the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Jun 12, 2023
In large parts of the Northeast and Midwest, from Minneapolis to Detroit to New York, from Boston to Baltimore, there was literally no air to breathe—only smoke. The sky was covered with an orange/brownish tint that, by now, residents of arid western states are familiar with: the toxic smoke from wildfires that no one can escape completely—not even indoors.
For several days last week, millions of people in the lush, green East and Midwest have also inhaled that noxious wildfire smoke, and a lot of it. For one particular day, New York and Philadelphia actually registered the WORST air quality of all major cities in the whole world!
The smoke was coming from the many large, out-of-control forest fires in Canada. The winds carried tons and tons of smoke down south, and then also east and west across many U.S. states.
Experts say that, of all types of particulate air pollution, wildfire smoke is one of the most toxic. People with certain respiratory ailments, such as asthma, suffer the worst. For them, and for people with heart disease and high blood pressure, this kind of pollution can be deadly. But in healthy people also, particulate pollution can cause cancer, miscarriages and premature births. It makes everybody’s life less healthy, and shorter.
The huge, long-lasting wildfires that cause this deadly pollution are a sign of our times. As the earth’s average temperature rises, extreme weather events become more severe, and more frequent. Hotter, drier air causes more wildfires.
It’s the climate change that scientists predicted, and warned about, decades ago. There will be more catastrophic weather events for us in the future. A warmer earth will give us more hurricanes, more floods, more droughts, more wildfires. And the warmer the earth gets, the more severe, the more catastrophic these weather events are becoming.
There is no doubt that the ongoing warming of the earth is driven by human activity—by the increased amount of carbon dioxide gas in the earth’s atmosphere, a result of burning coal, oil and natural gas for energy. Just this last week, scientists at the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration announced that the carbon dioxide levels in the air are now higher than they have been in more than four million years.
Wildfires and the air pollution they cause—and behind them climate change—are not the problem of one city, one region, one country. Air moves unhindered across neighborhoods, cities, the countryside, and across national borders.
So, climate change is a problem that concerns all of us, ALL human beings. But it’s obvious that today’s world leaders are simply incapable of solving this problem.
For half a century now, governments have been organizing yearly climate conferences, pretending to find ways to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. But carbon dioxide levels in the air have only kept increasing. And the increase has in fact been happening even faster in recent years.
It’s not that we don’t know what needs to be done. We, today’s human society, have the knowledge and technology to develop solutions to the warming of the earth and to carry them out. But we don’t even get to work on this problem, because today’s decision-makers on how energy is generated, distributed and used—big capitalists—are concerned with only one thing: their own profit.
We no longer can wait. How many more suffocating wildfires, destructive hurricanes, devastating floods can we suffer through? Not to mention all the other disasters this capitalist society throws workers into: unemployment, poverty, addiction, wars.
Today’s ruling class, the capitalist class, is only capable of leading us down the path to total catastrophe. The power to make the decisions affecting society’s future has to be taken away from them.
There is a social class that’s capable of doing that: the working class. It’s because workers produce all the society’s wealth. The wealth that the capitalist class grabs only for itself, which it uses to establish its control over the whole society.
Workers can take back the wealth we ourselves produce and use it to begin to solve the dire problems we all face. But we can do that only when we, collectively as a class, step up and take the lead—to run society for the benefit of all human beings, not just a tiny, privileged minority.
Jun 12, 2023
Former President Trump faces indictment on Tuesday, June 13, that he withheld classified documents when first the Archives, and then the FBI, asked for them back from his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.
Apparently some officials at high levels of government are worried that the wrong people could find out classified secrets about U.S. enemies and allies, what the U.S. government really thinks about leaders, or what the U.S. government really wants to do—all the things the population never hears about until much later.
Remember the Iraq war and the Bush administration’s lies about “weapons of mass destruction"? The Bush administration was determined to go to war with Saddam Hussein and too bad if the population did not like the idea, nor want to pay for it in money and soldiers’ lives.
Maybe the Democratic Party leaders are happy that indictments against Trump could in some way upset his election next year. Maybe some among Republican Party leaders would like to see Trump not able to win the election next year as well. But this circus is not about justice nor about the population having democratic choices during elections. (We never do!)
Jun 12, 2023
When prices for everything we need really started skyrocketing about two years ago, the companies, politicians, and media gave a bunch of excuses. They said the pandemic had created supply chain problems. They said oil and food prices were up because of the war in Ukraine. They even tried to blame rising wages.
Well, oil prices and the basic prices of food ingredients have come back down. Any supply problems from the pandemic are over. Any wage increases workers got didn’t nearly keep up with rising prices. And guess what—the companies continue to jack up the price of almost everything we buy!
The truth is, companies increased prices in order to increase profits. As an economist working for hedge funds put it, companies “had a perfectly good excuse to go ahead and raise prices. Everybody knew that the war in Ukraine was inflationary, that grain prices were going up, blah, blah, blah. And they just took advantage of that.”
