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
Aug 21, 2023
Lahaina, Maui looks like a bombed-out warzone after the devastating wildfire hit on August 8. Nothing is left of the bustling town of 13,000 people but ash and cinder. Over a hundred are dead, with more bodies discovered every day. Thousands have been left homeless.
It was the worst fire disaster in the U.S. in over a hundred years. And it should never have happened.
Certainly, official reports commissioned by the local government several years before warned that wildfire conditions had gotten increasingly more dangerous. Maui is in the grip of a long drought. Plants that can burn explosively cover huge swaths of grasslands. Winds from increasingly more powerful storms spread fires ever more quickly.
And the reports also recommended how to prevent such a tragedy: secure the electric grid, cut back on all the flammable plants, provide early warning systems, etc. This was obvious. It didn’t take experts to figure it out. But nothing was ever done to address those dangers. Because the safety and well-being of the population and the land were never the top priority of the big capitalists, or the top government officials who serve their interests. No, for them, profits of the big landowners, resorts and electric utility always came first.
While the electric utility, Hawaiian Electric, steadily increased its profits and dividends to its largest shareholders over the last years, it did nothing to make its old decrepit electric grid any safer. So, when a hurricane, hundreds of miles away, spawned 70 mile an hour winds in Maui, live power lines crashed to the ground, sparking one fire after the other. Downed power lines also forced officials to close one of the only escape routes out of Lahaina. Many were in their cars, stuck in traffic, trying to get out, when the fires overcame them.
At the same time, a few big companies that own most of the land did nothing to cut back on the overgrown, highly flammable grasses that grow all over Maui. These are the same companies that owned the big sugar and pineapple plantations that dominated the Maui economy during the previous century. After these companies tore out the plantations, they replaced them with resorts, golf courses and retail developments aimed at tourists and the very rich looking to build their vacation homes. On much of their land, which remained undeveloped, the big landowners allowed vast expanses of grasses to grow that become explosive tinder during the dry summer months. To the big landowners, it was an unnecessary expense that cut into their profits to either replace these grasses with more fire-resistant vegetation, or even just cut them back. Those grasses provided the fuel for the fires that were whipped up by high winds. The fires spread so quickly, it was impossible to outrun them.
The top government officials showed the same disregard for the safety of the population as the big companies. They never even bothered to upgrade the early warning system. So, the warning sirens never sounded, leaving most people unaware of the fire danger. The staff at some of the big hotels were so uninformed of what was going on, they continued to check in new guests, even as others were fleeing for their lives.
Today, thousands of survivors of the fires are living in shelters, with nowhere to go. Others left the island in order to stay with friends or relatives. Before the fire, big parts of the working population were already living on the edge, having to cope with prices that are 13% higher than on the mainland, as well as a terrible housing shortage. Only a month before, Governor Josh Green said the state of Hawaii has the highest housing and rental prices in the country.
Today, Biden and other top officials reassure the thousands of homeless families that they will be protected and taken care of. Words, just words. History proves that after all past disasters, capitalists take advantage of people’s vulnerability and desperation to increase their holdings on the cheap and swallow up most of the disaster relief to rebuild, making their resorts and developments bigger and more opulent, leaving the workers in the dust.
No, the class war of the capitalists against the workers is not suspended during disasters. The capitalists don’t suddenly feel a sense of compassion and love for all those who do the work and make everything run for them. On the contrary, the capitalist drive to accumulate ever more wealth at the expense of the working class goes into high gear. It’s why the motto of big capitalists is: “Never let a crisis go to waste.”
It’s one more reason why the working class has no other choice but to organize itself independently in order to get rid of this rotten system.
Aug 21, 2023
Everyone is totally done with COVID. But … COVID has other plans. And it has been on the rise since July, doubling in August—just in time for the beginning of the school year. Although it is far below the numbers seen in previous waves, nonetheless hospitalizations are up across the country. EG.5 is the most recent variant, an offshoot of the Omicron variant, causing 17% of new COVID-19 cases in the country. XBB.1.16 is another common variant.
EG may sound like a whole new flavor of the virus, but it’s not. It is in fact a spinoff of the XBB strain of the Omicron family. EG has one extra mutation on its spike. This mutation has appeared in other coronavirus variants before. Scientists aren’t sure what new tricks it allows the virus to do, but variant hunters are paying attention because many of the new XBB descendants have adopted it. This suggests that this mutation may have some evolutionary advantage for the virus. Both variants are slightly more resistant to the antibodies that fight COVID, which are found in serum of infected and vaccinated people, according to Dr. David Ho, a professor of microbiology and immunology.
COVID is not going away. It is evolving and its family tree is growing. This is similar to what happened with the 1918 flu epidemic. It lasted three years and had multiple waves. And it is still with us—that is, the descendants of the pandemic flu. People are still hospitalized and still die from flu and its complications. And we are seeing a similar pattern with COVID.
And we are being told an updated vaccine will not be available until the end of September—after schools have been in session for several weeks.
Aug 21, 2023
It’s been a year since President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) into law. While inflation is down compared with a year ago, many economists say that has little to do with the IRA. And many workers would question just how much inflation is down, considering how rapidly prices of gasoline, car insurance and rents still seem to be going up.
In fact, the IRA has little to do with reducing inflation. It’s a lot like when the politicians passed what they called “welfare reform”, which was really an attack, and called it the “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act,” or when President Obama signed into law what was called the “Affordable Care Act.”
