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
Jul 18, 2022
Recently 115,000 railroad workers voted by 99% to authorize a strike. And with good reason! The rail workers who deliver the country’s freight have not had a raise in three years, while inflation has raged. They are also paying a large part of their health care premiums. In the last six years, the rail bosses have eliminated 30,000 jobs, while the need for delivering freight has increased. The rail companies filled the gap by organizing forced overtime, often seven days a week, sometimes with just 90 minutes notice.
These attacks on the rail workers resulted in record profits for the railroad companies. And the rail bosses now wanted even more profits, and more concessions from the workers. They wanted to pay wages that would put workers ever farther behind prices. And they wanted to run trains with just one engineer on board, instead of two. Meaning unsafe and overworked!
After letting the companies tie them up for three years negotiating a new contract with the rail companies, the union leadership finally said it would call a strike on July 18. The vote of the workers said they were more than ready!
That’s when President Joe Biden stepped in. Biden issued an executive order under the Railway Labor Act that mandated arbitration and a “cooling off” period, totaling 60 days. Under this same law, after the 60 days are up, Congress could further delay any strike or even impose a forced settlement.
Biden calls himself pro-worker and pro-union. It is obvious what workers are losing due to inflation and job cuts. Biden didn’t intervene on behalf of the workers when the union was trying to negotiate. Why not? Why did he intervene against workers about to go on strike? If he’s on the side of the workers, why delay a strike? No wonder the rail companies and the Chamber of Commerce praised Biden for his order. Biden was stepping in on behalf of the bosses.
Biden said a strike would be disruptive to the supply chain. That is true. These rail workers deliver 30% of the freight in this country. So what? Corporations have disrupted the supply chain with their profit-driven management of the economy over and over again. It’s time the workers finally disrupted things!
So far, the union leadership seemed ready to accept this arbitration and “cooling off” period. It remains to be seen whether the railroad workers themselves will be “cooled off.”
In just the last month, there have been strikes by rail workers in Canada and Britain, disrupting the corporations’ business as usual in those countries. Railroad workers in this country have their own history of militant strikes going back over a hundred years—strikes where workers have gone up against the government and their armed forces.
When workers have fought in the past, they often quickly figured out that the laws, and the courts, and the police are not on their side. And the workers learned to ignore the laws, and they learned to organize the kind of fight that they needed to make. They also learned that the bigger the fight the better, the more workers involved, the more power they have.
A fight today by the railroad workers, or any group of workers, always has the possibility of spreading and growing into a bigger fight, involving many more workers. So, the bosses and Biden are afraid of this? Good! Because that’s exactly what should be done.
All workers are facing the same problems. Inflation, and wages that don’t keep up with prices. Not enough jobs for all. More work being done with fewer people. Why should we accept this? Millions of workers today have the same reason to fight to defend their standard of living.
Any fight by the working class that becomes generalized can show the power that workers have. But it also opens the door for workers to decide how things should be run. The working class can even decide who runs society, whether it should be a few wealthy people and their politicians only looking out themselves, or should it be the whole working class looking out for the good of the whole society.
Jul 18, 2022
At the beginning of July, the Chicago minimum wage went up to $14.50 an hour. The director of labor standards for the city announced the increase with great fanfare. "To the workers, we see you. We hear you … in our office you’ve got an ally…."
The more than 430,000 workers in Chicago who make minimum wage are surely glad for any increase. But is this guy serious? An ally, who enforces $14.50 an hour in a city where a gallon of gas is almost $6, and the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment is $1850 a month?
Back in 2012, some activists tied to the unions and the Democratic Party began a campaign to “fight for $15.” Now we finally almost have it—and that 15 dollars can barely buy what 10 dollars did ten years ago!
To really get livable wages, workers will have to claw back wealth the big corporations have exploited from their labor. That is something no politician of either party will ever do—no matter how much of an “ally” they claim to be!
Jul 18, 2022
NASA released the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope last Tuesday. The Webb telescope is the most powerful space-based telescope ever built. It was a collaboration between NASA and the European and Canadian space agencies. Webb orbits at a point a million miles out from the planet Earth; it got there late this February. It’s been scanning the cosmos since; these images are the first of what should be many.
One image was of the Carina Nebula, a giant gas cloud 7800 light years distant. This cloud is a place where gravity pulls the dust together to form new stars. Another image is a spectrum, that is a “fingerprint,” of the light coming from a planet that is orbiting a distant star. The light, collected by the Webb telescope, tells us that this planet has clouds and water in its atmosphere. This planet probably does not harbor life, but the work shows that the Webb telescope may be able to find other planets, far from our own solar system, which do.
One image released was of Stephan’s Quintet, a set of five galaxies, that is, five giant clouds of stars, with tens of millions of stars like our sun in each. Four of those galaxies are orbiting each other. Their gravitational pull will eventually bring them all together into one more massive galaxy. There is a fifth galaxy, to fill out the “quintet” of the name, but it is much closer—it just happens to “be in the picture.”
The Webb telescope cost 10 billion dollars. So yes, it is expensive, but it is money much better spent than the 40 billion that Biden sent to Ukraine for weaponry, and at the drop of a hat.