PepsiCo is a good example. The company reported that they increased the prices of drinks and snacks by an average of 16% in the first three months of 2023, after increasing them by a similar amount at the end of 2022. This was much more than any increase in the prices they had to pay for ingredients: the government’s official measure of the prices companies have to pay to suppliers showed an increase of only 2.3% this April compared to last April.
With the prices they charge going up much more than the prices they pay, Pepsi’s profits were also way up. And the same is true for most other big companies selling the things we want and need.
They can get away with it because just a few companies dominate most industries, even food. Pepsi owns Lays, Doritos, Cheetos, Fritos, Ruffles, Tostitos and many other brands. The stores where most people shop barely sell any other snack foods! So Pepsi can increase prices—and it is hard for workers in most places to find alternatives to their products.
Corporations exist for one reason—to maximize their profits. And that comes at workers’ expense, both on the job and in the grocery store!
Jun 12, 2023
In 2017, workers organized by the Teamsters in Washington State struck a concrete company called Glacier Northwest. There was wet concrete in some trucks, which had to be thrown out.
The company sued the union, claiming workers had timed the strike so that the company would lose money.
After Washington State courts ruled in the union’s favor, the U.S. Supreme Court took up this case. At the beginning of June, it ruled in favor of the company. Eight of the nine justices agreed to make the Teamsters pay damages—including Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, two of the supposed “liberals” on the court.
In the 1930s, in the face of a massive workers movement, the government passed a series of laws that made it possible to strike legally—though only under certain very particular conditions. These laws were aimed at reining in the workers movement, keeping it within bounds that would not threaten the capitalist system and boxing in the new and growing unions by giving them a narrow legal path to strike.
Ever since then, the government has been further limiting the already very limited legal right to strike, step by step. With this decision, the Supreme Court has taken a big step toward throwing it out altogether.
To launch any kind of effective fight on the scale that is needed, workers will have to go past the legal framework “granted” by the government. When workers do so, they will have to be ready to face not just the corporations, but also the government that works in the corporations’ interests.
Jun 12, 2023
Organizers of the Detroit Grand Prix forecasted that the event will have a 77 million dollar impact on the city’s economy. Supposedly the city’s hotels, restaurants, and bars benefited from people attending the race.
It remains to be seen how much that will benefit residents of the city. One byproduct of the event was increased water use that contributed to almost 40 water main breaks in the city, which is unusually high, according to Gary Brown, the director of the Detroit Water and Sewage Department.
Maybe they can put some of that money toward fixing the water system. Don’t hold your breath, though!
Jun 12, 2023
One out of five assaults in this country targets gay and transgender people. In the past two years, at least 15 states have passed laws preventing some health care for gay or transgender people. Only six months ago, five people were murdered in a shooting at a gay bar in Florida.
And twelve states still have laws on the books to criminalize sexual acts between consenting adults. Two states recently passed laws banning books in schools or libraries with openly gay characters or books that talk about the discrimination against them.
Although the majority in this country have supported laws to allow same-sex marriage, a minority insults, degrades and criminalizes LGBTQ people and denies them their basic human rights.
Where does this push toward a less tolerant society come from? First, tolerance has not always been the norm. It took more than 100 years and decades of fighting for black people to gain the voting rights they were guaranteed after the Civil War. The black movement of the 1950s and 60s inspired the women’s movement, and also movements for gay rights, Native American rights and an anti-Viet Nam war movement.
That period of tolerating differences ended when the economic situation began to slide downhill. Since the 1970s, at least two generations of working people have seen their standard of living decline, their wages eaten up by rising costs, their children unable to find good-paying jobs with benefits. More intolerance is one result.
Politicians have pushed to make divisive strategies work for them, appealing to voters with religious right-wing rhetoric against gays, against black people, against immigrants, against women.
A Lutheran minister imprisoned by the Nazis wrote after World War II on how divisions prevent us from defending ourselves:
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a socialist.
“Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a trade unionist.
“Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Jew.
“Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
Jun 12, 2023
The three-and-a-half foot wide pipe carrying sewage from northwest of Baltimore City, under Lake Roland and the Jones Falls creek and into the city to join the main sewer line, is in desperate need of repair. The 70-year-old pipe is also seriously overburdened by the increasing sewage load from more and more suburban developments. A sewer feeding the pipe near the lake has more than 500 defects and keeps flooding when more than seven times the volume it was designed to handle comes through. For years, E. coli bacteria has been found in the lake.
Baltimore County has not met its federal obligation, negotiated in 2005, to renovate the pipe, just as Baltimore City has not met its promise from 2002 to fix the main sewer line. Politicians are quick to offer tax breaks and all kinds of incentives to developers, but when people’s toilets and basements flood, the politicians say they have no money for the infrastructure.
Capitalist society has known how to handle sewage for decades now. But they chose to put the money necessary for repairs into profit ventures. And our streets are flowing with the result!
