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
Mar 11, 2024
As of March 5, Super Tuesday, it is as good as official. Biden clinched the Democratic nomination, although it is yet to be made official. Trump did the same thing in the Republican Party, forcing Haley out of the race.
Biden used his State of the Union speech to launch his candidacy. His political supporters in the party and the press spent untold dollars and hours planning ways to get around Biden’s presumed weaknesses.
They told him to be forceful. Be a tiger! Come out yelling and in charge!
They told him to promise everything, blame the Republicans for failing to produce results and use carrot-and-stick tactics.
There is something for everybody in Biden’s speech. Problems with income? He has a fix for that. Problems with health care costs? He has a fix for that. Are price hikes eating you and your family up? He has a fix for that.
Promises, promises.
And then come the threats.
Threats about Russia to justify continuing to spend billions on war in Ukraine, where the vast majority of the aid goes to U.S. weapons manufacturers. Where two years of destruction have resulted in countless deaths, millions of homeless, and whole towns and cities of ruined buildings.
Then there is the war in Gaza. Not much was said by Biden, beyond pledging the weapons for the Israeli state’s continued bombardment of civilians, children and women, and the old in the majority. No food, no medicine, no hospitals, and no end in sight. Thirty thousand and more are already dead. They are airdropping small amounts of food while creating more victims with every passing day. How many more will die before the promised “floating pier” delivery can be completed?
Biden promises that no American will be sent to war. Where have we heard that before….
He promises better schools, better jobs, better medical care, lower prices here in the states….
What a joke! Billions for war, but only promises for workers!
Biden tells the truth when he says he is a capitalist and wants to make capitalists successful. He adds that he just wants them to be less greedy. He will make them pay taxes like workers do.
Give us a break! Capitalism is the system that is robbing workers across the globe, taking the lion’s share in profits and leaving the workers with barely enough to live on. Make the bosses pay taxes? Another joke. They run things and tell the president what to do! The bosses have the system totally behind them—politicians, police, and courts—to enforce their rules.
Biden says to be afraid; there are Russians and Iranians under every bed and, even worse, there is Trump, who is a crook and a liar, a bigot and misogynist to boot.
Yes, he is all those things. So, this gives us two unfit candidates. In fact, there are two candidates to aid and protect our enemy here at home. The capitalist class.
The only good news, as one pundit says, is that only one of them can win.
Neither of these candidates nor their parties represent the interests of the working class, not here, not abroad. They represent the small minority of super-rich families, who take our wealth through exploitation and who own everything.
For centuries, the two-party system has handed off the ball, each party to the other, every four years, like a spectator sport. Don’t like a Democrat? Vote Republican, they say; it’s the only choice. Each party does the same as the other: Trick and rob the majority for four years. Then switch.
It’s time to get rid of them. Workers need a party of their own, a party that is ready to take on the bosses and the politicians, not just at election time but every day. We need to push Democrats and Republicans out of the way. All they do is block and cover for the capitalists. We need a party for workers that will tear the mask off the system and organize workers to fight against the capitalists who dominate society.
This system will never work for the average worker because it enables a tiny minority to suck up all the wealth workers produce. It thrives on war and violence and leaves the workers in worse and worse conditions.
Let the politicians and their mouthpieces on TV babble on, but these parties have nothing for us. We need real leaders, real fighters, who are unafraid to organize, fight, and take down capitalism.
Mar 11, 2024
The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overturned the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling barring Donald Trump from appearing on the ballot in the November election for president. The Colorado Court had said Trump was ineligible because he participated in what they agreed was an insurrection on January 6, 2021, violating the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
While there was some disagreement among the federal Supreme Court, the majority went so far as to say that only Congress can enforce the Constitution’s ban on an insurrectionist’s ability to hold office. Their ruling makes it difficult for the Democrats to keep him from taking office should he be elected in November unless they could win a solid majority in both houses of Congress.
Given the numerous criminal and civil cases Trump faces around the country and his ability so far to remain free and run for office, many workers and poor people raise the question of whether they would face the same “justice” if they were facing the same charges.
The answer, of course, is a resounding “No!” as we know that the courts work for the wealthy, and Donald Trump is wealthy. Yes, he’s a big crook, but he has powerful friends—and the courts—on his side.
Mar 11, 2024
First, the Israeli government dropped bombs and missiles on Gaza, killing over 30,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children. Next, the Israeli government began starving Palestinians to death.
The U.S. government said it would help the people of Gaza by dropping food from planes. The first drop was 38,000 meals—for over 2 million people!!! Then Biden announced that the U.S. government would build a floating pier from which to deliver food into Gaza—maybe 60 days from now!!!
The actions of the U.S. government are worse than cynical. The U.S. government knows there is absolutely no need to airdrop food into Gaza. Just resume bringing all food deliveries into Gaza by truck, just like they have always gotten their food. There is no need to build a new pier in Gaza. There is a deepwater port in the Israeli city of Ashdod, less than 25 miles north of Gaza. Food is not coming in that way only because Israel has closed the northern border crossing into Gaza. Food deliveries into Gaza could be drastically increased immediately! All it would take would be for the Israeli invasion forces to back off, open the borders, and stop slowing down the food trucks.