Thousands of scientists, engineers, administrators, and workers worked together to build and launch the James Webb Telescope, and as we can see, it is a collaboration between the space agencies of many countries. The Webb telescope reminds us of what we, humanity, are capable of. We can investigate the length and breadth of the universe, and peer back more than 13 billion years, to look at the aftermath of the Big Bang, that is, the beginning of the universe.
But at the same time, it stands in stark contrast to the fact that, with all our technology, with all its ability to produce, capitalism refuses to feed, clothe, and house an enormous portion of our population.
Jul 18, 2022
A constitutional amendment to protect abortion rights will be on the ballot this year in Michigan. The people who campaigned for it were able to turn in over three quarters of a million petition signatures to get on the ballot.
The fact that so many people signed the petition was in line with polls that consistently show that the majority of people in Michigan and in the whole country are in favor of a woman’s right to decide whether or not to have an abortion. Six judges on the U.S. Supreme Court have tried to overrule the rights and wishes of the majority of the population, many millions of people.
The people who did the petition campaign are trying to use the legal process to stand up for the rights of women. But when people mobilize their forces, they can find many ways, “legal” and otherwise, to fight for their rights.
Jul 18, 2022
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi is a novel about the consequences of colonialism and slavery. The novel portrays a series of interlinked storylines. It follows the descendants of two half-sisters from the Gold Coast (modern day Ghana). One sister was captured and sold off to slavery in the American colonies. The other remained on the Coast as divided tribes positioned themselves within an encroaching British Empire.
The American chapters depict the gruesome conditions of slavery, the Civil War, Jim Crow, the Great Migration, and the Civil Rights struggles. A chapter on the use of convict labor in the American South during Jim Crow follows the efforts of formerly convicted black and white miners who fought against the bosses in Alabama to organize an integrated labor union.
The West-African chapters portray the rivalries between tribes, wars with the Europeans, imperialism, and the Ghanaian struggle for independence. Homegoing highlights some of the political currents that took shape in Ghana after independence.
Homegoing is available in paperback edition. It is also available at your local library. For those who like to listen to books, there is an audiobook version as well.
Jul 18, 2022
Following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, abortion is now banned in Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. Almost half of U.S. states are expected to allow either abortion bans or severe limits on abortion to take effect in the near future.
Taking pills to end a pregnancy is expected to increase because of these abortion bans. Called “Medical Abortion", “Medication Abortion” or “Self-Managed Abortion,” an estimated fifty-four percent of abortions happened using this method in 2020 according to the Guttmacher Institute.
The medication can be taken at home and does not involve a medical procedure. It has been argued that abortion pills could prevent women from going back to the era of coat hangers in this post-Roe world. In fact, medication abortion is definitely not a safe substitute for legal abortion, for many reasons.
First, medication abortions are documented in multiple studies to have four times the complication rates of medical procedures. In about 5% of cases, there are serious complications. So, taking the abortion pills is not without risk.
In addition, risk is amplified in cases where the abortion pill is taken in a state with an abortion ban. The details of how these pills work points out why a trip to the emergency room might become necessary.
Taking pills to end a pregnancy involves a two drug combination, taken one or two days apart. One is mifepristone, a synthetic steroid that blocks the hormone progesterone. Progesterone is necessary for a pregnancy to continue. The other is misoprostol, a medication that causes intense cramping in the uterus and bleeding that builds in intensity and then tapers off.
According to the FDA, these medications are not safe for women with an IUD, a history of bleeding problems or with an ectopic pregnancy.
If there is heavier than expected bleeding or the abortion is unsuccessful, the patient needs medical care. Women in states where abortion is illegal will risk facing criminal charges if they seek medical care after complications of a medication abortion.
Roughly one million abortions happen each year in the U.S. At a 5% complication rate, that translates to potentially 50,000 women facing complications and needing to go to the emergency room.
A just-released study in the New England Journal of Medicine looked at medical care for miscarriages since the passing of the “Texas 6 Week/Heart Beat” abortion ban in September of 2021. Since the medical symptoms for miscarriages and failed abortion attempts can be the same, this study is an important comparison.
The study found women in Texas in the middle of miscarriages are being denied treatment for sepsis—an infection of the bloodstream that can kill. The reason? The heartbeat of the detached and dying fetus has not yet stopped, so care for the woman is delayed!
The lead author of the study said, "What we have seen in Texas could very well be a preview of what we will see elsewhere…. Abortion bans create a climate of fear for providers."
Dr. Lorie Harper, chief of maternal-fetal medicine at the University of Texas at Austin, explained to a reporter that doctors are waiting until pregnant mothers are in "heart failure, waiting until hemorrhaging, waiting until a patient needs to be intubated, or is [having organ failure.] … Not every patient who becomes that critically ill will recover."
The chipping away at access to abortion that started soon after the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling was horrendous, but with Roe in place, abortion-related deaths dropped dramatically compared to pre-Roe days.
The overturning of Roe will again lead to the preventable deaths of women—especially working class and poor women. The very mobilization that is needed to turn this horrendous situation around could be the spark that lights the flame of revolt in a U.S. working class that is majority female.