What the IRA really is about is a huge federal handout to big corporations supposedly aimed at “encouraging investment in green energy.” Officially, the bill provides for 400 billion dollars in federal spending. Of that, 216 billion will go to tax breaks, grants, and loans to corporations to build plants for producing electric vehicles (EVs) and EV batteries.
It also includes 43 billion dollars in credits to individuals, including $7,500 toward the purchase of a new EV. These credits, however, come with protectionist language that says the vehicle must be “American made.” Biden, Senator Joe Manchin, and other supporters of the bill sold it as a way to cut into China’s lead in producing EVs. China currently accounts for 80% of the production of EV batteries.
But the IRA’s protectionist language does not just exclude purchasers of Chinese EVs, it also excludes those who would purchase most vehicles made in Europe, Japan, and South Korea. Seventy percent of EVs currently sold in the U.S. wouldn’t qualify, such as cars made by South Korea’s Hyundai. Hyundai currently produces the second highest number of EVs sold in the U.S., with Tesla being number one. Many European EVs contain batteries produced in China.
Some economists predict the IRA will, in fact, lead to higher inflation. Others, including economists from Goldman Sachs, the Brookings Institute, and even the White House Office of Management and Budget predict the real cost of the IRA might be closer to 1 trillion dollars.
Regardless of what happens with inflation, these handouts to the corporations will add to the federal budget deficit and increase the amount of interest to be paid on government debt. It will be the working class, which pays a disproportionate share of the taxes in this country, that will pay the bill for these generous gifts to the corporations. More than likely, in addition, most workers won’t earn enough to even buy the electric vehicles they produce!
No wonder the bosses’ politicians felt the need to try to slide this bill under a fake name, in the hope they could fool workers into believing it’s in our interests. Don’t believe the hype!
Aug 21, 2023
A recent Washington Post investigation of the Smithsonian Institution revealed its so-called racial brain collection. This collection includes 255 human brains that were removed primarily from dead Black and Indigenous people without their consent and without their families’ consent or knowledge. These brains, as well as 30,000 other body parts, were collected mostly in the first half of the 20th century at the behest of the head curator of the Division of Physical Anthropology at the Smithsonian, Ales Hrdlicka. He was widely viewed as an expert on race, evolution, and human variation. When he started at the Smithsonian in 1903, Hrdlicka created a massive network of physicians and scientists that would collect these brains and body parts on his behalf.
These brains and other body parts were stolen from graveyards, battlefields, hospitals, and morgues in more than 80 countries. Hrdlicka was a racist who believed in white superiority. He was also a longtime member of the American Eugenics Society. He was collecting these “specimens” to research race and prove his racist ideas. But the Washington Post investigation was unable to find any studies that Hrdlicka actually did. But the fact that he had no real scientific evidence did not stop him from making these racist claims on the front pages of newspapers, that white brains show superiority to black brains. "There are differences of importance between the brains of the negro and European, to the general disadvantage of the former," he wrote in a 1926 letter to a University of Vermont professor. He never even specified what the differences were!
Hrdlicka’s ideas were not new or isolated. Going back as early as the 1600s, naturalists like Linnaeus were categorizing human beings into hierarchical races, with white at the top and black at the bottom.
Hrdlicka was a curator for the Smithsonian, which meant they funded his collection. His own racist beliefs were featured in the Journal of Physical Anthropology, which was affiliated with the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. He helped found both organizations. His colleagues at the museum celebrated his birthday—after he was dead. Hrdlicka was like a god to them. He advised the American Eugenics Society on how to gain support from doctors for forced sterilization, which the Supreme Court legalized in 1927. The Nazis later embraced his now-discredited theory on selective breeding improving the gene pool.
He felt justified in stealing all those brains and body parts because to him they were sub-human, just specimens. And these ideas of biological white supremacy have been used to justify all sorts of atrocities from slavery to genocide to forced sterilizations and more.
These ideas serve another purpose for the ruling class and the capitalists. They hide the class nature of society. Racism and white supremacy can make it appear that poor and working class white people are the same as the white ruling class and have the same interests. This is the big lie which got the stamp of “science” on it. Native-born white workers have the same class interests as black workers and immigrant workers. That is the fact that the capitalists wish to obscure with racism and racist ideology.
Aug 21, 2023
The county council in Montgomery County, Maryland, passed a so-called rent stabilization law in July. The law limits housing rent increases to three percent above inflation. Politicians, the media, and liberal organizations went wild celebrating the news. But the law has loopholes and problems you could drive a truck through—a cash transport truck.
New housing built from now on will be exempt from the cap for 23 years! The cap does not apply to the thousands of apartments in incorporated cities like Rockville and Gaithersburg. And in the nine months before the law takes effect, landlords are free to raise the rents as high as they have been doing recently. Renters have complained to the county about rents going up as high as 22%, even 90%, in the last several years.
The main problem is the cat is already out of the bag. Rents were too high before the pandemic and have exploded since. Putting a cap on rent that is already too high doesn’t help the thousands of working and retired people who were already priced out of the county.
The only real answer is a system that frees housing from the profit motive.
Aug 21, 2023
A woman who had lived with her family for 18 years, in a home she bought in Baltimore, just found out the house was sold from under her. Her lawyer says she was not informed about an unpaid water bill. The new owner’s lawyer says the sale was legal, etc.