Jun 12, 2023
Five Washington, D.C. firefighters sued the city in early June for failing to fund pensions for them. Around 20 years ago the city merged its firefighting and emergency medical services. At that time, city paramedics or emergency medical technicians (EMTs) had only a retirement savings plan like a 401(k) for public employees. They were told if they got training in firefighting, the money would be transferred into a regular pension. But now they have learned the city spent the money on equipment and other expenses instead. Some have worked for well over 30 years, but the chief told them they have to work for another 15 years to earn a pension!
The city’s word means nothing, not even for the “first responders” they always pretend to honor.
Jun 12, 2023
Public high school seniors are being charged mandatory fees to participate in graduation at a number of schools in Montgomery County, Maryland, and elsewhere in the state and country. Students at John F. Kennedy High School in Silver Spring have to pay $135.36. Students at Walter Johnson High School have to pay $71. These dues and fees often pay for caps and gowns which the schools say are mandatory for students to wear at graduation.
The big companies, which sell the caps and gowns nationwide, charge dozens of dollars for each of the more than three million seniors who graduate each year. This means big money, and they rake in well over 100 million dollars a year.
Instead of focusing on the accomplishments of the students, these companies see the ka-ching of cash registers.
Jun 12, 2023
A San Francisco Superior Court judge recently ruled that the Marriott Hotel committed wage theft by illegally pocketing tips customers had left for workers during banquets between 2012 and 2017. The judge ordered the hotel to pay the 9 million dollars it owes to hundreds of workers.
But just because the workers won in court, it doesn’t mean they will get their money.
In a similar case in 2019, a Philadelphia restaurant owner named Kwang Bun Kim settled a federal wage theft case by agreeing to pay one million dollars in back wages, fees and tips. But four years have gone by, and the 200 former workers of the restaurant still have not gotten a penny. In 2020, the federal government even filed a one-million-dollar lien against the properties Kim owns, but Kim is apparently able to use a Pennsylvania law that jointly-owned properties (such as owned by Kim and his wife) cannot be seized to pay a debt.
In capitalist society, laws and legalities offer all kinds of ways for bosses to break their agreements with workers and get away with it. The workers’ only recourse is in their own ability to spread the fight.
Jun 12, 2023
This documentary tells the story of a 1937 Chicago Memorial Day peaceful picnic and march of striking steelworkers and their families, who were shot at and beaten by hundreds of police, resulting in ten dead and more than a hundred injured. The police and the media all claimed the strikers themselves were to blame, that they had rioted. Paramount had a film crew there that had filmed events as they unfolded, but it then decided to bury the footage as it showed the cops clearly and brutally at fault. The film was later subpoenaed, and the truth was revealed.
This novel tells the story of three generations of an immigrant Slovak family who worked in or around the steel mills in Homestead or Braddock, Pennsylvania (just outside of Pittsburg) from the 1880s to the 1940s. Written by a man whose family endured this life, the novel powerfully depicts the cruel hardship they endured, the everyday struggle of the men and women to survive, the 12-hour shifts, and the constant threat of injury and death in the mills. It shows workers at the mercy of the boss, Carnegie and others, and the government that always took the side of the boss. It shares the hopes and dreams of the families in the face of misery. And it tells of the efforts to organize and fight against the greed of the companies.
Jun 12, 2023
On Saturday, June 24 there will be a march on Woodward Avenue in Detroit to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Walk to Freedom, which was headed in 1963 by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. of the SCLC and Walter Reuther of the UAW. Organized in Detroit by the Detroit Council for Human Rights, 125,000 attended and it was the largest march in civil rights history up to then.
This year’s event begins at 10 a.m. at the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd and Woodward. It ends with a rally at 12 noon at Hart Plaza. The Detroit NAACP and the UAW International Union are this year’s sponsors. March organizers insist that the fight for jobs, justice and freedom continues.
The Detroit march and rally in 1963 came on the heels of a 3-month successful mobilization of the black population in Birmingham, Alabama. There, young people played a major role in forcing a vicious racist sheriff, “Bull” Connor, to leave office.
The year 1963 saw the era of urban rebellions begin. On the night of May 11th, the black population of Birmingham rioted in response to white supremacists bombing the residences of black leaders.
When speaking in Detroit, King referenced protests in 60 communities at that moment. But by the time of King’s speech in Detroit, sections of the black population had moved beyond the philosophy of working within the system. Embracing a more radical call for “justice now” and as Malcom X advocated, “by any means necessary,” more immediate demands began to be raised.
The social explosions and urban rebellions that began in Birmingham in 1963 were followed by explosions in Harlem in ’64, Watts in ’65, Cleveland and Chicago in ’66 and then went to Detroit and Newark in 1967 and almost every city in 1968, when King was assassinated.
It was, finally, these urban rebellions that forced the capitalist class and their political representatives to begin hiring black workers into the plants and workplaces that previously were segregated. These jobs improved opportunities for housing and education.
Today, decades since these massive social movements, gains from that era are steadily being clawed back. We see that what the leaders of this society “give” during a mobilization gets taken back. The lesson is that the population only holds onto gains we continuously fight for. The Freedom March of 1963 and the rebellions that followed are an impressive groundwork that can be picked up and advanced when a new generation of fighters is ready.
