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
Dec 5, 2022
Joe Biden and the Democrats and Republicans in Congress imposed a contract settlement on the freight railroad workers to stop a possible strike. Workers in four unions, representing a majority of the railroad workers, had voted down a contract that was the result of government-imposed arbitration.
In the past few years, the railroad companies have eliminated thousands of jobs, 30% of their workforce, and forced the remaining workers to work insane work schedules, always on call. Cutting jobs brought in huge profits for the railroad companies—over seven billion dollars in just the last three months.
The job cuts have enriched the wealthy company stockholders, who have received 196 billion dollars in dividends and stock buybacks over the past decade. But these same job cuts have meant dangerous working conditions for the short-staffed railroad workers and for the trains they run.
Because there weren’t enough workers left, the railroad bosses refused to give any paid sick time and the railroad workers were often forced to work while ill, endangering their own health. In contract negotiations, the railroad union leaders had asked for 15 paid sick days. The contract imposed by Biden and Congress gave the workers one paid sick day and a couple of unpaid days—many railroad workers said that this outrageous offer was the reason they voted against the contract in the first place!
As this editorial was written, it was not clear how the railroad workers will respond to having the contract forced on them. What is clear, however, is where Biden, the Democrats and the Republicans all stand.
Biden claims to be pro-labor. Some Democrats and Republicans in Congress say they take the side of the working class. But when push comes to shove, these politicians, who represent the government state apparatus, did what they always do: they stand on the side of the railroad companies, on the side of the banks, hedge funds and other stockholders, on the side of the whole capitalist class. They stand against the railroad workers—and against the whole working class, who all face the same type of attacks faced by railroad workers.
This is the reality that the working class always faces. In this society divided into classes, the politicians of both major parties serve the interests of the ruling class—the capitalist class. The politicians pass laws to serve the interests of the capitalists, like the laws they used against the railroad workers. And if the workers defy these laws, the capitalists have the power of the state apparatus—the courts and the police—to use against the working class.
Today the whole working class is under attack by this capitalist class. All workers are facing similar problems to what the railroad workers face. Most workers are paid wages that are lower than the railroad workers, wages that don’t keep up with inflation. Millions of jobs have been cut and the remaining workers are overworked, risking our health.
Just like the railroad workers, the rest of the working class can’t depend on the politicians or the laws to solve these problems for us.
But the working class has its own power to use—when it is ready to use it. That power is all our forces together. That power is that we make everything run—and we can make everything stop.
The railroad workers have a certain power because of the role they play in the economy. That’s why the politicians were so quick to come together, trying to stop a strike. But the whole working class together has an even greater power.
The working class has used that power in the past, many times defying the politicians and the laws when they are ordered not to strike, ordered to keep working. And in the future that same power could be used not only to defend our interests, but to get rid of a system that is set up against us and to build a society that the working class runs themselves.
Dec 5, 2022
The 27th annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP27, was held at the Egyptian resort of Sharm El Sheikh in November. Attended by delegates from 190 countries and 92 heads of state, it produced what the previous 26 COP conferences had produced before: some promises made by governments and nothing else. And, judging from the previous 26 conferences, we can be certain that these governments—those of the richest, and most carbon-producing, countries—will not keep these promises either.
This time around, the “new” promise is to contribute money to a “loss and damage fund,” supposedly to help underdeveloped countries pay for the damage done by extreme weather events—such as the recent floods in Pakistan, which in fact was only one of many catastrophic weather events around the world in 2022.
Behind these increasingly severe weather events (heat waves, storms, floods, droughts) is a steady rise in the average temperature of the earth’s surface (known as global warming)—which, in turn, is caused by an increase in the amount of carbon dioxide gas in the earth’s atmosphere. So, the stated goal of these annual UN conferences is for governments to take measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, by reducing the burning of fossil fuels (coal, petroleum and natural gas).
But these conferences have proved to be a charade, a meaningless yearly ritual that actually moves further and further away from that stated goal. Since the first COP meeting in 1995, carbon dioxide emissions and temperatures have only kept increasing, with exactly the expected consequences: more and more severe, and more and more destructive, heat waves, wildfires, storms, floods and droughts.
Besides government delegates, there were also thousands of so-called “civil society” visitors at COP27, including many activists who, as they do every year, protested the inaction of governments in the face of the worsening climate crisis. In fact, scientists have been coming up with ideas to reduce carbon dioxide emissions for a long time. But neither scientists nor protesters make such decisions. It’s not even governments, for that matter. In this capitalist system we live under, the decisions on how to produce energy are made in the boardrooms of privately owned energy companies—the very companies that profit from extracting and selling fossil fuels.
And those profits are anything but small. The fossil fuel industry expects 4 TRILLION dollars in profit in 2022 alone, an amount roughly equal to Germany’s GDP (gross domestic product), which is the largest in Europe and fourth-largest in the world.
So, unlike government delegates who could never agree, there was in fact one big group of participants in the hallways of the conference who were clear about their goal. More than 630 lobbyists for the fossil fuel industry (25% more than last year) descended on the conference, to further cement their ties with the governments of rich countries that provide them with generous subsidies to extract more fossil fuels—and to pollute more.
Is it any surprise that this conference, like the ones before, produced a lot of empty speeches, a few promises, including promises to continue to negotiate next year, and zero action in the foreseeable future?
Dec 5, 2022
The profits are so extreme in the railroad industry that more than enough money exists to fund the paid sick days that railroad workers need and voted to strike to gain. Congress and the President could have imposed this on the rail companies at minimal cost. Providing sick leave would cost just 4 days worth of rail companies’ recent profits.
