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
Jan 15, 2024
After settling a so-called “record contract” with the auto workers union, Stellantis wasted no time reverting to normal. First, they sent WARN notices to Michigan and Ohio governments about February shift eliminations at one plant in each state. Then, on January 12, they sent text messages to over 500 temporary workers that it was their last day of work and they would no longer have a job at Stellantis. The message stated that the cutback was “part of our normal course of business.”
So, how did the union leadership react to this announcement? A detailed message by the UAW top leadership the following day made clear that they were neither surprised nor disagreed with the Stellantis announcement. In fact, they said that another 1,600 supplemental workers would be terminated within the next few months before they could reach nine months and achieve full-time status!
What the hell happened! How could this be? In the “highlights” they presented to the Stellantis workers, the union leadership listed out all the gains that had been achieved, including gains for the temporary supplemental workers. The UAW leaders said that some supplemental Stellantis workers would be converted to permanent, full-time jobs starting 90 days after ratification. They said that all remaining supplemental workers would be converted to full-time jobs when they reached nine months of unbroken service time. The UAW’s “highlights” said that “within the first year of the agreement 3,200 SEs (supplemental workers) would become full-time”.
There was only one problem—Stellantis had over 5,200 supplemental workers. What would happen to the remaining roughly 2,000 supplemental workers?
Workers found out on January 12 when the company told 539 supplemental workers that they would be immediately terminated.
It is clear that the UAW leadership misled Stellantis workers. They knew Stellantis had 5,200 supplemental workers. They knew that converting 3,200 meant that Stellantis planned to get rid of about 2,000.
Most workers had no way to know how many supplemental workers there were. What most workers knew was that the “highlights” said that everyone will be converted within nine months, so many of them reasonably assumed that the 3,200 converted would mean all of them.
The new UAW leadership, which presented itself as a more militant alternative, did what the old UAW leadership often did. To get workers to vote for a contract, they simply did not tell the workers the truth.
The new leadership, like the old leadership, just accepted that layoffs are “part of our normal course of business.”
And that is exactly the problem. “The normal course of business” includes waves of temporary hiring followed by waves of job cuts. It’s supposed to be accepted as normal that hundreds of workers suddenly lose their livelihoods, and their children lose the security of food on the table just because the profit margins of companies demand it.
It’s supposed to be accepted as normal that union contracts merely set rules for how layoffs will proceed. And then, following job cuts, the remaining workers are normally put on overtime to fulfill orders!
When these jobs are cut, it won’t just be the supplemental workers who suffer.
Overloaded jobs. Insufficient break time. Killing schedules. Mandatory overtime up the wazoo. Did you know that only a small percent of auto workers make it to that golden retirement, first tier or not?
We need more workers!
Both Stellantis and the “new” union leadership played the same rotten game. They put a glittery pot of gold up front, an amount that is equivalent to less than five percent of its 17.9 billion dollar profit. Of course, it looked good. But in exchange, there was an unstated deal not to oppose wringing every drop of labor out of workers’ minds and bodies in the shortest number of paid hours.
UAW president Shawn Fain and his new administration and their “historic” agreement have failed to represent workers’ interests as surely as any prior UAW administration. They made promises they didn’t keep and put workers’ lives and limbs on the chopping block.
We would have found out about this sooner or later. Sooner is better!
Jan 15, 2024
On January 11, the U.S. bombed more than 60 targets in Yemen. According to U.S. military officials, these strikes were in response to attacks on shipping by the Iranian-backed Houthi militias.
Maybe the U.S. launched these strikes because Houthi attacks on shipping were disrupting trade—though almost all the Houthi missiles and drones were either shot down or fell harmlessly into the sea, and the few that hit caused little damage and no injuries or deaths.
Certainly, the U.S. attacks on the Houthis are a warning to all the states and armed groups, like Hezbollah, that if they engage themselves in the war Israel is inflicting on the people of Gaza, they will face the U.S. military itself.
But they are also a demonstration to the world that the U.S. is ready to engage its own military forces against anyone, anywhere. And even though U.S. military leaders say they want to avoid it, these strikes are a big step toward the wider war the U.S. is preparing. They are open attacks, and the U.S. claims them.
Since it withdrew from Afghanistan, the U.S. might have appeared to be acting a little less openly with its own military, relying more on proxies like Ukraine and Israel to do its dirty work. The U.S. never stopped deploying military forces all over the world—in Syria and Iraq, for instance. But U.S. leaders posed as if they were acting carefully to avoid escalation.
In fact, well before the last war ended, the U.S. was preparing for the next war. Ten years ago, the U.S. military began to “pivot to Asia,” further encircling China. It reinforced bases in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. It built new bases in the Philippines. It deployed even more massive naval forces to the region.
Decades before the Russia–Ukraine war began, the U.S. was expanding its military forces surrounding Russia. It brought countries that used to be allied with or even part of the Soviet Union into NATO, the military alliance the U.S. dominates. It put U.S. bases in some of these countries. Since that war began two years ago, the U.S. has armed Ukraine to the teeth, using the Ukrainian people as cannon fodder against Russia. The U.S. has sent even more forces to bases in the region and pushed its European allies to build up their own militaries.