Jul 18, 2022
A 10-year-old girl has become a political football for the Democrats and the Republicans to pass back and forth for their own political gain. On June 30 of this year, the six and a half months pregnant 10-year-old, from Ohio, crossed state lines to get an abortion in Indiana because Ohio has a “fetal heartbeat” law that makes all abortions after six weeks illegal. This law came into effect after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade six days earlier.
The Democrats want us to believe that if we vote for them in November, this kind of thing won’t happen. But women and children have been raped and sexually abused every day in class society, regardless of who is in office.
This little girl is, sadly, not the only one. While the data about rapes that lead to pregnancy is limited, a CDC (Centers for Disease Control) report found that more than 1,700 infants were born to children aged 10 to 14. Since May 9 there have been 50 police reports of rapes or sexual abuse for girls age 15 or younger in Columbus, Ohio alone. In 2020, there were 52 abortions in children age 15 or younger, again just for Columbus, Ohio.
No, this child is hardly alone. The CDC indicates that three million women experience rape-related pregnancies in their lifetime. One in nine girls under age 18 experience rape, according to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN). No matter who has been elected, Democrat or Republican, this kind of tragedy continued to happen.
The Republicans show themselves for the right-wing monsters they are, denying at first it had happened. Then they admitted it might have been a rape but tried to claim the procedure was not an abortion. Jim Bopp, a lawyer for an anti-abortion organization, proclaimed, "We should not devalue the life of the baby because of the sins of the father." What about the girl’s life? She is already born. Does she have no rights? Are women and girls just supposed to sacrifice their own well-being to continue a forced pregnancy?
There are 17 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births in the U.S., while Canada only has half as many maternal deaths. Pregnancy for most adult women can kill them. We should "think of this as a child [referring to the pregnant 10-year-old] whose organs are more vulnerable, whose body has not developed to be able to handle 9 months of that kind of pressure," explained Michele Goodwin, author of Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood. What is certain is that teen pregnancies carried to term will only increase as a result of the Supreme Court decision.
The Democrats may not have been so outrageous, but they offer women no protection. This is something elections can’t fix. It will require fights that change this rotting society and its reactionary view of women.
Jul 18, 2022
Gerson Fuentes, a 27-year-old from Guatemala, confessed to raping the 10-year-old girl twice. Trump referred to illegal immigrants as monsters and rapists. Obviously, that is not true. This is more the exception than the rule. The majority of men who rape in the U.S. are white—57%, according to RAINN. Furthermore, 8 out of 10 rapes are committed by someone known to the victim. Not the “stranger danger” rapes women have been made to fear.
Rape is pervasive here. One out of five women experience sexual violence during their lifetime. This not a rare encounter with someone on the fringes of society. It’s boyfriends, coaches, pastors, fathers. And it is completely related to keeping women in a particular role and subservient to men. Rape is part and parcel of a society that oppresses women, like this one does.
Jul 18, 2022
On June 27, at least 53 people from Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras roasted to death in an abandoned tractor-trailer in San Antonio, Texas. About ten people survived the ordeal.
Human smugglers trying to escape capture by border patrol agents had abandoned the tractor-trailer in the sun on a day when the temperature reached about 100 degrees. It had neither air-conditioning nor ventilation, and was only discovered when a worker at a nearby building heard cries for help.
Deaths like this are not rare. On top of the hundreds of people a year who die of exposure, drowning, or thirst while trying to cross the border, just last December, a tractor-trailer with an estimated 200 migrants crashed in Mexico, killing 55 and injuring dozens of others.
It costs between $2,500 and $3,500 to be transported across the U.S. border. The fact that poor people are willing to pay such enormous sums of money and risk death illustrates the desperation this capitalist, imperialist system has inflicted on so much of the world.
The U.S. capitalist class takes advantage of this desperation when people stay in countries like Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras, paying super low wages on farms and supplier factories that produce goods to be sold here. But even if they make it to the U.S., working class migrants are still set up to be super-exploited by the same U.S.-based capitalist class, since their illegal status means they must put up with harsh working and living conditions or run the risk of being deported. This super-exploitation on both sides of the border drives down wages for workers everywhere.
In other words, the bosses profit by maintaining the militarized border. It helps them enforce desperation on people on both sides, driving down wages for everyone, and they could care less if it sets the stage for all these people to die.
And none of this benefits the working class of any country. After all, the people who died in this tractor trailer are part of our class. Workers in the U.S., wherever we were born, however we got here, have the same interests as those in the countries to the south: putting an end to this capitalist system that sets us against each other, puts our lives at risk, and exploits all of us.
Jul 18, 2022
When he was campaigning for president way back in 2019, Joe Biden promised to make Saudi Arabia "a pariah" over the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Now as president, he has kept his promise by visiting the Saudi dictator responsible for the murder, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and giving him a grinning fist bump.
Biden insisted that even though he felt he had to visit Saudi Arabia, "for an American president to be silent on an issue of human rights is inconsistent with who we are and who I am." He even claimed that he brought up Khashoggi’s murder "at the top of the meeting," whatever that might be worth!
