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
Oct 16, 2023
Another barbaric war broke out in the Middle East, this time engulfing Israel and Gaza. The U.S. government and news media blame the Palestinian group, Hamas, for setting off this war.
Yes, Hamas fighters carried out a murderous rampage, killing over a thousand Israelis and wounding thousands more. This is blind violence, and it has to be condemned. But the U.S. is in no position to condemn this violence. Its hands are not clean.
The Israeli military’s response to this rampage explains how we got here. For the Israeli military launched a war against the entire Gaza population of more than two million people, half of whom are children. The Israeli government cut off all water, electricity, gas, food, and medical supplies to the Gaza Strip, condemning countless people to sickness, starvation, and death. Warplanes have been dropping thousands of bombs every day on Gaza, killing thousands and turning entire neighborhoods into rubble. And while the Israeli army masses a heavily equipped army of 300,000 troops along the border, it has ordered all Palestinians living in the north of Gaza to move to the south, provoking a mass panic, exodus and certainly more death.
Gaza is a tiny territory, half the size of Chicago. It is one of the most densely populated areas of land on Earth. Most people are refugees, who fled other wars and conflicts. They are extremely poor. And they are already trapped, completely surrounded by troops, guards, fences, walls, and war ships. Gaza is an open-air prison that has been periodically bombed and invaded in war after war.
The Israeli military now proposes to invade—this means urban warfare, soldiers fighting street to street, house to house, and much more death and destruction. And what will that produce? Ethnic cleansing? This will bring more wars, endless wars. What it will not bring is more protection or security for the various peoples—obviously not the Palestinians, but certainly not the Israelis either.
Israel, the U.S., and the rest of the big powers denounce Hamas for terrorism. But what these big powers carry out against the Palestinian population is unspeakable terror and violence from one of the biggest, most advanced, and heavily equipped militaries in the world.
Biden, the U.S. government, and the U.S. military say their support of Israel is the support of the Jewish people. That is a lie. The U.S. supports the state of Israel for one reason: the Israeli state is U.S. imperialism’s cop in the Middle East, a region rich in oil resources, which means tremendous profits and wealth for U.S. oil companies, financiers, military contractors, the capitalist class as a whole.
In order to safeguard those profits and wealth, the U.S. and the other big powers have divided the different peoples and ethnic groups of the region against each other. Divide and rule is how the U.S. and the other imperialist powers have always imposed their domination. Those divisions have produced nationalist and religious fundamentalism, and many, many wars: Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and all the wars between Israel and the Palestinians. For the Israeli population, that means being on the front line, kill or be killed, over and over again.
All the peoples of the Middle East could live together in peace, despite all their differences, ethnic or religious. That can only be brought about when the working class and poor of all the different countries in the Middle East rise up and overthrow their own rotten rulers, religious fanatics and parasites who oppress and divide them. This will allow them to get rid of the system that is causing the worsening cycle of wars and ethnic conflicts: capitalism and imperialism. And in so doing they will help the mighty working classes in the big imperialist countries to do the same.
Peace is possible only when the working class takes power from that tiny capitalist minority that runs society today, in order to run society in the interests of the majority.
Oct 16, 2023
Film: Killers of the Flower Moon, premiering in local theaters Oct. 20th.
Director Martin Scorsese’s latest film is set in the 1920s. Huge deposits of oil are discovered in the Oklahoma territory of the Osage Tribe, but as the film shows, the oil rights are primarily and corruptly controlled by white businessmen, lawmen, and con artists. Simultaneously, in the same area, there are a series of brutal murders stretching over years sowing a climate of fear, known as the Reign of Terror. Finally, the federal government can’t ignore the obvious abuses and gets involved.
In the midst of all this, the film focuses on an Osage woman who marries a white man. Their relationship is a microcosm of the horror and dilemmas around them. This film is long, 3 hours 26 minutes, however, it is a truly stupendous film with incredible attention to detail, feeling, and history, and demands we question where we have been, and where we are going.
Book: Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848–1849, by Christopher Clark, 2023.
This book is a vibrant and sometimes exciting telling of the revolutions in 1848 in Europe and around the world, their aftermath, and their long-term impact on the world’s social order.
Though the book is long, it immerses you in the events. You see revolutions spreading like wildfire across Europe, jumping from city to city. The working class demands better wages and lower food prices, and the petty bourgeoisie demands the right to vote for all in the property-owning classes, free speech, the right of assembly and a national republic. And you see the two forces combine against the vestiges of feudalism, corruption, and royalty and more or less sweep them away.
Though it tells that many gains were reversed a year later, and the moving forces of the revolutions of 1848 may have been pushed back, the lines were drawn. Will the future be working class internationalism or liberal nationalism?
Oct 16, 2023
Will you live into your 80s? Or will you die of a chronic disease before you reach retirement? Not surprising, studies show life expectancy is going down in the U.S. But not for everyone.
Those with less money have less access to doctors, have less money for medical expenses, and live in areas where school completion rates are lower, where college students often don’t finish a degree, where good-paying jobs have left, and where pensions are rare. As a result, the life spans of poor people and many working class people are getting shorter.
