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
Jul 1, 2024
Joseph Biden and Donald Trump met in a debate last week. We were all told to tune in to help us decide who to choose as “our” president for the next four years.
For ninety minutes, the two touted their own records and attacked each other. For ninety minutes, we heard nothing that had anything to do with our lives or concerns. And if we did, we heard lies about how to solve those problems, like attacking immigrant workers.
Both Trump and Biden touted the economy they presided over as great and strong. Great? For whom?? Yes, the economy was ‘strong’ during Trump’s, then Biden’s presidency. For the wealthy, the banks, and corporations. But working people suffered during both terms.
People lost jobs. People lost buying-power from inflation. People were attacked by their employers, who decided that they could get away with anything to fatten their bottom line. People were sick and died from COVID. And both administrations, Trump AND Biden, showed the capitalists they could get away with it.
After the debate, all of the media reports were filled with stories about how badly Biden had performed—and he had, no doubt. All the big newspapers were concerned with whether Biden could continue as the Democratic nominee, or if they should replace him, and who they could nominate in his place.
The New York Times went so far as to suggest in an editorial that Biden should step down and allow someone else to take his place. They raised questions about whether Biden, at 81, is unfit for the office.
In other words, the pundits were concerned not about the substance of the debate (because there was none), but only about the delivery of each candidate. Biden wasn’t energetic enough. He didn’t LOOK good. That was the only thing that mattered.
This is all smoke and mirrors, for the working-class population of this country, because both of these candidates have shown themselves to be unfit—for delivering what working people need. And not because of their age or ‘diminished capacities.’ What makes them unfit to represent workers is that they are clearly servants of the capitalist class, those who exploit us.
BOTH of these choices, and the parties they represent, are here to represent interests opposed to working peoples’ true interests. Both represent our class enemies, the class that is every day exploiting us and taking away our labor to line their own pockets.
The Democrats, the Republicans, and all of the major media outlets who parrot them want us to believe that this is the only choice we have before us. They want us to pay attention to these ridiculous performances by their top two performing seals, telling us that OUR fates are decided by how we vote in November. When in reality, both are performers who will be ready to sell us on the latest poison they want us to swallow—in the interests of the capitalist class.
That doesn’t sound like much of a choice.
What sounds like a system rigged for the capitalist parties is just what it is. These parties do not represent working people.
The ONLY answer for working people is to build our OWN party, representing our own interests truly, and not to buy into the idea that we are trapped in the cycle of voting for the lesser of two evils.
Evil is still evil. We can’t depend on our enemies to represent us. We need to represent ourselves. And to fight for what we truly need.
Jul 1, 2024
On Juneteenth, Chicago hit 95 degrees with a heat index of 101. With the city’s large black population disproportionately lacking air conditioning, you’d think the least the city could do to celebrate the end of slavery was make sure people had a place to cool off.
Real life was just the opposite. Because it was a federal holiday, the city closed all but one cooling center and all the libraries.
Leave it to capitalist America to use a celebration of the liberation of black people as an excuse to save a buck—largely at black people’s expense!
Jul 1, 2024
The Detroit fireworks were once a day of fun and family, but no more. City officials have decided to close all city parks up and down the river, including the entire Detroit Riverwalk. The only place to set up a picnic is Belle Isle and you have to be there early to get a spot. Otherwise, you have to be crammed into Hart Plaza and Campus Martius.
Officials can open the city for the NFL draft and the Grand Prix, but for local events, we get crammed into sardine cans.
Jul 1, 2024
An “independent” union monitor is investigating Shawn Fain and Margaret Mock after a recent UAW leadership change. Perhaps this is retribution for last year’s strike. Perhaps something unlawful did occur.
Either way, it should be up to union members to police our union, not the feds. We can handle our own issues. Any representative from the bosses or their government is not going to be on our side.
Jul 1, 2024
The Supreme Court struck down part of a federal anti-corruption law. Essentially, the Court legalized bribery of government officials so long as they get the “gift” after the official gets a lucrative contract for the donor.
This is the very Court that has been criticized for accepting undisclosed gifts from wealthy patrons. Remember Clarence Thomas, who regularly took lavish vacations and private jet flights on Texas billionaire Harlan Crow’s dime? They sure do know how to cover their butts.
Jul 1, 2024
During the debate, Trump lied again and again about immigrants.
He said “millions of people” have come into this country “from prisons, jails, and mental institutions.” That is an out and out LIE. The vast majority of migrants are fleeing poverty and the violence that comes with it, and were never in jail, prison, or a mental institution.