Who American presidents “really are" was made clear from the actual content of the meeting: deal after deal to reinforce the business ties between U.S. corporations and Saudi Arabia. In addition to pumping more oil, the Saudis will invest in pipelines with U.S. companies, buy weapons from U.S. military producers like Boeing and Raytheon, buy medical supplies from U.S. companies like Medtronic, buy telecom equipment from the U.S.—the list goes on and on.
Biden may frame these business deals as helping U.S. consumers faced by the high price of oil or helping to wean Europe from “Russian oil.” But anyone who really believes the Saudis will “save us” from high gas prices—when U.S. oil companies are enjoying record profits—has another think coming.
The reality is clear: Biden works hand in glove with the Saudi government, like Trump, Obama, and every president before them stretching back 100 years, because U.S. corporations make huge profits from that country. Protecting those profits is the number one job of the president, from whichever party. All the talk of “human rights” is just so much hot desert air.
Jul 18, 2022
Saudi Arabia just inked a deal to buy even more U.S. weapons. And what has it been doing with the weapons it purchased so far?
Starting in 2015, Saudi Arabia intervened in Yemen. It has used U.S.-made planes and bombs to kill tens of thousands of Yemeni civilians and fighters. According to the U.N., including deaths from disease and starvation caused by the conflict, almost 400,000 people have died in that war. About 70% of those were children under the age of five.
More than 15 million people have been forced into extreme poverty, on the brink of outright starvation. And despite what the U.N. has called the world’s worst humanitarian disaster, U.S. imperialism has never hesitated to resupply its Saudi ally with the weapons needed to keep this murderous conflict going.
Jul 18, 2022
This article is translated from the July 8 issue #2814 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group of that name active in France.
The Ukrainian government has imposed martial law ever since the start of the Russian invasion. Men between the ages of 18 and 60 who can be mobilized are banned from leaving the country. But the martial law also makes it easier to take away workers’ rights.
Behind President Volodymyr Zelensky, represented as the hero of the Ukrainian resistance, have always stood rich Ukrainian oligarchs. For example, Oleg Kolomoisky, owner of the television channel that got Zelensky elected. And Rinat Akhmetov, the richest man in the country. He controls Ukraine’s main steel and energy companies. These oligarchs owe their fortunes to corruption and to their past and present connections in the Ukrainian and Russian government apparatuses. They employ hundreds of thousands of workers.
For oligarchs, it was not enough to loot the country’s resources, plunge the Ukrainian population into poverty, and push them to migrate. For years, they have demanded that the government reform the laws to remove measures protecting workers, in the Soviet-era Labor Code which dates from 1971.
An example is draft law number 5371, which is said to be “aimed at simplifying the regulation of labor relations in small and medium-sized enterprises and reducing administrative burdens.” It is intended to allow employers in enterprises with fewer than 250 employees to replace nationwide collectively bargained contracts with individual hiring arrangements, where the employee accepts anything and everything under the pretext of “mutual consent by both parties.” As if bosses and workers were equal! This affects 70% of Ukrainian workers.
This bill—mostly drafted by the former pro-American president of the republic of Georgia, Saakashvili—provoked reactions from workers and was abandoned in 2021. But now two factors let legislators put this law back on the table, in the name of national unity. First, the declaration of martial law prohibits strikes and demonstrations. Second, the war has cost more than five million jobs, destroyed factories, and closed down the borders. A majority of legislators voted for it at the first reading.
Not only is this law intended to survive the war. But also, the de facto dictatorship that reigns in Ukraine, along with martial law, lets the bosses impose what they want for the duration of the war, with government support. So, the work week may increase from 40 to 60 hours. A company may dismiss any employee with only 10 days’ notice and may suspend all employment arrangements and stop paying wages. In this way, millions of employees are no longer paid.
Yes, people glorify “Ukrainian resistance.” But the Russian invasion did not put an end to the class struggle in Ukraine. On the contrary, it intensified the class struggle by temporarily weakening the ways workers can defend and organize themselves.
Jul 18, 2022
This article is translated from the July 15 issue #2815 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group of that name active in France.
Ukrainian authorities accused the Russian army of deliberately setting fire to wheat fields for a number of days, “destroying grain granaries and agricultural equipment.” This is not implausible. On the contrary—each side strikes both civilian and military targets.
For the four-plus months it has gone on, this war between Ukraine, Russia, and the great powers is being waged on all fronts, including communications and the media.
French and Western media loyally repeated the accusation, calling Putin’s army practices a scorched earth policy figuratively and literally.
This accusation has two advantages for them. In the opinion of their countries, the accusation blames Russia as responsible for the soaring prices of everyday consumer products like bread, pasta, sunflower oil, and so forth. These include the grains and other plants of which Ukraine is one of the world’s leading producers.
This propaganda is also intended to appear humanitarian—emphasizing the fate of poor countries especially in Africa, whose population depends 40% on Ukrainian and Russian wheat. Ukrainian wheat burns while Russian wheat prices are high.
The apparent good conscience of the media barely cloaks a row of shameless and even odious lies. If Africa in particular depends on imports to feed itself, this is because French colonial domination and then British imperialism strangled food crops there. This doomed a big part of its population to total dependence on imports, and therefore a state of permanent quasi-starvation.