One study showed that people without a college degree were more likely to die in their prime working years, between 25 and 65, than those with college degrees. Those without degrees are more likely to die from opioid overdoses and chronic diseases like obesity, hypertension, and diabetes.
These inequalities in health care in the United States are a result of living in a capitalist society. Health care is all about making a profit, just like every other business. If you are wealthy, you can have the best health care money can buy. If you are not wealthy....
Good luck! Good health care is a privilege and a luxury in the United States.
Oct 16, 2023
Potomac Electric Power Company (Pepco) agreed to pay 10 million dollars in penalties and promised to spend 47 million dollars to clean up the Anacostia River and contamination at two riverside facilities and numerous underground sites in Washington, D.C.
From 1933 to 2013 Pepco’s coal and oil-fired power generating station at Buzzard Point spilled and released petroleum and hazardous substances like carcinogenic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) at the confluence of the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers in D.C. For 100 years Pepco also has been releasing unfiltered wastewater laced with oil into the city’s storm water system, which empties into the Anacostia.
Pepco leaked and spilled oily water in working class neighborhoods, not the rich neighborhoods far west of the river. This pollution has contributed to the decades-long contamination of the Anacostia. Thousands of people used to swim in the river and depend on eating the fish. How many people have been poisoned and sickened—even killed—by toxic discharges into the river?
The settlement is equivalent to hardly more than one day of Pepco’s annual revenue of 19 billion dollars; Pepco won’t even miss it.
Pepco could have produced electricity without illegally dumping. In fact, electricity can be produced much more cleanly and with a smaller contribution to climate change. The technology exists today: scrubbers in smoke stacks, and so forth. But Pepco and other power companies would rather make billions instead of doing what is necessary for the health of people and the environment.
Oct 16, 2023
A couple of weeks ago, casino workers in Detroit voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike. They include everyone from cleaners, to cooks, to servers, to gaming employees. At the time, some of the workers interviewed in the media spoke from the heart—about everything from their low wages; to the price of groceries and rent and everything going up; to how, weren’t these jobs supposed to be the answer for workers in Detroit when auto plants closed and people’s livelihoods were pulled out from under them?
Well, these casino jobs weren’t the answer, since, 24 years later, workers are saying they need wages to make sure one job in a casino should be enough to live on, that they shouldn’t pay more for their health care benefits, and that they should have better retirement benefits. That’s why some workers are invoking the powerful words of civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, “We’re sick and tired of being sick and tired.” And this resonated with workers in the city who heard these casino workers speak.
Oct 16, 2023
On September 28, the Baltimore City Department of Public Works (DPW) announced that on September 26, drinking water in one of the city’s reservoirs had tested positive for a microscopic bacterial parasite that can sicken people and even kill them. Older people, children, and those with compromised immune systems (such as people with HIV) were particularly at risk. They were advised to either drink bottled water or to boil tap water for at least one minute before drinking it. This warning applied to hundreds of thousands of people in parts of Baltimore City, Baltimore County and Howard County.
On October 3, DPW announced that new test results showed no contamination in the water.
The parasite that has caused this problem is a common one throughout the world. Experts say it probably got into Baltimore’s treated water supply from bird or deer droppings. But the reason it was able to do this is because some of the city’s treated drinking water is stored in uncovered reservoirs.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ordered that all such reservoirs be covered years ago. They even issued an order just this past May predicting much of what has now happened in Baltimore. But the city has lagged and repeatedly extended the date when this will be accomplished. They are now saying that this will finally happen by the end of this year.
The obvious irresponsibility of city officials in this fiasco has caused many people to distrust what they say. Is the drinking water supply now really O.K? Are the open drinking water reservoirs really going to be finally covered by the end of this year?
People want to know.
Oct 16, 2023
Amundsen Park, on Chicago’s far West Side, will not be converted into a temporary shelter for migrants. The City agreed to open the shelter across the street in a vacant building—but only after neighborhood residents loudly objected that putting the shelter in the park would displace sports and health programs for young people and the elderly.
Migrants have been arriving in Chicago, with over 18,000 coming on buses and planes from Texas since last August. More than 3,000 are camped out in the lobbies of police stations, waiting for a better place to stay. The migrants are largely asylum seekers from Venezuela, fleeing an economic and social crisis that is the result of a U.S. blockade of that country.
Yes, these migrants need support to help them find their footing in the city. But who believes the only way to house migrants is to move the youth football team? As one resident told a local paper: “We’re not against migrants.... We want to help them.... We just don’t want our programs taken away.”
The city government, when it makes these moves, plays right into the “Hunger Games” mentality that pits the migrants against other working-class Chicagoans. Chicago is a wealthy city, with lots of empty buildings available. Hell, there was one right across the street!
Oct 16, 2023
On September 30, Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom of California vetoed legislation that would have allowed workers to collect unemployment pay while on strike.