The timetable of how and when the government intervened in the railroad strike is telling. Biden issued a 60-day “cooling off period” on July 15. On September 15, Biden announced his administration had brokered a deal between railroad bosses and top union officials to be voted on by the membership. Another 60-day “cooling off period” ensued, set to end AFTER the November elections.
Pushing all these deadlines to AFTER the November elections was convenient for the politicians. Before the November 8 elections, both parties played pro-labor games. But after the elections, it was a different story. The majority of railroad workers—in the four biggest unions—rejected that Biden deal. A new potential strike deadline was set for December 4.
So Congress rushed into action. On November 30, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to impose the Biden deal on railroad workers. And in a separate vote, seven days of paid sick leave were approved to be added to the contract by the House. On December 1, the Senate voted to outlaw a strike and impose the Biden contract on workers, but refused to impose the sick leave agreement on railroad bosses.
Splitting the vote into two parts allowed a yes vote on outlawing the strike. It allowed political posturing while safely voting the sick leave down to please the railroad bosses and their Wall Street backers. All of this happened as far away from the next election cycle as possible.
"Progressive Democrats” and even some Republicans who voted to add in the sick leave claimed to be defenders of the workers. True defenders of the workers would have done all they could to allow railroad workers to strike. What they did created the exact situation we saw. For months, the companies pretended to negotiate, knowing full well Democrats and Republicans would step in at the last minute to save the railroad corporations from the consequences of their own greedy actions by blocking a necessary strike. This amounts to politicians playing games with workers’ lives and livelihoods.
Several railroad activists expressed disgust with Biden and his party’s actions. "Here we have someone who touted themselves as the most labor-friendly president for many decades, and he basically just betrayed us," said a freight railroad brakeman who lives in Nevada. "There really is no difference between Democrats and Republicans anymore. They’re just feeding corporate greed."
On the day after the U.S. Senate voted to force a contract down railway workers’ throats, it did not go unnoticed that Biden’s next stop was a meeting with a member of the British royal family in Boston. As Biden entered a building to meet with Prince William, a railway worker and about a hundred supporters called out the president, chanting, "Joe Biden is a scab!"
When asked about this meeting, an organizer from Railroad Workers United, a group of workers aiming to unite all the rail unions, said, "I would say to Joe Biden and Prince William, watch yourselves. Workers everywhere are getting the short stick and are looking to fight back in the US and in the UK as well. The fight is not over."
Dec 5, 2022
Members of the UAW (United Auto Workers) have voted for changes in the top leadership of the union.
For the first time, the UAW president and members of the union’s International Executive Board were voted upon directly by the union members, instead of being elected by delegates to the UAW convention. Only about 10% of the union’s one million active and retired members voted in the mail-in ballot election. But the majority of those voting cast their ballots for candidates running against the incumbent leadership of the Administration Caucus, who have controlled the top positions in the UAW for decades.
The main opposition slate won 5 positions outright and will have 2 other candidates in run-off elections, including for union president. Another opposition candidate won a Regional Director position, beating out the incumbent. Depending on the outcome of the run-off elections, it is possible that opposition candidates could control a majority of 8 positions on the 14-member union executive board.
All of the opposition candidates, in one way or another, campaigned on two main issues. They said the current leadership should be replaced because of the corruption of some of the former top UAW leaders who were convicted of misusing union dues and joint funds. And they said that they were opposed to the UAW leadership’s policies of agreeing to concessions with the auto companies.
Certainly the vote by the UAW members reflected the workers’ anger at the top leadership over both corruption and concessions. It seemed that, in many cases, the workers were voting against the top leadership as much or more so than voting for opposition candidates that they did not know or they knew little about.
But if workers want to see a different direction for the UAW, if they want to see an end to the concessions, it is important to understand what that is going to take. It will take more than new leadership. To stop concessions, it is going to take a serious fight against the auto corporations and the other companies. What happens in the future will depend, not so much on having new leadership. It will depend on the workers’ readiness to make a fight.
Dec 5, 2022
This year, half of all seniors in the U.S. will have chosen a Medicare so-called Advantage plan rather than a Medicare supplemental plan. These plans are heavily advertised on TV and by mail, and the ads stress that the plans pay for dentures and hearing aids. (Medicare was designed and passed by Congress in 1965 without dental or hearing aid coverage.) The so-called Advantage plans’ premiums are lower than supplemental Medicare plans, which helps many seniors who lack pensions.
The catch, in this capitalist society, is that these plans turn down almost one of every five claims. The ads for these disadvantage plans never mention that, nor the fat profits they make for the five largest healthcare insurers in the country, with million-dollar salaries for their CEOs. They are known to turn down the doctor or surgeon chosen by the patient, the treatment proposed and the rehab required.
The senior, on a limited budget, in a wheelchair, needing dialysis, will be turned down for transportation coverage to get to where these plans send patients. The money saved in lower premiums will be wiped out when care is really needed and the so-called advantage plan does not pay.
In addition, every government agency or business or corporation covering the healthcare of retirees is charged more for Medicare Advantage claims. This overcharge comes to billions of dollars, according to the New York Times, which recently reported NASA was overcharged by 20 billion dollars and the FBI by close to 10 billion dollars, and so on for many other government agencies.
The disadvantage plans cost ALL taxpayers extra money, because these healthcare racketeers charge more per patient to the federal government for reimbursement than do Medicare providers. Again, they get away with it thanks to lobbying politicians. When these plans began 20 years ago, they immediately charged the Medicare Trust Fund more money than did regular Medicare. The CMS, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid, already knew by 2009 about some of the dirty tricks used by insurers such as Aetna, Cigna, United Healthcare and Kaiser. A medical analyst pointed out, "even when they’re playing the game legally, we are lining the pockets of very wealthy corporations that are not improving patient care."