The U.S. knows all this. And the U.S. government knows it could force the Israeli government to open food deliveries into Gaza. The Israeli government could not wage this barbaric war on the people of Gaza without the backing and support of the U.S. government.
The U.S. government is responsible for the deaths and starvation in Gaza. For the U.S. government to pretend that they care about the Palestinians by dropping a few food packages is entirely despicable.
Mar 11, 2024
Vice President Kamala Harris, speaking for the U.S. government, recently called for a “ceasefire” in Israel’s war in Gaza. She spoke as if the U.S. government disagreed with the Israeli government as it continues to slaughter Palestinians in Gaza.
The U.S. government has been supporting Israel’s wars for many years. The Israeli government is by far the biggest recipient of U.S. military aid—over 158 billion dollars since World War II. After the Hamas attack inside Israel on October 7, Israel invaded Gaza, and the U.S. provided Israel with even more weapons—anti-missile systems, artillery shells, and over 15,000 bombs, many of which have been dropped on people in Gaza. In October, the U.S. government approved another 14.5 billion dollars in military aid. Today, the Biden administration is proposing to give Israel even more money for military weapons.
Harris may have called for a ceasefire, but the U.S. government has never ceased funding Israel’s wars.
Mar 11, 2024
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) released a new report on March 4 regarding the blow-out of a door plug on a 737 Max 9 airplane during an Alaska Airlines flight in January. The FAA says it has “halted any production expansion” of 737 Max 9 airplanes until the airplane’s manufacturer, Boeing, “provides a response,” within three months, to the FAA’s criticism of its “inadequate and confusing safety culture.”
So, the FAA says the Max 9’s manufacturing process is not safe. And all the FAA demands from Boeing is “a response” in three months? While Max 9 aircraft are already up and flying again, with the FAA’s blessing???
No, like Boeing, the FAA is also just putting on a show, pretending that it is doing something about the door blow-out that could have easily caused many deaths.
The blow-out was not an accident. It was a disaster bound to happen. And the FAA knew about it because, for years, Boeing workers had been reporting all kinds of problems on the production line created by Boeing’s reckless speed-up. But the FAA ignored them all. Not only that, but the FAA even ignored 1,200 malfunction reports Alaska Airlines filed within two years about the Max 9 planes they were flying!
For years, Boeing executives have been pushing workers to work faster and finish airplanes as quickly as possible to increase profit. They have been ordering workers to move airplanes through the line whether one section’s work was completed or not. They have also been assigning a lot of overtime, so workers have been constantly overworked and tired. On top of that, beginning in 2017, Boeing deliberately removed thousands of quality inspections to further accelerate production, cut labor costs, and increase profits.
In doing all this, Boeing executives not only ensured that mistakes would happen on the production line but also that mistakes would be overlooked. And that’s exactly what led to the Alaska Airlines incident on January 5: the door that flew out of the fuselage was missing four bolts that were supposed to hold it in place!
What Boeing executives have been doing, with the complicity of FAA regulators, is murderous—and it has, in fact, led to hundreds of deaths, when two Boeing 737 Max 8 airplanes crashed in 2018 and 2019, killing 346 people. After 51 other countries grounded the Max 8, the FAA, which had been dragging its feet, also grounded them for nearly two years. But still, as Ed Pierson, a former Boeing production manager has pointed out, the FAA did not even investigate the electrical problems the two crashed planes had.
In other words, true to their long-standing tradition, government officials not only let Boeing regulate itself, but they also let Boeing get away with mass murder.
In capitalist society, government officials do not get in the way of the profit drive of a big company like Boeing, pushed by Wall Street greed. They, in fact, aid and abet it.
Mar 11, 2024
The Inland Empire, the vast suburbs extending east of Los Angeles and encompassing Riverside and San Bernardino counties, had long been considered a more affordable place to live, especially for working families looking to buy a home. Lower housing prices attracted millions of working families to these far-off suburbs, and the population boomed.
Of course, working families paid in other ways, including endless traffic jams, long commutes, and some of the worst air pollution in the country. Over the years, these problems only worsened as Amazon and other big shipping companies built enormous warehouses, turning the Inland Empire into an enormous warehouse and transportation hub.
But in 2020, in the wake of the COVID pandemic, home prices in the Inland Empire began to skyrocket. In 2023 alone, prices increased by almost 20% on average, making it increasingly impossible for many working families to own a home.
But priced-out Los Angeles area residents aren’t the only people looking to buy homes in the area. Quickly rising prices attracted speculators of all sorts. Private investors, operating under LLCs and trusts to hide their identities, as well as big financial companies, swooped down and spent tens of billions of dollars buying up private homes in the Inland Empire, thus driving the prices even higher.
These speculators then turned the homes into rental properties, and they not only boosted rents to record levels, but they also often squeezed every penny they could from these homes by not maintaining them, as well as resorting to evictions and court judgments.
So, not even in the far suburbs are housing prices affordable anymore; the problem is worsening. This means a basic and important need is increasingly out of reach for working families.