The real problem is that Baltimore city and a few other places in Maryland still have the power to sell houses at the yearly tax sale, when a homeowner owes even a few hundred dollars. In fact, over the last seven years, more than 40,000 homes were sold at the tax sales and out of those, hundreds, if not thousands, were occupied by people who lost their homes to investors. These investors help destroy neighborhoods to make money.
Real estate investors pay the city or state a small amount to hold the home, while an entire legal process goes on over what is supposed to happen. A person owing a few hundred dollars in taxes or water bill is likely a person unable to pay a lawyer to go to court and help them solve the mess.
This Baltimore woman has a lawyer fighting for her. What about thousands more? Baltimore is a city where the city itself cannot keep track of who owns which empty homes, cannot hire enough people to resolve multi-thousand-dollar water bills sent out in error, and agreed in 2019 to a moratorium on throwing people out of their homes over unpaid bills. Then the city began the process again to throw out people now that the mayor had a new proposal.
Hopefully, this woman will get her home back, but even so, the city is responsible for these scams on poorer residents.
Aug 21, 2023
It’s hard enough for people employed to pay their rent or mortgage. For people working part-time or on disability or retired, it’s about impossible.
In Baltimore, with 9,000 families still waiting for vouchers to have lower-cost housing, the city opened the process and another 26,000 families put in their applications in just 10 days.
That shows how ridiculous the lack of affordable housing is, and how little the city does about it. The vouchers come from federal funds.
Aug 21, 2023
Excerpted from the SPARK’s L.A. Metro Bulletin
Between 2018 and 2022, assaults on Metro bus operators doubled. According to Metro’s own statistics, there were 80 assaults on operators in 2018, and there were 158 assaults on operators in 2022. No doubt, it’s even worse this year.
A homeless person threw a bottle at an operator on Line 18, right after the operator had told the person that the bus was completely full and there was a bus right behind him. But as the operator began to close the doors, the person threw the bottle, hitting the operator in the face.
As housing prices explode, more and more people are forced to live on the streets. And living on the streets can drive anyone crazy and angry. They target anyone close to them, starting with Metro employees.
Real estate speculators, landlords and bankers could care less. They’re making their profits by pushing housing prices higher and higher, no matter how many lives they destroy.
Aug 21, 2023
Almost one out of every three residents of Michigan—over three million people—currently receive one version or another of Medicaid. Having this health insurance can make a life or death difference for people.
Since the COVID epidemic began, once someone was found eligible for Medicaid, they remained eligible. They were not required to come up with a bunch of documents to recertify their health care coverage every year.
In some states, over a million people have already lost coverage since this re-certification process re-started. It has not been as bad in Michigan. However, it has been reported that 23,000 people in our state lost Medicaid coverage in June and July. A lot more are expected to lose coverage soon.
In the richest country in the world, why can’t everyone have medical insurance without having to jump through hoops?
Aug 21, 2023
On August 8, thousands of Los Angeles city workers went on strike for one day. At City Hall, hundreds of mechanics, gardeners, trash haulers, lifeguards, and traffic officers picketed, often in their uniforms. At Los Angeles International Airport, mechanics and custodians started marching before dawn. This strike was the first significant walkout by Los Angeles city workers in more than 40 years.
These city workers have the same problem as other workers: long working hours with less money.
"We are doing the work of three people," said one worker. "It’s more work for less money," said another. City officials drastically shrank the workforce during the COVID pandemic, mainly due to the City’s “incentivized” early retirement policy that forced older workers out of the workforce, creating a large number of unfilled vacancies within city agencies.
After the pandemic, the workload increased. But the City did not hire new workers, although it had the money allocated for this purpose in its budget. Instead, the City loaded more work on the remaining fewer workers, often stretching the workdays to 12 hours.
The protesting workers also said their wages did not keep up with inflation. The one-year contract under which they work provided members a 3% pay increase and a one-time bonus equal to 5% of a worker’s annual salary. That doesn’t come close to the double-digit price increases in rent, food, utilities, gasoline, and other basic necessities all workers face.
City officials then passed the supposed “savings” from squeezing the workers on to their capitalist “partners” in construction, real estate, or other businesses.
All workers face the same grueling reality imposed by our capitalist bosses every day: more work for less money. The fight of the Los Angeles City workers is also the fight of all workers everywhere.
Aug 21, 2023
Hotel workers in the Los Angeles area, whose contract expired on June 30, have been conducting rolling walkouts at dozens of Los Angeles hotels since early July. So far, UNITE-HERE Local 11, which represents 15,000 workers at more than 60 hotels in Southern California, has organized four waves of strikes, where workers walk off the job at a number of hotels, for three to five days at a time.
Besides better wages and benefits, workers are demanding better staffing. When the Covid-19 pandemic began three years ago, hotels drastically reduced staff, but they did not recover the old staffing levels when the hotel business picked up again. Alain Kemple, who works as a concierge at Waldorf-Astoria in Beverly Hills, said that the hotel had 27 personal concierges before the pandemic, but now there are only six. “I do the job of five people … I’m only paid for one,” Kemple said.
