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
Feb 26, 2024
Since Israel’s murderous war against the Palestinians in Gaza began in October, the Biden administration has blocked three ceasefire resolutions at the U.N. Security Council. It has also twice defended Israel’s occupation and war against Palestinians before the World Court in The Hague.
In so doing, the Biden administration confirmed once again its complete support for Israel’s War—as bloody and destructive and despicable and barbaric as it is.
Of course, even if those supposedly “august” and “prominent” international bodies did pass a resolution or rendered a verdict against Israel’s war and occupation, it wouldn’t be worth the paper it is written on. Over the last half century, the U.N. General Assembly has passed hundreds of resolutions condemning Israeli policies against the Palestinians. But none of that stopped the U.S. super-power from continuing to support the Israeli government to the hilt.
That is because Israel is the U.S. super-power’s top cop in the Middle East. It is a loyal defender of U.S. domination. The U.S. government’s enemies are Israel’s enemies. It regularly threatens and bombs Iran and Syria. It invades Lebanon, where it has also attacked various rebellions of the poor. It helped Saudi Arabia bomb Yemen. It bombed Iraq when Saddam Hussein was in power.
All this protects U.S. investments and trade in the Middle East. It protects the profits of U.S. oil companies, the big engineering companies, the big U.S. financial companies. And let’s not forget the U.S. weapons makers, for whom the Middle East is a veritable gold mine.
To play this role, the U.S. has armed the Israeli military to the teeth. Israel’s population of nine million people may be smaller than Los Angeles County. But its military gets more support from the U.S. than any other country in the world, a total of 158 billion dollars since Israel’s founding in 1948. That makes Israel the greatest recipient of U.S. military aid in history.
All that aid and support from the U.S. has emboldened and strengthened the Israeli ruling class, who constantly seek to expand the borders of its tiny territory. That means constantly going up against the Palestinians in one war after another.
It means Palestinian “removal.” Of course, the U.S. government is not a stranger to such “removal” policies, given its own history of extermination and genocide of the indigenous population in the U.S., not to speak of the enslavement of the millions whom it brought from Africa in chains.
Today, top Israeli officials call the Palestinian people who they are murdering and starving, “human animals” and “sub-humans,” just like top U.S. officials called the indigenous people in this country, “savages,” and black people, “niggers.” Both show their contempt for human life.
This contempt is nothing but the product of a class society, a society based on the exploitation of the working class, the impoverishment of the working masses, for the benefit of a tiny minority of parasites and slave drivers. To them, the only thing that matters is their wealth and their power and they don’t care how many people they kill and destroy to get it.
Watching the horrifying images of the Israeli war in Gaza is certainly shocking. Just as shocking is the fact that it is our tax money here in this country that is paying for it. All of it.… All so that the capitalist class that rides roughshod over us—cuts our jobs and pay, to enrich itself—can rule over the workers of the rest of the world.
Feb 26, 2024
The Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are children! This outrageous claim is not at all based on what ordinary people think of as children. Nor is it based on science. The frozen “embryo” is actually a zygote, what scientists call an egg fertilized by a sperm and allowed to grow for a few days. The court’s ruling is pure propaganda, pushing the belief of some Christian sects that life begins at conception. In fact, this is a continuation of the attack on women that the U.S. Supreme Court made when it overturned Roe v. Wade.
Never mind that these “cryogenic children” as the court referred to them, cannot be held or played with, don’t need to be fed or educated or taken care of in any way—the “best kind” of children. They can only be seen with a microscope. The reality is that these frozen embryos have a long and uncertain journey on the way to becoming actual children.
First, the embryo has to be implanted into the mother’s womb. There can be no talk of potential life or babies without the mother! The frozen collection of cells that make up the embryo are meaningless in test tubes. Successful implantation of the embryo is by no means certain. More often than not it fails to attach to the uterine wall. Once the woman becomes pregnant, the next problem is staying pregnant, not miscarrying. Miscarriages can happen for a variety of reasons. Things can go wrong with the embryo or the mother that can lead to miscarriage. Then, if the embryo survives all those dangers, it may get the opportunity to be born.
The infant mortality rate as well as the maternal mortality rate in Alabama is higher than the national average—and the U.S. average is higher than the rest of the developed world. Alabama is a poor state with a median household income of $54,000. If there is a successful birth there are still obstacles to overcome. What if a parent is laid off, becomes homeless, loses their health insurance? How does the actual child survive?
The point is that it takes many people and systems to make children possible. This is the main reason human societies evolved in the first place: to make child-bearing and child-rearing possible. In other words, it takes a village. A test tube is not a village and a frozen embryo is not viable.
These judges want to make these baseless claims to protect what they call “children” when they could care less about them once they are born. They don’t care about children. Their attitude is once it is born, the child is on its own. But human children are totally helpless at birth and require lots of help.
Using the judges’ “logic” these attacks could continue. Next, they could block birth control because it prevents conception. They may back down from their extreme position because of public outcry, but in the meantime support systems for women have been taken down, doctors are quitting and women and families are being deprived of IVF (in vitro fertilization) and prenatal care that is vital to healthy mothers and infants.