As for the prices of grains and the food products derived from them, they are soaring everywhere, but this began before this war. From July 2021 to February 2022—before Russia launched tanks on its neighbor—the price of wheat rose by 50% on average, from 200 to 300 dollars per ton. When the war started, the price continued to rise, reaching 328.25 dollars on July 4. A little less rapid for the time being, still this rise exhibits strong fluctuations, which indicates a speculative market. Big brokerage firms and agribusiness giants lead the way at the Chicago World Agricultural Commodities Exchange, where growers and speculators from around the world cluster.
Local media are happy to interview farmers from around Zaporizhzhia or Mykolaiv who are saddened by their burning fields. But the same media are careful not to explain that Ukrainian oligarchs and Western capitalists own huge areas of the most fertile soil of Ukraine, which they have cultivated for starvation wages by farm workers and impoverished small farmers. This with the blessing of Zelenskyy—this president whom the West praises and whose electoral program included, among other things, a major privatization of land requested by the International Monetary Fund.
Protected by Zelenskyy and the Western states, the predators of Ukrainian agriculture know how to throw their weight around. They have the means to partially get around the Russian navy’s blockade of Black Sea ports. Germany, among others, aids them there, and helps its own agri-food market by providing them with DB trains (the German equivalent of France’s SNCF rail lines) to carry huge quantities of grains out of the country. It takes 15 trains to transport as much as a bulk ship. But, in war anything goes. Capitalist groups operating in Ukraine have been able to export a fifth of its wheat production since February.
And if Ukraine and Russia are major grain exporters, the United States, France, and Canada are their main rivals in this field and are well placed to profit from the consequences of the war. It offers them the possibility of snatching markets in other countries and allowing their corporations and speculators to inflate their profits by imposing food price increases on a global scale—while blaming the Kremlin!
Jul 18, 2022
This article is translated from the July 8 issue #2814 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group of that name active in France.
One of Germany’s biggest gas suppliers, Uniper, is on the verge of bankruptcy. The Russian natural gas it used to buy cheap is no longer getting to it in sufficient quantities.
To meet its commitments to its customers, Uniper is forced to buy natural gas on the market at a very high price. This costs the company nearly 30 million dollars a day. Uniper’s central role as energy supplier in the German economy means that many companies could be dragged down by its fall. The German government is considering nationalizing the firm.
Since June 14, Russian company Gazprom has reduced its natural gas deliveries to Europe. Gazprom claims there is a technical problem. But in fact, this is a counterattack to the boycott that the United States has been trying to impose since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. Because this reduction in deliveries has led to soaring natural gas prices, Gazprom took advantage of the situation by selling less gas but at a much higher price. But this has panicked European leaders, who fear they will not be able to build up sufficient supplies for winter.
Germany is the country most affected because its economy has long relied on Russian natural gas, both as a source of energy and as a raw material in the chemical industry. At the largest chemical processing site in the world, BASF in Ludwigshafen, Rhineland, natural gas arrives directly from Siberia via a joint subsidiary of BASF and Gazprom. With this natural gas, the site produces many chemical substances for medicines, cosmetics, food products, paints, fertilizers, plastics, and so on.
So, it’s understandable why the big boss at BASF led the protest against the boycott of Russian natural gas. He stated, “Russia covers 55% of our gas supply. If it were reduced to zero overnight, unemployment would rise to a very high level. Many businesses would go bankrupt. To put it plainly: this could plunge the German economy into its worst crisis since World War II.” And natural gas is just one example among many other imports. Economic relations are so intertwined that a total boycott of Russia would have serious consequences for the entire world economy.
The example of the BASF site shows the contradictions of the current capitalist economy. On the one hand, this site needs global partnerships to operate. These let it have a production capacity far beyond the German and even the European market. But on the other hand, this exceptional means of production is the property of a very small number of shareholders. They alone decide how it is used. Rivalries between capitalist powers mean that the border policies of various national states can hold it back.
Only by abolishing private ownership of the means of production and by abolishing the borders between nations can the world economy develop on a new basis.
Jul 18, 2022
On July 13, the president of Sri Lanka, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, fled the country. He was quite literally chased away by a massive popular revolt, culminating in the invasion of the presidential palace by thousands of people on July 9.
Cameras showed audiences all over the world how protesters were enjoying the posh bedrooms, dining rooms, the pool, and other amenities in the mansion, giving an idea of the kind of luxury the president and his entourage have been living in, while the vast majority of Sri Lankans have had to live without enough food, fuel and other necessities for months.
Since the beginning of the year, fuel, food, medicine, and other essential items have been in short supply in Sri Lanka, a small island nation of 22 million located in the Indian Ocean just south of India. These necessities are currently simply not available, or so expensive that only very wealthy people can afford them.
There are regular, long power outages, and schools have even shut down for lack of paper. People have been spending many hours, even days, waiting in long lines for gasoline and cooking oil. Police and army are regularly deployed to keep people in line—since people waiting in line often start another demonstration!
Initially, when protests began in Sri Lanka’s largest city, the protesters were mostly students and middle class people, coming together in a park in an upscale neighborhood, calling for Rajapaksa’s resignation. But the protests spread quickly, and soon thousands of people were marching on government buildings, as people from other sections of the population, and other parts of the country, joined the movement.