Another crucial issue for the workers is that their wages don’t keep up with the cost of living in the L.A. area, and in particular the cost of housing. Many of the hotel workers work two jobs, and few can afford to live near where they work. A recent survey by Local 11 found that more than half of its members either had moved outside of L.A. or were planning to do so in the near future, because of housing costs. Many workers have very long commutes, and some live as far as 105 miles away.
In fact, the cost of living is the same issue of another group of workers on strike in L.A.: writers and actors for the movie studios and tech companies that run streaming services. The writers, who have been on strike for more than three months, and the actors, who joined the writers on picket lines about a month ago, also point out that, with the amount of money they make, they can no longer make a living—especially since the companies have used changing technology to reduce payments to writers and performers.
The bosses are intent on using the high cost of living as a weapon against the workers. A movie industry executive told the news website Deadline, "The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses."
There is something else the hotel and movie industry workers have in common: the size of the enemy they are facing. As in other industries, big companies in the entertainment industry have been buying up other big companies in recent years, bringing the striking workers face-to-face with corporate giants: Disney, which bought 21st Century Fox in 2019, made 83 billion dollars in revenue last year, 23% more than the previous year; while Comcast, which owns NBCUniversal, cashed in 121 billion dollars. As for the 44 hotels that are digging in against their striking workers, behind them is also big capital—either big hotel chains such as Marriott, Hilton and Sheraton, or big real estate companies or private equity firms.
Low wages and high housing costs, combined, make it impossible for workers to live. These strikes in L.A. could be part of a bigger fight to put together the combined power of more workers. The whole capitalist class, not just one industry or two, has declared an all-out war against the livelihood of the working class.
Most trade union leaders keep the fight contained in a narrow vise—proposing to fight one corporation at a time. But the working class can fight much more effectively, by joining all of our forces together—across all industries.
Aug 21, 2023
What follows is a translation of the editorial that appeared on the front of all Lutte Ouvrière’s workplace newsletters, during the week of August 14th.
The tramp of boots continues to be heard in Africa, in the Sahel region. The heads of state of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) met on August 10 and ordered the “immediate activation” of an intervention force to restore the president of Niger, who was overthrown by a military coup at the end of July. American and French leaders are at work behind the scenes. French president Emmanuel Macron is the leader most eager for war. He made it clear that France’s 1,500 soldiers present on Nigerien territory would actively support such an intervention.
In the meantime, Niger has been experiencing a blockade for two weeks. The country’s population—more than half of whom live under the poverty line—faces power outages, cancelled bank transactions, soaring food prices, and growing shortages.
The imperialist powers pose as defenders of democracy. In reality they defend the right of some big industrial and financial concerns to keep reaping profit in this region. The “French interests” that Macron seeks to protect are those of Orano, formerly Areva, which has been exploiting Niger’s uranium for 50 years; those of oil and construction giants Total and Bouygues, and other French capitalists who make profit by keeping African working people in underdevelopment and poverty.
The officers who made the coup in Niger seek popular support by denouncing how France looted the country. But only a few weeks ago, these top brass were France’s accomplices. They took their share of the spoils, just like the corrupt leaders they overthrew—whom American and French leaders defend in the name of “democracy.” Western governments can very well find common ground with these officers. After all, they know them because they trained them. But they do not accept that these military men pretend to stand up to them, especially in the current context of widespread tension in international relations.
The showdown in Niger is part of a more general and never-ending war the great powers wage for control of markets, sources of raw materials, and spheres of influence. They aim to exert control over Africa like over the rest of the world, and even in earth’s orbit! The imperialist system constantly plunges many nations’ peoples into barbaric wars. With the deepening crisis and economic war between governments, the major powers have begun an escalation that could lead the world to all-out world war.
Deadly conflict has pitted the imperialist countries led by the United States against President Vladimir Putin’s Russia through Ukrainian intermediaries for the last year and a half in Eastern Europe. Tension with China is escalating. The major powers are sharply increasing their military spending. Their military staffs are preparing for “high intensity” wars which their populations will also be drawn into, sooner or later.
In France, workers and ordinary people are not yet dying under the bombs. But they are already paying for the consequences of these military preparations. The billions that are spent on producing ever more expensive weapons are lacking from the hospitals, schools, housing, transportation, and so on. But war preparations bring fortunes to certain industrialists like the Dassaults and other makers of killing machines. In an uncertain economic situation, the capitalists win big through the establishment of a “war economy” which guarantees them rising profits.
The governments and all the political representatives of the bourgeoisie claim their military expenditures are intended to “defend our country.” Tomorrow this same argument will be used to muster us and send us to kill or be killed by other workers who heard the same lying speeches from the other side.
The future promises us ever more serious crises and ever more widespread wars. Workers’ destinies cannot remain in the hands of the ruling classes, their governments, and their military commands. We must expropriate the corporations preparing for war and confiscate their profits. We must dedicate these billions to hiring in hospitals and schools. Society must be led by workers. This is humanity’s only hope to escape catastrophe!
Aug 21, 2023
This article is translated from the August 18 issue #2872 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
Migrants drown every day trying to reach Europe on makeshift boats. Those who die off the shores of Tunisia, Greece, Italy, and Spain join those who perish in French waters, under the watch of the French government and by its fault.
Six Afghans died this way on August 13 when a boat sank carrying 65 migrants trying to reach England. Six deaths following hundreds of others resulting from the criminal policy pursued for years by French and British governments on both sides of the English Channel.