As David Brady, a public policy professor at the University of California at Riverside, commented, “There’s nothing rational, reasonable, or affordable about any aspect of California housing. You saw these problems become completely insane in L.A. in the past. Well, now they’re becoming insane in the Inland Empire as well.”
Mar 11, 2024
The mortality rate for the homeless living on the streets of very wealthy cities like Los Angeles more than tripled in ten years, according to University of Pennsylvania researchers. This study found that more than 2,000 unhoused people died in Los Angeles in the last year, meaning an average of nearly six deaths a day, turning being homeless into a death sentence.
Housing costs are very high in Los Angeles: the rent for a two-bedroom apartment is around $2,900. The wages are too low: the minimum wage is around $17 an hour. Businesses relentlessly seeking ever-increasing profits cause these high rents and low wages.
For this reason, many workers live together in cramped environments or far away from the county. And it is very easy to lose your job. For this reason, the number of homeless has been soaring over the years. Los Angeles County now has more than 75,500 homeless people, making it the home of one of the largest homeless populations in the U.S.
Once someone loses their housing, everything else immediately starts to fall apart. First, finding a new job becomes very difficult. After they are thrown into the streets, daily worries of lacking any shelter, struggling to find food to survive, and defending themselves against violence suck workers into desperation, hopelessness, and mental illness.
This often leads to drug and alcohol addiction, one of the leading causes of death for homeless people. Homeless people also die because of heat and cold exposure, traffic injuries, homicide, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and malnutrition. Such deaths might have been avoided if the homeless had access to a home, food, or preventative medical care. Even a minor infection can easily be deadly after healthcare is lost.
This high number of homeless deaths is “comparable to something like a natural disaster or war,” pointed out one researcher. Yes, these homeless deaths are the consequence of the class war waged by the rich against us, the working class.
Mar 11, 2024
A fire that broke out in a rented rowhouse in Baltimore’s heavily immigrant and working-class Baltimore Highlands/Highlandtown neighborhood on February 27 killed a thirteen-year-old Guatemalan girl, her eight-year-old brother, and their twenty-two-year-old cousin. Nineteen neighbors were displaced. This fire never should have caused such damage, and it only did because the property had no working smoke detector. Now, community activists are combing the neighborhood and checking for smoke detectors. But the landlord’s lethal negligence is the kind of sloppy profiteering city officials protect again and again.
More than a year ago, a community group complained that 11 of this landlord’s 25 rental properties in this one neighborhood had received a total of 35 citations since 2016. A tenant tried suing the landlord a decade ago. But city government? Radio silence.
Housing for profit is what’s lethal.
Mar 11, 2024
Anjanette Young, a 51-year-old Chicago social worker from the west side of the city, undressed to go to bed just before officers stormed inside her house with shining flashlights, demanding that she put her hands in the air and stay still or they would shoot.
She was forced to stand still, naked, in front of a dozen police officers, before she reacted and started screaming back at them, telling them that something was wrong. Handcuffed, she tried to tell them she was the only person in the house.
This took place on the evening of February 2019. Chicago police were executing a search warrant on her house. They used a battering ram to enter. They were looking for a man with a gun. Later they found out that the man had lived there 4 years before.
CPD was told by a confidential informant that the men they were looking for lived at Miss Young’s address. CPD didn’t bother to verify the information.
Later, Young sued the CPD and was paid 2.9 million dollars by the Chicago City Council. The Chicago Police Board agreed to fire Sergeant Alex Wolinki, who oversaw the operation that night.
All this took place under previous Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot. Four years later, Anjanette Young continues her fight to make the City Council pass an ordinance to change how CPD executes search warrants, including a ban on No-Knock Warrants.
Ms. Young hopes that current Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration will make the ordinance possible.
These types of incidents are standard practice in poor workers’ neighborhoods. It is well known that police don’t care about legal rules when they have an excuse to go after a suspected criminal. They just go inside people’s houses, harassing and mistreating anyone there.
Mar 11, 2024
This book tells the very moving and powerful story of the author and her family living in the occupied West Bank and the fight for the right to live peacefully on their own land. Every year, Israel takes more and more of their village land and even their water source. After her family decides to protest the constant illegal infringements, the Israeli army comes more and more into their village. You hear why nine-year-old Ahed decided to join the protests against the infringements and the constant violent army attacks. Videos of the young Ahed challenging the army go viral. She becomes a symbol of the innocence and the fury of the oppressed. By the time she is sixteen, she comes to represent many Palestinians’ hopes and anger. You read of how the Israeli government tries to suppress any opposition, breaking their own laws. The book is a personal tale, but it exemplifies the hopes and efforts of many.
Videographer Dorsay Alavi had a three-decade friendship with Shorter when she decided she would compile this film. It follows the three stages of Shorter’s life. The first was during the turbulent sixties when he was a saxophonist and composer for first Art Blakey’s band and then Miles Davis’s while also composing and publishing solo albums. You see how his compositions reflected the times and what jazz meant to the revolutionaries of the day. In the second part, you see how he founded his own band, Weather Report, and how it was one of the very few that successfully fused jazz and rock and how it continued to inspire. He continued working and composing through all the decades of his life. He died at 89 years old in March 2023. His music expresses the creativity, hard work, and energy of change.