Companies often simply wait for a strike to collapse, expecting that the lost income of workers alone would force unionized workers to accept companies’ demands. Recently, Hollywood writers repeatedly expressed this concern during their strike.
By vetoing this unemployment benefit bill, Newsom clearly sided with the companies. But, in return, California Democrats, who have a supermajority in California’s Assembly and Senate, did nothing, although these Democrats had the ability to override Newsom’s veto easily.
Since 2011, California governors have been Democrats, and the Democrats have dominated the California legislature. This ping-pong game of the California legislature passing a bill seemingly favorable to workers, and then the governor vetoing these bills, has been repeated many times.
For example, in September 2021, Newsom vetoed a bill that would have boosted California workers’ paid family leave. Companies usually pay less than 60% of workers’ income for family leave.
In October 2021, Newsom vetoed a bill that would allow farmworkers to vote for their union’s proposals and elections through the mail, although California citizens elected Newsom himself through a vote-by-mail process.
In October 2022, Newsom vetoed a bill that would have made undocumented immigrants eligible for California unemployment benefits. Undocumented immigrants pay state and local taxes, which the University of California calculated to reach $3.7 billion in 2019. But they do not have any rights under labor laws. This California bill could have provided some financial support. Newsom denied this support.
And on and on.
Democrats passed all these bills, but Democrat Newsom rejected all of them. The Democrats never overrode the veto. Newsom and Democratic politicians in the California Congress play this game over and over, and all are anti-worker.
Oct 16, 2023
Only days before a Maryland law would take effect to remove any statute of limitation on when people who suffered abuse by Catholic priests in the Baltimore Archdiocese could go to court about it, the Archdiocese declared bankruptcy under Chapter 11 federal law.
In this kind of bankruptcy proceeding, the Archdiocese will be able to keep all its churches, schools, and other operations running while it supposedly “reorganizes.” But abused people will only have four months to file with a judge, and after then, no further lawsuits or charges will be allowed for past abuses.
This is not about the money. This is about potentially silencing hundreds of people. The Archdiocese says it has paid more than 400 people a total of 20 million dollars as compensation for abuse since the early 1980s. The state has reported 600 people who suffered abuse. One said as a boy a priest gave him beer and cash after orally raping him and then told him he would be “damned to hell” if he told anyone. A woman said as a girl she was raped and told she had received “holy communion.” Lawyers had expected more than 1,000 people to step forward now. But with the bankruptcy proceeding, not all of them will be able to publicly state their case and have their day in court.
The church has taken advantage of the federal bankruptcy law to do this again and again—in 32 jurisdictions in the U.S. so far, including San Diego, Milwaukee, New Orleans, Wilmington, and so on.
And above all these dioceses is the whole hierarchy of the Catholic church all the way up to the Pope, protecting sexual predators all around the world—while claiming the right to tell us how to live our lives!
Oct 16, 2023
Teachers, union stewards, and parents in Montgomery County, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C., complained about Joel Beidleman’s sexist harassment for at least 12 years in three middle schools where he was assistant principal or principal. But management did not follow up on these complaints. Managers kept protecting and promoting him.
When managers promoted him to be principal at a high school this past summer, finally the Washington Post published an article exposing the situation. The district hired a law firm to investigate. But management chose the same firm they had paid more than $100,000 in the last year to represent them in other matters. The firm did not pursue many of the complaints and essentially excused management’s cover-up of Beidleman’s abusiveness.
Management disregarded complaints like these: “You should just f--- me,” he told one teacher at a party he crashed in 2020. He texted teachers at 11:30 p.m. and 3 a.m. telling them to meet him in a hotel room. Teachers said he “frequently looks women up and down” and “looks at my chest all the time.” He talked about women’s and girls’ bodies and outfits and criticized a teacher for not wearing makeup. He told an eighth grader, “Don’t be like [your friend]. She’s a whore.” He screamed in teachers’ faces, berated and humiliated them, and warned them not to report his unwanted advances. “He is the most vindictive person I’ve ever met,” one teacher said.
It is not surprising that sexist, macho behavior like this is protected by management. It is protected and encouraged in all kinds of public and private workplaces in this capitalist society—including in liberal Montgomery County. Male dominance is one of the features of capitalism. Until society is free from capitalism, our education system won’t be free of male dominance and sexism.
Oct 16, 2023
On October 1, Democrat California Governor Gavin Newsom appointed Laphonza Butler to fill Dianne Feinstein’s vacated seat in the U.S. Senate. Democrats promote Butler as a pro-labor politician. This is a lie.
Butler started her career as an organizer for nurses in Baltimore and hospital workers in New Haven, Connecticut. In 2009, she joined these unions’ efforts to organize in-home caregivers and nurses in California. Then, Butler’s union bureaucracy career jumped off in a short time. At the age of 34, she became the president of the California Service Employees International Union (SEIU) State Council in 2013.
Butler ended her union career in 2018 when she left SEIU to join a consulting firm, SCRB Strategies, whose website proudly touted the company as “California’s top spin doctors.” This firm tasked Butler to represent Uber against Uber’s drivers.