These insurers pressured doctors and nurses to find more diagnoses per patient in order to charge more to the fund; they would reward doctors and nurses for stating that patients were sicker; they sent out providers to diagnose people at home with cancer, which is impossible. And for such practices, a few lawsuits cost these companies a couple million dollars in fines. These are the consequences of making healthcare a for-profit business.
Dec 5, 2022
Fourteen years ago, California voters approved a bond measure to raise about 10 billion dollars for a fast train that would carry passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco in less than three hours. The California politicians who put the bond measure on the ballot advertised this project as the nation’s biggest transportation project, to be finished by 2020, at a total cost of 33 billion dollars.
It’s now two years past that deadline, and more than 10 billion dollars have been spent—but not one mile of track has been laid yet! No one even knows when it will be finished. And the latest projected cost, 113 billion dollars, is already more than three times the estimate presented to voters in 2008.
It’s not even certain if this train will ever go to Los Angeles and San Francisco. The part being built now, a 23-billion-dollar, 171-mile stretch (about one third of the initially planned 520-mile L.A.–S.F. line), is not even expected to be completed until 2030. And this line would connect only four mid-size cities in California’s agricultural Central Valley, which does not have a large population.
On top of that, this train will not be a “fast train” either, because at least one portion of it will be single-track, where trains in opposite directions will have to wait for each other—and, a 19-mile portion of it will be travelled by bus!
In short, this whole thing is a monumental fiasco, completely earning its nickname, “Train to Nowhere.” In fact, from the very beginning, this big state project was nothing but a big money grab for the big companies that lined up to contract parts of the project and the big landowners whose land was to be bought by the state to build the tracks on.
The California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA), the agency in charge of building the train, had only 180 staffers in 2019, at the same time that it was paying contractors, on average, 427,000 dollars a year per engineer, more than three times its own in-house cost of 131,000 dollars per engineer!
All work on the project, and its management, have been contracted out to private companies, with essentially no oversight by the CHSRA itself. The contractor companies themselves have hired subcontractors, and the subcontractors have hired sub-subcontractors, etc., to the point that there are five different layers of contracted work, which means usually no one knows what’s going on with the project.
Deadlines keep being pushed back, and cost overruns keep piling up, again and again. The CHSRA has not even bought all the land the rail is supposed to be built on.
High-speed rail, commonly referred to as “bullet train,” is nothing new. Such fast trains have been operating for almost 60 years, and in many countries around the world. During the past 26 years since the CHSRA was established, many countries have built entire rail systems. And yet California, which claims to be the fourth-largest economy in the world by itself, can’t even build one line.
No, California officials would rather hand out big, overblown contracts to private companies out of the tax money they collect and continue to drag this cash cow along!
Dec 5, 2022
The City of Chicago paid out 25 million dollars to settle three lawsuits for police misconduct in September. This comes in addition to over 250 million dollars paid from 2018 to 2020 for excessive force, accidents, illegal searches.
The largest settlement, 15 million, is for the family of Guadeloupe Francisco Martinez, a 37-year-old mother of six. Martinez was coming home from work in June 2020, when she collided with a police SUV going nearly a hundred miles an hour through an intersection, killing her instantly. The police were chasing an alleged carjacker. They had been ordered to terminate the chase by supervisors, before they ran a red light. High speed chases often end badly—180 chases ended in accidents just in 2019.
City lawyers settled with Anjanette Young for 2.9 million dollars this summer. Police broke into Young’s apartment in February of 2019, serving a no-knock warrant. Young was naked; an all male police team paraded before her while rummaging around her house, until they realized their informant gave them bad information.
Mayor Lightfoot’s administration attempted to block the release of video from the raid. Young has spent years fighting the city—first of all just to bring the raid to light. She pushed a reform in City Council that would ban no-knock warrants, and would prohibit police from pointing guns at children. Lightfoot’s allies in the city council blocked that ordinance in the beginning of November.
The city paid the family of LaQuan McDonald 5 million dollars, months before video of his murder at the hands of police officer Jason Van Dyke was forced into the public eye.
These payouts are an admission of guilt by the city. The politicians who run Chicago pay victims some blood money, for some of the dirty work of the police that comes to light. But no change, no real reform ever takes place. That’s because the bourgeoisie needs the police to be brutal and unrestrained. The bourgeoisie rules over a brutally exploitative, racist society—they need police unfettered to impose their order.
Dec 5, 2022
Staughton Lynd, activist, writer, and lawyer, recently died, aged 92. His many decades of activism included teaching, union organizing and writing. He served in the Korean War as a conscientious objector. The army discharged him dishonorably because he had been active in left organizations in college. He believed Yale University, which hired him to teach history, got rid of him for his beliefs.
Lynd at different times called himself a socialist and a pacifist. Whatever the labels, he wanted to make a difference. He and his wife Alice lived for a few months in a Quaker commune. He taught history at Spelman, a black college in the south. Southern civil rights organizers made him the coordinator for education during the Mississippi Freedom Summer, the summer of 1964, when three other white activists were murdered there.
Perhaps his lasting legacy was not the issues he protested but the testimonials he gathered from others active. He and his wife put together Rank and File, with the activists of the 1930s. In their own words, these militants spoke of experiences of fighting the bosses to change the world. These are experiences younger people would have little idea of. He and his wife also interviewed activists against the Vietnam war in their book called We Won’t Go. Again, knowing such history could help new generations become active.