The forces they have built up show what the U.S. military leaders are preparing for. It may not be clear when it will start or how the various countries will line up. But the U.S. has created military forces, prepared systems of alliances, and built bases spread around the world on the scale needed to fight a world war.
But wars are not fought by weapons and bases alone—they are fought by populations. Today, the U.S. population is not enthusiastic to go to war again. People here see little benefit from the wars the U.S. military carried out in the first decades of this century in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.
The U.S. military has faced this problem before: after the Vietnam War, military leaders complained that the U.S. population had “Vietnam Syndrome,” meaning people weren’t ready to fight their wars anymore. For a whole period, the U.S. relied on proxy forces to fight its wars in Central America and the Middle East. But little by little, the U.S. military tried to find a “cure” for Vietnam Syndrome: little wars in Grenada and Panama and the limited invasion of Iraq in 1991. These “little” wars—not so little for the people of these countries, but relatively short and with relatively few U.S. casualties—helped prepare the U.S. population for the bigger, longer wars the U.S. carried out in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Like those “little” wars, the attacks in Yemen are part of the U.S. military leaders’ preparation for a much bigger war. Most of all, these attacks are a preparation for the U.S. population, aimed at “curing” us of any hesitation to go to war, getting us to accept once again that it is normal to have U.S. military forces involved in fighting.
Workers have no reason to swallow this “cure.”
These wars are paid for out of money taken directly from what we need. The cities and small towns are already crumbling, the schools are starved of money, the public health services are in even worse shape than before COVID. All of these services will be made even worse to fund wars that will not be in any way in the interests of working-class people in this country. This is the world capitalism prepares for us.
Homeless veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are camped out on the street corners of the big cities, broken by what they were sent to do. This capitalist system is preparing to send more of our sons and daughters to be maimed or to die to maintain U.S. corporations’ domination of the world.
The wider war capitalism is preparing carries with it a threat to all of humanity.
Jan 15, 2024
The U.S. staged missile attacks on the Houthi militia in Yemen. U.S. officials say they ordered these strikes in retaliation for the Houthis’ own missile attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea.
The threat that Houthi attacks pose to the profits of multinational corporations may well be on the mind of the U.S. government, considering that 12% of world trade passes through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea. The U.S. military has named its campaign against the Houthis “Operation Prosperity Guardian,” but whose prosperity? Not the working class, for sure, which is suffering not only in the Middle East but also in the U.S.
The Houthis, a Shiite Islamist militia, are one of the sides in Yemen’s decade-old civil war. After the Houthis took Yemen’s capital, Sana, in early 2015, Yemen’s northern neighbor, Saudi Arabia, intervened to oust the Houthi regime. The ensuing nine-year war has devastated Yemen’s population, killing hundreds of thousands of people and threatening millions of people with starvation because of a brutal Saudi blockade.
The Saudi regime is a close ally of the U.S., and the weapons that have killed, starved, and uprooted millions of people in Yemen have been provided by the U.S. The war in Yemen is one of the regional conflicts in the Middle East that U.S. imperialism has used to maintain its control over this strategic, oil-rich region of the world.
The endless wars and suffering caused by U.S. imperialism in the Middle East give an opening to religious and nationalist militias like the Houthis, who try to use the devastation caused by U.S. imperialism to gain support in the population. And that, in turn, opens the door for the intervention of regional powers like Iran, which backs the Houthis. Finally, the constant threat of a larger war hangs over the whole region and even the world because bigger military powers, like China and Russia, also try to take advantage of these regional conflicts to expand their own influence.
Following the bombings in Yemen, U.S. officials said that they were trying to avoid harm to civilians. But how is that possible? A resident of Sana said that people open the windows every time bombs fall on the city because bombings in the vicinity damage people’s mud-brick houses if the windows are closed.
Who lives in mud-brick houses? The working class and poor, of course. And U.S. bombs have been falling on Sana for nine years already. Whether dropped by Saudi Arabia, a regional surrogate of the U.S. or directly by the U.S. itself, U.S.-made bombs fall to maintain U.S. imperialism’s control over that region.
Imperialism’s wars in the Middle East are wars against the workers and poor.
Jan 15, 2024
For residents of Los Angeles’ working-class neighborhoods, noisy helicopters hovering low over their heads is an everyday—and every-night—reality, waking people up, causing anxiety and extra air pollution. Now an audit by the City Controller’s office put a dollar price tag on it also. Those police helicopter flights cost taxpayers nearly 50 million dollars a year!
And that’s only the LAPD. Together with the L.A. sheriff’s department, the police forces in the L.A. metropolitan area have 34 helicopters and four small airplanes. It’s the largest municipal air force in the world. The audit found that it targets certain neighborhoods for its daily air patrols—such as L.A.’s historically black working-class areas.
It’s the kind of routine surveillance that occupying armies do to intimidate the local population. Residents report how, from childhood, they have been awakened at night by helicopter noise. One resident recalled how a police helicopter once followed him with its spotlight. And sure enough, residents have been trying to stop the helicopter flights in their neighborhoods. The controller’s office said that its audit of LAPD helicopters was in response to residents’ complaints. The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition is currently suing the L.A. sheriff’s department for its flight records.