Jun 12, 2023
In 2020, California began charging people with no health insurance a fine. At the time, Governor Gavin Newsom and his fellow Democrats who control the California legislature promised that they would use the money raised from this fine to partially compensate out-of-pocket costs such as insurance premiums and deductibles.
It was a lie. Not only did California keep all the money it collected, but now, in his new budget, Newsom put that money into the state’s general fund.
It’s a lot of money, amounting to 1.1 billion dollars after three years, projected to increase to 1.8 billion dollars in two more years. And California Democrats can now hand all that money to big companies in the form of tax breaks, as they regularly do.
In California, 2.5 million people don’t have health insurance. Many working-class people pay the fine rather than buying insurance, because insurance plans are not only expensive, but they also feature very high deductibles. For example, for what insurance companies call a “mid-tier” plan for individual buyers, deductibles have gone from 3,700 dollars in 2021 to 4,750 dollars this year to 5,400 dollars in next year’s offers. That’s a 46% increase in three years!
No wonder more than half of the Californians who responded to a recent survey said that they had skipped or delayed medical treatment in the past year for financial reasons. And that includes people who have health insurance. A survey by Covered California, the state’s health insurance market, found that 48% of its customers delayed important medical care because of cost.
This “fine” on the uninsured is nothing but a tax on the poor people who can’t afford health care. It’s an insult on top of injury!
In this country’s two-party system, Republicans are for the wealthy, and the Democrats are … just the same!
Jun 12, 2023
This article is translated from the June 9 issue, #2862 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
The commemorations of the D-Day landings on June 6, 1944 brought together the chiefs of staff of the United States, Britain and France, their political representatives and French president Macron himself. They held forth on the same theme: our elders fought for freedom in the Second World War, Ukrainians are doing it today, and we must be prepared to do the same.
Against Hitler yesterday and against Putin tomorrow, freedom has a price that must be paid, said this high council implicitly, if not explicitly. But, even repeated over decades, a lie does not become a truth. The French, British and American ruling classes, their governments, and their diplomacy did not fight fascism and Nazism. On the contrary, they favored Hitler’s accession to power in 1933, only too happy to find a killer to subdue the German working class.
The reason for the Second World War was the changing balance of power between the imperialists, and the general economic impasse, not the will or individual madness of this or that dictator. The freedom the Allies boast of having defended was first and foremost the freedom of British and French slaveholders to retain their colonial empires, coveted by Germany and Japan. It was not for the people of Algeria, India, or for so many others who were no more than cannon fodder, and for whom the end of the war brought only the prolongation of their servitude.
Nor was it for the German or Japanese workers and ordinary people, those at the rail junctions in France, condemned to perish under the bombs. It was not for this issue that tens of millions of people died, in and out of uniform, in every latitude.
Freedom, on the other hand, was full, complete and profitable for American capital, which, after all these horrors, was able to dominate the world uncontested. The end of the fighting was obviously a relief, as was the liberation of the prisoners and survivors of the death camps. But it also ushered in a period in which the pursuit of imperial domination would unceasingly produce new wars.
The fight for freedom is just as falsely invoked, by the same people and for the same reasons, when it comes to Ukraine. Here again, the freedom for which armies are fighting in Eastern Europe is that of exploitative imperialism, primarily American, and of the Ukrainian thieving oligarchs against that of their Russian counterparts. For the peoples on both sides of the front, it’s about dictatorship and sacrifice.
Future historians may say that the third world conflict began with the war in Ukraine, and for a reason similar to the first two: the impasse in the system of capitalist domination. Clearly, the governments and staffs of the imperialist countries are preparing for it. Military budgets are exploding, political, militaristic and patriotic preparations are underway, and the D-Day commemorations are part of this process.
Whatever form it takes, whatever sides are involved and whatever pretexts are invoked, this war will be a war against workers. To avert the danger of war, capitalism must be brought down. It’s not an easy fight, but to prepare for it, we need to refuse any “sacred union” behind the bourgeoisie: by denouncing its lies about the past, by refusing to march in step in the present, and by preparing to turn the weapons it has distributed against it in the future.
Jun 12, 2023
The following are excerpts from an article translated from the June 9 issue #2862 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
An international conference on global plastic pollution was held in Paris in early June. Delegations from 175 countries participated, along with 1,500 scientists and representatives of organizations and companies.
There is cause for concern. Plastic waste in different states of decomposition accumulates from oceans to mountaintops. Decomposition produces many chemicals, of which 3,200 are considered extremely dangerous for human and animal health. These include plasticizers (phthalates), bisphenols, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and other per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) known as “forever chemicals.” They have biological effects which can cause cancers, disruptions of the endocrine system, premature births, infertility, obesity, cardiovascular diseases, and so on ….