It’s not just a few far-right judges. The mainstream politicians have allowed all these attacks to take place from the U.S. Supreme Court to the Alabama Supreme Court. If the population does not mobilize to fight back, these attacks will keep coming. They won’t stop until we stop them.
Feb 26, 2024
In August 1910, Clara Zetkin, a communist militant and advocate for women’s rights, proposed the establishment of an annual “Women’s Day” as a strategy to promote equal rights for women, including suffrage—through socialism.
Zetkin said, “… Working women are absolutely convinced that the question of the emancipation of women is not an isolated question which exists in itself, but part of the great social question. They realize perfectly clear that this question can never be solved in contemporary society, but only after a complete social transformation.”
The actual birthplace of International Women’s Day was the beginning of the Russian Revolution in 1917 when women textile workers began a demonstration that eventually engulfed the whole city of Petrograd, demanding “Bread and Peace”, an end to WWI, to food shortages and to the end of the brutal Tsarist regime. This “Women’s Day” started the revolution.
After women gained suffrage during the Russian Revolution in 1917, International Women’s Day was made a national holiday on March 8th. And while in some parts of the world today, the celebrations marking this day still somewhat reflect its radical political origins, in some countries, you could say, this day has been hijacked and history has been rewritten. In the U.S., for example, it has come to be associated with the women’s movement of the 1960s, with its demands for “equal pay for equal work” and for women’s reproductive rights—all within the framework of this present system of capitalism. Many organizations, all the way up to big corporations, have “adopted” this day, and hold events that can include women politicians and women executives as speakers.
But, in the face of all the attacks today on women’s rights, in particular, on working-class women, this very system indicts itself as incapable of recognizing and fulfilling women’s rights.
The original International Women’s Day was called for by women who were working-class revolutionaries, and it was birthed by the women who started the first and only workers revolution against capitalism in history. And its true legacy is recalled and reinforced by the militant, determined struggles of working-class women—all over the world, to this day.
Feb 26, 2024
Katie Orndoff charged her boyfriend with abuse in 2021 after he punched her in the face twice and made her nose bleed. Many partners are abused in this society, but she had the courage to stand up for herself. But this put her up against a bigger abuser: the court system. First judge James Fisher ordered her not to talk about her boyfriend’s earlier abuses. But she did. The judge suddenly accused her of appearing intoxicated and asked if she had taken drugs. A classic attempt to turn the victim into the accused! In effect, he interrogated her without a warrant and without reading her Miranda rights—all in order to silence an abused woman who fought back.
Detectives in the courtroom said she did not act intoxicated. But Orndoff admitted she had smoked marijuana—several hours earlier, because she was nervous about the trial. No wonder! In Virginia it’s legal to smoke marijuana. But the judge ordered a drug test and sentenced her to 10 days in jail for testifying under the influence, which is not legal. In jail Orndoff was made to take off all her clothes and be completely naked after some official declared she was a suicide risk. Her lawyer got her out on bond after two days and won a case against the judge, which the judge then appealed.
This February the Virginia Court of Appeals—made up of eight women and eight men—confirmed the judge’s sexist act. They ruled that he was right under the law to jail her! Orndoff said: “I will never feel safe reporting abuse again because doing so does not protect me.” She wrote: “Not only did I suffer abuse by my significant other, but I was punished for testifying…. The system and the courts have no real interest in protecting victims and punishing abusers.”
Feb 26, 2024
This book is the definitive biography of Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Ida was born into slavery in Mississippi in 1862. After her parents died when she was 16, she tried to provide for as many of her seven siblings as possible by becoming a teacher in Memphis. As Jim Crow repression reversed the opening of Reconstruction, she narrowly escaped death and moved to Chicago.
She became an advocate for all freedom from oppression, including women’s rights, but was particularly forceful in writing and speaking all over the country about the horrors and injustice of lynching. The pamphlets she wrote and distributed were painstakingly detailed and made the truth clear to all. She and her husband, a defense lawyer, used their own money to fight these battles.
In Elaine, Arkansas, sharecroppers had dared to organize for their just share of their work growing cotton. The owners retaliated by organizing a race riot, and hundreds of sharecroppers were murdered—but only the surviving sharecroppers were charged and imprisoned. Through her tireless organizing efforts, they were released and charges were dropped.
Ida B. Wells Barnett was an incredible fighter and leader of all, especially the hopeless and forgotten.
Feb 26, 2024
Going to college is extremely expensive, and students from low-income families rely on financial aid to help them. Many fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) in order to receive financial assistance to pay for college.
In 2020, Congress signed the FAFSA Simplification Act to streamline the overly complicated forms. The recent rollout of the new form was delayed, and because of various other glitches, the deadline to submit the form kept getting pushed back. Families without Social Security numbers have been unable to submit the form at all. The U.S. Department of Education has offered a workaround for this problem. Yet, they’re still taking longer to process all of the applications and provide students with award letters.