Uber, Lyft, and other so-called gig companies classify their drivers as “contractors.” As such, these gig companies don’t recognize the rights of these workers under labor laws. In 2019, legislators wanted to change this by passing a bill in the California State Senate to classify these drivers as workers with minimum wage rights, and to require these companies to cover their drivers’ expenses and contribute to state unemployment.
Uber started to negotiate directly with the Teamsters Union and SEIU to undermine this law. To conduct these negotiations, Uber hired Butler. She trained Uber on dealing with these unions in several face-to-face meetings between the gig companies and union representatives. Many of these union representatives were Butler’s friends and co-workers when she worked for SEIU. Butler outright sold workers out so that she could have a political and money-making career.
In 2020, Butler joined another gig company, Airbnb. Butler helped Airbnb avoid hotel-motel taxes by lobbying politicians at the State and Federal Government levels. Through such arrangements, Airbnb avoided paying taxes that support workers, such as unemployment benefits. Airbnb rentals employ workers for their upkeep as contractors with no benefits.
Butler is a politician who uses organizing skills she learned earlier against workers by representing multi-billion dollar corporations such as Uber and Airbnb. With this U.S. Senate appointment, a very rich businessman, Newsom, just rewarded Butler for her anti-worker efforts.
Oct 16, 2023
The Israeli state currently creating an enormous human disaster in Gaza is a direct product of U.S. policies aimed at dominating the Middle East. The Israeli military is deploying U.S.-made weapons, largely paid for by U.S. taxes, and the U.S. has already announced new weapons shipments. U.S. naval forces have moved to back up the Israeli military. U.S. political leaders, starting with President Biden, have announced unlimited political support for Israel.
The foundation of Israel as a Jewish state was only possible from the beginning because of U.S. support. The U.S. did not support the creation of this state out of any altruistic concern for the Jewish people, or out of a desire to create “democracy” in the Middle East, but because it intended to use the state of Israel as the most reliable armed outpost to ensure its domination of this oil-rich region.
At the conclusion of World War I, Britain took Palestine from what had been the Ottoman Empire. As everywhere, the British used the policy of divide and rule to maintain their control.
They allowed, and even encouraged, a limited Jewish immigration into this overwhelmingly Arab territory. These Jewish immigrants were themselves fleeing oppression in Europe. They might have sided with the Arabs, also oppressed. But instead, the Zionists, or Jewish nationalists, sought to find a place for only their own people. They bought land from large Arab landowners—then evicted the Arab peasants who often worked as sharecroppers, setting these peoples against each other. When the Great Arab Revolt broke out in 1936, the Zionists sided with the British, even providing auxiliaries to the British Army that repressed this revolt with enormous bloodshed. And so from the beginning, the Zionists constituted an armed force that could be used by imperialism against the Arab population. They were also a convenient target for Arab rulers, who sought to direct the anger of their populations against the Jewish people, instead of the big powers, in order to be able to maintain good relations with the dominant imperialist countries.
After World War I, Zionism attracted only a relatively small minority of Jews. A large number participated in the socialist and communist movements, standing for international working class solidarity, rather than Jewish nationalism, and many were trying to assimilate into whatever country they lived in.
With the Great Depression of the 1930s, antisemitism was ramped up by forces defending the interests of the capitalist class, serving to divert the populations’ anger away from the capitalist system. By the end of World War II in 1945, six million Jews had been murdered, and hundreds of thousands were homeless refugees. The U.S. and the countries of Europe accepted only a small number. Many turned to Palestine, hoping to find peace and safety there.
Britain did not want to let these refugees into Palestine because they would help the Zionists launch a Jewish state, and Britain intended to keep the region for itself. But the balance of power had shifted—the U.S. was now the world’s dominant power, in the Middle East as everywhere else.
U.S. corporations had increasing interests in the region’s oil. But their interests were potentially threatened by rising Arab nationalism. They saw that a Jewish state surrounded by hostile Arab countries and dependent on the U.S. might be useful in that situation. The U.S. pushed Britain to allow the Jews entry into Palestine and to allow for the creation of a new country that would be divided between two states, one Jewish and one Arab—with no one proposing that the two peoples might live together in a shared homeland.
In fact, there was no real shared Jewish national identity among the hundreds of thousands of refugees arriving from more than a dozen different countries. To impose a new Jewish state, the first religion-based state in the Middle East, its founders artificially created a supposed Jewish identity to unite the population behind them. They brought back a dead language, Hebrew, that was only spoken in religious services, and made it the national language. And even though most of the founders were themselves secular, they made Jewish religious dogma the law of the land. This opened the door to the rise of today’s Jewish religious fundamentalists and terrorists.
The moment the Zionists declared the state of Israel in 1948, the new state found itself at war with both the Arab states surrounding it and the bulk of the population of Palestine itself. In the ensuing war, the Israeli army and the paramilitary groups linked to it carried out a planned policy aimed at “Judaizing” the territory, to drive out the Arab population and create an ethnically pure state. Between 700,000 and 800,000 people fled. Hundreds of thousands of these Palestinians were forced into vast refugee camps. Many who live in Gaza today are the grandchildren—or great-grandchildren—of these refugees.