Thousands of people try to cross every year in rubber dinghies on waters loaded with tankers and giant container ships. French authorities systematically closed all the other ways across.
Millions of migrants have been swallowed up by patrols in and around Calais in France. Its walls bristle with barbed wire, infrared cameras, drones, carbon dioxide detectors, and so on. Monitoring of trucks in the port of Calais alone costs eight million dollars per year, above and beyond the manhunt at the Channel Tunnel. Authorities have done everything possible to make life impossible for migrants. They even put fences under bridges in downtown Calais to prevent migrants from sheltering there.
But nothing deters these thousands of refugees who have already risked their lives several times over travelling thousands of miles from places like Afghanistan, Syria, or Sudan. The only effect this war on migrants has is to push them back to sea. Networks of smugglers are ready to offer attempts at extremely dangerous crossings.
Now again the French and British governments pass the buck and focus their rhetoric on these networks of smugglers which they themselves foster. These governments show no lack of cynicism. No matter what they claim, their policy turns the English Channel into a graveyard.
Aug 21, 2023
This article is translated from the August 18 issue, #2872 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
For months, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his Conservative Party have been waving the immigration scarecrow in an attempt to make people forget their failure to tackle the cost-of-living crisis and to divide working people.
The latest episode in this sinister series: the barge Bibby Stockholm, moored on England’s south coast in Dorset, “welcomed” its first “residents” at the beginning of August. At 90 meters long and three stories high, it is expected to accommodate up to 500 people in its 222 rooms. Although the government claims that the facility respects human rights, it is in fact a floating prison.
The firefighters’ union has denounced the safety shortcomings of a barge designed to hold half as many people. Migrant aid associations have protested against the conditions, which are likely to be worse than in existing holding centers. The discovery of legionella in the pipes on August 12 confirmed these warnings and led to the provisional evacuation of the first arrivals.
This deliberate inhumanity is in line with the policy defined in 2012 by the Home Secretary, the future Conservative Prime Minister, Theresa May: to create a “hostile environment” for immigration, on the pretext of discouraging would-be emigrants, and above all to play to the voters most susceptible to xenophobic demagogy. Sunak praised this new form of accommodation for migrants, which would cost taxpayers thirty times less than a hotel….
In July, the Conservative majority in Parliament passed a law prohibiting anyone who has entered the U.K. illegally from applying for asylum, which, according to the UN, is against international law. Home Secretary Suella Braverman, on the other hand, having failed to push through her plan to systematically deport so-called illegal immigrants to Rwanda, is now considering deportations to Ascension Island, a little speck of British territory lost in the middle of the South Atlantic.
When it comes to anti-refugee delirium, she and her peers know no bounds. Anything goes, as long as it can be used to divert attention from the real culprits of the crisis: the capitalists.
Aug 21, 2023
This article is translated from the August 18 issue #2872 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
The year 2022 broke all records for oil consumption: 99.9 million barrels per day. And the International Energy Alliance, which provides these figures, predicts a new record in 2023: 102.2 million barrels/day. Some major producers, such as Saudi Arabia, are limiting production, but only to keep prices up, not to limit consumption.
Governments, international organizations and the media talk of nothing but global warming, the greenhouse effect, melting glaciers, mega-fires, hurricanes and threats to biodiversity. Meanwhile, black gold is flowing like never before, bolstered by gas and coal, enriching every billionaire on Earth. Contradiction? No, it’s a division of labor: some people entertain public opinion with green energies, while others pocket the greenbacks!
Aug 21, 2023
The first test of the atomic bomb, dropped 78 years ago in Los Alamos, New Mexico, left civilians caught in the fallout twisting in the wind. The pre-dawn test blast jolted communities across southern New Mexico. It shot a mushroom cloud ten miles into the sky, and then rained radioactive ash on thousands of unsuspecting residents. The new movie, Oppenheimer, spotlights the scientist most credited with the bomb. But the movie completely ignores the people who lived in the fallout zone. Many have since died from resulting cancers.
The site of the bomb test was chosen supposedly for its isolation. Oppenheimer picked the site in northern New Mexico for the Manhattan Project, the government’s secret project to build an atomic bomb during WWII, because it was hard to find and hard to get to—situated where four mesas are separated by deep canyons. In the movie, Oppenheimer is quite proud of the location he picked. But there were nearly half a million people living within a 150-mile radius of the site. The Manhattan Project scientists and leaders knew these people were at risk. But secrecy was the government’s priority, not the civilians, who were not informed, not warned, and not evacuated—that might have compromised security. In fact, the military came up with a cover story for the bombing: an ammunition magazine explosion.
The July 16, 1945 blast was more powerful than Oppenheimer and others expected. It was equivalent to 25,000 tons of TNT, according to recent estimates. Witnesses said the plutonium ash fell for days on areas where people grew their own food and drank rainwater from cisterns, and into irrigation canals that made the desert fertile. Weeks later, chickens began to die.
The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of 1990 covers people who were downwind of above-ground tests in all the test sites except the first one. It does not cover the first test in New Mexico. So, those who got government compensation were in Arizona, Nevada, and Utah. Uranium industry workers and military personnel at the Los Alamos site are also covered. The government has already paid out 2.5 billion dollars. Some in Congress say that expanding compensation to people living in New Mexico would be too costly.