In the 1930s and the 1960s, protesters and organizers not only risked beatings, jails and layoffs, they risked death. The KKK was particularly vicious to union organizers in the 1920s and 1930s.
In a 2010 interview, Lynd, asked why he was still active, replied, “At age 16 and 17, I wanted to find a way to change the world, just as I do at age 79.”
The world has need of many more who want to change it by acting on their beliefs. Such determined people are the key to changing this unjust and unequal world we live in.
Dec 5, 2022
The owner of Fox News in Maryland had an idea: since he did not like the politicians in Baltimore City, why not get everyone to vote to get rid of them with term limits? Proposition K went into the 2022 elections with a ton of money and advertising behind it, and it passed. From now on the mayor, the Baltimore City Council president, city council members and the comptroller, will be limited to two terms, that is, eight years.
The president of the Baltimore City Council had a prompt response after the election results: he proposed the city council vote themselves a FULL pension after the eight years.
The city solicitor raised that this might be a tiny legal conflict of interest, that the very people who benefit from this pension would be voting to give it to themselves. The city council members did indeed vote themselves a FULL pension after eight years. The mayor jumped in a few days later to veto it.
Very smelly-looking to vote themselves a pension after eight years, when the majority of city residents have NO pensions and the ones who get pensions have to wait 25 or 30 years to get one!
Dec 5, 2022
What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all Lutte Ouvrière’s workplace newsletters, during the week of November 28, 2022.
Capitalism has turned sport, and soccer in particular, into a big money business. Clubs, sponsors and even players make millions. Each global competition brings billions into play, which end up in the coffers of cement companies, sports gear manufacturers, television channels, advertisers, hotel chains, etc.
All this has been known for a long time. But the fact that the World Cup is being held in Qatar this year has taken this capitalist logic to new heights of crassness and absurdity.
Qatar was created by British imperialism. Its borders were established in the mid-1930s, after the first oil fields were discovered. They were drawn to ensure the control of Western oil companies over the region’s hydrocarbons.
The keys to these very profitable wells were then entrusted to the al-Thani clan, a dynasty still in power. Oil companies such as Total continue to profit from it and the princely family is now at the head of an investment fund worth more than 400 billion dollars.
Awarding the World Cup hosting rights to Qatar was a guaranteed jackpot for FIFA and for all the capitalists looking for good deals. No wonder French politicians Sarkozy and Platini lobbied for the World Cup to be held in Qatar rather than the United States!
For the French bourgeoisie, of which Qatar is a major partner, it was even ideal. The deal between France and Qatar included the purchase of several Rafale aircraft manufactured by Dassault, for over six billion euros.
But the deal has also offered golden opportunities to Vinci, Eiffage, Bouygues, Saint-Gobain, Accor and Thales. And it did not disappoint, because Qatar has paid big bucks! The country is said to have spent 220 billion dollars, when the World Cup in Russia only cost 14 billion.
The emirate has built roads, a new city and seven magnificent stadiums out of the desert sands, all of which will probably go unused after the tournament. And since it does not have the hotel capacity to accommodate all the fans, it has arranged daily round-trip flights with Kuwait and Abu Dhabi.
At a time when world leaders are calling on people to make sacrifices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and when the world is sinking into war and climate crisis and some countries into famine, all this is absurd and revolting.
"It was necessary to give the Cup to the Arab world," said FIFA. What a joke! FIFA doesn’t do anyone favors.
It has sold the Cup to a petro-monarchy where the needs and lifestyle of the 350,000 Qatari citizens are provided for by two million foreign workers from India, Nepal, Bangladesh and the Philippines.
As for Qatar, it doesn’t give a damn about the populations of the Arab world! For Emir al-Thani and his clan, Egyptians, Syrians, Iraqis and Sudanese are above all exploitation fodder. He also rules with an iron fist over the inhabitants of his own country, relying on a rigorous practice of Islam to oppress women and persecute homosexuals.
As always, it is the workers and the poorest among them who suffer the most ferocious dictatorship. In Qatar, the workers who have built this paradise for princes and the jet set are deprived of their rights. Their working conditions illustrate what wage slavery is, in the original sense of the word.
Indebted and threatened with eviction at the slightest protest, workers are forced to work in temperatures of over 104 degrees Fahrenheit, sometimes 12 hours a day, seven days a week, sometimes with rationed food and water. All this to earn 200 to 300 dollars per month, that is, if their boss doesn’t disappear into the desert when it’s time to pay the long-awaited salary!
According to an investigation by The Guardian, more than 6,500 workers have died in Qatar over the last ten years, while the country has only officially acknowledged three work-related deaths! Nepalese, Indian and Egyptian workers have been victims not only of a medieval labor law that chains the worker to his boss, but also of the rapacity of the capitalists of our country.
Soccer, the players and the fans have nothing to do with all these horrors. It’s the profits made by Vinci, Bouygues, Thales and Alstom that are red with the blood of the workers who died on these building sites. Capitalism “was born sweating blood and mud from all its pores”, wrote Karl Marx. The way this World Cup is organized shows how true this still is.
Nathalie Arthaud
Dec 5, 2022
The beautiful multi-colored team outfits and shoes for the World Cup come mainly from Nike, a U.S. company, and Adidas, a German company.
Both, of course, sub-contract the vast amount of their manufacturing to the countries of South Asia, especially China and Vietnam. But a recent report on World Cup merchandise said Myanmar, the military dictatorship once known as Burma, is paying its garment workers sewing World Cup merchandise less than $60 per month.