LAPD brass say these helicopter flights deter crime, but there is no known data to substantiate this claim. On the other hand, the city controller’s audit found many instances of “ceremonial” use of helicopters. For example, over the five-year period between 2018 and 2022 that the audit examined, there were 783 casual “fly-by activities.” That’s nearly a helicopter fly-by every two days for things like LAPD graduations, retirements, funerals—and a local golf tournament, too. Once, an LAPD helicopter was deployed to take two LAPD officials to a meeting 20 miles away. And all this at an operating cost of about 3,000 dollars an hour.
Obviously, LAPD brass cherish their helicopters, and they are getting a new one this year—it has been approved by L.A. politicians. There is no doubt that the people who pull the strings—L.A.’s big business elite, that is—also approve of such excesses by the LAPD. The proof is that this recent audit was the very first of its kind, even though the LAPD has been using helicopters for almost 70 years.
In fact, as expensive as LAPD’s helicopter force is, it amounts to only about 1.5% of L.A.’s three-billion-dollar police budget. The LAPD has 12,000 employees, 9,000 of them uniformed cops, and an abundance of armored vehicles and heavy weaponry. It’s a large, heavily armed police force, acting as an occupying army in the city’s working-class neighborhoods—to maintain the dominance of a small, very wealthy ruling class over society.
Jan 15, 2024
In December, Baltimore officials claimed to have a great new way to deal with vacant properties in the city. Vacant houses are a huge fire hazard, to say the least. Many people in this city, where one-quarter is in poverty, can’t afford to keep up their payments for housing, like property taxes, water bills, and so on. So, they simply move out, or when they die, other families don’t move in, and thousands of homes become vacant and slowly fall apart.
But what do the politicians say? They say the problem is actually how the courts and the city treasurer track property sales. They propose to hire a company to write a computer program to use the same convoluted internet technology as Bitcoin, the “blockchain,” to track sales of up to 14,000 vacant properties. They say this will be faster and more accurate.
The real problem is that people can’t afford housing, and that’s because jobs don’t pay enough. The internet can’t stop that! But leave it to the politicians to create a “solution” that will only help real estate brokers.
Jan 15, 2024
Every time a new year begins, medical insurers demand we pay our deductibles before our health insurance kicks in. Yes, deductibles, even while we pay insurance premiums every month at jobs with health benefits. Last year, the average deductible in the U.S. for a single person was over $1,700.
Paying $1,700 or more before insurance kicks in is one of the many insane sides of U.S. health insurance for profit. But even Medicare, which is not for profit, demands $240 starting this January 1. And while Medicare Advantage plans claim they have “low” deductibles, they somehow don’t mention the reason—they will deny your health care services in a heartbeat. You only get what these disadvantage plans agree to pay. (And people with employer regular health care plans also get turned down for services every day of the week.)
On average, men get taken for 3% of their average yearly wages in deductibles, and women get taken for 4% of average annual wages (because women average relatively a bit lower wages than men!)
It’s past time for a completely not-for-profit healthcare system!
Jan 15, 2024
Washington, D.C.’s mayor Muriel Bowser cut pandemic-related food benefits in March. Some people lost over $100 per month. This cut affected nearly 145,000 residents—around one in five people in the city. For many, this is how they can afford to eat.
The city financial officer declared the city has the money for the increased benefits. Legal Aid DC and a law firm threatened to sue. Many people, including seniors and young parents, got busy calling city officials relentlessly, demanding the funding. Then, the mayor relented. With the funding restored, people will get, on average, around $8 per day for food. But only through September will this whole fight have to happen again!
What a crime for people to be hungry in the capital of the richest country in the world.
Jan 15, 2024
In March of last year, 37-year-old Dexter Wade of Jackson, Mississippi, went missing. His mother, Betterston Wade, filed a missing person’s report with the Jackson police. She continued calling them numerous times but still got no response from them.
Only in August did Ms. Wade hear that Dexter was killed when he was hit by a police car and later buried in a pauper’s cemetery behind a jail outside the city. After discovering where he was buried, his family had his body exhumed and an autopsy performed on him. In the process, it turned out Dexter was carrying a wallet with his I.D. and other identifying information. The police claim they tried to call his family and got no response—but even if that were true, they made little effort to contact anyone in his family to inform them of his whereabouts before burying his body.
After the Wade family went public about what happened to Dexter, 215 bodies were found in the same cemetery. All were buried there just since 2016. The bodies were buried with no coffins and with the graves marked with nothing but a metal rod and a number. It turns out one-third of these victims were carrying identification when they died.
Going further back, it appears there were many more. Dexter Wade’s grave was number 672, suggesting there had been 671 buried before him.
Other families have since come forward with similar stories about what happened to their loved ones. The city charges the families $250 to get the bodies exhumed for a proper burial.
The Jackson police try to justify their failure to notify the families of those buried there by saying most were drug addicts, but so what? Even if that were true, that doesn’t mean their families don’t have a right to know how they died.
And who knows what else the Jackson cops might be hiding?
Jan 15, 2024
A family of five was forced to jump from their second-floor apartment when a fire destroyed their building in Highland Park, Michigan, on New Year’s Day. Highland Park is a separate, financially strapped city within the city limits of Detroit.