… Current negotiations on limiting plastics are scheduled to wind up by the end of next year at the earliest. The main obstacle to any reduction is market forces, meaning capitalist interests. The capitalists give no government the right to impose any limits on them.
Global production of plastics doubled between 2000 and 2020. It could triple again by 2060. Around eight billion tons of plastic waste has accumulated, enough to coat all the land on earth with a fifth of an inch of trash. This will grow.
Producing what humanity needs while preserving the environment now and for the long term can only be done by taking economic power from the bourgeoisie .... The governments’ prime directive is to protect the interests of the capitalists. None of their fine-sounding resolutions will curb pollution.
Jun 12, 2023
This article is translated from the April 14 issue #2853 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
A petition launched by big computer pundits and by billionaire Elon Musk warns of the “major risks for humanity” that recent advances in artificial intelligence supposedly represent. Afterwards the media have outbid each other to take an equally misleading and reactionary tone.
"Recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one—not even their creators—can understand, predict, or reliably control," the petition says.
In fact, the “future of humanity” is their excuse. In this case, the motivation of the main signer Elon Musk, who owns auto company Tesla, SpaceX rockets and Twitter, is to criticize technological advances which happen to benefit one of his main competitors, Microsoft.
The petition denounces the risk of disinformation because artificial intelligence software might produce false reports or fake images. But counterfeiters did not wait for artificial intelligence to tamper with photos and documents! This kind of misinformation has been around for a long time. And governments and major official media organizations never shrank from using disinformation to deceive people .... Witness the U.S. government that invented Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” to justify its Gulf War in 2003. Not to mention the radioactive cloud from the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986, which French government experts told us not to fear at the time because it had supposedly stopped at the border between Germany and France. It didn’t take artificial intelligence to invent this—just lying politicians and slavish journalists, trained to say the “right thing” much better than any computer.
Admittedly, recent advances in the field of artificial intelligence are impressive. Programs like the one called ChatGPT are capable of producing long texts, even entire books, as if they had been written by a human being. Computers can generate extremely realistic images. But, on the practical level, artificial intelligence is used in many fields. For example, it is used to process medical images, to automatically translate from one language to another and to transcribe human speech extremely reliably regardless of the speaker’s accent.
Artificial intelligence software consists of computer programs that not only integrate a huge amount of information provided in advance, but they also learn in the process. The more a doctor uses this kind of program to analyze patients’ medical images, the more the program evolves by integrating what it learns from these images. There is nothing threatening in this, in itself. On the contrary, it can mean important progress for humanity.
But as with all scientific discoveries, the problem is that those who dominate a capitalist economy based on competition and the search for bigger, faster profit are those who decide and direct the use of this technology. Are machines killing jobs? No, capitalists make the choice to increase their profits through layoffs rather than lightening the load on workers’ jobs. The conclusion to draw is that what humanity must get rid of is not scientific progress, but this social organization that perverts it: that of Elon Musk and company.
Jun 12, 2023
U.S. military officials have carried out a publicity campaign through the corporate media over two recent confrontations with China in the South China Sea. On May 26, a Chinese fighter jet flew directly across the path of a U.S. Air Force reconnaissance plane. Then on June 3 a Chinese navy ship crossed within 150 yards of a U.S. Navy destroyer. Following both incidents, U.S. officials called the actions "unnecessarily aggressive" and "unprofessional" and released videos that were widely broadcast and circulated by the media.
No one, however, mentioned that when the plane incident occurred, the U.S. plane just happened to be flying over a routine naval exercise involving Chinese aircraft carriers. The U.S. plane carried equipment enabling it to intercept electronic Chinese signals and possibly intercept Chinese intelligence. Nor did they point out that the confrontation between the ships occurred on the very same day that the U.S. defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, and China’s defense minister were in Singapore for an annual defense conference.
Both these incidents occurred in the South China Sea off the coast of mainland China. The Chinese defense minister, Li Shangu, asked, "Why did all these incidents happen in areas near China, not near other countries? ... They are not here for innocent passage. They are here for provocation."
That certainly seems to be the case. Just imagine how the U.S. might respond if a Chinese plane spied on U.S. naval exercises or a Chinese navy ship roamed around off the coast of Florida or California. We already know how they reacted when a Chinese balloon floated into U.S. territory!
These incidents are taking place at the same times the U.S. is attempting to put the economic squeeze on China and is using the war in Ukraine to go after Russia. U.S. history is filled with wars starting over trumped-up “incidents,” like the Gulf of Tonkin incident that led to the Vietnam War, or Saddam Hussein being coaxed into invading Kuwait before the first Persian Gulf War.
Who knows when the U.S. might use another incident such as these to be the pretext for starting the next world war?
Jun 12, 2023
This article is translated from the June 9 issue, #2862 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
In Kosovo, a small Balkan state bordering Albania and Serbia, to which it belonged until 1999, clashes broke out on Monday, May 29 between Serbian demonstrators and police and soldiers from KFOR, the NATO force deployed in the country, leaving 80 people injured.