Trump said, “There have been many young women murdered by the same people he allowed to come across our border … these killers are coming into our country, and they are raping and killing women.” Later, he added, “people are coming in and killing our citizens at a level that we’ve never seen.” That is an out and out LIE. Every study shows immigrants are less likely to commit crimes, including rape and murder, than people born in this country.
Trump said about migrants: “they’re taking black jobs and they’re taking Hispanic jobs….” That is an out and out LIE. Migrants don’t control the jobs—the capitalists do. The bosses have destroyed the jobs of every part of the working class by putting more work on fewer people, driving down wages so people need overtime to live, and forcing others to take two or three part time jobs.
Trump said: “millions of people are pouring into our country, and they’re putting them on to Social Security; they’re putting them on Medicare, Medicaid. They’re putting them in our hospitals. They’re taking the place of our citizens.” That is an out and out LIE. Immigrants without papers and migrants waiting for asylum hearings do not qualify for Social Security—but when they work, Social Security is still deducted from their checks. They don’t qualify for Medicare or Medicaid—though they pay into these programs.
Trump said, “Our veterans are living in the street and these people [immigrants] are living in luxury hotels.” That is an out and out LIE. In a few cases, hotels got subsidies to let some migrants stay in them temporarily. But in cities like New York and Chicago, most have been crammed into unsanitary shelters, converted warehouses, and the like. Others are sleeping on the streets—right next to the homeless veterans. Trump’s answer is that we should fight over who gets into the homeless shelter!
Trump’s lies are part of a massive disinformation campaign to convince workers that the most recent immigrants are somehow to blame for our problems.
But these immigrants are part of our class, the working class. Our problems are caused by the capitalist class that owns the country’s wealth. It’s in the capitalists’ interest to get workers to blame other workers for our problems, to cause disunity, to weaken the only force that is a threat to their control over every part of this society—a unified working class.
Jul 1, 2024
With great fanfare, the Biden administration announced “new actions to keep families together.”
He ordered that the Department of Homeland Security put in place a new process for undocumented spouses or children of citizens to apply for lawful permanent resident status—also known as a green card. He also ordered that some undocumented people brought here as young children—those the Obama Administration gave some very limited protections to under DACA—can more easily apply for work permits.
Both Fox News and The New York Times called this move “sweeping.” But it is about the very least the administration could possibly do. Undocumented spouses must have lived in the U.S. for ten years to qualify. And they are already eligible for green cards—this order just promises to reduce the number of hoops they must jump through.
As for the young people under DACA: they can only get a work visa if they have completed a college education in the U.S. and have a job offer in their field of study. How many young people does that happen for these days, immigrant or not?!?
On top of that, Spanish-language TV and radio are full of warnings that no one should apply yet, because it’s not clear how—or if—these announced changes will really be put in place. They warn of scammers offering to help people through the process who will instead steal their money.
In other words, Biden barely pretended to offer the slimmest olive branch to immigrants, after his announcement that he was closing the border a few weeks ago.
Instead, his policies continue to slice up the 50 million immigrants in the U.S. into a hundred different categories, with second, third, fourth, and fifth class “Americans”, each more under threat, and thereby vulnerable to exploitation, than the next.
Jul 1, 2024
Workers assigned to scrub the outside of CTA railcars with the toxic detergent SECO 101 reported severe burns that caused their skin to peel, and that spread over time to other parts of the body. Some had to leave work to obtain medical assistance. One required emergency room medical care.
These workers went to their supervisor to report their injuries, asking at first, then insisting that they be moved to some other assignment until proper PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) and adequate training were provided. But the CTA rejected their demands and suspended them for “Gross Misconduct,” the penalty for which is termination.
CTA President Dorval Carter publicly insinuated that because some of the temporary workers have past criminal records, they should be happy to have their jobs, saying the city is: “giving individuals with barriers to employment the opportunity to really turn their lives around.” He just happens to be the highest paid of all the officials appointed by Mayor Brandon Johnson. The injured workers, meanwhile, are temporary part-timers who make just $15.50 an hour with no health insurance, sick days, vacation, or other benefits.
For all its claims to be “progressive,” the Johnson administration has sided with the highly paid officials and their corporate bosses, not the injured, low wage workers forced to work with dangerous chemicals. Just like every administration before it.
Jul 1, 2024
Oklahoma’s state superintendent mandated that all public schools teach the Bible. “Immediate and strict compliance is expected,” Ryan Walters’ memo ordered. Walters claims: “the Bible is a necessary historical document to teach our children about the history of this country.”
This mandate comes on the heels of Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry signing a law directing all public schools in the state to display the Ten Commandments.