It turns out a Detroit fire crew initially stopped at the scene and had carried a hose line into the building but left before Highland Park firefighters arrived, and the fire continued to burn. Brandon Lightsey says, "We noticed there was no urgency to put out the fire," so he made the difficult decision to jump and then yelled for his wife, Sharon Mayhawk, to throw their three kids, aged one-, three- and five years old, out the window, which she did before jumping herself. In addition to being homeless, the family naturally remains traumatized.
Highland Park Fire Chief Erik Hallowell was critical of the Detroit Fire Department, saying, "Times like that you just do your job, you put the politics, attitudes, you put that to the side." Detroit Fire Chief Charles Simms initially had plenty of excuses, saying, "Detroit has no obligation to go to Highland Park. It’s only a request, and we were never requested." He also said his crew left the burning building because they were called away to another emergency in Detroit.
The two chiefs eventually met and said they agreed to "tweak some protocols regarding mutual aid," according to CBS Detroit. That, however, does nothing for the Mayhawk family or the other residents of their four-unit apartment building. Chief Hollowell said he believes the building could have been saved if the Detroit fire crew had stayed to put the fire out.
Even assuming Detroit’s fire crew was needed elsewhere, what does it say that the fire department for a city the size of Detroit is so strapped for resources that they would leave it up to parents to jump and throw their three young children out a window to save them?
The real culprits behind such a ridiculous dilemma are the politicians so busy giving away billions of dollars in tax breaks and subsidies to billionaires and huge corporations that there’s no money for working people to expect basic services like having their homes and their families protected from a fire.
Jan 15, 2024
A century ago, Vladimir Lenin, whose real name was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, died at the age of 53. Lenin founded the Bolshevik Party, and he was one of the two main leaders of the Russian Revolution of October 1917, along with Leon Trotsky. During that momentous revolution, the working class in Russia overthrew the capitalist class and took power for the first time in history. Lenin then led the first workers’ state in Russia in its first years.
Lenin devoted his life to the emancipation of the working class and, more than anyone else, focused on building the organizations workers needed. He founded the Bolshevik Party, an essential tool for the working class to take power. After the workers took power in Russia, when workers worldwide looked to the Russian Revolution as a model and inspiration for what they wanted to do, Lenin and the other Russian revolutionaries pushed to create the Third International.
Lenin was born in 1870 into a middle-class family. He was a brilliant student and could have had a successful career as the lawyer he started out to be. But Lenin was revolted by the backward and repressive rule of the Tsar. When he was 17 years old, his older brother was executed for trying to assassinate the Tsar. Shortly after, Lenin was won over to Marxist ideas. He came to understand that it wasn’t enough to get rid of the Tsar and change the Russian government. The working class needed to get rid of capitalism and exploitation and build a new society. And it wasn’t enough to do it only in Russia. The socialist revolution would become international, or it would not be.
In 1893, Lenin was imprisoned and then exiled for political activity organizing workers’ study circles. Together with many other revolutionaries, he went abroad, where the work of building a revolutionary workers’ party continued.
During the late 19th and early 20th century, socialist parties were being built in many countries. The biggest and most successful, by far, was in Germany. It led the Second International, an international grouping of socialist parties, which Lenin’s party in Russia belonged to.
As these parties gained strength, they spread Marxist ideas and teachings. But their goal was to attract as many people as possible. Among them were people who used these parties to fulfill their own personal ambitions, winning elected positions in the government or privileged positions at the head of trade unions. They often succumbed to the reformist pressures of the middle class or the more privileged workers aspiring to be middle class.
This particular period—the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century—encouraged a decay of the socialist movement. The big capitalist powers of Europe were going through a growth spurt based on the colonization and enslavement of big parts of Africa and Asia, with the plunder and riches from those continents bringing untold wealth. The capitalist class kept the bulk of the booty themselves. But to blunt the rise of the working-class and socialist movements, the capitalists also granted a few reforms to workers inside the richest imperialist countries.
Lenin recognized the dangers of the growth and pressures of the middle class and their reformist goals on the socialist party in Russia. He set a goal of building a party of professional revolutionaries, that is, people committed to the cause of the working class and revolution, as opposed to the looser socialist parties whose goal was to pull in as many people as possible. In 1903, at a party congress, Lenin argued for a much more limited party, only admitting those who had proved their commitment to the cause of the working class and who devoted their activity to the working class. This led to a split among Russian socialists.
At the time, many inside the movement, including other important revolutionary leaders such as Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, did not understand the full meaning of this split and opposed Lenin for pushing to carry it out. But capitalism was producing new crises and wars. What happened in revolutions all through Europe over the next decades would soon prove Lenin right.
Already, in 1905, in the midst of a disastrous war with Japan, the Russian working class revolted and carried out a revolution that in the end was crushed. But in the process, the workers developed a new form of organization, workers’ councils, the soviets. These workers’ councils decided on their action much more democratically than all the bourgeois parliaments and congresses combined, and they were a very important step that the workers would again take in their successful revolution 12 years later.
The years that followed the 1905 revolution were ones of retreat and demoralization in the face of virulent repression. But the core of the Bolshevik Party held together and went through the experience of both revolution and repression with the working class. In 1912, despite the repression, the workers in Russia carried out a new strike wave. Those strikes might have led to a revolution. But they were cut short by Russia’s entry into World War I.