The deadlines to commit to a school are looming. But without knowing the amount of aid students will get, it’s impossible to make a decision. Those who can pay for college out-of-pocket don’t have to worry about it. For working-class students, this makes an already uncertain future even more uncertain.
College is advertised as a way to a better job and more stable life. But in such an unstable system, that’s becoming increasingly impossible.
Feb 26, 2024
In 2015, after long negotiations, the National Football League (NFL) agreed to pay money to former football players experiencing dementia.
Some 1,600 players have gotten some payout, although lawyers and doctors got much more than the individuals suffering. It turns out, as an investigation by Washington Post reporters showed, that at least 1,000 NFL players were denied claims for settlement for dementia. In the Post’s “Concussion Files,” dated February 4, 2024, reporters tell stories of players with dementia, some of whom died without a penny in NFL money. The article details NFL doctors denying claims sent by reputable doctors all over the country with long experience with dementia patients. The story documents racial profiling; it mentions autopsies that showed players died with CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy. CTE is specifically associated with football players, who often suffer concussions while playing.
The NFL lawyers claim their definition of dementia was in the settlement, although players dispute that. The NFL definition of dementia requires that players meet a standard that is higher than that which doctors use widely throughout the U.S. As one neurologist interviewed put it, “I assume this [settlement] was written this way on purpose to save the NFL billions.”
During games, the NFL constantly promotes the military. Maybe that’s where they got the idea of denying claims. For many years the U.S. military denied claims for damage to the health of soldiers who were exposed to Agent Orange, a chemical dropped by the U.S. Air Force all over Vietnam. It seems the NFL denies many claims for treatment of former players in just the same way.
Feb 26, 2024
The City of Los Angeles terminated the last pandemic-era renter protections on February 1. The city now allows property owners of rental units to increase their rent by at least 10%, and to collect the unpaid back rent accumulated during the pandemic, which started in April 2020.
These actions will drastically impact low-income workers. In Los Angeles, the average two-bedroom apartment rent is around $2,900, according to Apartments.com, making Los Angeles one of the most expensive cities in the U.S. Nearly a third of renters had household incomes under $30,000 in 2022. Roughly 60% of renters are estimated to be unable to pay the back rent.
Already, Los Angeles landlords doubled their eviction filings last year, reaching around 77,000. That number of evictions is expected to skyrocket even further.
Where will these families end up? Many will be forced into overcrowded or structurally inadequate conditions, threatening their health and well-being. But for sure, these evictions will push many more people to the streets in a city which already has one of the largest homeless populations in the U.S.
Feb 26, 2024
Last week, the Los Angeles City Council allocated four million dollars to remove graffiti and secure three partly-finished skyscrapers. These buildings were slated to be a one-billion-dollar luxury real estate development called the Oceanwide Plaza. But the real estate developer halted the project in 2019, leaving the buildings abandoned and dilapidated.
These three buildings gained national attention in early February when teams of graffiti artists tagged them right before the Grammy Awards, which were held across the street at the Crypto.com Arena at L.A. Live, which is also home to four big professional sports teams, the Lakers, Kings, Clippers, and Sparks, in addition to numerous restaurants and shops.
Of course, the only reason city officials decided Los Angeles taxpayers should foot the bill for contractors to secure the ground floors of the unfinished skyscrapers, remove graffiti, and provide security services and fire safety upgrades is that developers are turning this downtown neighborhood into an exclusive business and entertainment center.
That is, the money gets all the attention.
These giant unfinished and empty skyscrapers are symbolic of the insanity and wastefulness of the workings of the housing market in Los Angeles, which is in the midst of a worsening housing crisis, with a dire lack of affordable housing, along with the skyrocketing homeless population.
This housing crisis is not due to the lack of vacant apartments or places to stay. Along with these unfinished skyscrapers, there are more than a hundred thousand vacant apartments. These apartments are kept vacant by corporate landlords in order to boost their rents. At the same time, office buildings in Los Angeles are more than 30% vacant.
All those vacancies, all that space sitting there empty could go to people who need a place to live right now. But standing in the way of doing that is a capitalist class, for whom housing is just a way to extract ever more profits and accumulate ever more wealth.
Feb 26, 2024
The first American oil well struck “black gold” 165 years ago. Since that time millions of U.S. wells have been drilled. Today, the big majority of these wells are pumping very little oil or gas or are completely dormant.
Dormant wells are supposed to be “plugged.” Otherwise, many leak oil and brine (a mixture of oil and water) onto farmland or even into basements in Los Angeles, or into waterways. They also emit poisonous and explosive gases.
The effects are worldwide because many dormant wells belch out methane gas, a major contributor to global warming and climate change.
Oil companies are supposed to be legally responsible for plugging their old wells. While their wells are producing, the companies are supposed to set aside money in the form of bonds for plugging them later on. If they don’t plug them, the government itself uses the bond to pay for plugging them. But a recent study estimates the cost to clean up and properly plug old U.S. wells will be at least 150 billion dollars and surely much more. Yet the bond money now set aside for this is only about 2% of this amount. Obviously, the bond amounts required by state and federal agencies are not enough.