The U.S. government, in the service of the U.S. bourgeoisie, had no problem with injuring its own citizens with radiation in order to test and later, mass produce this new weapon. They did it in order to accomplish their agenda of demonstrating that they were the dominant power of the world. They did not hesitate to use these barbaric weapons, within one month, on millions of human beings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Aug 21, 2023
This article is translated from the August 18 issue #2872 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
At a time when the great Western powers, led by the United States, are using Ukraine to wage war on Russia, it’s worth recalling how, from 1950 to 1953, the same United States waged war in Korea, using its population against Mao’s China, though at the time, unlike today, over 36,000 American GIs paid with their lives.
Korea had been dominated by Japan since 1905. This domination had been particularly ferocious. In the racist ideology of the Japanese military dictatorship, Koreans were almost subhuman. As a symbol of this humiliation, during the Second World War, the Japanese army developed a state-run pimping system, turning thousands of young Korean women into “comfort women” for its soldiers.
When the Japanese colonial administration collapsed at the end of the Second World War, there was a nationwide social explosion. Parties came out of hiding. People’s committees were formed, often on the initiative of communist militants but under the leadership of nationalist leaders. And on September 6, 1945, a national conference of these committees founded the People’s Republic of Korea.
But for the United States, the great victor of the world war, allowing colonial peoples to take advantage of the power vacuum to emancipate themselves was out of the question. A few months earlier, at the Yalta Conference, U.S. President Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Churchill, and Soviet bureaucratic chief Stalin had divided up the areas of the world where revolts could break out. Stalin had offered his services to the imperialist powers to maintain their social order, hoping in return that they would let him control the USSR and its zone of influence.
When the People’s Republic of Korea was proclaimed, the Soviet army entered Korea from the north and the U.S. army from the south, decreeing that the 38th parallel would be the dividing line between the two zones of occupation. In the southern zone, which included the country’s capital, Seoul, the American army refused to recognize the new republic and set up a government under its thumb, linked to the large landowners and wealthy classes who had collaborated with the Japanese colonizer. People’s committees were banned, as were all organizations claiming to be communist.
In September 1946, a major strike by railway workers in a southern city spread across the country. There were uprisings in the countryside for land reform. The repression led by the American army and South Korean police resulted in a thousand deaths and tens of thousands of prisoners. But in the northern zone, Stalin’s army also refused to recognize the leaders of the People’s Committees. For him, they were much too close to the mobilized population, which risked making them too independent of Moscow.
Stalin chose to impose a young leader of the Korean CP, Kim Il-Sung, as head of state, coming from the guerillas of Manchuria where he had fought against the Japanese army. But unlike what the Americans had done in the South, the Northern regime organized an agrarian reform that made it popular throughout the country. And it was on this basis that, in June 1950, it launched a military offensive against the South to reunify Korea.
North Korean troops met with little resistance. Most of the American army had left the country, lending credence to the idea that South Korea was perfectly independent. And while some of the South’s population waited on the sidelines or were even frightened by the arrival of the North’s troops, others, especially the poor peasants, were hopeful that they would bring about land reform and a government opposed to the wealthy classes. Within three months, the South was largely conquered.
The United States could not allow Korea to escape its control. Especially since, less than a year earlier, in October 1949, Mao had seized power in China by overthrowing the dictator who was their ally. American leaders had opted for a policy of containment: from then on, they would oppose any poor country’s desire to join the camp of the so-called communist countries, led by the USSR and now China.
Under cover of a UN intervention, with the military participation of the other Western powers, the American army organized a landing in September 1950. Within a month, it had recaptured the entire southern zone, then moved into the northern zone as far as the Chinese border. The U.S. dropped as many bombs as had been dropped in the Pacific during the entire World War. In the rear, the police of the reinstated South Korean dictatorship cleaned house: 100,000 civilians were executed.
General MacArthur, who led the American troops, went so far as to propose dropping atomic bombs on China. He was relieved of his command. China, for its part, sent hundreds of thousands of troops to support the North Korean army, and the balance of power shifted once again. American troops were forced to retreat to the 38th parallel.
From then on, the front stabilized, but the deadly battles to regain a few meters of ground continued. It became clear to the American leadership that they could not win against the Chinese army and reconquer the North. Negotiations began and lasted two years. Under pressure from the United States, an armistice was signed on July 27, 1953, but no peace treaty followed. In all, 700,000 soldiers and over 2.5 million civilians were killed. And Korea, from north to south, was devastated.
The South became one of the U.S. army’s main bases in Asia. It received massive investment from the United States and Japan to develop an industry in line with their interests. A Korean CIA, the KCIA, imprisoned and tortured en masse to prevent any protest or independent organization of the young, numerous and combative working class that industrial development was producing. As for the North, it was subjected to an economic blockade that strangled its development. The progressive aspects of the early years of the regime gave way to the dictatorship of an increasingly restricted clan, which had nothing to do with communism and didn’t even claim it.
The policy of imperialism thus prevented a people from taking its destiny into its own hands, and divided it into two parts set against each other, to make the South one of the main points of support for U.S. policy in this part of the world. A few years later, 320,000 South Korean soldiers were sent to fight alongside American troops in Vietnam.
Aug 21, 2023
U.S. President Joe Biden hosted the Prime Minister of Japan, Fumio Kishida, and President Yoon Suk Yeol of South Korea at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland on the weekend of August 18th. The “special occasion” was to push both leaders into what public relations spokesmen call a “new security” arrangement with the U.S.