All the Socialist Parties had denounced war before it broke out and even pledged to lead general strikes to try to stop it. But once the war began, most of those parties reversed themselves and supported their own governments, succumbing to all the nationalistic and racist propaganda that government officials and the news media propagated, justifying the slaughter of millions of workers for the profit of their own capitalist class.
Lenin’s deep conviction was that only the workers’ revolution on the scale of the world could finally offer a way out. In his writings, Lenin explained the capitalist economic forces behind World War I, the underlying causes for the collapse of the socialist parties faced with this war, and the need for the working class to smash the old capitalist state apparatus. This meant especially getting rid of the capitalists’ forces of repression, consisting of the army, police, and government bureaucracy—the workers needed to create their own state, serving the interests of all the oppressed.
In February 1917, a new wave of strikes broke out in Russia in the midst of the war’s mass slaughter and the hunger and starvation striking the working class and peasantry. The workers’ mobilization pushed out the Tsar within a matter of days. The workers created new soviets, that is, workers’ councils, to organize their activity. Meanwhile, the capitalists formed a new government called the Provisional Government.
In April 1917, right after Lenin returned to Russia from exile, he called for “all power to the Soviets,” that is, for the workers to throw out the Provisional Government and take power. Many of the leaders in his own party didn’t think this was possible, including Stalin, and they sought an alliance with the moderate socialists of the Provisional Government. When Trotsky, who had remained independent of the Bolshevik Party up until that time, returned from exile in April, he immediately embraced Lenin’s policy and joined the Bolshevik Party, bringing thousands of other revolutionaries with him.
Lenin’s slogans corresponded to a sharpening of the forces of revolution, that is, the growing radicalization of not only the workers but also the peasants. In October, Trotsky led the Bolshevik Party’s insurrection that swept out the Provisional Government and put the workers’ soviets firmly in power in Russia.
The 1917 revolution took place in a country that was gigantic and rich in natural resources. But the rule of the tsars and the capitalist class had left Russia poor and backward, with only a few concentrations of industry and commerce, and much of that had been decimated by capitalist war. But the revolution did open a way forward. Everyone understood that the revolution in Russia would not be able to survive if it remained isolated. The idea was to hold on as long as possible while the working class moved ahead in other countries. The revolution would spread.
In the following years, in big countries and small countries, from Germany to Hungary to Finland, all the way to China, the working class carried out revolutions over and over again. But revolutionaries in other countries had not built what Lenin and the other Russian revolutionaries had built: a party of professional militants with deep roots in the working class, that is, a party of the Bolshevik type that could provide an alternative to the collapse and betrayal of the Socialist Parties that had gone over to the side of the capitalist class.
With the Third International, the Bolsheviks rushed to help workers and revolutionaries build new parties in their own countries. But they were trying to build parties in the midst of a revolution. They had no choice. They had to try. And they did. But they did not build real deep-rooted parties in time. One after another, the other revolutions fell backward.
In the following years, the young workers state, led by the Bolshevik Party, did hold on. Those other revolutions gave it some breathing space. The old regime could not come back. But the workers paid an enormous price. Isolated and surrounded by the hostile forces of the big imperialist powers, Russia was beset by civil war, poverty, backwardness, famine, and epidemics, that is, the legacy of the old capitalist society that roared back with a vengeance, even with the capitalists gone.
Under those conditions, the working class in Russia that had made the revolution retreated, bled, battered, and famished. For a time, the working class in Russia was so weakened it practically disappeared. Quickly filling the void was a reactionary bureaucracy with Joseph Stalin at its head. This bureaucracy took over the running of a state that the working class had built, but it was a cancer that relentlessly reinforced its position and privileges against the working class.
It fell to the relatively small Bolshevik Party to combat this cancer. And in his last years, Lenin—already very sick—led the fight, along with Trotsky and many “old Bolshevik” leaders, against Stalin and the growing bureaucracy. The lack of a successful workers revolution in other countries strengthened the hold of Stalin and the bureaucracy, which took over the Third International and used it to consolidate its own power, betraying workers revolutions in other countries as it did.
The way history is usually taught here, Lenin prepared the way for Stalin. No. Stalin was the gravedigger of the revolution. And Lenin recognized this earlier than anyone. In fact, even as he lay on his sick bed in early 1922, Lenin formally broke personal relations with Stalin, strongly opposing Stalin’s crushing repression against national minorities. And Lenin looked to Trotsky as his main ally in this fight. In his last will and testament, which the Stalinist bureaucracy kept hidden until the 1960s, Lenin called for Stalin’s removal from office.
Lenin did not live long enough to carry out his fight to the end. Stalin erected a mausoleum in Moscow to display Lenin’s body, a “cult of personality” that would have outraged Lenin. Krupskaya, his widow, said that if he had lived longer, Lenin would probably have wound up in prison along with all the other “old Bolsheviks"—all of whom eventually were “eliminated” by the bureaucracy.
Nevertheless, this very first attempt of the working class to take and hold power already shows what is possible. Its success depended a great deal on the struggles carried out by Lenin to build the revolutionary party the working class needed.