Perhaps Myanmar is the worst, but then a few years ago South Korean garment manufacturers were accused of using slave labor from the Uighur area, a Muslim part of China, to make sportswear for World Cup soccer leagues.
By sub-contracting like this, all the companies claim their hands are clean. If workers make starvation wages, if factory conditions lead to fires killing thousands, as happened in Pakistan and Bangladesh recently, it’s not THEIR fault, it’s the fault of the sub-contractors.
But soccer is hardly the only place where all the profits end in the owners’ dirty hands. Nike also supplies the jerseys and footwear for half the NCAA basketball teams and half of the Division 1 football teams.
Major league baseball used to get its equipment from workers making starvation wages in Haiti. When political unrest broke out there, the suppliers moved their equipment manufacturing to Costa Rica. One company has a monopoly on making MLB balls, for which Costa Rican workers are lucky if they make $400 per month (less than $100 per week). These balls are sold to fans with team authentication for about $100 each.
One of many profitable businesses for the rich world’s relaxation.
Dec 5, 2022
NBA star Kyrie Irving posted a link to the Amazon site for a movie, Hebrews to Negroes, that claims that the Holocaust was a lie, modern Jews are linked to Satan worship, and that they aren’t real Jews—that instead, they are a conspiracy bent on world domination.
None of this is true: the Nazis murdered about six million Jews in one of the most well-documented atrocities in history, and there is no Jewish conspiracy to run the world. But Irving is not the only one putting out these ideas. In addition to the rantings of Ye (formerly Kanye West), various versions of antisemitic (anti-Jewish) ideas seem to be circulating with increasing frequency throughout society.
Antisemitism has been called “the socialism of fools,” because it is a way to explain the problems of capitalism by pointing to one small group. It works because even though Jewish people never formed the most powerful layer of the ruling class in any country (until the founding of Israel), many Jews have occupied a position within capitalist society that has pitted them against the poorest layers of the population. For this reason, antisemitism has long been useful for the capitalist class, especially in times of crisis.
In the Middle Ages, when the church barred Christians from loaning money at interest, some Jews found a way to become rich by playing this role within the developing capitalist economy. As soon as banking became a highly profitable, important part of the European economy, the church took away that restriction and Christians took over the highest levels of banking. But the reputation stuck. The ruling classes of Europe soon found Jews a convenient scapegoat when people in the countryside threatened to revolt.
In Russia, the Czarist government organized groups that said, in effect: the government isn’t the problem, the landlords aren’t the problem, the businesses aren’t the problem—it’s the Jews! These groups organized pogroms, or riots, in which thousands of Jewish people were murdered.
The Czarist government wrote a forgery that still circulates, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, pretending that it was written by a Jewish conspiracy to run the world. During the Russian Revolution, the counterrevolutionary armies even claimed the workers’ revolution was really a Jewish conspiracy, and again carried out mass murder of Jewish people.
It was this idea that Hitler eventually played on in Germany, blaming the population’s problems on a conspiracy of Jewish bankers and communists, instead of the German capitalists who actually ran that society. This eventually led to the attempt to kill all of Europe’s Jews in the Holocaust.
Some Jewish businesspeople were also counterposed to black people in the U.S., setting the stage for antisemitism in the black population. Many black neighborhoods in the northern cities had previously been Jewish neighborhoods. Most Jewish people moved out of those areas as black people moved in, but some kept ownership of apartment buildings and little stores. Jews did not set up slavery, Jim Crow, or segregation in the North, but some of them profited from it, overcharging black renters and shoppers who could not go elsewhere.
So while few Jews occupied the highest levels of U.S. capitalism, they formed an easy—and understandable—target for some of the anger of the black population.
Here, as in Europe, antisemitism has been useful for the ruling class. Henry Ford himself famously pushed that same conspiracy-theory forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Some of the richest people in the country today funnel money to far-right groups and websites that push antisemitic ideas, as well as anti-black racism. As Kyrie Irving himself pointed out, the Amazon corporation distributes the antisemitic video he linked to.
We are again in a time of crisis because the basic operation of capitalism is in decay. But no one outside a tiny handful of socialists and communists points out the real cause of this decay. Instead, this system destroying our living standards and threatening the world with war and environmental collapse is defended by the “mainstream media” and by the politicians of both parties. And so, people looking for an explanation for humanity’s problems can be pulled into conspiracy theories that seem to explain what’s happening—and some version of antisemitism still lurks at the bottom of nearly every conspiracy theory rabbit hole.
This only serves the capitalist class. The problem of capitalism is not a Jewish problem, any more than it’s a Christian problem. Jews may have been disproportionately in certain branches of business, but they were also disproportionately in the socialist and communist movements that sought to overthrow capitalism and put the working class in power, and they formed a disproportionate share of the white people in the Civil Rights movement.
In the long run, the only antidote for “the socialism of fools” in this society in decay is the socialism of the working class, organizing itself against its real enemy, the capitalist class.
Dec 5, 2022
Despite all the talk of the NATO alliance, the war in Ukraine has done nothing to slow the rivalry between U.S. and European companies. Instead, U.S. companies, backed by the U.S. government, are taking advantage of the war to push their advantage.
U.S. defense contractors obviously profit by selling weapons to the U.S. government, which the U.S. then gives to the Ukrainian military. But even the military aid provided to Ukraine by European countries like Germany and France often takes the form of purchases from giant U.S. companies. The war has also served as the excuse for the U.S. to push these countries to increase their own military budgets. While they have their own military industries, the U.S. is by far the dominant world player when it comes to selling weapons. So these increased military budgets will likely mean more cash flowing out of Europe and into the pockets of U.S. capitalists.