This has been known for years. But political lobbying by the oil and gas industry has stopped required bond amounts from being increased.
So today states and the federal government will have to increase taxes if they want to plug and clean up thousands of old well sites. Once again, ordinary working people will be called upon to pay for corporate environmental irresponsibility.
Feb 26, 2024
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, just sold another 8.5 billion dollars worth of Amazon stock. Amazon’s stock has gone up 12% so far this year. A share is worth almost 170 dollars.
Bezos still has more than 900 million Amazon shares worth roughly 158 billion dollars. And his net worth is in the neighborhood of 191 billion dollars.
Meanwhile, Amazon has cut 27,000 jobs over the past year and more job cuts are promised. It’s not an accident that the value of Amazon stock is increasing. It is because of the layoffs.
Maybe Bezos can afford to not care about these 27,000 workers, but we workers cannot.
Feb 26, 2024
What follows is part of a presentation given at a public meeting in Detroit on February 18.
When Donald Trump was running for president in 2016, his garbage mouth ranted about people coming in from Mexico. He said they were all criminals, drug dealers, and rapists. He said he was going to build a big wall along the Southern border. And later he called people from certain countries such as Haiti, El Salvador and places in Africa as coming from “shithole countries”.
You probably thought it couldn’t get worse. But now politicians are joking (or not joking) about KILLING immigrants. Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott talked about shooting people trying to come to the United States, and then said the only reason he can’t is because he would probably be accused of a crime. Then a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia, Mike Collins, suggested some illegal immigrants could be murdered by throwing them out of a helicopter.
Politicians like this have encouraged attacks on immigrants, asylum seekers, and border-crossers. For example, we now have the so-called “God’s Army” in Texas that you may have heard about.
Some of the racist politicians today have also supported and talked about what is known as the “Great Replacement Theory.” This right-wing white-nationalist movement pushes the theory that white people are the victims.
But the anti-migrant campaign is not restricted to right-wing Republicans. Republicans and Democrats alike have been denouncing migrants who are turning up at the border every day.
Biden, while campaigning in 2020, said, “We’re going to restore our moral standing in the world and our historic role as a safe haven for refugees and asylum seekers.” But today he says, “Don’t come. Shut Down the Border."
And in case you didn’t know, more people were deported under President Obama than were under Presidents George W. Bush or Donald Trump.
Almost every day, you can hear news stories about migrants at the southern border, referred to as “the Border Crisis,” and “the Immigration Problem.” So why do politicians and their mouthpieces in the news media repeat all this? Why is the issue of immigration in the news prime time? It’s NOT a new issue. Just the opposite. More likely, it is because it is an election year.
Today, an average of 5,000 people are trying to come across the southern border every day. While previously many of the migrants had come from Mexico, today the majority of the poor immigrants are not from Mexico, but actually coming from farther south, from Central and South America, from the Caribbean, and even as far away as the African continent. Some of these countries are even poorer than Mexico. It is almost impossible to comprehend what some of the people go through to try to immigrate to the United States.
In 2022, over 800 people died just trying to cross the border. This does not take into account the degradation they must go through to get to this point.
The determination of these people is evident: enduring the treks of thousands of miles; the money they have to spend to even get here; and even if they do get here, what they have to endure in the worst jobs at the lowest wages…. Who would do this if they did not have to??
They are ordinary workers, very poor farmers and very poor people who, like the immigrants of the past, are fleeing from poverty and hunger and desperate situations.
Today’s migrants who are trying to come into the U.S. are fleeing disasters created by the U.S.—by U.S. imperialism, which has waged economic and military wars all around the world in order to super-exploit the workers and extremely poor farmers of many countries. It is U.S. imperialism that causes the devastation and poverty, the political repression, provoking one refugee crisis after another.
And when they get here, these refugees face untold physical and economic challenges, not to mention the attacks by the so-called God’s Army and the insults coming out of the mouths of the politicians.
Yes, we are bombarded with the propaganda that there is a border crisis. That we need to keep “them” out. But this propaganda isn’t meant to end immigration for the most part. It is directed at working-class people here, so that we succumb to this propaganda and accept to direct our anger toward other workers, who happen to be coming today, much like our relatives came decades, or maybe centuries ago.
At the same time, the reality is that certain sections of the capitalist class, in fact, want immigrants here—just like they wanted massive numbers of immigrants in the 1800s and 1900s. They want certain immigrants here for cheap labor, thereby driving down the wages of everyone else. And then they can turn around and use this as a way to divide the working class, directing the working class who has been here longer, to blame the newer working class arrivals for their problems.
The bosses want immigrants here, but on THEIR terms—low wages, bad working conditions, with no legal rights, therefore being unable to fight back for fear of being sent back. AND they want the children of immigrants here to use for cheap labor even if their parents are not here.
A recent New York Times (1/14/24) article entitled “How to Fix America’s Immigration Crisis” lays bare capital’s goal in its last line, which said the goal is, quote, “to bolster our work force.”—in areas of the economy ranging from agriculture, food processing, construction, to landscaping, etc.