Today, as the continual decay of capitalist society leads to new forms of barbarism and impending world war, new workers’ revolutions are on the agenda. What was gained in Russia all those years ago still offers a guidepost for workers who will be pushed to revolt in our day.
Jan 15, 2024
This article is translated from the January 10, 2024, issue of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
The Israeli far right sees the war in Gaza as an opportunity to push ahead with its program to expel Palestinians from their land.
The leader of the Religious Zionist Party, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, has put forward a target figure: “100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza", which would mean expelling over two million Palestinians. He is also in favor of re-establishing Jewish settlements.
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant countered, "There will be no Israeli civilian presence in the Gaza Strip once the objectives of the war have been achieved." Remaining very vague about the “Palestinian actors” who could administer the Gaza Strip and ensure security there, he continued "on condition that they are not hostile to Israel and do not act against it." He made no reference to the Palestinian Authority, nor to Fatah, the party of its president, Mahmoud Abbas, contrary to what the U.S. wishes. The U.S. government speaks of a “renewed” Palestinian Authority to run the Gaza Strip. Under this plan, the Israeli army would reserve the right to intervene in Gaza, as it has done ever since it withdrew from the territory in 2005.
Minister Gallant spoke also of an “international force,” led by the U.S. with the help of European and Arab states, to coordinate humanitarian aid and finance and organize reconstruction, in which Israel intends to play no part.
The Gallant plan has not been approved by the divided Israeli government, which is under pressure from its far-right ministers.
For the moment, the Israeli government’s only plan is to crush the Gazan population with bombs. In the three months since the war began, more than 22,000 people have died there and 7,000 are missing. Water, food, electricity, and medicines are in short supply, and hospitals are practically out of action. In Rafah, a city in the south of Gaza, 500,000 displaced people are living on the streets, exposed to cold, rain and mud. Epidemics and famine threaten.
Discussions at the top of the Israeli state show that its leaders have nothing to propose but the perpetuation of the oppression of the Palestinians and the wars it engenders.
Jan 15, 2024
This article is translated from the January 10, 2024, issue #28993 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
The Ukrainian army’s shelling of the large Russian border town of Belgorod on New Year’s Eve was presented by the Western media as a new event.
In fact, Ukrainian missiles had already been targeting the town for months. But this was the first time they had targeted the town center, resulting in so many civilian casualties: 25 dead, including children, and around a hundred wounded.
The Kyiv authorities couldn’t admit that, by striking such a blow, they wanted to make people forget the failure of their counter-offensive to retake the 22% of territory held by the Kremlin’s army. So, they presented it as a response to the Russian bombardment of Ukraine, with both sides accusing each other of pursuing a policy of terror for almost two years.
Thus, on January 1, when he addressed his greetings to the nation from a military hospital, Putin claimed: "We are striking with precision weapons the places where decisions are made, where soldiers and mercenaries gather, other such places, military installations above all." As if the countless collapsed, burnt-out apartment blocks we’ve been seeing for months, from Kyiv to Kharkiv, from Kherson, taken and retaken, to Donetsk, capital of the pro-Russian Donbass, didn’t provide appalling, large-scale proof that the leaders and generals of each side don’t give a damn about the population opposite! It’s worth pointing out that they also don’t care about the fate of their own population, if only because the blows inflicted on the opposing side always lead to reprisals, in an escalation of horror.
As Putin reminded us on January 1, he promised to step up his army’s so-called targeted strikes. In the same sentence, he claimed, “We do not have Ukraine as an enemy,” but it’s clear who the Ukrainian working classes, like their sisters in Russia, have as enemies. They are the Russian bureaucracy, of which Putin is the leader, and the Ukrainian privileged classes rallied to the imperialist camp, of which Zelensky is the current representative.
On the Russian side, this manifests itself in the incessant levying of men sent to the slaughterhouse and in the repression of all those who refuse or criticize Putin’s war. The consequences are also colossal cuts in social budgets (and therefore in workers’ living standards), wage and pension freezes as inflation rages, and the Kremlin’s priority being the military budget and war production.
In Ukraine, the government has also decided to strengthen the military-industrial complex and arms production, which has tripled in 2023 and is set to increase sixfold in 2024. At the same time, it is stepping up mobilization, as the general staff needs 500,000 new recruits. Hence, the intensified hunt for draft dodgers has led to scuffles in the streets of Kharkiv, Odessa, and Chernivtsy. Any recalcitrants caught are beaten up or even tortured, as in Ternopol, where the incident was filmed and investigated by the courts.
The Rada (Parliament) is discussing the possibility of exempting certain categories of conscripts, including the 300,000 employees of the military-industrial complex. It is also considering exempting men who pay a high level of income tax ... and, therefore, have ties to the same business circles as deputies and ministers!
The streetcar driver who earns the equivalent of 300 euros won’t be so lucky. On the other hand, like other workers, he too will pay the price for the diktats of Ukraine’s Western guardians. The IMF has rejected the Ukrainian government’s 2024 budget, demanding that it find almost a billion euros in additional revenue. This means subtracting them from the little that remains of spending that is useful to the population, as there is no question of touching the 6 billion euros that this year will go to arms production and repair, mainly to large Western corporations.