Mar 11, 2024
Washington, D.C.’s mayor proposed a public-school budget in February that would eliminate 450 positions, including teachers at 80 or 90 schools and ten percent of central support staff. After people protested, the proposed staff cuts were reduced to “only” 200 positions. The justification? Federal pandemic subsidies are ending, teacher pay is rising, etc.
But everyone knows teacher pay is nothing compared to inflation. And the city government gives up millions of dollars each year in tax breaks for big companies, money that could fund the schools. For example, the city gives over 30 million dollars in corporate income tax breaks when business equipment needs to be replaced—not when workers need new equipment! That money alone would pay to keep these 200 positions filled. In addition, high-tech companies get tax breaks totaling five million dollars; life and casualty insurance companies get another five million; real estate developers get five million, and supermarkets get three million…. But there is no money for teachers or support staff? Come on!
And this is happening in this wealthy nation’s rich capital!
Mar 11, 2024
What follows is the historical part of the presentation at the public meeting in Detroit on February 18.
The U.S.A. is a country of immigrants. While some people came here willingly, many more were forced here. So, if this is a country of immigrants, why are immigrants treated like villains by politicians in this country? It’s nothing new—there has always been anti-immigrant propaganda and violence.
From the beginning, U.S. capitalism was organized and built on the backs of labor: slave labor. Indentured servants. And so-called free labor, which, in fact, was anything but free.
The capitalist class, with the help of their politicians, used immigration to staff their expansion across North America and then used anti-immigrant propaganda to foment fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners when they didn’t need them. When they consciously wanted one part of the working class to keep down another. It’s not a new story.
According to Howard Zinn, in A People’s History of the United States, “U.S. capitalism developed in a territory with productive land and a vast amount of raw materials. ‘Indian Removal,’ as it has been politely called, cleared the land for the white occupancy between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, cleared it for cotton in the South and grain in the North, for expansion, immigration, canals, railroads, new cities, and the building of a huge continental empire clear across to the Pacific Ocean. What it did not have was the labor power to carry out all this expansion and development.”
For most of its history, American capital filled that hole with unwilling immigrants—people they enslaved. Tens of millions of people were robbed from the African continent, brought by force to the U.S., and sold like merchandise.
Slavery was the original division in the working class in this country, and it set in motion the system of divide and rule, pitting one part of the working class against another, white against black.
When American capital could no longer get enough slaves nor necessarily want to use them in certain industries, it turned to immigrants from Europe to fill its labor shortage. In the 1800s, with capitalism developing over the entire continent, immigrants from Ireland, and then later from China, performed much of the back-breaking labor for building the roads, canals, and railroads. On these massive projects, the conditions were so horrendous, the mortality rate so high that in the South, the slave owners preferred that the work be done by Irish immigrants rather than risk having so many of their slaves wiped out, which would cause them to lose their investment.
Railroad companies used Irish immigrants to build the railroads on the East Coast and Chinese immigrants on the West Coast.
No one waved a gun at the Irish workers nor put them in chains. But they hardly came by free choice. You may have heard about the Irish potato famine, caused by a disease that caused a potato blight. Since potatoes were the most critical food source in Ireland, it is estimated that about one million people died in Ireland from 1845 to 1851. To avoid starvation, about 1.5 million Irish immigrated to the U.S. at that time.
Here’s a description of ships carrying poor Irish immigrants, a large proportion of whom died during the transatlantic voyage under horrible circumstances: “… hundreds were literally flung on the beach, left amid the mud and stones to crawl on the dry land how they could…. Many of these … gasped out their last breath on the fatal shore, not able to drag themselves from the slime in which they lay….”
These Irish immigrants were vulnerable, meaning that when they got here, they could be thrown into the hardest jobs created as the country industrialized and paid the lowest wages. They built the canals, dug the coal, and built the railroads for years.
The rich railroad owners pushed to bring in workers from China to build the railroads on the West Coast. For those bosses, Asia was a closer source of labor.
Over 100,000 Chinese were dragged here, often hijacked by Chinese gangsters trafficking in people—much like the coyotes who bring people up from Mexico and other parts of Central America today. One thousand two hundred Chinese workers died in building the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s. By the finish of the railroad, 80% of the workers on the Central Pacific Railroad were Chinese. They were paid less and did the most dangerous work, including blasting dynamite to build tunnels through the mountains in the west and later digging in the gold and silver mines in Nevada.
But when the railroads were complete, the capitalist class no longer needed the Chinese workers. It was at this point that campaigns that began with denigrating Chinese people took on a life of their own. Brutally racist campaigns were directed against Chinese workers, using a lot of propaganda, such as the Chinese were stealing jobs. But it was not the Chinese who were organizing the economy!
So, the bosses created the low-wage jobs. Then, the very people, the Chinese, who were forced to take these jobs were spit out after the work was complete and became the victims of anti-Chinese propaganda. And mob violence was directed against Chinese workers, especially in California.
Congress gave legal standing to attacks against Chinese people by passing the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, the first law limiting immigration into this country. This was the first widespread legal attack on people coming to the U.S. from other countries.
There were also attacks against the Irish working-class immigrants. When the so-called “Long Depression” hit in 1873, lasting until 1879, signs went up: “No Irish Need Apply.”