Biden, representing U.S. capitalism, is pushing to get these two Asian nations to publicly align against China.
The U.S. capitalist class has clearly decided to escalate its trade war against China. Victor Cha, prior advisor to George W. Bush, put it aptly in a New York Times interview when he stated, "This consolidation … is happening now because the external environment is just so uncertain and unstable."
So, what made it that way? Biden has been working to build a military web around China. He recently signed a three way agreement with Australia and Great Britain, has ramped up U.S. military troops in the Philippines and has established a grid of Indo-Pacific nations publicly allied to the U.S.
Today, China is the largest trade partner for both Japan and South Korea. Prolonging the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine has been useful to Biden in bullying and bludgeoning nations away from China. Bush advisor Cha finishes his statement by saying, "There is nothing like an actual real war, even though it’s in another part of the world, to completely change the way or affect the way leaders think about their own security."
It is the U.S. instigating war. U.S. officials make much of the recent Chinese/Russian joint military exercises in the Sea of Japan. But these maneuvers followed, rather than preceded, U.S. trilateral missile drills with Japan and South Korea.
U.S. state spokesmen were quick to deny the proposed agreement’s similarities to NATO agreements. Clearly, given the history of U.S. imperialism in Asia, any goal to align militarily is filled with pitfalls.
In passing, spokesmen comment on the hesitancies of the leaders of both Asian nations to sign nuclear pacts. Small wonder, considering that the U.S. was the first and only nation to drop nuclear bombs on Japan! Or to tear Korea apart in a ferocious war that killed millions and permanently divided the country, isolating and impoverishing North Korea, dividing families still today.
This new “commitment to consult” is nothing but a cloak thrown over a drawn U.S. dagger.
The U.S. will continue to reward or punish economically or militarily based on its own agenda and will pursue cold or open war at its convenience. The purpose of this summit is to clear the way for the U.S. to dominate China.
Aug 21, 2023
What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters, during the week of August 13, 2023.
"Teamsters win historic UPS contract." Those were the words Teamster President Sean O’Brien used, when he announced his union had negotiated a new contract—and without a strike.
Before negotiations started, the union said it would strike if the company didn’t answer three demands. First, wages should catch up with what had been lost to inflation. Second, workers who want full-time jobs should not have to work part-time. Third, there should be no two-tier pay scales.
The new contract fell short, way short. The wage increase doesn’t catch up with what workers lost to inflation in the five years since the last contract. It will not protect against inflation during the next five years. Part-time workers still will be over half the workforce. They still will earn less than 65% of a full-time hourly wage.
So, what happened? Was the talk about strike just a bluff?
Those problems are not unique to UPS. They run through the whole capitalist system. Every company, big and little, pays wages that don’t keep up with inflation. That’s how companies make their profits go up faster than the rate of inflation. Almost every big company has lowered its wage bill by bringing in new hires at lower wages—two-tier or part-time or temp or contract workers. It’s another way companies increase profit. And each company increases the speed of work, worsening conditions, trying to dig still more profit from the workers’ hide.
Problems like these are not going to be overcome in one contract, affecting workers at only one company, even as big a company as UPS—or at one industry, even one as important as auto.
This is the heart of the problem. To take on these problems requires a different perspective—a revolutionary perspective, completely different than the one union bureaucrats have fastened on the working class for the better part of a century.
The problems are system wide—the fight against them has to be based on that fact. Simply “reforming” the system—as some union leaders claim they want to do—isn’t enough. Aiming to get a “fair share” for the workers is a pipe dream.
This system isn’t “fair.” It is built on exploitation of the working class, for the great benefit of the capitalist class.
So, if the problems are system wide, what does that mean? What can any group of workers in one workplace—or even one company or one industry do? How does one part of the working class take on the whole system?
For decades, unions have threatened strikes, sometimes called them, but those strikes always stayed within the boundaries of what the system allows. Workers fought company by company, fought at different times, isolated from each other.
One part of the working class won’t solve the problem. Workers at one industry can’t overcome the whole system. That’s a fact.
But workers at even one company could start a fight that will. And that’s also a fact! They can be the spearhead of the fight that spreads to other parts of the work force—if their fight, starting in their company, aims to bring in workers from other companies and workers from other industries.
For that to happen, there have to be at least small groups of fighters within a number of companies who understand that the system can’t be reformed. There have to be workers whose goal is revolution—the fight only the working class can carry on. There have to be workers whose goal is a new society that only the working class can build.
So, what happens next? UPS workers themselves haven’t finished voting on the contract. Maybe they will vote it down—there seemed to be a lot of complaints about the new contract. But even if workers vote a contract down, nothing will change—not so long as workers wait on a union bureaucrat to negotiate something for them.
The working class holds the future in its own hands. But for that future to be realized there at least have to be small groups of workers in a number of workplaces with a revolutionary perspective. And that’s true, even for workers just to defend themselves within this system today.
Aug 21, 2023
Film: Last Train Home, a 2009 documentary, available for rent for $3.99 on Apple TV+.
Shot over three years, Last Train Home deals with the largest annual human migration on the planet—every single Chinese New Year, 130 million Chinese migrant workers leave the cities and return home to their rural villages. The film footage of the millions of workers migrating all at once are incredible. The movie puts a human face on this migration by showing the effects on a single family.