Jan 15, 2024
This article is translated from the December 30, 2023, issue, #1318 of Combat Ouvrier (Workers Fight), the paper of comrades in Guadeloupe and Martinique, two islands that are French overseas departments in the Caribbean.
As the year draws to a close, there’s no let-up in the war between armed gangs. And the population of working-class neighborhoods is the victim of this terror.
At the southern exit of the capital, traffic to the southern departments of the country is banned, and the police have clashed with the gangs that control this area, resulting in dozens of deaths among the local population.
In the city center, the rare vans that dare to transport merchants are held to ransom and drive at their own risk. Business is reduced as gangs fight to control traffic on the main roads, especially to the airport.
In the north of the capital last week, the "400 Mawozo" gang, which controls the area leading to the border with Santo Domingo, led a punitive expedition against a neighborhood where two of its members had been intercepted and neutralized by the local population.
The few workers on the industrial estate are on vacation at the end of the year, and at this time of year, they used to travel to the provinces to visit their families. This year, it’s impossible again, as gangs control the roads, and if they’re willing to risk the trip, the cost of transport has risen so much that their meager wages no longer allow it.
In some of Pétionville’s chic restaurants, a few musical groups tried to create an illusion with shows for the bourgeoisie or to attract young people. Churches and other denominations called for religious demonstrations, but to no avail.
Armed gangs are disrupting food production and transport, severely affecting Haiti’s main granaries. Half the population is now food insecure, exceeding the levels seen after the 2010 earthquake. The policies of the government, the police, the political class, the U.N., and the embassies of Haiti’s so-called friends are showing their impotence.
The gangs are waging war on the poor, who are waiting for an opportunity to strike back, as they did sporadically a few months ago. A rehearsal as a prelude to a general mobilization of the exploited masses would be the best solution. But this presupposes not only organization but also the politics of the poor masses, independent of bourgeois parties and crooked politicians.
Jan 15, 2024
What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters during the week of January 8, 2024.
The Middle East is burning. Israel bombards Gaza again. Trying to escape, a million people crowd into Rafah. The Israeli army carries out raids on the West Bank, and Israeli “settlers” drive Palestinian herders from their villages. Hezbollah sends rockets into northern Israel. Israel launches air strikes into Lebanon. Eighty thousand people flee from their homes in northern Israel; 75,000 people flee in the south of Lebanon. The U.S. sends drones against a neighborhood in Baghdad, searching for militias. (And why does the U.S. have troops in Iraq and Syria?) Houthi rebels use fishing boats to stop oil tankers in the Red Sea. A Hamas leader and six other Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are killed in an Israeli rocket attack on Beirut. Bombs are set off at a memorial gathering in Iran, killing nearly 100 people. ISIS (the Islamic State) claims credit for it.
The match for the Middle East fires may have been struck in the region, but imperialism laid the tinder for it.
In 1908, large-scale reserves of oil were discovered in Persia—today, it’s called Iran. European powers already had military bases in the Middle East. Britain and France controlled the Suez Canal at one end of the Red Sea. Britain controlled Aden—today Yemen—at the other end. Together, their armies controlled the trade routes through which Asia’s wealth was brought to Europe.
After World War I, Britain and France carved up the Middle East, posting more troops in the region and extending their control. More oil reserves were found—in what, after World War II, would become Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Kuwait, the Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia.
After World War II, the Middle East was again carved up. Lines drawn arbitrarily on a map established new countries. The different tribal groups, clans, and peoples were cut into bits and pieces.
The most reactionary forces were established as the new rulers of the new countries. Warlords were turned into kings and princes. Pirates were transformed into sheiks. Imperialism provided the military forces to put them in place. Each was directly tied to one of the imperialist states—Britain, France, or, eventually, the United States.
Religion was reinforced. Islam, Judaism, and Christianity held the believers in check.
The different peoples living there had no say in the matter. They didn’t decide what the new states would be. Nor who would rule them. They didn’t decide together with their neighbors what future they would have. They didn’t decide that some people would be shipped out and some imported. Those decisions were made in London and Paris and later confirmed in Washington, D.C.
The conditions for fires in the Middle East were laid down in London, Paris, and Washington.
The myth may have it that Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over a lantern, setting Chicago on fire. But the cause of a massive fire doesn’t depend on one bad-tempered cow. Real estate interests crowded people together to maximize their profit. They laid the conditions for the fire to destroy Chicago long before Mrs. O’Leary even got a cow.
Wars don’t start from one or two stupid incidents, either. The conditions for them are laid.
Today, the conditions for a new world war have been laid. The capitalist economy has been in crisis for 50 years, and the capitalists and their governments have not been able to find a way out of it. In the scramble for profit, they pursued “little wars”: Korea, Algeria, Vietnam, Lebanon, Iraq, Congo, Kenya, and the South of Africa. Some wars are over, but their after-effects continue to spread.
The world today is like that Chicago neighborhood. And no bad-tempered cow will be needed to set off the fires of World War III.
Capitalism has more than enough pyromaniacs itching to start the conflagration. This is the future capitalism is preparing for the peoples of the world.
It’s what we face until the working class becomes conscious of its own interests and its own capacities until it gathers its forces for the fight only it can make to throw out capitalism.