Again, anti-immigrant legislation was passed. Reactionary forces organized anti-Irish riots in the East. A political party had been formed in the United States at that time called the Know-Nothings. It was a nativist and anti-Catholic party with strong financial support from certain wealthy interests. It developed into a real political party. It organized mobs, looting, and firebombing of Irish and German immigrant neighborhoods as early as the 1850s.
When the economy grew, American capital returned to Europe looking for more workers. It sent agents (much like the coyotes today) to Southern Europe, then Eastern Europe, to entice new groups of desperate workers. In 1864, the Contract Labor Law was passed, which made it possible for companies to sign contracts with foreign workers when the workers pledged to give twelve months of their wages to pay the cost of emigration. Thousands of immigrants found themselves in indentured servitude to their bosses upon arrival, on top of the low wages and horrific working conditions. Now, there were not so many Irish and German immigrant workers. It was Italian, Russian, Greek, and Jewish workers this time. And all of them went through the harrowing ocean voyage of the poor. Steamship lines at this time made huge profits, packing in thousands of immigrants below deck with little or no food or sanitation.
The countries the new immigrants came from may have changed, but dire circumstances also forced them to leave their countries. These new immigrants again came into situations where they had to take whatever job they could get. This ended up being jobs in the deadliest, dirtiest industries, where they were hired for the lowest wages.
But this wasn’t all. There was desperate economic competition among the newcomers for the jobs. The bosses used racism when they could, directing white workers against black workers. But they also fomented trouble between ethnic groups, such as Irish workers vs. Eastern European workers. So, this did not start with the workers but with the bosses.
One of the big railroad owners at that time—and he was also a rich banker—was Jay Gould. He knew how important it was to divide this diverse working class for the benefit of his class, the capitalist class. He is famous to this day, for one thing, he said: “I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half.”
In 1919, there was a massive strike wave in the U.S. Over 4 million workers, from longshoremen to steelworkers, from textile workers to telephone operators, engaged in strikes characterized as “… the greatest wave of labor unrest in American History.”
This workers’ movement was met with brute force. Military forces were directed against the strikes, where strikers were shot down and arrested. But there was also an organized campaign to isolate strikers from the rest of the working class. That is where the anti-immigrant propaganda came in handy for the bosses.
There was massive repression directed against workers—not only to break the strikes but also, once again, to divide one section of the working class against the other and to instill fear in workers that they would face harsh consequences for even trying to challenge the capitalist class’ control.
The government carried out a repression called the Palmer Raids that physically broke up militant workers’ organizations. Many of these organizations were led by immigrants from countries where workers had carried out revolutions against the capitalist class and who had brought their revolutionary traditions with them. Anti-foreign, anti-socialist, and anti-worker repression was set loose. Repression included national immigration quotas being imposed against particular immigrant groups, especially those who had come from countries where there had been revolutions. There were deportations, sterilization of working-class women, and even executions.
Here, we can recall the case of Sacco and Vanzetti, a fish peddler and a shoemaker, who were anarchists in the early 1920s. They were falsely arrested, convicted, and executed for a crime they didn’t commit, based on anti-Italian and anti-immigrant sentiment.
Over and over again, the story repeats itself: a boom of migration when capital needs more labor, but then a reversal when the capitalist drive for profit destroys their own economy and results in depressions. For example, labor contractors opened the doors for Mexican immigrants to come into the U.S. in roughly the period of 1910 until 1928 to work as agricultural laborers in California and the mining regions of the Southwest. When the Great Depression hit, it was estimated that there were over a million people of Mexican descent who then were deported to Mexico from 1929 to 1935. Sixty percent of them were U.S. citizens.
So, the scene that we see today, of talks of crisis at the border and declarations of immigrant invasion, is nothing new. It rests on and continues this history: the capitalist class learned long ago that its interests lay in using one part of the working class against another—the better to exploit all parts.
The working class has other interests: to unite all parts and confront our real enemy, the capitalist class itself.
Mar 11, 2024
This article is translated from the March 6 issue, #2901 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
On Thursday, February 29, the Israeli army opened fire on Palestinians rushing humanitarian aid trucks in northern Gaza, killing more than 110 people.
Since the start of the Israeli offensive, the population of the Gaza Strip has lacked electricity, water, food, and medicines. Famine is worsening; fifteen children have died of malnutrition and dehydration in the space of a few days. The Israeli government blocks more than a thousand containers of humanitarian aid in the port of Ashdod. It accuses UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, of complicity with Hamas. They throw up obstacles to prevent food aid distributions, which are said to have dropped by half in February.
It’s no wonder that as the convoy approached, thousands of people tried to grab what they could. Israeli soldiers responded by firing on the starving crowd, claiming to have felt threatened. This massacre is also indicative of the increasingly widespread state of mind among Israeli troops. Videos posted on social networks have soldiers showing off while they commit abuses against Palestinians. Like all colonial wars, this one transforms many soldiers into torturers who trivialize violence and display contempt for Palestinians. As a result, this war fuels the rise of extreme right-wing ideas among the Israeli population.