Kosovo has a population of around 1.8 million, the majority of whom are Albanian-speaking, with a sizeable Serbian minority of 120,000, mainly in the north of the country. The violence of recent days is the culmination of a political crisis sparked by the decision, in November 2022, of Kosovo’s central government to stop recognizing Serbian license plates. Serbia, which has never recognized Kosovo’s independence, called on Serbs to protest by refusing to take seats in Kosovo’s institutions, and then to boycott the municipal elections organized in April to replace the resigning mayors. This call was heeded: the turnout for the elections was only 4%. As the only candidates, Albanian-speaking mayors were elected to head the four main towns in the north. When they attempted to enter the municipal buildings on Friday, May 26, they were met by Serbian demonstrators.
The United States and the European Union intervened, calling on the head of the Kosovar government, the nationalist Albin Kurti, to show moderation, in particular by cancelling the municipal elections contested by the Serbs.
Against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, and while Serbia has received support from Russia and China, Western leaders do not wish to see a crisis in the Balkans. Their diplomatic pressure is accompanied by the reinforcement of NATO’s military presence, which has announced the dispatch of 700 additional troops to northern Kosovo. The Kosovar Prime Minister may eventually back down, but this will not put an end to the nationalist opposition that has never ceased since the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and which led to Kosovo’s proclamation of independence in 2008.
Formed in the aftermath of the Second World War under the leadership of the Communist Party and its leader Tito, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia had enabled long-established intermingled populations to coexist peacefully, thanks to a relative balance of rights recognized to each national community.
After Tito’s death in 1980, the flag of nationalism was used by leaders vying for power. They set people against each other, dragging them into fratricidal wars, digging ditches of hatred and bloodshed between inhabitants of the same region, the same district. To establish their authority over “ethnically cleansed” territories, they engaged in massacres. Between 1991 and 1995, the war claimed 200,000 lives, mostly civilians, and left over 4.5 million refugees and displaced persons.
The intervention of the imperialist powers only exacerbated the situation, as each of them sought only to capitalize on the conflict to increase its influence. Playing the role of policeman of the imperialist order, the United States put an end to the war by imposing the Dayton Accords in 1995, which endorsed the ethnic divisions imposed by the nationalists. In 1999, NATO launched a bombing campaign, particularly against Serbia and its capital Belgrade, killing hundreds of civilians and forcing hundreds of thousands to flee.
The current confrontations in Kosovo show that imperialist interventions, bombings and the dispatch of military contingents have settled nothing. In the Balkans, and indeed throughout Central Europe, nationalist opposition is all the stronger for having been fueled by the worsening economic and social crisis. The war ravaging the Ukraine shows what that can lead to, and how imperialism is capable of using them to assert its interests, with total disregard for the consequences for the people.
Jun 12, 2023
This article is translated from the April 28 issue #2856 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
The repression targeting opponents of the ayatollahs’ regime in Iran is such that no opposition party exists inside the country, neither openly nor underground.
Some parties that played a role in the period of social upheaval that led to the fall of the Shah in 1979, and in the first months of the Islamic Republic, survive in exile, but without influence on the ground in Iran.
The revolt which began after the police assassination of 22-year-old Jina Mahsa Amini last September brought forward courageous and tenacious militants. But no visible political leadership emerged which could stand as an alternative to the regime. However, since the beginning of this year, various groups and coalitions in exile have been maneuvering to arrive at potential leadership. They all adopted the movement’s slogan, “Woman, life, freedom.”
Some of these diaspora groups claim to belong to the trade union or civic movement, such as the 20 organizations which signed a charter in February listing a dozen democratic and progressive demands, while staying very vague about how to obtain them. They recently held a conference in Cologne, Germany.
Still other groups bring together intellectuals, academics and lawyers who place their hopes in the so-called “reformer” politicians of the Iranian regime, such as former presidential candidate and former prime minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who is now under house arrest.
However, the coalition that has the most financial support includes Reza Pahlavi, the son of the shah; Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi; feminist Masih Alinejad—who was recently received by the French president at the Elysée Palace in Paris—and even actress Golshifteh Farahani. Pahlavi is supported by the U.S. and just toured Israel, role-playing as Iran’s alternative statesman.
If none of these coalitions has any actual influence inside Iran, despite their very unequal means, they all jockey for position. But none of them challenges either Iran’s social order or imperialist domination.
Those who fight within Iran today—first and foremost workers—must build their own leadership.
Jun 12, 2023
An explosion at a dam on the Dnipro River in Ukraine caused extensive flooding and environmental damage. Many villages and part of the city of Kherson were flooded and tens of thousands of people were forced from their homes; unrecorded numbers of people died.
It is not clear who or what caused the explosion. The Ukrainian and the Russian sides in the war blamed each other. What is clear is that this dam explosion and flooding added to the devastation that the people of the region have suffered during this war. And it is clear that neither the Ukrainian nor the Russian regimes even tried to mobilize their militaries to support people who suffered from the flood.