Government violence against protesters, perpetrated by police and armed thugs of Rajapaksa’s party, the Sri Lankan People’s Front, resulted in nine deaths and more than 300 injured in May. But that only seemed to strengthen the resolve of the protesters—the demonstrations persisted.
Different sectors of the Sri Lankan working class have also been part of the ongoing popular revolt with their own actions. Healthcare workers have struck over pay cuts, and then again for free fuel and higher wages, this time in defiance of a government ban on strikes! Electricity workers have also struck, against the privatization of the electric company. Oil workers have also protested against privatization, and textile workers in Colombo’s Free Trade Zone have clashed with police over the military control of these zones, where no labor laws apply. There were also two general strikes, on April 28 and May 6, which contributed to the resignation of the prime minister.
The prime minister, Mahinda Rajapaksa (the president’s brother), was forced to resign in May. But that did not stop, or even slow down, the demonstrations either. And for good reason: the “new” prime minister, the 73-year-old politician Ranil Wickremesinghe, was filling the post for the fifth time since 1993!
In any event, Wickremesinghe’s “cure” for the economic crisis was worse than the disease itself. He announced plans to eliminate 800,000 public sector jobs and to cut down pensions. The prime minister even dared to tell workers to look for jobs abroad, so that they could send much-needed foreign currency to import fuel and other necessities! The government also reduced the working week to four days, and declared a two-week government shutdown in late June, further reducing workers’ income.
Thus, the protests continued, and grew, finally ousting the president. But behind the politicians and the civilian government is the military, and it’s likely that it was the military brass, in consultation with big powers, especially the U.S., that told the president it was time for him to go (the Sri Lankan Air Force has confirmed that Rajapaksa left the country for the Maldives on a military jet).
For the U.S. government, and for the governments of other imperialist powers, the problem is to contain the massive popular revolt in Sri Lanka and prevent its spread to other countries where populations are also caught in economic crisis. On July 9, upon the invasion of the presidential palace by popular masses, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Bob Menendez urged the country’s armed forces to use “restraint" and declared "all parties must work together with the international community for a new government that respects the democratic and economic aspirations and upholds human rights the Sri Lankan people deserve.”
Why did he make these comments? The U.S. and other imperialist powers want to make sure that Sri Lanka continues to pay its debt to imperialism! In fact, the attacks on workers’ standard of living announced by Sri Lanka’s prime minister are the standard requirements that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) always imposes on governments in debt. They are the conditions for a new loan the IMF is offering to the Sri Lankan government, which has been defaulting on its debt payments.
It’s a vicious cycle of loans and interest payments, pushing populations of entire countries deeper and deeper into poverty, while the banks enrich themselves on the interest payments of these loans.
So far, protesters in Sri Lanka, and media commentators, have mostly focused on the hated Rajapaksa clan and their government. But Sri Lanka’s economic tailspin is very much part of a worldwide recession, which was already underway in 2019, when the Rajapaksas took office. Then, in 2020, came the Covid-19 pandemic, deepening the recession. Among other things, the pandemic put a stop to tourism, which was a major source of revenue for this small island nation. And finally, with the advent of the war in Ukraine in February, prices of imports, especially fuel and other necessities, further increased, turning the screw even more on Sri Lanka’s economy.
It’s true, the government made some moves that accelerated the downfall, such as giving the rich a big tax cut in 2019, which reduced government revenue by more than 1.4 billion dollars. They also banned imports of chemical fertilizers in 2021 to save foreign currency, which then led to a shortage of staple foods and an increase in food prices.
But overall, the crisis in Sri Lanka is part of the worldwide crisis of the capitalist system, the brunt of which is being carried by the working class in all countries, including the U.S.
What’s needed in Sri Lanka, as elsewhere, is not just new faces in government, but an entirely new course, both economically and politically. But politicians representing big capitalists, who enrich themselves off the crisis, will not do that. Only the working class has the reason to do that, taking Sri Lanka’s resources and using them, first and foremost, to meet the needs of the population, starting with all those who have been deprived of food and other necessities for weeks, even months. Then, to fight to spread the revolt, to gain allies against imperialism, which will seek to isolate and throw back the movement.
The strikes and other actions recently taken by Sri Lankan workers show that the working class is in a good position to take the lead of, and give direction to, a massive popular mobilization in Sri Lanka. It remains to be seen if that will develop in coming weeks and months.
Jul 18, 2022
Child vaccination rates around the world dropped considerably over the past two years, according to UNICEF and the World Health Organization. The percentage of children receiving the full dose of the vaccine against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis, and the measles vaccine, dropped from 86 to 81% between 2019 and 2021. Even worse, the number of children worldwide who received zero doses of the most basic vaccines rose by almost 38%, from 13 million to 18 million during that time.
The drop in child vaccination rates is worst in poorer, underdeveloped countries like India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Brazil.