The workers leave remote rural villages to find work, and live in miserable barracks close to the factories, thousands of miles from home, and send the money home. By law, their children are not allowed to live with them. Grandparents raise the young. Obviously, this has a huge social impact on the family.
Before this, the families were living in abject poverty, so the parents feel they have no choice. They sacrifice at incredible cost to themselves and their families. But as the film poses, through the mouths of the children, what will the future bring?
Book: Deep River, by Karl Marlantes, 2019
Deep River is an epic immigrant story of mostly Finns, but also Swedes and Greeks, who settle in the Northwestern corner of the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th century. They work in incredibly miserable conditions logging the huge virgin trees of the Northwest, fishing in the rivers or in the ocean, or in the canning factories processing the abundant salmon. Life is hard, but it is the profit motive that drives the owners to never even provide clean straw to sleep on. The race for profits causes the companies to push workers past what’s safe, and people die or are lamed for life. You see the Wobblies (the Industrial Workers of the World) organize in the logging camps and factories. And you see the men and women who fought to build this country and gain a better life.
Aug 21, 2023
Michael Oher was the subject of the movie The Blind Side, which came out in 2009. The movie depicts how Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, a wealthy white family in Memphis, took in Oher, a black teenager living in poverty and passed around the foster care system, and helped him get good grades and play football, eventually going to their alma mater, Ole Miss.
The movie eventually raked in over 300 million dollars, and garnered Sandra Bullock an Oscar for her role as Leigh Anne Tuohy.
Oher has often made it known that he has been unhappy with how he was depicted in The Blind Side—as someone unintelligent who could never have gotten anywhere without the Tuohys. He has said that this image followed him throughout his career and impacted how he was treated.
Last week, Oher filed a petition in a Tennessee probate court, stating that he had been led to believe that he was being adopted by the Tuohy family, and only recently discovered that never happened. Instead, he has been under a conservatorship since he was eighteen, which means that even though he is a legal adult, the Tuohys have legal authority over all of his business deals.
Oher also claims that he never saw any money from The Blind Side, though he says the Tuohys and their two biological children received hundreds of thousands of dollars and possibly even millions from it. Oher’s petition seeks to end the conservatorship; to prohibit the Tuohys from using his name, image, and likeness; and money compensation.
The Tuohys, for their part, deny that they made much money from The Blind Side and say the conservatorship was the best option to get him into Ole Miss. They say they will end the conservatorship.
The situation right now is messy and unclear. There are different dynamics tangled up in this story—family, personal, class and race. What exactly is true about each person’s claims is not at all clear at the current moment.
What seems clear, though, is that Oher feels betrayed. And this expression of anger on his part may be what is most shocking to many people who saw the movie: this was presented as a feel-good story about how a family with wealth took in a poor kid and helped him realize his dreams. Now the story carries the stink of exploitation for personal gain.
And maybe that feel-good story was the problem to begin with. It’s part of the pattern of myth-making in this society: claiming that a wealthy white family helps a poor, “slow” black kid. A story where an individual beaten down by this system gets a leg up through accidental connections with a rich benefactor.
It’s always a story of individuals making their way out of poverty, not about people finding a collective way to end that poverty. And it always involves the kindness of those who have done very well within this system, while never questioning the wealth disparity—or how the wealthy made their wealth in the first place.
And Oher’s lawsuit shows that even those stories “based on a true story” are still mostly myths.
Aug 21, 2023
Here are two of the strikes that are going on in the U.S. These strikes may remain isolated and separated today. But others could join them.
In New Brunswick, N.J., 1700 nurses of United Steelworkers Local 4—200 went out on strike August 4. They are up in arms over the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital’s refusal to bargain and adjust the dangerous short-staffing practices ever since COVID.
A striker exulted in their strike action at long last: "We don’t get recognized for the hard work we do. Stuff that we deal with like getting peed on, getting all these bodily fluids, 12, 14-hour shifts that turn into 16-hour days, barely any rest break. I’m lucky if I could go to the bathroom. I don’t know how many times I’ve actually sat down and had a proper break for lunch. So, I think this is absolutely beautiful."
In Newton, Iowa, Thombert Inc. refused to begin bargaining with the 84 members of UAW Local 997 until one week before their contract expired July 24. Then the company demanded takeaways like reducing Sick and Accident insurance. "We brought the company’s offer to the members, and it received a 90% NO vote," said the Local 997 president.
Workers at Thombert produce polyurethane wheels for electric forklifts. If they have to make the wheels come off of production, to get some fair treatment, then so be it. The workers went out on strike on August 1.
Aug 21, 2023
During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, roughly the past three years, Detroit had a moratorium on water shut-offs. That moratorium expired in January 2023, and now the Water and Sewerage Department is saying around 750 households in the city are at risk of having their water shut off starting this week, and that number is just part of the nearly 60,000 people who are behind on their water bill.
There are programs to attempt to alleviate the burden, including the “Lifeline” plan for low-income workers which can allow for 90% of eligible workers to have their debt completely paid off via state relief funds. Of course, there are always barriers to these kinds of means-tested programs. And besides, the State knows what your income is from your tax returns.
Why shouldn’t your bill just be adjusted from that automatically? And why is there even a water bill?! We need water to live! If there are costs involved, let that come from the taxes we pay, or maybe let’s have the rich pay their share instead of giving them more tax-free handouts.