But least of all did help come from the government most responsible for continuing this war with all its death and destruction—that is, the U.S. government. A few days after the dam collapse, Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak met to promise more money to Ukraine. The money was not for the aid that is desperately needed by those people displaced by the flood, but rather it is more money for Ukraine to continue the war. Biden said the U.S. government would continue to send military weapons “for as long as it takes.”
The war has already gone on for 16 months, and regardless of who struck the first blow, U.S. policy is what set in motion the events that led to the war in Ukraine and has guaranteed the war continues.
Before the war even started, the U.S. and NATO were training Ukrainian troops and supplying them with weapons, establishing another threat to Russia, right on its border, like all the other former parts of the old Soviet Union pulled into NATO. Once the war started, the U.S. and NATO provided Ukraine with an escalating supply of tanks, armored vehicles, artillery, rockets, guns and enough military weaponry to keep the war going. The U.S. has supplied intelligence and helped plan Ukrainian strategy. It has done everything except provide the soldiers. Ukrainian soldiers act as U.S. proxies to do the dying in this war.
Up until now, the policy of the U.S. government has been to continue the war as long as possible, with the goal in mind to weaken the Russian regime. Since last fall, the U.S. government has talked for months about a “spring offensive” to justify sending more tanks and armored vehicles and fighter jets to Ukraine. Lately those armaments have been used inside Russia, including by forces fighting inside the borders of Russia—neo-Nazi groups, similar to the right-wing groups that were incorporated into Ukraine’s military.
This is the U.S. government’s war, plain and simple, and U.S. government policies have pushed this war to continue, leading to hundreds of thousands of people, Ukrainians and Russians, being killed and wounded. This continuing war has meant that millions of Ukrainians have been displaced from their homes and much of the infrastructure of the country has been destroyed.
Now a dam has been blown up and a large area is flooded and uninhabitable. That is another consequence of U.S. policy, no matter how it happened.
Jun 12, 2023
What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters during the week of June 4, 2023.
Biden and McCarthy announced a last-minute deal that supposedly averts the possibility of a U.S. government default.
There was never a real possibility of default, only just talk—talk about government not paying its bills, financial markets going into convulsions, Social Security payments suspended.
That was scare talk. There was never any chance the government would default, that is, stop payment on its bonds. There are hundreds of billions of dollars in those bonds held in the vaults of the big banks and financial groups. Does anyone seriously think the government would miss a single payment going to its bankers?
Every year or so, the politicians put on the same melodrama. (And, by the way—if you were wondering—there has been a “debt ceiling crisis” in 11 of the last 13 years.)
Underneath all the high drama, there is only this simple fact: the two parties agree to cut public spending on the needs of the population, in order to slide more money into the bulging bank accounts of the capitalist class.
This deal guarantees that government debt, which currently stands at 31.4 trillion dollars, will go even higher. That means more government bonds issued, with higher interest payments, funneling more money into the big banks.
The centerpiece of the Biden-McCarthy deal is an agreement to increase “regular” military spending at least one percent faster than the rate of inflation, while ordinary civilian spending will decrease in absolute terms in the coming year, and will lose out to inflation in the year after that.
There will be more cuts to public services—to roads, water sources, dams, levees, bridges, parks, woodlands, and so on, as well as to schools, already starved for the money needed to hire teachers. More people will be cut from programs like food stamps, family income and Medicaid, under a series of “policy changes.”
Today, the economy is in crisis, the standard of living of the working people is being driven down. But the two parties have nothing to offer other than more cuts.
The goal of these cuts is to find more money to fund a bigger military. The U.S. is the biggest military power in the world, accounting for more money spent than the total spent by the next nine countries put together. The U.S. has bases on every continent, and in almost every country in the world.
The U.S. not only has its own troops; it uses the people of other countries as cannon fodder in the wars it pursues and pays for, just as it is doing today in Ukraine. And the U.S. has former soldiers enrolled in the many “private” military companies that patrol the world.
Biden and McCarthy may pretend that all this government spending on the military is for “defense.” But think about it. Do other countries have military bases on U.S. borders?
The size of the military budget, and its continual growth, says one thing and one thing only: the U.S. is preparing for an offensive war, a massive war, one which would far surpass its wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Viet Nam, Korea.
Capitalism has already taken the world to two global wars. World Wars One and Two were the only way capitalism could get past economic crises in which its system was mired. Once again, the capitalist world is caught in an economic crisis. And capitalism, with U.S. capitalism in the forefront, is taking us on a race to a new world war.
The working class, which is the only force that has the capacity to rid the world of capitalism, is not aware of the stakes today. That’s true in this country, true in Ukraine and Russia, true in China, true around the world. But there is no other answer than for the working class to uproot capitalism, throw it away—before the war comes, or when the war comes. In Russia, in 1917, the Bolshevik Party proposed to the working class to turn capitalism’s war into a class war for the emancipation of itself and of humanity. There was no other answer then, there can be no other answer today.