It’s not just military companies profiting. Before the invasion of Ukraine, the European countries got the bulk of the natural gas they use for heating, cooking, and energy production from Russia. In addition to the disruptions of war itself, the European countries have been moving to stop buying gas from Russia. And so, these countries have increasingly turned instead to buy liquified natural gas from U.S. oil companies. But the price Europeans pay for this gas is about four times what the same fuel costs in the U.S. This directly profits the U.S. companies that sell the gas, and it also gives U.S. factories an advantage since the price they pay for energy is so much less than their European rivals.
One U.S. official pointed out that companies reselling gas within Europe also make huge profits from importing and distributing natural gas, like France’s TotalEnergies, the biggest European importer of U.S. gas. True enough—there are sharks on both sides of the pond! But that doesn’t change the fact that the balance of economic power is swinging even more toward U.S. capital.
And despite all the talk of the European alliance, the U.S. government is reinforcing this swing. What the Biden Administration coyly termed the “Inflation Reduction Act” was really a package of many billions of dollars of subsidies to U.S. corporations. These subsidies give U.S. companies one more advantage against their European rivals, something the Europeans are well aware of. The Dutch Trade Minister said, "The Inflation Reduction Act is very worrying. The potential impact on the European economy is very big." The French Economy Minister even urged the EU to approve its own raft of subsidies to compete with the U.S., pointing out "We are in a world of power struggles."
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, economic rivalry accelerated to a trade war among the major imperialist countries. Not only did the reduction in trade lead to even more factory closures and job losses around the world, but it was also an important step on the road to World War II. We may be far from another war among the world’s major imperialist powers—but the unending rivalry among capitalist sharks, each looking to take maximum advantage of any weakness among their rivals, keeps such a possibility on the table, so long as these capitalist sharks continue to run the world.
Dec 5, 2022
Since early October, workers at the world’s largest iPhone factory in Zhengzhou, China, have been fighting over unfulfilled contracts and promises over wages and benefits, the danger of COVID spreading in the factory, rigid COVID quarantine enforcements and lockdowns, crammed dormitories, and worry over finding food under the quarantine lockdowns. As the contractor for Apple, Foxconn employs up to 300,000 workers at full production capacity in this factory to manufacture more than half the world’s iPhones.
This compound resembles a vast work prison for the workers. Under a so-called “closed-loop” production system due to the COVID pandemic, Foxconn requires these workers to work and live in the Zhengzhou manufacturing compound, which includes dormitories, shops, and cafeterias. Because of the COVID epidemic, Foxconn forced a lockdown on workers, requiring daily COVID tests and preventing workers from leaving the compound.
When COVID started to spread among the workers and Foxconn imposed lockdowns over them, tens of thousands of Foxconn workers fled the compound in late October, fearing that they would get trapped and die in the compound. Some escaped on foot and walked to their homes, tens of miles away, because the government stopped or restricted public transportation.
Foxconn normally pays $3.30 an hour. To recruit and retain new workers, Foxconn promised $5.00 an hour, or $3,500 for two months of work. Foxconn has also promised allowances, including a retention bonus of up to $1,100 to keep working until March, and a bonus of up to $1,375 to meet production quotas in December. These wages are miserly even at these “jacked-up” levels, considering that the iPhones these workers produce each easily pull in more than $1,000 for Apple.
But Foxconn’s promises did not work. Some workers saw Foxconn cut their allowances. Others doubted that they would ever get these promised bonuses. In the past, Foxconn many times promised to give such allowances, but the workers had to revolt to get them. So, the workers have every reason not to trust Foxconn now.
The Foxconn workers also faced more dire conditions. Foxconn crammed eight people into each dormitory room. And it forced some recruits to share their rooms with known COVID-19 patients. Workers described food shortages and the fear of being at Foxconn’s mercy for necessities, according to the New York Times.
“They changed the contract so that we could not get the subsidy as they had promised. They quarantine us but don’t provide food,” said one Foxconn worker. “Everyone in the dormitory wants to quit,” said another.
Fights broke out between protesting workers and security forces at the factory. The workers kicked down barriers and dismantled COVID testing kiosks. The Chinese government brought an army of cops against the workers, but the workers didn’t stop. To quell the revolt, Foxconn lifted the COVID lockdown and offered up to $1,400 to the workers who chose to leave.
The Foxconn factory needed 100,000 new workers to resume full production capacity. Local government authorities started to recruit People’s Liberation Army veterans, Chinese Communist Party members, and civil servants to “form teams” and join Foxconn’s assembly lines for at least a month. So, the Chinese government effectively acted like a strikebreaker.
Apple is one of the world’s most profitable companies. Apple’s China sales snowballed during the pandemic, and Apple now skims off more profit than the combined income of China’s two biggest tech companies, Alibaba and Tencent, according to the Financial Times. Apple reached this “success” on the backs of Foxconn workers who risk their lives for miserly wages. Workers will get their relief, pay, and benefits only through such revolts.
Dec 5, 2022
This article is translated from the Nov. 30th issue, #2834 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
In China, on the weekend of November 26 and 27, picking up the baton from the Foxconn workers’ revolt, thousands of demonstrators in at least a dozen cities and in universities protested not only against the government’s zero-Covid policy, but also against its dictatorship.
The death of ten people in a burning building in Urumqi, the Uyghur capital of Xinjiang, gave new impetus to this protest movement. Like tens of millions of Chinese at the moment, the inhabitants of Urumqi have been confined under quarantine, for more than a hundred days. The health restrictions are such that the authorities chain the doors of the buildings to prevent people from leaving. For many Chinese, it was these obstacles to the arrival of help that caused the death of the ten residents of the building. After the fire, thousands revolted, taking to the streets of Urumqi and forcing the local government to announce an easing of constraints.