On the other hand, after more than five months of war, some Israelis are expressing their hostility to Netanyahu by demonstrating almost weekly to demand the Prime Minister’s departure and the holding of early elections, the next of which are not due until 2026. Some demonstrators no longer hesitate to declare themselves openly opposed to the war. On Saturday, March 2, several thousand people once again marched in Tel Aviv, some brandishing placards bearing the slogan: “Only peace can bring security.”
Part of Israeli opinion may feel encouraged to declare itself in favor of negotiations by the changing rhetoric of U.S. leaders. On Sunday, March 3, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris called for “an immediate ceasefire for at least the next six weeks, which is currently on the negotiating table.” She referred to the meeting organized on the same day in Egypt between representatives of Hamas, Qatar, and the United States to reach a truce. This could begin on March 10, the start of Ramadan, but this is far from certain.
The United States is putting pressure on its ally Israel to accept this truce, as it wishes to prevent the conflict from spreading to the whole region. But they didn’t want to impose it, and they continued to support their war effort by supplying arms and munitions. In this way, they allow a mass slaughter to take place, in which they are, in fact, accomplices and whose end always recedes into the future.
Mar 11, 2024
This article is translated from the March 8 issue, #2901 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary worker’s group of that name active in France.
The largest military exercise organized by NATO since the days of the Cold War with the USSR has entered a new phase called Nordic Responses. It is set far north in Lapland. Swedish troops will participate, even though Sweden has not yet formally joined the military alliance.
A total of 90,000 troops from over 30 countries will participate in the exercise over four months. It’s intended to simulate a response to an attack from the east and will be reinforced by U.S. troops. NATO plans to organize this kind of exercise twice a year with more firepower. NATO considers 40,000 European soldiers to be “highly prepared” but wants to raise this number to 300,000. This large-scale mobilization shows how the great powers are preparing more and more for war and are dragging in the small countries they have coerced into being their allies.
For now, the U.S.—the most decisive military power by far—aims to avoid uncontrolled escalation. The U.S. gives Ukraine considerable military and financial aid, without which Ukraine couldn’t resist the Russian army. But the U.S. also doesn’t want the war to enter any new phase without its seal of approval. Yet the U.S. already has gone well beyond what was initially announced.
Two years ago, American and European leaders ruled out supplying Ukraine with heavy tanks and jet fighters. But they did it anyway. Belgium, Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands will deliver around 60 F-16 fighters to Ukraine in the coming months. Great Britain and the U.S. will coordinate the training of Ukrainian pilots. And NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Ukraine will have permission to use these warplanes to attack targets in Russia.
A dispute was aired, intended to be kept hushed among the top ranks of the German Air Force. The news was intercepted and broadcast by the Russian army. Germany’s chief air force commander was speaking with two generals about supplying the Ukrainian army with long-range Taurus missiles to destroy the bridge linking Russia to Crimea. German chancellor Olaf Scholtz immediately declared his opposition to delivering these missiles.
We do not know how long the West’s relative restraint will last. European leaders worry about Russia’s favorable position today and the increasingly evident weariness of Ukraine’s army. Casting about for a solution, they waste no opportunity to assert that they are Ukraine’s best supporters and that under no circumstances will they let Russia win. They also question how determined U.S. leaders are to continue bankrolling the war.
The conflict drags on with its own logic. The leaders of the great powers are not entirely in control of this war.
Mar 11, 2024
This article is adapted from the March 9, 2024, issue #1323, of Combat Ouvrier [Workers Fight], the paper of comrades in Guadeloupe and Martinique, two islands that are French overseas departments in the Caribbean.
In a press release dated March 3, the government of Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry declared a state of emergency in the west of the country, where Port-au-Prince is located, for 72 hours. Faced with coordinated gang attacks, the Prime Minister also decreed a curfew in the same territory until March 7 in an attempt to regain control of the capital.
Since Thursday, February 27, organized gang violence has escalated several notches. The gangs announced their intention to overthrow the Prime Minister. They launched their attacks while Ariel Henry was in Kenya, where he had been negotiating the dispatch of police officers to assist the Haitian police forces. An alliance of gangs, going by “Viv Ansanm,” targeted strategic sites. On Saturday, March 2, the state prison was invaded, and prisoners released, including several gang leaders.
Several important police stations were set on fire, and the main international airport was occupied. Jimmy Chérizier, alias “Barbecue,” claimed responsibility for the attack, saying “all the armed groups act to obtain the departure of Ariel Henry.” With these new strikes, the fate of the inhabitants of the targeted neighborhoods is even more precarious. Some people had to leave their homes, hands in the air; others hid where they could. In addition to several police officers, dozens of people were killed.
All flights to and from Haiti have been canceled for the past eight days. Clearly abandoned by the White House, Prime Minister Ariel Henry, along with several government ministers, is stranded in Puerto Rico. There is a total power vacuum. Politicians are jockeying for position and access to the trough. They wait, like dogs, ready to jump at any opening for a powerful role within the government. The coalition of gangs, via their spokesman “Barbecue,” also claimed political power. But in the end, Uncle Sam will always decide via the Organization of American States and the American Embassy in Haiti.