Here is an example of the bosses bringing in immigrants for their own needs: In 1994, in Morton, Mississippi, black workers at a chicken processing plant formed a union and began to strike for higher wages. The bosses in that industry went to Mexico and hired workers from there, shipping them in to break the strike.
And where are the immigrants working? In meatpacking plants, in hotels, on golf courses, in grocery store chains. They make up 70% of the agricultural workforce in Michigan. And while we don’t see recent immigrants a lot working in auto here in Michigan for the Big Three, they do work in the small, non-union auto suppliers. Just like they work for low wages in Ford, GM, and Stellantis plants in Mexico, and Central and South America. The low wages there cause workers there to try to come to the U.S. But they face comparatively low wages here, too.
In the past two years, almost 400,000 children crossed the border without parents. Some were sent home. But others are now working in deplorable conditions in this country. The meatpacking industry is one that often has immigrant children working dangerous hours, in horrible conditions.
Today, the food processing industry in the South is made up of migrants, many of them “illegal”: slaughterhouses employing 14-year-old migrant children, often in the most dangerous jobs. Slaughterhouses, like one in Mississippi that supplies chicken to Chick-fil-A, employ children, two of whom were killed in the last two years after having been sucked into de-boning machinery.
Big well-known corporations like Tyson and Perdue—yes, we eat their chicken products—have been charged with hiring young teenagers in their food processing plants.
Today, also, you can see how more recent immigrants have been contracted by low-wage companies and funneled into a series of jobs that had formerly been done by unionized city and county workers—jobs on roads, in construction, in paving, etc. And contracted into jobs in housekeeping, landscaping, roofing, concrete, drywall, carpeting and painting.
In the past there were attacks on immigrants. And we see this today. How is this accomplished? Lies. Divisive, often racist language. The news media quotes people over and over even if they know it is lies.
One example of the lies about immigration that we have heard: for years lies circulated about immigrants not paying taxes. First of all, it’s just not true—think for a second, when you go to a store, do they ask about your citizenship before the store decides if you have to pay the 6% sales tax? Of course not.
In fact, the opposite is true—immigrants pay MORE in taxes than they get out of the system. For example, an immigrant who works here for a few years pays into Social Security and Medicare but never lives here long enough to get a penny out of it. Immigrants are estimated to pay 12 billion dollars per year more into Social Security than they get out of it. From the IRS website: “Wages paid to resident aliens employed within the United States by an American or foreign employer are subject to Social Security and Medicare taxes under the same rules that apply to U.S. citizens.”
Politicians and media try to divert U.S. workers’ anger by making migrants the scapegoats for what the capitalist class is responsible for here in this country and all over the world. The anti-immigrant propaganda of today may be used as a threat against the millions of migrants today, but its main purpose is to address native-born workers, covering up what the capitalists are doing to us. Taking our jobs, slashing our wages and benefits, in all the ways capital always does, with or without immigrant labor. Scapegoating undocumented immigrants diverts native-born workers from our real enemies and pushes us to turn against immigrant workers, thus allowing the very class that exploits all workers to divide the working class against itself.
Competing with each other is a fool’s game. If we fall for it, we help the capitalist class drive down the standard of living of every working person. We shouldn’t fall for their disgusting, false arguments. When we allow ourselves to be divided—whether now or in the past—whether it’s anti-Black, anti-Irish, anti-Jewish, anti-Arab, we only hurt ourselves. It isn’t about our nationality, or our color. It is about our class.
Do we fall for the propaganda, or do we stand for the idea that the working class has the answer? We talked earlier about the politicians’ threats of violence against immigrants. When that happens, they do not get their hands dirty. They drive other people to do it. But what if we were all united and we did not let them use one group of workers against another?
If WE don’t defend the least among us, then this hurts everyone. But to be clear, it is not the immigrants who are the problem, it is the system that we live under that hurts the whole working class. We have a common fight alongside workers who are coming here now AND along with workers in other countries.
Immigrants ARE a part of the working class. They are our sisters and brothers. They have already shown tremendous courage, bravery and self-sacrifice just to be able to make it to this country, just to try to support their families. We must all come together to take on our true common enemy, the capitalist class.
Today the organizations that spew the anti-immigrant garbage to workers here in this country against other workers include right-wing organizations like the Army of God and the Proud Boys. But as we have said, it’s also the two parties, the twin capitalist parties, the Republicans and the Democrats.
Our job is to unite workers based on our class, the working class, rather than believe the lies of those trying to divide us. That is why the working class needs to build its own party—that is, a Revolutionary Working Class Party.
Feb 26, 2024
Russian oppositionist Alexei Navalny died in a prison in Russia’s far north on February 16. Whether or not he was directly killed under orders of Putin and the regime, his death in this prison notorious for its atrocious conditions is the regime’s responsibility.