Jan 15, 2024
On January 8, 130 Teamsters of IBT Local 705 struck US Foods’ operation in Bensenville, Illinois, adjacent to O’Hare Airport. Their contract expired on December 29.
Strike authorization at Bensenville was unanimous. For the last two years, US Foods, a national supplier, took record profits out of the workers’ low wages, poorly funded healthcare, and unsafe working conditions.
US Foods claims a national distribution network of 250,000 restaurants and food service partners. But the “essential workers” who delivered all that food to all those places during the pandemic are not honored any more but are pushed around to keep delivering those high profits, regardless.
The company has not only targeted workers’ wages and healthcare. The fox wants to guard the entire henhouse. US Foods says that it and it alone will determine what constitutes a ‘serious accident.’ This means that management alone will decide on discipline and discharge of drivers or others involved in accidents. Bad brakes? Bald tires? Worn-out steering? Never a problem! Fire the driver!
Teamsters locals at other US Foods sites may be called out in solidarity. Many Teamster contracts allow it.
About 100 freelance interpreters for the courts of the State of Minnesota organized themselves to refuse assignments starting January 8.
Since the freelancers are classified as “independent contractors,” they must pay their own taxes, Social Security payments, insurance, equipment, certification, etc. “It’s actually not tenable for many, many people,” said a striker, explaining why there is a shortage of state court interpreters. The private sector pays much better, and so do federal courts.
The state’s latest raise to only $65 an hour sparked the strike. “All we’re asking for is not even a raise,” she said. “What we are asking for is to have our purchasing power restored to what it was in 1997 when they established a rate of $50 per hour.” Merely catching up with inflation would mean a raise to $96.50!
The court administrator blames the state legislature for not giving courts enough money to operate. But certified interpreters are necessary if people who need language translations are to enjoy any form of justice in civil or criminal cases.
Jan 15, 2024
On Friday, January 5th, an Alaska Airlines-United flight was ten minutes into a flight from Portland to Southern California when a panel on the side of the plane—a so-called “door plug”—blew off at 16,000 feet. The cabin depressurized, bringing down the oxygen masks, blowing open the cockpit door, and raining passengers’ phones and clothes over the Portland suburbs. The pilots made an emergency landing ten minutes later. No one was badly hurt, though a teenager near the hole had his shirt sucked from him. Passengers and crew were all terrified. Because the plane was still climbing, passengers had their seatbelts on.
The plane was a Boeing 737 Max 9—the same series of planes that crashed five years ago, killing almost 350 passengers. In those crashes, Boeing was found to have rushed its design and skimped on safety to save on costs and time—all to pad its shareholders’ bottom line.
Alaska Air and United have both found “bolts that needed additional tightening” on the door plugs once they started investigating their Max 9 aircraft. The door plugs, along with the entire fuselage, or body, of the Max 9, are manufactured by Spirit AeroSystems.
Spirit AeroSystems was a division of Boeing that the company spun off and sold to a private equity group in 2005 as a way of boosting its stock price.
Why does a plane have “door plugs” on it in the first place? Airlines, Boeing’s customers, want to cram greater numbers of passengers into the plane. With the seats closer together, FAA regulations require more emergency exit doors. Boeing sought to save money by having one fuselage type and then delivering planes with “door plugs” to airlines like Alaska that didn’t need the extra doors. It seems that Spirit AeroSystems skimped on making sure some of these door plugs were securely attached.
Boeing and Spirit AeroSystems cut costs and handed more money to their shareholders. By doing so, they put everyone who flies at deadly risk. So long as we have this rotten profit system, we are going to have rotten planes built by rotten corporations.
Jan 15, 2024
Book: The Making of Black Revolutionaries by James Forman, 1972
This incredible autobiography encompasses three momentous decades. It starts with Forman’s youth in rural America in the 1940s, the impact of WWII, describes his experience moving to Chicago, and then details his participation in the Civil Rights movement in the 50s and 60s. He does not glamorize his experiences. You hear his excitement as well as his frustration with the efforts to overturn a racist society. Forman talks of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the conflict between young and old in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, and the NAACP, the debates about the strategies of non-violence versus the efforts at self-defense, and the life-and-death battles they faced. His descriptions are so vivid that you feel you are living them with him. Even though incredible victories were won, he faces the fact that racism was not defeated. His life’s work points the way to battles for another day.
Film: Slavery by Another Name, a 2012 documentary
This documentary, based on the book by Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War up to World War II, describes how different forms of slavery continued for nearly 100 years after the Civil War. The director Sam Pollard (who also directed Eyes on the Prize) uses personal narratives to give us a window into the criminalization of black life. As a result of the Civil War, slavery was outlawed. But the Southern ruling class still used the labor of Black people practically for free. Old letters are used in the movie to show how laws were used to arrest men on trumped-up charges. The main victims were Black men. Their labor was then sold by the legal system to mine owners, factory owners, and big farmers, essentially putting them back into slavery.
The movie also uses narratives that expose how peonage or debt was used to keep the “debtor” in bondage for life, whether for court-sanctioned “debts” or with sharecroppers, paying forever on debts they took to keep their farms. Of course, the debt never became smaller.
The film demonstrates how black and white people were kept poor and demonized. Our future must shake off this terrible crippling legacy.