In the period after World War II, movements against the regimes the British or French had put in place swept the Arab countries. For instance, in Egypt, nationalist military officers took power and took a somewhat nationalist, independent stance against the domination of their region by Britain, France, and, increasingly, the United States.
When in 1956 Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, which had been owned by British and French investors, the Israeli military jumped in to help British and French forces try to stop the Egyptians. Then, in 1967, Israel attacked the surrounding Arab states, taking the West Bank and Gaza and weakening the states it defeated militarily. In 1973, Israel fought another war with these same states. These wars and the pressure of the Israeli military helped push Egypt more or less permanently under the domination of the U.S.—a domination which continues to this day.
And yet, the Egyptian regime remains fragile, like the other Arab dictatorships. An explosion of the poor population or even a revolution is always possible, like those that swept the region in the Arab Spring starting in 2011. The Israeli state, on the other hand, rests on a population pulled behind the Zionist project and thus totally dependent on U.S. support.
While proving once and for all Israel’s usefulness to imperialism, the conquests of 1967 also created a new problem. The Israelis could not just drive out the populations of the territories they conquered in 1967, as they had in 1948. They could have tried to integrate these populations into their own country, which was more developed and had the possibility of offering a higher standard of living. But doing so would have meant abandoning the project of having a Jewish state.
And so instead, Israel has militarily occupied these territories for the last 56 years.
In 1987, the first Intifada broke out. Every day, for six years, young Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza threw stones at Israeli soldiers. These responded with batons, tear gas, and bullets. But they could not contain the revolt against an Israeli occupation which kept the Palestinian population trapped in a permanent prison camp.
Finally, Israel and the U.S attempted to find a way out by agreeing to the creation of a Palestinian state in 1994 that they hoped would control the Palestinian population, something Israel had found itself unable to do.
Up to this point, the Palestinian resistance had been organized by nationalists who did not emphasize religion. But seeing themselves increasingly bypassed, the Islamists in 1987 created their own political organization, Hamas.
The Israeli state continued to tighten the screws, continued to take land and build settlements in the Palestinian territories for Jews only, pushing the Palestinian population into deeper poverty. The new Palestinian Authority was unable to meet even the most modest expectations of the population. It was in this context that Hamas was able to win young Palestinians to agree to carry out suicide bombings aimed at Israeli civilians. It is a mark of the desperation of the population that Hamas found young people willing to blow themselves up in this way—but it was also a dead end not just for the bombers, but for the population. Instead of a mass mobilization against an occupying army, as had characterized the first Intifada, Palestinian resistance increasingly took the form of terrorism against the Israeli population—which threw that population more fully into the arms of the most reactionary Zionists, and behind them, the U.S.
When Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007, Israel almost completely cut it off, depriving people of any way to leave. Gaza has remained an open-air prison ever since.
Today, about five and a half million people live under Israeli occupation or blockade in Gaza and the West Bank, compared with about six and a half million Israeli Jews and two million Arab citizens of Israel.
The history of the Jews themselves demonstrates the dead-end of nationalism: they were first the victims of European nationalisms that excluded and then massacred them by the millions, and those who accepted Jewish nationalism (Zionism) are now trapped in the prison of the Israeli state, even if they now play the role of the prison guards.
But more fundamentally, this entire situation is the result of the imperialist domination of the world. It is imperialism—first British, and then American—that has set these peoples against each other. And it is U.S. imperialism that benefits first of all from the existence of an Israeli state, armed to the teeth, counterposed to the peoples of the region, and totally dependent on the U.S. for survival.
Oct 16, 2023
The mainstream media and politicians portray Israel’s bombings and invasion of Gaza as an understandable response to the horrific terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas on Israeli civilians. But these ignore the horrific daily situation of the Palestinians, enforced by the Israeli state.
Over two million Palestinians live crammed into the Gaza Strip, an area about the size of Detroit, walled in between the sea and Israel’s border by a high-security fence with surveillance towers.
More than half the inhabitants of Gaza live below the poverty line. Unemployment is over 50%. Water and electricity can be turned off by Israel. Health care and schools are in short supply. Farmers and fishermen have been deprived of their means of subsistence by the blockade, and only 17,000 inhabitants have obtained a work permit in Israel, which imposes painful and humiliating hours of waiting every day to pass through checkpoints.
The situation of the Gazans, like that of other Palestinians, has given rise to many revolts. The only perspective offered to these revolts, a nationalism aimed at creating a Palestinian state, has proved to be a dead end.
The failure of nationalism and the ongoing repression by the Israeli state has created the breeding ground for Islamic fundamentalists like Hamas. It won local Gaza elections after the Israeli state, under the tutelage of the U.S., accepted supposed “self-rule” by the Palestinians as a way to control the population. Afterwards, Israel removed its troops from Gaza and, along with Egypt, imposed a total land, air and sea blockade. And as that blockade has continued year after year, the population has grown more desperate.