While he first gained notoriety as a far-right nationalist politician, Navalny became known as a harsh critic of corruption. In 2007, he made a video comparing immigrants to cockroaches and demanded that they be expelled. He criticized Putin for not being harsh enough, even as the police were hunting immigrants down. But he later toned down his nationalism and focused his fire on the Putin regime and the top layers of Russian oligarchs.
These oligarchs enriched themselves by stealing the wealth created by the Russian working class during the whole existence of the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, life for ordinary people went into freefall as the economy collapsed. One mark of this: life expectancy for Russian men fell by six years just between 1991 and 1996. It was in the midst of this human disaster that the oligarchs grabbed their initial fortunes, dividing up the resources of the Soviet Union among themselves, selling off what they could. And while the Putin regime set some limits on the oligarchs and stabilized the economy somewhat, it continues to enable the oligarchs to enrich themselves at the population’s expense.
In 2012, Navalny appeared as one of the main leaders of a massive protest in Moscow against Putin’s fraudulent “election” to a third term as president. He then began posting YouTube videos of the fabulous properties of the top oligarchs, whom he called “parasites” and “crooks.” These attracted millions of views. The most famous were of Putin’s 1.3-billion-dollar palace on the Black Sea in Crimea and former president Medvedev’s enormous mansion in Italy.
Navalny’s personal bravery also made him a pole of attraction. In 2020, the regime poisoned him. After he was treated for this poisoning in Germany, he returned of his own accord to Moscow, knowing perfectly well what likely awaited him: a sentence of 19 years in prison that ultimately cost him his life.
Navalny was not a revolutionary, nor did he take the side of the working class. He called for Russia to establish “honest” capitalism and to more fully integrate its economy with Western Europe and the U.S. This stance turned him into a hero for the U.S. press. It also gained him support from some capitalists and even oligarchs who would prefer not to have to give a share of “their” profits to the “crooks” in power, and who would like to be able to spend their fortunes around the world as they please, like “normal” billionaires from other countries.
But in the current situation, any pole of attraction against the regime was evidently too much of a threat. In the last two years, hundreds of thousands of young men have been killed or wounded in the war in Ukraine. Increasing inflation and taxes fall heavily on the Russian working class, while the oligarchs and bureaucrats continue to bask in luxury and wealth. All this can only feed resentment against the regime and the “crooks,” even if it cannot always be expressed.
The protests that broke out when the war expanded in 2022 have been squelched, with unnamed thousands imprisoned. The Russian authorities even repressed Navalny’s funeral, refusing at first to hand his body over to his family. Protests were banned and those who went to lay flowers anyway were arrested and spent up to 15 days in prison.
Today, the Russian population may seem resigned to submit to this increasingly open and brutal repression. But this repression itself shows that the regime fears a reaction in the population against the war in Ukraine and the worsening conditions of life for most people in Russia. While the regime has large forces at its disposal, the Russian working class also represents a massive force, capable of overthrowing this regime and reorganizing Russian society in the population’s interests.
Feb 26, 2024
While American politicians and the corporate media have spoken loudly about Putin’s treatment of Alexei Navalny, they have been practically silent about the case of Julian Assange. Assange and his lawyers recently put in an appeal of the British court’s decision to approve Assange be extradited to the U.S. Prosecutors in the U.S. are seeking to try Assange for spying and imprison him for 175 years. The British courts have rejected several of Assange’s previous appeals, and many observers believe this could be his last if this one fails.
So, what are the “crimes” for which the U.S. government is really persecuting Assange? In March 2010, he and/or his organization, WikiLeaks, apparently helped U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning download and leak hundreds of thousands of documents on the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among those downloads that WikiLeaks released was video footage of U.S. soldiers killing 18 civilians, including two Reuters reporters, from a helicopter in Baghdad. The leaked Iraq and Afghanistan war documents revealed tens of thousands of civilian deaths, for which the U.S. had denied having any record, along with evidence of torture and abuse of prisoners.
Later in 2010, WikiLeaks published hundreds of thousands of cables revealing U.S. spying on world leaders. Some of them showed that U.S. diplomats had knowledge of corruption by world leaders. Some of these exposures may have helped lead to the Arab Spring. In 2011, WikiLeaks worked against President Hosni Mubarak’s attempts to shut down mobile phone networks during the uprising in Egypt.
In Assange’s latest appeal, his lawyers argued that he was a journalist and his leaks should be covered by freedom of speech. Prosecutors working for his extradition portrayed him as simply a hacker and a spy. Assange became involved in hacking and working with hacking groups at an early age. Some of that hacking, whether his own or that of others with whom he was involved, may not have been done with the purest of motives. But in later years, his efforts and those of WikiLeaks were clearly directed at exposing the horrors of war and secrets of imperialism’s oppressive world order. And that is why the U.S. state apparatus wants to put him in prison and throw away the key.
Assange has essentially been imprisoned already for nearly 12 years. In 2012, to escape extradition he accepted political asylum from the Ecuadorian embassy in London. In October 2018, U.S. politicians hinted to Ecuador’s president that economic cooperation, the joint war on drug trafficking, and the return of a USAID mission to Ecuador depended on their embassy turning Assange over to the U.S. Six months later, Ecuador revoked his asylum and London Police arrested him. He’s been held for nearly five years in HM Prison Belmarsh under harsh conditions, and his supporters are concerned about his mental and physical well-being.