Jun 12, 2023
Here are some strikes that are currently going on or have recently taken place in the U.S. While these strikes remain isolated and separated, they show that some workers are ready to fight today. And any strike always brings the possibility of a wider and more generalized fight that starts in one place and spreads. That is what is needed!
Dock workers at six West Coast ports worked without a contract for a full year before many simply stopped showing up for work, starting June 2. The workers of ILWU Local 13 unload and load container ships. The ship operators complained that the absent workers, who are used to fill out daily crew assignments, are “severely impacting operations!” Railroads bringing freight to the ports are backed up and under a “Red” delay alert.
On May 8, UAW Local 12 struck Clarios (previously Johnson Controls), a battery maker in Holland, Ohio, near Toledo. The 500 workers have been out four weeks in their fight for better pay and for limits on so much forced overtime. The strikers voted down the latest company offer by 76%.
Clarios got a local judge to limit strikers to groups no more than five, and they must stay 100 feet from plant gates. The company brings in vanloads of scabs. Police protect scabs going in, and truckloads of batteries going out.
Clarios is owned by Brookfield Business Partners, a part of the giant Brookfield Corporation, of Canada, with over 725 billion dollars of assets under management. Brookfield Asset Management recently made the biggest single asset sale of the pandemic era, the 1000-room Diplomat Beach Resort, for 835 million dollars.
Clarios has many plants worldwide that, all together, make one-third of the world’s lead-acid batteries, including for GM, Ford, Stellantis, WalMart, AutoZone, DieHard, Optima, and many others.
Jun 12, 2023
On top of increasing degradation that has wracked the island nation of Haiti in the past year, two new natural disasters hit it, one right after the other.
On Friday and Saturday, June 2 and 3, intense thunderstorms brought heavy rainfall, flooding more than 13,000 homes, killing 42 and displacing thousands. Most of the flooding damage hit the areas west of the capital of Port-au-Prince.
Then on Tuesday, June 6, a magnitude 4.9 earthquake hit that very same western area, killing 4 and injuring 36.
These disasters follow on long months in which the government of Haiti collapsed, replaced by an “acting prime minister,” Ariel Henry, who is ruling in name only. Gangs have run rampant, ruling the streets, extorting the population and killing anyone who refused.
That is, until the population, in certain areas, began organizing themselves and fighting back. Some organized self-defense squads. Some took it further and began killing gang members who had been terrorizing their neighborhoods for months. The gangs fell back into the shadows in those areas. In addition, angry demonstrations of workers took place in Port-au-Prince’s industrial zone for three days in early May.
Hopefully the population can mobilize to collectively address the needs resulting from these recent disasters. Beyond that, there is still much wealth within Haiti, stolen from the working-class population by the corporations, the State and the gangs, that can be taken back and put in the service of those workers who made it and need it!
Jun 12, 2023
This article is translated from the June 9th issue, #2862 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
In the 1990s and 2000s, Salvatore Mancuso was the leader of one of Colombia’s paramilitary groups, the far-right militias responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths during the sixty-year civil war. In order to benefit from a reduced sentence for his crimes, he decided to confess.
In 2003 and 2006, during President Uribe’s right-wing government, paramilitaries including Mancuso were demobilized and given reduced sentences in exchange for confessions. But in 2008, Mancuso was extradited to the United States. He is nearing the end of his sentence in the USA, and would now like to benefit from the peace agreement signed in Colombia in 2016 with the FARC guerrilla group. This explains his new confession.
The civil war in Colombia pitted the guerrillas, supported by the poor, predominantly Indian population, on one side. Their leaders sometimes tried to reintroduce themselves into official political life, but were usually assassinated. On the other side, the property-owning classes, determined to cede nothing, had at their service the police, the army, the paramilitaries and a political class whose complacency extended to drug traffickers. Uribe’s father’s private plane was even used to deliver drugs for the notorious trafficker Escobar.
Today’s confessions are upsetting for many people, as they remind us of the collusion between the official authorities of the time and the paramilitary groups of killers. The Colombian police and army certainly perpetrated massacres. But when they were reluctant to do certain dirty work, the paramilitaries took over, having benefited from the same training as the police and army.
In this way, the military could hand over lists of opponents to be eliminated to the paramilitaries, who would turn up at their homes to kill them.
These massacres eventually worried the paramilitaries themselves, who decided to make their victims’ corpses disappear, either by burning them in crematoria or by burying them in mass graves, including in neighboring countries such as Venezuela.
These confessions confirm what is well known. The vast majority of the massacres committed were not the work of the guerrillas, as the Right claims, but of paramilitary forces of repression, with the active support of the State apparatus; a complicity that the Colombian Right, led by Uribe, still refuses to admit.
After 2016, a commission was set up to take stock of sixty years of civil war. It came up with an overall figure of almost 9 million deaths in this country of 51 million inhabitants. Peasant communities paid the heaviest price, with 80% of the dead being civilians. A paramilitary told the commission that it was acceptable to shoot twenty people to get one “subversive.” In other words, there were no limits on killing suspected guerrillas, which explains the staggering number of victims.