Israelis are also the victims of failed nationalism—but it is the nationalism of the oppressor. So in the end, both Israelis and Palestinians find themselves trapped in the dead end of imperialism’s nationalist, divide-and-conquer strategies.
Oct 16, 2023
On October 6, Biden announced that he will expand the border wall some 20 miles along the Mexico-U.S. border. The Biden Administration is also resuming deportations of Venezuelans. The Democrats are making a political calculation that many voters feel that immigrants are making the lives of people born in the U.S. harder. So, Biden is going back on a campaign promise he made ... and blaming it on Trump.
Lots of people come to the U.S. from all over. People come here for all sorts of reasons like poverty, brutally repressive governments, and war. People want a better life. Instead, they are turned into political pawns by both parties.
The U.S. bosses use the cheap labor of undocumented workers. They also use undocumented workers as scapegoats. By pitting native-born workers against migrant workers, the capitalist class hopes to convince native-born workers that their problems are the fault of migrants and not the bosses’ economic system.
The Democrats and the Republicans may have different rhetoric in regard to immigration, but in the end they both carry out the same policy. This is because they both represent the same class interests—the interests of the capitalist class.
As workers, our interests are exactly the opposite. Our interests are to fight the bosses and the capitalist class alongside our sisters and brothers from Venezuela and Mexico and everywhere in between. For workers to take power and run things in the interests of all humanity instead of a handful of greedy parasites.
Oct 16, 2023
This article is translated from the October 7, issue #1313 of Combat Ouvrier (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active on the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique.
The dominant system of our time, the worldwide capitalist system, creates subhuman situations, the greatest misery and barbarism from one end of the planet to the other. That is certainly the situation in Haiti.
Gangs exercise terror there on a daily basis. The abuses committed by these gangs are appalling: rapes, kidnappings, killings.
At the origin of these modern gangs are politicians who armed them and/or capitalists who paid them off and use them to settle their accounts with political opponents. Jovenel Moise, the Haitian president murdered in 2021, had his own gang. Then the gangs multiplied. That there are today gangs acting for their own account is not surprising. Heads of state have long created and used their own gangs.
From 1957 to 1986, the dictatorship of the Duvaliers, father and son, terrorized the population with their militia army, the Tonton Macoute. Other heads of state have copied them, like former President Aristide and his “Chimeres.” Then president Martelly, from 2011 to 2016, directly financed the gangs in order to put them at his service. Chimeres, zenglendos, and other bandits have multiplied without end.
On top of gang violence, the population suffers from extreme poverty. Out of 12 million people in the country, 5.2 million need emergency help for food and shelter.
It is poverty that feeds the gangs. Those who decide to join these bands of murderers are coming themselves from working-class neighborhoods and are often very young people. They put themselves under the orders of gang leaders, in the hope of receiving a little nest egg or just having a meal.
Capitalism is a class system where the capitalists get rich by exploiting the working class. And so, the rich have an interest in keeping workers poor, and even in seeing them get poorer. This is the case all over the world, and it’s even more true in Haiti. Poverty forces workers to accept extreme speedup and wages that aren’t even enough to survive. The capitalists maintain this poverty with the help of countries like the U.S. and France. The United States turns a blind eye to trafficking of weapons in Haiti, which come from Florida!
The workers and the poor population of Haiti cannot rely on anyone but themselves.
The few revolts of residents of Port-au-Prince neighborhoods against the gangs are examples of the determination that the population can demonstrate. In forming and multiplying self-defense groups, the population can make the gangs fear them for once and regain control of the streets and neighborhoods. In doing so they would not be far from building their own political party. We saw workers in the Sanopi area, for instance, stand up to the fiercest bosses, and go on strike for their wages.
And then the population of Haiti constantly organize demonstrations against gangs or against the Prime Minister. Regularly, thousands of people take to the streets and express their anger. Their conditions show the need to go further.
If the workers and the Haitian population managed to form a revolutionary workers party, an organized expression of class consciousness, then the conditions would be ripe for radical change, the extermination of gangs but also the eradication of capitalists who suck the blood of workers from Haiti. This would be the way toward the revolutionary taking of power by the workers and the poor.
Oct 16, 2023
What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters, during the week of October 8, 2023.
Hamas, which has controlled Gaza since 2006, launched a military offensive on Israel. Armed commando groups, breaching the military barriers that divide Gaza from Israel, attacked Israeli civilians, taking hostages. Rockets rained on heavily populated areas, including the capital of Tel Aviv.
Israel’s military was apparently taken by surprise. But it quickly mounted a vast response. Its chief of staff warned that Israel’s “enemies will pay a price beyond anything ever seen before.” The words were aimed at Hamas, but the weapons used by Israel were aimed at the Palestinian people.
By the end of the first day, over 500 people had been killed, both Israelis and Palestinians. On that same day, the Israeli army warned all civilians to leave Gaza. Most Palestinians have no place else to go in Israel’s apartheid framework. So, they will be a target in Israel’s military “cleanup” of Gaza.