The Chinese government seems to be at an impasse. It sticks to its zero-Covid policy made of cynical and brutal confinements, which it imposes with its authoritarian traditions, because the coronavirus epidemic is on the rise again while few of the elders are vaccinated, and those who are vaccinated received inferior vaccines. If they were decimated by disease, it would pose other political problems for those in power. But the challenge now goes beyond the zero-Covid policy. Like a drop of water overflowing a vase that is too full, the tragedy in Urumqi has brought out hundreds of demonstrators in large cities like Beijing or Guangzhou, even thousands in Shanghai, and in universities. The demonstrators defied the regime and its police, brandishing blank pieces of white paper against the dictatorship, singing the Internationale or the Chinese anthem which begins with “Stand up! people who no longer want to be slaves,” and shouting slogans like “Xi Jinping, resign” and “Down with the Chinese Communist Party.”
All this underlines the crisis that society is going through, including layers of the petty bourgeoisie, the intellectual workers or those who aspire to rise socially. Economic development, which could allow youth to think that they could get rich, is at half-mast. Unemployment, especially among young graduates, has soared. The real estate crisis is a disaster for those who had invested in an apartment as insurance for their old age. Added to this is the concern of part of the youth in the face of rising tensions with the United States, or the nationalist and war- mongering speeches toward Taiwan.
Young people, often described as resigned and individualistic, have made this the first protest of their lives. These demonstrations, which took place across the whole country, are a first since 1989 and the revolt then crushed in blood on Tiananmen Square. They were preceded by protests from the workers imprisoned in the prison-factories a few days earlier. Xi Jinping, who at the 20th Congress of the CCP wanted to assert himself as the sole master of Chinese policy, naturally becomes their target.
On Sunday, November 27 and Monday, November 28, the government arrested many demonstrators. On Monday the 28th, government forces occupied the locations of demonstration to prohibit any gathering. Censorship on social networks has reasserted itself. Power tries to close the lid. But the power is faced with the youth whose future is blocked and above all faced with the Chinese working class, hundreds of millions strong organized in giant factories. They alone would have the means to offer a perspective to the revolt, although there is no guarantee that it will succeed.
Dec 5, 2022
What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters, during the week of November 28, 2022.
Republicans used their part of the 16.7 billion to attack the Democrats, blaming them for the economy’s problems. Democrats used their billions to attack the Republicans for tearing up a woman’s right to choose abortion.
It’s true the Democrats controlled the levers of federal government power while the economy was going haywire. It’s also true that Republicans used their power in the courts and state legislatures to tear up women’s right to choose abortion.
But putting the two parties back in power doesn’t mean these problems will be dealt with.
To deal with inflation and other problems of the economy, the capitalists’ mad chase after profit has to be dealt with. Profit is what tears the economy to pieces, causes inflation, squeezes the last drop of money out of public services and schools, and turns the whole economy into a wildly-swerving, driverless car, riding roughshod over the population.
The capitalist mad rush to make profit off of our labor has to be taken away from them. But neither party has ever tried to do that—not even proposed it.
As for the right to abortion, what protection came out of this election? Yes, in Michigan a constitutional amendment was put on the ballot to leave the choice for abortion up to a woman and her doctor. And the amendment passed.
But the Democrats weren’t the ones who got it passed. They just rode the tail of a popular mobilization that did the work, using it to put themselves in office in Michigan.
That wide mobilization of people, women and men, scoured the state, getting over 750,000 signatures to put the amendment on the ballot. They were the ones who made sure that people came out to vote for it, talking to neighbors, co-workers, friends, long-lost friends, family, people on the street, going door to door ....
Many women must have felt relief the amendment passed. But no right is permanent, no right guaranteed. The courts once declared that Roe v. Wade guaranteed women the right to choose an abortion. But it never did, not now, not 10 years ago, not 20 years ago, not 49 years ago when Roe v. Wade was issued. Both parties have been voting to legally restrict that right ever since. But it’s worse. In this capitalist society which puts a price on everything, a woman has never had the full right to choose abortion if she couldn’t find a way to pay for it.
The only way any one has ever had rights is by fighting to impose them.
Elections are over—the two parties now go back to rearrange their seats in the new Congress. But just as in the old Congress, they will both work to defend the one right they both respect: the right of the capitalists to make a profit.
The election didn’t change that. What will change the situation is the decision that workers make to fight for their wages to keep up with inflation and to fight to make sure that the whole next generation, all of their kids, get jobs.
What will give us rights is the decision that any part of the population makes to mobilize to get basic human rights denied to them.
Working people have the power to do this. The working class, sitting in the center of the economy, can tear up the capitalists’ hold over the economy, which those greedy vultures use to steal wealth from the workers’ labor.
Power resides in the center of the economy, and the working class occupies it every day.
From that power can come a new society, one where profit doesn’t stain everything. In such a society, there will be no need for a “struggle for survival.” Everyone will respect everyone else.
In this way, we all finally can have what we today call our human rights.
Dec 5, 2022
Docuseries: FIFA Uncovered, 2022, four episodes on Netflix
This documentary mini-series premiered just days before the World Cup began in Qatar. Billions of people watch this international sporting soccer competition, but few know what goes on behind the scenes. This series carefully exposes the bribes, corruption, power struggles and more that have gone on for decades.
FIFA is theoretically a nonprofit organization, but the sport generates billions. The money is supposed to go back to the participating countries for player development, but with no oversight or accountability, it was used instead to enrich the managers of FIFA.