The recent declines reverse gains that were made over the previous three decades, particularly between 1990 and 2010. Some of the drop is the result of parents having more difficulty getting their children vaccinated due to Covid lockdowns. Misinformation about vaccines and mistrust of Covid vaccines have also played a role. To some degree, this mistrust is not hard to understand, given how access to Covid vaccines has been denied to those in poorer countries by pharmaceutical companies more concerned with profit.
The drop in vaccination rates is already showing its effects. For instance, Brazil’s government declared measles eradicated there six years ago, but it popped up again in the country this year.
The experience of Covid-19 and other epidemics have taught public health officials lessons about what could be done to increase vaccination rates, such as setting up pop-up vaccination posts and keeping them open at night and on weekends. Lily Caprani, of UNICEF, put it well, "We aren’t going to solve this with poster campaigns or social media posts. You need reliable, well-trained, properly compensated community health workers who are out there day in, day out, building trust ... And there simply aren’t enough of them."
Covid-19 has proven that infectious diseases can’t be stopped by putting up border walls. Declining vaccination rates in poorer countries endanger everyone, including those in wealthier countries.
Though public health officials have pretty good knowledge of what it would take to get people vaccinated, this capitalist society based on profit that produces increasing inequalities within and between nations will not succeed in preventing infectious disease outbreaks. It must be replaced with a society that puts human health first.
Jul 18, 2022
What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters, during the week of June 27, 2022.
The Supreme Court did exactly what its contrived leak said it would do. It overturned Roe v. Wade, getting rid of 50 years of legal protection that many women assumed they had.
This court, the very top of this country’s legal system, declared that no woman has the right to make the decisions about her own body. They said it openly: her health, her physical, emotional, and social well-being are subject to the whim of state legislators. Open reactionaries, many of them.
Roe v. Wade itself—the original 1973 Court decision—was a recognition of rights that women had imposed themselves on this society through decades of mobilization and struggle, at the same time that society faced other social movements.
The original Supreme Court decision never protected all women. Far from it. Only three years after Roe v. Wade, Congress voted the “Hyde Amendment,” which prevented Medicaid from paying for abortions. For the next 45 years, no matter which party controlled Congress, Hyde blocked all federal medical funding for abortion. It was a big attack on the poorest women, including those condemned to work the low-wage jobs reserved for women.
In the 49 years since the original Roe v. Wade decision, both Congress and the states chipped away at it. Access to abortion became more difficult, more bureaucratic, much more expensive, less available. By the end, actual access to abortion was denied to the majority of women.
So, no, Roe v. Wade was never a real guarantor for most women.
But the legal overturning of Roe v. Wade has directly turned the clock backward. Abortion is now illegal, or will be within a few weeks, in 22 states.
That’s not the end of the game for this well-funded right-wing movement that worked to get rid of Roe v. Wade. The same forces are aiming to have federal courts throw out state laws which allow or even protect access to abortion in the states where access still exists. Birth control is now on the chopping block. So are sexual relations between two people of the same sex. All of this was once criminalized in this country. All of it—and more—can become criminalized again if the right wing has its way. Unions were once illegal. They can be made illegal again. Strikes or other mobilizations were once declared to be “criminal syndicalism,” they can be declared so again.
Big Money has inscribed a target around all these things, just as it targeted women’s access to abortion. Over the years, anti-abortion political committees paid billions of dollars to get rid of Roe v. Wade. A good deal of that money came from some of the biggest corporations in the country. In the last five years alone, Coca-Cola gave 2.6 million dollars to political committees pushing to restrict or outlaw abortion; GM gave 2.4 million; Comcast, 1.9 million; AT&T, 1.5 million; CVS, 1.4 million; Walmart, 1.1 million; Amazon and Verizon, almost one million each; and five other companies gave half a million or more, including three of the biggest banks in the country.
As the result of vast social movements, a certain number of social guarantees were once inscribed into law—the right of black people to vote, the right of women to control their own bodies, the right of workers to organize a union and to strike. But “legal guarantees” mean nothing when the movements that produce them recede.
In a country, which claims to be a “democracy,” but isn’t; in a country, which claims to recognize individual rights for every person, but doesn’t; there are no guarantees that ordinary people can count on, other than what they bring into being themselves by their own mobilizations.
That was true when the movements of the mid-twentieth century created the rights we gained. It is true today more than half a century later when right-wing forces attempt to roll back the clock.
Jul 18, 2022
Film: Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World, a 2019 documentary, available to stream on YouTube, Netflix, and Amazon
The award-winning documentary looks at Native Americans’ influence on American music. In the face of horrific attacks on their lives and way of life, their cultural influence lives on in modern music.
The film shows their influence in pre-blues, and how the mingling of Native Americans and Black Americans fostered a merger in blues and in jazz and how it helped change the trajectory of rock and roll. The film features scenes from Mardi Gras and folk music, and musicians Link Wray, Jimi Hendrix, Buffy St. Marie, Danny Castillo, and others, and features interviews discussing how these artists and their culture inspired and changed music.
Book: How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr, 2019
This book exposes how the United States is not just the fifty states. It lays bare that the U.S. has a hidden history of deception here at home in the U.S., and more hidden history abroad, in which it ruthlessly conquered and exploited a large colonial empire all over the world. It hid this by saying they were “civilizing” these populations, that they were “helping” them, all the time stripping them of wealth and even taking their lives.