The absence of a government at the head of the country is of no concern to the population since the presidents, prime ministers, and ministers who have succeeded one another in power have always had only one concern: to deplete the public coffers to fill their bank accounts. The gang onslaught has worsened the living conditions of the working classes, who are the primary victims.
The industrial park in Port-au-Prince, which provides most jobs in the country, is closed. Even though the wages were ridiculously small, they enabled an entire family to survive. The public markets, the lifeblood of the small-scale, informal trade that constitutes the country’s real economy, providing a livelihood for a large part of the population, are not functioning. Small stores in the neighborhoods, when bandits do not loot them, are empty. Most neighborhoods have no water supply either. In addition to the killings, serial kidnappings, and rapes, hunger and thirst are ravaging the population of the capital, which is cut off from the provincial towns. In many of the capital’s outlying districts, a mass exodus of people flee the terror of bandits. As if that weren’t enough, some hospitals serving the poorer sections of the population are being looted, vandalized, or set on fire.
When the workers and the poor are themselves candidates for political power with their own class party, these armed gangs will be no match for them. That is certain, provided that the workers and poor masses find their own emancipation through full class consciousness and a policy of class political independence.
Mar 11, 2024
What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters during the week of March 3, 2024.
Biden announced the U.S. had airlifted meals into Gaza to help people dying of starvation. Thirty-eight thousand meals were delivered to this open-air concentration camp, which is Gaza. But Gaza’s starving people need two million a day!
It was a cynical gesture behind which the U.S. hides its own role in the catastrophe. Biden, facing an election, pretends he disapproves of Israel’s war. But actions speak louder than words. Even as the war became more bloody, destructive, and barbaric, the U.S. continued to give Israel its full support. The military goods bought with U.S. tax dollars are slaughtering the people of Gaza.
It’s not just Biden. The U.S. super-power, under both political parties, created and reinforced this vast war machine, which is Israel’s military. Under Trump, it was the same. With either Trump or Biden, it will be the same.
The wars carried out by the U.S. and Israel are intertwined. Israel bombed Iran and Syria many times over. It invaded Lebanon, attacking rebellions of the poor. It helped Saudi Arabia bomb Yemen. It bombed Iraq when Saddam Hussein was in power.
Israel joined with the U.S. to impose U.S. domination over the Middle East. Its military protects the investments of U.S. oil companies, the big engineering companies, and the big U.S. financial companies. The wars carried out by both countries have made the Middle East a veritable gold mine for U.S. weapons makers.
But Israel also had its own aims. Ever since Israel’s creation in 1948, the goal of Israel’s leaders has been to expand the borders of its tiny territory. Whether they said it or not, that meant to remove Palestinians. The Zionist project—which wanted Israel to be a “homeland” only for Jewish people—this project ended up with the attempt to “remove” Palestinian people from the newly proclaimed Israel and with wars.
The U.S. ruling class has carried out the same policies, just on a much more enormous scale.
To grab land and extend U.S. territory, U.S. rulers sent their military to “remove” and practically exterminate many indigenous populations in North America. American leaders presided over the “removal” of millions of people from Africa, enslaving them to expand plantation agriculture in the South.
Some people contend this is past history. Not at all. We are living in the present that the past created. Today, Africa is beset by wars, and its lack of development stems from the fact that its population was reduced by half during the nearly three centuries of the slave trade. European and American capitalism blocked and diverted its own economic development.
Today, U.S. cities are beset by poverty, which is arbitrarily imposed on the black population. This stems from the fact that early American capitalism bought and sold people like merchandise—only to toss them aside when slavery was no longer profitable enough. Today, capitalism also tosses immigrants aside when their labor is no longer profitable enough. It condemns much of the working class to a bare, meager existence.
History doesn’t repeat in exactly the same way. But it is not something that disappears. The war Israel is carrying out today against Gaza rests on the history of Israel, on the way it was created, and on the choices its leaders made in that creation. The support of the U.S. for Israel rests on U.S. history, which used the last two world wars to become the strongest power in the world—and to turn the Middle East into its own profit center.
They have different histories, but they merge in the war in Gaza. Underpinning their different histories is this common fact: Israel and the U.S. are part of the same capitalist system, a system whose periodic crises lead to social explosions and/or wars.
Because the working class did not intervene soon enough to get rid of capitalism, the world’s peoples faced World War I, and then World War II. But both wars set in motion social explosions.
How will this past play out in our future?
Mar 11, 2024
Ronaldo Ponce today is paralyzed with no use of his legs and limited use of his arms. He was a 17-year-old immigrant from Honduras working in housing construction in Traverse City, Michigan. He was trying to guide a roof truss into place. The foreman ordered Ponce’s safety harness to be unhooked so that he could reach the truss. When the roof beam tipped, Ponce fell 30 feet to the ground.
After Ponce fell, his bosses did not call 911 or an ambulance. They just put him into a car and dropped him off at a hospital. The construction bosses never reported this injury to any authorities or workplace safety regulators. The incident only came to light because a lawsuit was filed. Today the building owner, the general contractor, and the subcontractor are all denying any responsibility for Ponce’s hospital care.