Louisiana has the fifth lowest literacy rate in the country. In Oklahoma, 43% of the population reads at a 7th grade level or lower. Both public school systems are near the bottom compared with other public school systems with regards to educating their children.
Working-class children need to learn how to read and write. They need to learn math, and they need to learn science. Both these school districts are failing to do this. Teaching religion in school will not fix this problem. Our children deserve to be educated. Education should not just be for children from wealthy families. Our children should get to learn about evolution and plate tectonics and physics just like the rich kids do.
Jul 1, 2024
Willie Mays, who died recently, was certainly one of the greatest baseball players ever. It was a joy to watch his grace, skill and athleticism. Some considered him the best all-around player ever to play in the Major Leagues for his hitting and his fielding. Mays hit 660 home runs, won the Gold Glove 12 times for his fielding, and made the All-Star team 24 times.
Mays was born near Birmingham, Alabama and grew up in the Jim Crow era. He played his first two seasons of professional baseball in the Negro Leagues before he signed with the Major Leagues in 1950, 3 years after Jackie Robinson became the first black player in the Major Leagues.
Mays faced some of the same racism that Robinson and the other first black baseball players encountered. Black players were often not allowed to stay in the same hotels as white players. Later in his career, Mays was told he could not buy a house in a white neighborhood in San Francisco.
Mays did get to play most of his career in the Major Leagues, while black players who were born earlier were denied that opportunity. Players like Josh Gibson, Satchell Paige and Buck Leonard were just as great as Mays, but were kept out of the Major Leagues for most or all of their careers.
The skill and ability of players in the Negro Leagues certainly matched or exceeded that of the players in the all-white Major Leagues. But the racism of the society kept the black players and white players from playing together and/or competing against each other. Racism deprived the fans of enjoying the competition of the best combined talents. Baseball and other sports were mostly segregated until the protests of the Civil Rights movements forced changes.
A few weeks before Mays died, Major League baseball announced that the records and statistics of the Negro League players would be recognized and added to the official record books of the Major Leagues. It was recognition that was long overdue.
Jul 1, 2024
In July 1934, workers in San Francisco staged a general strike that paralyzed the city. The San Francisco General Strike was the culmination of a struggle that had begun two months before with a longshoremen’s strike. The longshoremen’s strike spread quickly to other classifications of maritime workers, as well as other ports, shutting down the entire West Coast waterfront for more than two months.
In the 1930s, working conditions in West Coast ports were some of the worst in the U.S. After defeating a coast-wide strike through police violence in 1916, the maritime companies had imposed an “open shop” hiring process, which the workers called “the slave mart.”
Under the so-called “Blue Book” system (named after the books the company union distributed to the workers), only a small number of workers found somewhat steady work in the docks, through favoritism. For the rest of the longshoremen, it was common to go without work for several days, and then work only two or three hours.
These workers were not even able to support themselves, let alone their families. For food, they relied on charities and even rotten throw-away produce. Many of them were homeless. As for the “favored” workers, it was common for them to toil 24 to 36 hours straight. Constantly exposed to exhaustion and injuries, they basically worked themselves to death.
After the 1916 strike, workers’ fights against these conditions had been led by the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World), a militant union also known as Wobblies. But the bosses had been able to suppress these fights thanks to government repression. The U.S. government used the IWW’s opposition to World War One as a pretext to arrest Wobblies and deport some.
Workers’ struggles on the Western waterfront gained momentum again in the 1930s with the involvement of the Communist Party (CP). In 1932, some CP militants and former Wobblies began to put out The Waterfront Worker, a newsletter that echoed the workers’ complaints. The popularity of the newsletter indicated a defiant mood among dock workers, who were leaving the Blue Book union in large numbers and joining the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), a union based on the East Coast.
Worker militants in and around the CP also joined the ILA and began to play a prominent role in the union. But the ILA, like other old craft unions, was run by conservative officials who worked with the bosses and blocked workers’ attempts to fight for better wages and work conditions. In an attempt to circumvent the conservative ILA leadership and bureaucrats, militant unionists called an all-West-Coast convention in San Francisco in February 1934, to which paid officers of the union were not allowed as delegates. Besides a pay raise and a 30-hour week, the convention adopted union recognition and union control of hiring halls as demands.
Delegates set a strike date in March and elected a strike committee of 25, headed by Harry Bridges, who became the strike leader.
After several months’ delay (the maritime companies got U.S. President Roosevelt to request a postponement of the strike), the strike began among San Francisco dock workers on May 9. It spread like wildfire up and down the West Coast—by May 11, all waterfronts along the West Coast were on strike.