Host countries and FIFA presidents are chosen according to who paid the biggest bribes. Unsafe working conditions for migrant workers are business as usual. The series reveals how dozens of these corrupt managers were finally arrested and charged in 2015, but asks, has anything really changed?
Documentary Movie: God Forbid, the Sex Scandal that Brought Down a Dynasty, 2022, directed by Billy Corbin
This movie is not just about a sex scandal. It is about a famous evangelist, Jerry Falwell Jr., and his father, the equally famous Jerry Falwell Sr., and how they influenced religious and political life in the U.S. for decades. It focuses on the incredible power of Jerry Falwell Jr. while running Liberty University and how he used that position to advocate what he said were “correct moral stands,” like endorsing Donald Trump for president, or fighting to outlaw abortion.
As the film reveals, he used his position to enrich himself and to pleasure himself, a predator preaching morality all the while wallowing in wealth and lust. He convinced multitudes to follow his rules while he laughed all the way to the bank.
Dec 5, 2022
In its mad chase after profits, a major food-processing services company is using children, ranging in age from 13 to 17, to clean slaughterhouse floors and operate hazardous equipment, including power-driven grinders and bone-cutting saws. The children work the “graveyard” shift without proper training on equipment or the hazardous chemicals they are required to use.
Recent reports have exposed the barbaric workplace practices of Packers Sanitation Service, Inc, or PSSI. The company, owned by Blackstone Inc, a huge multi-billion-dollar investment firm, has 17,000 employees and cleans 700 food processing plants nationwide.
On-going investigations reveal that a minimum of 31 children at three facilities in Nebraska and Minnesota are suffering this abuse. However, investigators say they now expect at least 400 other sites are using child workers in a similar manner.
Several of the children were injured in various ways while on the job. The most common were chemical burns. A 13-year-old child received the most serious chemical burns.
In interviews, the children said their shifts start at 11 pm and end at 5, 6, or 7 am. Some work 6 or 7 days per week. Some go directly to school after their shift while fatigued from overwork and fall asleep during class, if they are able to show up in school at all.
As these horrific reports surfaced, PSSI moved quickly to thwart the collection of evidence. Managers attempted to hide and destroy documents, including work-related text messages and accident reports. Investigation interviews with child employees were obstructed and the children were intimidated by management while they were in progress.
Despite a growing mountain of evidence, PSSI cynically denies that it hires children, and said it was "surprised" by the reports because it has a corporate “ethics policy” that would exclude such hiring of children. They say that if children are working at their facilities, it’s because of "rogue individuals," guilty of fraud or identity theft. Thus, callously pointing the finger of blame at the abused children themselves!
PSSI has a long history of dangerous work practices and horrendous working conditions. A 2017 study found that PSSI had some of the worst rates of workplace injuries in the country. A 2022 report of a watchdog group reported that since 2018 the company was investigated for four employee amputations and three deaths, including one decapitation. The report says: "PSSI stood out as a particularly dangerous workplace with one of the highest numbers of serious injury reports compared to its relatively small number of employees."
But despite the horrific working conditions uncovered over the years and federal and state laws that supposedly protect workers from workplace hazards and abuse, the greedy vultures at PSSI continued and expanded its abusive practices to further maximize corporate profits. Token financial penalties imposed on the company by federal or state agencies, a mere slap on the wrist, only served to embolden PSSI to continue down its path of abuse.
Regardless of which capitalist party controls these government agencies, they will do nothing that significantly impedes the profit objectives of the corporate bosses they serve. That is their first priority.
Dec 5, 2022
Nancy Pelosi is leaving her position as Speaker of the House, but keeping her California Congressional seat, following the 2022 election results.
When she made the announcement, the news media was filled with praise for a woman’s successful leadership. It’s note-worthy because few women are allowed into positions of leadership.
When she was elected Speaker of the House in 2006, she was the first woman to obtain the position. At the time, she said it was a step forward following many years of women’s struggles. Indeed, it took more than 200 years for the men of Congress to recognize a woman could have leadership qualities.
Since then, many nasty women-hating remarks were thrown at her, some by elected officials. In 2016, she warned other women in Congress that they faced what she had—numerous threatening and obscene phone calls and Internet attacks. A few weeks ago, her husband was viciously beaten with a hammer by an intruder to their home asking, “Where’s Nancy?”
On the one hand, she showed leadership, voting for the rights of women to a legal abortion, the rights of gay people to wed, pushing through the watered-down Affordable Care Act. On the other hand, she is typical of many in Congress. She got her start in a political family, as her father was elected to Congress, and then as mayor of Baltimore.
Her husband has been for years a very successful real estate and venture capitalist. Pelosi herself is estimated as one of the ten richest people in Congress. The right wing was willing to attack her for buying and selling stocks, at a time when Congress was considering regulations for that industry. In this matter, Democrats and Republicans act exactly the same. They all made money on the oil and gas industry, with no slaps on the wrist for the tax breaks Congress gave that enriched shareholders for the last 100 years.
If she voiced opposition to the Iraq war, she did not stop the billions of dollars sent out to contractors to make money off it and in the Afghanistan war. She agreed to continue the Bush tax breaks, even if she opposed some of the Trump tax breaks. That’s politics.
When it comes down to it, no matter how liberal or progressive some politicians are on social matters, they support this capitalist economy. Pelosi opposed a proposal to stop elected representatives from buying and selling stocks while in office. As she put it, it’s a “free market economy,” and they should also be able to benefit from it.
Nancy Pelosi truly was “top of her class"—for the capitalist class!