Ronaldo Ponce is yet another victim of both child labor exploitation and immigration laws that are set up to exploit immigrant workers. He had worked in fields and cattle ranches in Honduras. He came on his own to the U.S., looking for work to send money back to his mother in Honduras. He requested asylum, but he was kept waiting many months for a work permit to be approved. Because Ponce was kept in an uncertain legal status, it was easier for his bosses to exploit this young man who just wanted to work. The subcontracting company classified Ponce as an “independent contractor” to avoid paying him any benefits. They put him to work on a dangerous job. They violated state and federal child labor laws by working with a 17 year old in construction.
But these companies have little to fear, even if they are caught. The fine for violating child labor laws is a maximum of $500. That’s what a Michigan meat-processing company was fined last year for working with a 17-year-old immigrant whose hand was caught in a meat grinder.
And companies have pretty much free rein to hire immigrant workers who don’t have the proper work permits. The government has a deliberate policy to keep immigrants who are looking for work in an “illegal” status. It is much easier for companies to exploit these workers who are under the threat of being deported. It’s one more way for the capitalist system to exploit workers.
Mar 11, 2024
In 2014, the California legislature passed a law supposedly banning “single-use plastic bags” at grocery stores. Stores began to SELL thicker plastic bags to customers instead. Paying for the bags, politicians said, would encourage customers to use the bags multiple times.
A recent study by the consumer advocacy group CALPIRG, however, found that the weight of discarded plastic bags per person in California was nearly 50% higher in 2022 than it was in 2014.
In other words, that law made plastic pollution even worse. But while plastic waste has been filling landfills and polluting oceans more than ever, big grocery chains have been handsomely profiting from the 10 cents they charge for a bag, which they buy for 5 cents.
Most of the plastic used in grocery bags is not recycled, either. The Environmental Protection Agency has estimated that in 2018, less than 9% of all plastics used in the U.S. were recycled. (Even that number was false, because it included millions of tons of plastic waste exported to China that year.)
And why is more than 90% of the plastic we use not recycled? Because it’s not profitable to recycle it. In fact, in the capitalist world we live in, “recyclable” is defined as: whatever can be broken down into materials that CAN BE SOLD. And for anything to be sold, of course, the seller must make a profit!
In other words, under capitalism, recyclable means profitable, period. That’s exactly why, despite all the grandiose green talk by politicians, and their bosses—corporate America—waste and pollution only keep increasing.
Mar 11, 2024
Farmland in Caroline County, Maryland, as far as 15 miles from seawater, has become increasingly overloaded with salt in recent years. Salty soil kills corn, which farmers on the Chesapeake Bay’s Eastern Shore depend on growing to sell as chicken feed. This destructive problem results from climate change.
The ocean is rising because the water and air are becoming warmer due to industrial pollution. The higher sea level sometimes reverses the flow of drainage ditches. Usually, these ditches drain floodwater from farmlands into the ocean. Now, unusually high tides make ocean saltwater flow inland along these ditches and spill onto the fields. Also, for millennia, tidal creeks have flowed slowly inland at high tide and back out to sea at low tide—more often carrying saltwater further inland and depositing it there. Extreme storms like Superstorm Sandy in 2012 caused massive saltwater surge flooding of farmland. The salt then chemically loosens phosphorus and nitrogen from fertilizer, and these pollutants drain into the Bay, causing algal blooms and dead zones.
Caroline County, the only landlocked Eastern Shore County, had over a 450% growth of salt patches in the last decade. On the Delmarva Peninsula as a whole, thousands of acres of farmland became salt patches. Meanwhile, in nearby forests, salt kills many hardwoods, like oaks. The same problem is happening from Massachusetts all the way to Mexico, but also in China, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Australia … eight square miles are scarred by salt every day around the world, researchers say.
Eastern Shore farmers have few options. Salt-resistant crops like sorghum for chicken feed or switchgrass for chicken bedding bring in much less money. It’s another way climate change caused by capitalism wreaks havoc on working people.
Mar 11, 2024
Measles cases are rising in the U.S. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported on March 1 that at least 41 measles cases had been reported in the U.S. in 17 states, including California, Illinois, Maryland, and Michigan, up from 35 cases the week before. The increases concern health experts because the number of recorded cases in the first two months of this year is nearing the total number recorded all last year.
Measles was officially declared eliminated in the U.S. back in 2000. It is still the most easily transmitted human virus presently in circulation. Before the measles vaccination program was started in the U.S. in 1963, an estimated 3 to 4 million people got the disease each year in the U.S. Approximately 500,000 of these cases were reported to the CDC each year. Of these, about 48,000 people were hospitalized, and 400 to 500 people died.
The CDC says the two reasons for the current increase in the number of reported measles cases are an increase in international travel and an increase in the number of unvaccinated people in the U.S. and other countries. Some health insurance plans don’t pay for vaccinations, and some people can’t afford to pay for them out of pocket. In addition, anti-vaccination attitudes have taken hold with some people. So, an increasing number of people are unvaccinated. This has created a disaster waiting to happen.
What’s missing is a truly comprehensive health system—one that could reach and teach everyone and could vaccinate all children quickly, conveniently, and for free.
A health system is entirely free from the profit system.