The Hamas offensive may have been prompted by a threatened Israeli-Saudi Arabian deal that could challenge Hamas control over Gaza. But it flows from long-term Hamas policy, whose main aim has been to force Israel and the imperialist powers to recognize Hamas as a legitimate part of their world.
By attacking Israeli civilians, Hamas may be aiming to shake support for Israel’s government. But just as in earlier wars in the region, the resulting mayhem is more likely to drive Israelis back into the arms of their government, with its vicious apartheid-like policies. And Hamas, with its organized terrorist violence, gave no perspective to the Palestinian people, only the likelihood of becoming unwitting victims of the violence coming from both sides.
Israelis are also caught in the dead-end trap of nationalism—the idea that Israel can maintain itself only by carrying out organized violence against the Palestinians. This gives the Israelis themselves no perspective other than living in a permanent state of war. It shows that a people who oppress another people cannot live in freedom themselves.
Israel came out of the attempt to build a refuge in Palestine for the Jewish people, themselves victims of Europe’s most atrocious racist violence. But the state of Israel was founded through violent attacks on the Palestinian people to drive them from their land. It guaranteed that Israel would live in a constant state of warfare with all the peoples in the region.
Based on a policy that divided it from its neighbors, Israel became an outpost of British and American imperialism. In exchange for weapons and economic funding, Israel turned itself into one of imperialism’s cops. Its military and advanced weapons were used to control the hotspots that regularly broke out in the Middle East.
Israel wasn’t fated to play this role. And the Jews, who had been severely oppressed or killed in Europe, were not fated to become the oppressors of the Palestinians. There were many socialists among the Jewish refugees from Europe’s violence. Their perspective was to emigrate to Palestine, to try to build a multi-nation country together with the Palestinians already living there.
But the socialists were not organized, and the Jewish nationalists were.
Seventy-five years ago, the nation-state of Israel was born as a specifically Jewish state, a religious state. Most Palestinians were driven out. Those who remained were relegated to an inferior status. Given that violent founding, all of the populations of the region have lived in a constant state of war ever since.
This does not need to be humanity’s future. We can build a different one. We can be part of a common struggle by all the oppressed. We can fight, all of us, against our own leaders and against the wealthy classes they serve. This was possible in Palestine in 1948. It is possible in this country today. It is possible around the world, the only level where such a struggle will finally succeed.
Oct 16, 2023
A new 19-million-dollar federal grant created the MIRACLE Center: a Michigan center aimed at reducing pregnancy-associated deaths among Black, Hispanic, American Indian women and women in rural areas. Researchers will take a public health approach to reversing worsening maternal mortality: the U.S. has a maternal death rate three times that of other high-income countries!
In Michigan, the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) says 64% of maternal deaths each year are preventable. The disparities are alarming. From 2015–19, black women died from pregnancy-related causes at a rate of 30 per 100,000 live births—more than double the overall rate. (White women died from pregnancy-related causes at a rate of 11 deaths per 100,000 births, also catastrophic.)
More than half of deaths of women happen after the baby is born. As MSU professor Jennifer Johnson explains, "If a mom is just trying to make ends meet, she may not go back for a two-week or six-week checkup.... She may be having headaches, or she may be having shortness of breath ... and just sort of shake it off or think, ‘Oh, I don’t have time for this’ and then she dies."
Said another advocate for new moms, "We have clients going back to work two weeks after delivery because they can’t afford the time off. They can’t afford to miss work at the minimum-wage jobs they’re working—just to keep food on the table."
The Miracle Center will try three interventions. First, in the Detroit, Grand Rapids, and Flint areas, community health advocates will go to the homes of pregnant women and new moms and help stand up for them within the broken healthcare system. Second, digital help will be available for women to learn about health warning signs and to connect with healthcare quickly. Third, expanded prenatal care will be funded in 14 counties. After 7 years, the funding for this desperately needed project will end.
In this society, the joy and wonder that is natural to feel around the birth of a new baby exists within a U.S. healthcare system based on making money. Prenatal healthcare and labor and delivery units are not big profit generators. Humankind has always required community support for new moms and babies. None of this should involve making a profit! Moms and families deserve all the money it takes for childbirth to be safe and for the next generation to have a great start in life.
Oct 16, 2023
Here are some strikes that are currently going on in the U.S. These strikes may remain isolated and separated today. But others could join them. New strikes arise almost every week.
Mack Truck workers voted down a tentative contract, 73% NO. Five UAW locals representing 4,000 workers went on strike October 9 at plants in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Florida.
Mack Truck is a subsidiary of Volvo Group, which had a profit margin of over 10% in 2022 and made 5 BILLION dollars. The workers, who created that value, need pay to keep up with inflation, health care co-pays that don’t break them, reasonable pensions, and relief from mandatory overtime. Most of all, they need the two tier system GONE! And they aren’t interested in tying themselves up in a FIVE YEAR contract, either.