Which confirms that Putin certainly is not the only world leader attempting to silence a prominent critic.
Feb 26, 2024
As the war enters its 3rd year, Ukrainian President Zelensky and his top military generals are now looking to draft another half million men into the Ukrainian military. The Ukrainian Parliament has been debating whether to lower the draft age from 27 to 25. The reason they have not done that so far is because there are so few Ukrainian men who are in their 20s. This is a consequence of the economic crisis that began in 1991 when the Soviet Union broke apart and former Soviet states, like Ukraine, became independent. As a result of the economic collapse, many Ukrainian families could not afford to have children and many young Ukrainians began leaving the country to look for work. The discussion in Ukraine today about sacrificing another generation of young men to war is one horrifying sign of the human destruction that has taken place in this war.
The true number of dead and wounded soldiers are not known at this point because both sides in this war have been hiding the real casualty figures. Some estimates are that about 500,000 soldiers have been killed or wounded. Other estimates range up to one million. Clearly thousands of civilians in both Ukraine and Russia have been killed. About 6 million Ukrainians have been forced to leave the country and millions of other were forced to leave their homes. The economic infrastructure of Ukraine has been devastated by the war and the economy in Russia is also suffering.
The Ukrainian people have been the pawns in what is essentially a U.S. war against Russia. Ukraine, with a much smaller population, has been able to continue the war only due to weapons supplied by the U.S. The U.S. government pays for the weapons. U.S. weapons manufacturers profit from selling the weapons. Ukraine is supplying the soldiers … and the deaths!
In the past year, this war has been fought to something of a stalemate. Neither the Ukrainian nor the Russian armies have been able to gain much ground, but the deaths continue to mount up on both sides. Despite the use of modern weapons with drones and GPS surveillance, much of the war has become the trench warfare of World War I.
It seems as if this war is reaching some limits today. Certainly, the political leaders of the U.S. and their NATO allies are glad to continue to have Russia weakened, militarily and economically, by this war. The U.S. will pursue its own economic and political interests, regardless of the deaths and destruction in Ukraine. For the U.S. ruling class, the destruction of lives of young men is just the cost of their wars.
Feb 26, 2024
What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters during the week of February 18, 2024.
The agony of Gaza was frozen for all-time in a photo. The lifeless form of a young Palestinian girl named Sidra is impaled on fence barbs; the stumps of her legs turn helplessly in the wind, shredded to bits by shrapnel.
The photo horrified much of the world, even in Israel itself. In the U.S., the media focused attention on the Super Bowl.
Today, Israel’s bombing concentrates on Rafah, the southernmost part of Gaza. Almost a million and a half Palestinian refugees have been huddling there in tents and makeshift huts, driven into Rafah by Israel’s military campaign to clear Gaza. But from Rafah, there is no escape. Gaza’s borders are closed and fortified.
Netanyahu declared that Israel won’t stop until Hamas is rooted out. It intends, Netanyahu claims, to prevent another October 7. That was the day Hamas carried out a violent, murderous attack, killing hundreds of Israeli civilians, taking hundreds more hostage.
Today, Israel is murdering thousands. In less than four months of bombing, Israel killed almost 29,000 people in Gaza, seriously wounded another 100,000. It leveled housing, public buildings and infrastructure throughout Gaza. It turned Gaza into a charnel house.
This is state-organized terrorism, violence perpetrated by one of the most heavily armed regimes in the world, directed against a civilian population. Israel is making the Palestinian population pay for what Hamas did.
Tragedy compounds tragedy. The suffering of the Palestinians does not pay for the suffering of the Israelis. It simply lays the groundwork for more suffering in the future by both peoples.
The Israeli people and the Palestinians are caught in a deadly dance which is not of their own making. It is the product of what the big capitalist powers have done to the Middle East, starting even before World War I.
Using the war, the European powers carved up the Middle East, drawing national boundaries where no nation states existed, installing dictatorial regimes—kings, princes, sheiks and other gangsters. And the French and British militaries were stationed there to back them up.
After World War II, the U.S. joined the imperialist hyenas feeding on the Middle East. It set up its own dictators. It established Israel as its own proxy in the Middle East, arming it to the teeth, using it as a cop to keep control over the region. When protests broke out, when strikes spread, when the peoples of the region pushed themselves forward, the U.S. military was on the spot, directing the repression.
Netanyahu heads a government whose very existence is dependent on decisions taken in Washington. Almost all Israel’s military hardware and ammunition is provided directly or indirectly by the United States. If the U.S. were to shut off its tap, the flow of weapons would come to a halt. Without ammunition, the Israeli offensive would collapse within days.
Over half of direct support for Israel’s economy comes from the U.S. If that were to be withdrawn, Israel’s government revenues would slow to a trickle, its banks would collapse, production would shut down. Even agriculture would dry up. The economy would go into a death spiral.
