that. What policy must we have? Let us continue our actions, maintain unity, insist on tolerance, in order to maximize our force, so that all personnel support the strike. And that the workers in the hospital mobilize to demand higher salaries, despite the fact that we face the police and armed men. With everything we’ve done, we’ve faced the armed forces mobilized against workers. That is the force mobilized by the bosses, because the armed forces protect the interests of the capitalists.
Good evening, the struggle continues!
Jan 17, 2022
This article is from a recent edition of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
Teachers’ and high school students’ unions and parents’ associations have called for a strike on January 13th to denounce the unacceptable situation existing in schools as students return from the holiday break.
Parents are disoriented, finding themselves forced to pick up their children sometimes in the middle of the day. And then they wait for hours in front of the pharmacies, which are completely overwhelmed by the demands for testing and vaccination. Seventy-five thousand children and 3,000 adults are isolating from French schools. Principals must verify dozens of certificates, to prove that children may return to class. Teachers find themselves in front of sparse classes. They must field dozens of questions from families and students. Housekeeping staff are obliged to do the work of sick co-workers. School nurses find they can no longer take care of any ailments except Covid....
The minister of education brags about leaving classrooms open—although 10,800 classrooms still had to close, or three times more than before the holidays—but above all, he has made a huge mess in schools and disorganized everyone’s lives and families. He has absolutely no concern to guarantee that thousands of young people, whether at elementary, middle or high school, have good conditions to study.
For the past two years, no additional positions have been created, no teaching or substitute positions. In some working class suburbs of Paris, the parents of students who called for a demonstration on January 13, denounced the fact that 70 teachers were out sick and have not been replaced since students have returned—in a district with 27 schools. Thousands of teachers and monitors have not been hired or replaced, likewise school nurses. The lack of space to split classes and allow students healthy educational conditions, means, with classes of 35 students, even with air filters, the situation is impossible.
Besides simplifying the health protocols until they are virtually abolished, and requesting retired teachers to come back, the education minister has put nothing concrete in place. He has dug in his heels, and responds only with contempt. He says everything will be kept in place, including the special graduation exams that arrive in a few weeks for some. It’s just too bad for those who will not be able to attend and for those who will not have been able to take the courses.
This attitude deserves only one answer: as many people as possible into the streets on January 13, and afterwards.