Teamsters Local 572 went on strike October 9 against MV Transportation, a subcontractor hired by the city of Santa Clarita to run their bus service. Santa Clarita is just north of Los Angeles. The 200 workers have been trying to negotiate a new contract for over a year without progress. The workers say their pay was cut in half during the subcontracting, compared to regular city employees, and they need that problem straightened out! The company did not even pay them the Covid “hero pay” that the city authorized for the workers. No wonder they’re mad.
Service Employees International Union, SEIU, and United Nurses Association of California, united as United Healthcare Workers West, pulled a five-day strike of 1800 healthcare workers against four Prime Healthcare hospitals in Centinela, Encino, and Garden Grove, in south Los Angeles County. The strike, from October 9 through 13, stressed the low pay and insane workloads on staff. “They pay lower than any surrounding places and they’re OK with that,” said one striker.
Another striker, a radiologist, said, "We have people working 20-hour shifts, 18-hour shifts. You don’t get your lunch breaks, you don’t get your 10-minute breaks.”
Prime’s registered nurses have filed more than 6,000 staffing objection forms with the California’s Department of Public Health since June.
“I’m striking for the housekeeping, laundry, and dietary workers being left behind with livable wages. We all do the same work, and we all deserve the same level of pay increases,” said a housekeeper who has worked at Four Seasons Nursing Home in Westland, Michigan, for 25 years. Her union, SEIU, began a strike against three nursing homes in Metro Detroit which are owned by Optalis Management.
The workers struck Optalis 3 years ago, to win small pay raises while working under the danger of the Covid epidemic. Optalis didn’t learn anything then, so the workers have to give them a remedial lesson now.
Oct 16, 2023
On October 9, about 4,000 workers at Mack Truck plants in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Florida went on strike after they voted down a tentative agreement negotiated by the United Auto Workers union (UAW) leadership.
The Mack Truck workers may have been encouraged by the auto strike. Three weeks before, UAW leaders had called a partial strike at what used to be called the “Big 3”—GM, Ford and Stellantis.
It is not just Mack and the three auto companies. Today other workers are striking or preparing to go on strike—still not much, but noticeably more than what happened for almost four years. Hospital workers at Kaiser Permanente, Blue Cross workers in Michigan, auto supplier workers in Alabama, chemical workers in Illinois, nursing home workers in Michigan and hotel workers in Los Angeles have struck. Meanwhile, casino workers in Detroit, General Dynamics workers and resort workers in Las Vegas have taken strike votes. It seems a little like what happened after the GM strike in 2019—when a rash of strikes caused some people to call it “Striketober.” But Covid soon shut down everything, including strikes.
Now there seems to be a resurgence. It’s not really a surprise. Working people are fed up, many of us very angry. We have faced worsening problems for too long, unsafe working conditions; wages falling well behind inflation; working jobs that are only part-time or temporary, or forced to work two jobs.
Workers’ resentment may have pushed onto the scene through these latest strikes. The question is, will workers take it past the limits in which the unions have led the strikes so far? This situation, which seems to open the door to workers who want to spread their strike, calls for it.
Up until now, the leaders of the unions are not proposing to make these fights as wide as they could be. Kaiser Permanente workers were called out for only three days, with the end of the strike set in advance. The new leadership of the UAW, which promised a more militant fight than the one the UAW carried out against GM in 2019, has so far called out only a few plants to strike, while most Big 3 workers continue to work. As of October 14, only about 24% of UAW autoworkers are on strike. Those who called the strikes are holding back the fight, keeping it safely within the boundaries the system allows.
UAW President Shawn Fain may talk about the working class. He denounces outrageous company profits. And he certainly projects a more militant appearance.
But he doesn’t discuss the system that creates this situation, in which high profits and lower wages are normal. This is called exploitation. And it is produced by the capitalist system—the same system the Democrats defend, even when they join a UAW picket line. (The Republicans do the same, but the union leadership doesn’t push them on the workers).
These strikes may well win something more than what workers have right now. For years, there have been no strikes, and with no fight, workers have no chance at all.
But even if workers gain a few things—so what? People may have forgotten, but GM workers in 2019 thought they won some things—in fact, they did. But it didn’t change the basic situation they and their families found themselves in. To do that, workers will have to begin thinking about the system that creates all these problems. It’s called capitalism. And the only perspective that gives workers real prospects is one that aims at getting rid of capitalism.
Oct 16, 2023
The Starbucks in Midtown Detroit closed earlier this year. The Starbucks on the famous “Eight Mile” at the city’s border removed all its seating, telling customers it was a “New Model.” You can call it, changing your model. Or you can call it like it is—they don’t want homeless people or poor people in there.
Social conditions in major cities have deteriorated so drastically over the years, that the homeless are everywhere. And no, many of them are not polite. They are not clean. And they don’t have the money—even for a plain cup of coffee. And they have nowhere to go. So, they can set up camp in establishments, like Starbucks; they panhandle outside of them; tie up their bathrooms, and basically cause problems for customers who can pay $7 for a Pumpkin Spice Latte.
This is what the “Old Model” of capitalism is producing—a system that throws people out of work, doesn’t provide any affordable housing, or mental health care.