If the U.S. doesn’t stop Israel’s campaign in Gaza, it’s because the U.S. government, defending the interests of U.S. capitalism, approves.
Capitalism created the deadly situation that pervades the Middle East today. It created similar situations in other areas. It creates impoverishment, racism and violence in this country. This country, the richest in the world, is also one of the most violent—one of the contradictions of capitalism. Capitalism spawns impoverishment and wars. It sets people against people.
If you want an end to the evils created by capitalism, you must carry out your fight, knowing that capitalism itself must be eliminated.
Feb 26, 2024
Stellantis made 20 BILLION dollars in net profit in 2023! The 38,000 workers ELIGIBLE for profit “sharing” will get an average of 13,860 dollars. That adds up to 527,680,000 dollars going to workers. Just over half a billion dollars.
But in 2023, Stellantis handed 7.1 billion dollars in cash to shareholders through dividends and stock buybacks. Workers’ “share” was a mere 7% of what the Wall Street types got!
Carlos Tavares, the pompous CEO, had the nerve to say this teeny “share” going to workers is “fair recognition.” This lie from a guy who got 39 million dollars in total compensation in 2023—a 56% boost!
To add insult to injury, Stellantis explained in the Detroit News that while Ford and GM supplemental or temporary workers WILL get profit sharing in 2024, Stellantis workers will not. Only in 2025 will that happen.
But long before 2025, as many as 1,800 Stellantis supplemental employees may be fired. According to an article in Wards Automotive News, a UAW International letter says, “Stellantis … promoted 2,857 of the company’s 5,219 supplemental employees to full-time status.… Stellantis also has told the UAW it expects to keep 500 supplemental employees in a pool to cover for absent workers.… The company has the intent and the direction to significantly reduce the number of (supplemental employees.)” Stellantis is doing this to cut costs and force more work on fewer workers.
When the UAW-Stellantis tentative agreement was coming up for a vote, many workers understood from studying the proposal that there were horrible problems with it. And 30% of workers voted NO! But there were no union meetings where these workers who saw the danger could warn coworkers.
In the contract highlights there was no mention of job cuts. But the union ever-so-delicately spoke of “Job Security for SENIORITY Workers”—so it appears they knew of problems and lied by omission.
This contract gave job insecurity to 1,800 supplementals, many of whom bravely sacrificed on the picket line and thought that they were fighting for a better future for their generation and their families.
To lie by omission in order to sell the contract was a betrayal of the supplemental workers. But it was a lesson for the future. These supplemental workers will go on to other workplaces. They just might become a generation of better organizers—ones who teach their fellow workers not to blindly trust top union officials—working-class leaders who teach that it is important to organize with coworkers to control your own union.
Feb 26, 2024
This article is translated from the January 30 issue #313 of Voix des Travailleurs [Workers’ Voice], published in Haiti by the Organization of Revolutionary Workers (OTR-UCI).
Ariel Henry and his government have been weakened by the suspension of the deployment of soldiers and military personnel from the multinational force in Haiti since February. All the political groups and chancelleries working on Haiti’s behalf are preparing for this new political situation as February 7, 2024 approaches. What about the working class, the exploited masses who are the main victims of this situation?
In the neighborhoods where they suffer daily violence at the hands of bandits, in the displaced persons’ camps where they struggle to make a living, in the factories where they toil to get through the day’s work, in the public markets, in the streets, on the sidewalks, the instantaneous, individual struggles to get a morsel of bread to live on and support their families prevail. Their anger, revolt and despair have, for the time being, retreated to the depths of their subconscious.
Yet they are the ones who make the revolution. Only the conscious, organized struggles of the working class, the poor peasants and the exploited masses can wrest economic and political control of the country from the clutches of the capitalists, socialize the means of production and then develop them under the dictatorship of the proletariat to meet the needs of the population. This requires the existence of a revolutionary party of workers and poor peasants within the working class, whose task it will be to organize their struggles and lead them to victory.
Today more than ever, no political group has sought to awaken this class consciousness, or even to organize it within the working class. The few individuals who have tried have done so in the name of nationalism, i.e., by subordinating the interests of the workers to those of the bourgeoisie, by subordinating the struggles of the exploited to those of bourgeois politicians in order to gain power.
Since the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship, the struggles of the exploited masses have favored the rise to power of nationalist, petty bourgeois demagogues flirting with extreme right-wing ideas and defrocked politicians. But their situation has never ceased to deteriorate. By now, we might as well try something else!
Everyone knows that organization is the infallible way to get the simplest thing done. The working and grass-roots classes can only defend their interests if they have the organizations to do so. Drawn from the most conscious elements within them, the Workers’ Party is the body that will take charge of planning everything on behalf of the millions of poor workers and peasants across the country and beyond.
By taking the lead in political and economic struggles, by uniting under the banner of their own organizations, workers will give themselves a chance of defeating the bourgeoisie and its villains. For those who believe in such a policy, let’s get down to mobilizing workers and building a revolutionary workers’ party.