In the Philippines, Puerto Rico, South and Central America, and many more, he describes in crackling and wry prose the gripping and startling details of America’s conquests. He graphically and even with humor tells outrageous story after story of the relationships the U.S. has with the rest of the world, how U.S. policies further the interests of the rich, and how and why the U.S. moved from having colonies or territories to a modern policy of globalization. Essential reading to understand the U.S. role in the world and how it needs to change.
Jul 18, 2022
Eight cops in Akron, Ohio fired 80 shots at 25-year-old Jayland Walker, as he was running away from them. Seven of the eight cops are white; Walker was black.
The cops claim they were attempting to pull Walker over for “unspecified equipment violations” on his car when he fled from them in his vehicle. They say cops in a nearby township had tried to do the same one day previously. They claim that some kind of flash of light was seen coming from the driver’s side of Walker’s vehicle, which they have referred to as a muzzle flash.
Yet there is no dashboard camera footage to verify their story, since Akron’s police vehicles are not equipped to do so. In any case, Walker had stopped his vehicle and was running away on foot when they opened their barrage of gunfire at him.
A medical examiner’s report now shows Walker was struck by 46 bullets, killing him. Some of the bullets entered through his back. The cops admit Walker was unarmed at the time. While he lay on the ground bleeding to death, the cops handcuffed him.
The cops have shown photos purporting to show a gun and ammunition clip in Walker’s car, but no video showing them making this discovery. It would not be hard to believe the cops planted the weapon in Walker’s car. Regardless, he was unarmed at the time they shot him.
More importantly, what vehicle equipment violations were so critical that it was necessary to send eight cops after him, creating the conditions for Walker to end up being shot 46 times? If he runs away, they had his car and would have had no problem identifying him and tracking him down later. It certainly raises the question whether the same violations would lead to the same response if the driver had been white.
Since the shooting, demonstrators have carried out daily protests in Akron. The city has responded by imposing a nightly curfew from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m.
People in Akron are right to protest yet one more unjustified, racist killing at the hands of the police. Police murder needs to stop, and it’s in the interest of the entire working class to make its opposition known!
Jul 18, 2022
If you’re a worker plagued with skyrocketing gas prices and reliant on Chicago Transit Authority buses and trains to get to and from work, then you are forced to deal with a rapidly eroding level of service.
Likely, you are having discussions with your boss explaining late arrival and absences. And your after-work plans, family obligations, and basic necessities like getting to the grocery store or the doctor’s office are getting messed up as well!
Train and bus schedules have been severely reduced and are in a constant state of flux. One study reports that since December 2021, the CTA Blue Line runs less than 55% of its scheduled trains. It’s supposed to run every 6 minutes, but it’s now common to wait 20 minutes or longer for a train. Riders are often frustrated by “ghost” trains and buses&emdash;those displayed on the CTA’s schedule tracking system, but which never show up. The CTA even runs customer alerts on a never-ending loop, apologizing in advance for “longer-than-usual” wait times.
One Blue Line train was recently disabled en route by what the operator described as a “power problem.” This train required repeated unscheduled station stops for 15 minutes and longer. Finally, midway through its route, all passengers were told to exit the train onto the platform and make alternate arrangements to get to their destination. And to top it off, the train going in the opposite direction was also disabled!
Earlier in the year, the CTA received millions in Federal money supposedly to “maintain service levels”. But current service levels are often less than half what they used to be. And we know from past experience, a large percentage of these millions will go into the coffers of big companies, contractors, and developers. Despite these millions, the quality of service continues to get worse.
Jul 18, 2022
On June 14, 2022, police responded to a domestic violence call at a hotel in El Monte, CA, where Justin Flores had stabbed his wife. When the El Monte police arrived, Flores’s wife told the cops not to come in because Flores had a gun. But “they did anyway,” Flores’s wife later said. As the cops came in, Flores shot and killed both El Monte Police Officer Joseph Santana and his training officer, Corporal Michael Paredes, before being killed by other police.
Following the shootings, there were police spokespersons, media outlets, and politicians who immediately blamed L.A. County District Attorney (DA) George Gascon for being “soft on crime.” Gascon had accepted a plea deal for Flores in 2021, when Flores was arrested for possessing an unregistered gun and methamphetamines. The DA had allowed Flores to serve 20 days in jail, followed by two years on probation.
The probation department, severely underfunded and understaffed, then had minimal contact with Flores once he was released. Flores did not physically meet with his probation officer (PO) in over six months. During that time, Flores began to spiral out of control. In March 2022, Flores’ own mother called his PO (probation officer), begging him to have her son placed in rehab because he was on drugs again. The PO told the mother that nothing could be done until Flores committed a violation.
Finally, on June 7, Flores violated his probation by hitting his wife. But his PO’s only response was to schedule a hearing with Flores on June 27.
So, Flores got no help. His wife told reporters the day of the killings, “The guy who killed, who died here today, that wasn’t my husband; that was a monster that I didn’t know.” In this society, based on profit for the rich, there is little or no help for working people and the poor with drug addiction and mental illnesses. Instead, the police offer them only two terrible choices: prison or death.