The strike also spread to other workers. Sailors, whose working conditions were at least as bad as the longshoremen, walked out with their own demands. San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles truck drivers voted to honor the longshoremen’s picket line. Boilermakers and machinists began boycotting ships that used strikebreakers.
When the companies brought in the police to break the picket lines, pitched battles ensued between strikers and cops. As the pickets stood their ground and stopped the ports from operating, passenger and freight lines cancelled services. All major ports along the West Coast shut down—except for one ship that Seattle strikers allowed to carry essential supplies to Alaska, where residents were completely isolated.
Within its first week, the strike had already suffered its first casualties, when police shot and killed two pickets, Dick Parker and John Knudsen, in Los Angeles. In San Francisco, police opened fire on pickets on May 28, wounding many.
Clashes between police and pickets came to a head on July 5, notoriously remembered as “Bloody Thursday.” Police on horseback attacked pickets on Rincon Hill near the waterfront with batons and tear gas, and fired into the crowd also. Workers responded with bricks and rocks but had to retreat to the ILA headquarters downtown—where police surrounded them in the afternoon. Undeterred by tear gas, batons, and bullets, hundreds of strikers and their supporters fought with bricks, rocks and tear-gas canisters that they threw back at the cops and turned police cars over. The battle continued all day.
Police shot and killed two pickets, Nick Bordoise and Howard Sperry. Over 100 people, including many passers-by, were reported to be seriously injured. The real number of the injured was certainly much higher, since many wounded workers did not go to the hospital for fear of being arrested.
The California governor used the events of July 5 as an excuse to call in the National Guard. But the brutal repression outraged not just the workers but other parts of the city’s population as well. On July 9, 15,000 people marched through San Francisco in utter silence, turning the funeral of Bordoise and Sperry into a massive demonstration in support of the strike. Police and the National Guard were nowhere to be seen.
During the funeral march, life in the city had come to a stop. In the days following the funeral, the call for a lasting general strike resonated all over the city. Union workers in different sectors, one after the other, voted to go on strike, some of them in defiance of their own union leaders. Within two days, delivery trucks, trolleys and taxi cabs in San Francisco had stopped running.
The strike enjoyed support from shopkeepers as well. Many small shops displayed “Closed Till the Boys Win” signs on their windows.
By July 14, somewhere between 120,000 and 150,000 workers were on strike in the whole Bay Area, including many public sector workers. Only businesses in certain sectors were open, such as health care, food, the ferry across the Bay, department stores, hotels, and 19 restaurants that the strike committee had ordered to stay open.
The San Francisco Labor Council also called for a general strike on July 16, but only to turn around and call an end to the general strike two days later, leaving the longshore and maritime strikes isolated.
In fact, the conservative union officials, who made up the labor council, had been against any strikes from the beginning. But they were now officially in charge of the general strike—because the original strike committee, led by Harry Bridges, had turned over the leadership to them.
At this point Bridges and his fellow ILA militants agreed to an arbitration process—something they had said they would never do. They also agreed that U.S. President Roosevelt—a representative of the capitalist class—appoint the arbitration board. In effect, they were telling the workers to look to the government to settle their strike, instead of their own forces.
The labor council’s call on workers to go back to work coincided with another round of terror, carried out by police and bosses’ thugs (whom the bosses’ newspapers called “citizen vigilantes”). As newspapers tried to create mass hysteria against the strike with headlines claiming that “reds” and “radicals” sowed mayhem, police and thugs raided workers’ meetings, the headquarters of the ILA and the offices of the CP, ransacking buildings and beating strikers. Police arrested hundreds of strikers and threw them in jail.
It wasn’t the first time the workers were facing police terror. But the longshoremen’s strike effectively ended and workers began to go back to work when the bosses quietly agreed to the workers’ demand that hiring halls be controlled by the union.
When the arbitration board announced its decision three months later, it was a confirmation of this new status quo. Officially, the hiring hall was to be run jointly by the companies and the union but, since the ILA controlled the dispatching of work crews, it also effectively controlled who would be hired. This ended some of the worst practices of the old Blue Book system.
Bridges and the ILA also agreed to settle the strike for the longshoremen while the sailors were still out on strike. That meant they agreed to divide the workers’ fight—one more thing they had said they would not do. And when the sailors eventually settled, all they got was union recognition. In other words, the ILA leaders abandoned—in fact, betrayed—the sailors, even though the sailors’ joining had been crucial for the strength of the longshoremen’s strike.
The arbitration board claimed that it had granted and took credit for significant gains for the longshoremen. The workers won a pay increase, a six-hour day with overtime pay after that, and a thirty-hour week—gains many workers today would look upon with envy. But this shows the effect that the longshoremen’s massive, determined fight had on the capitalist class.
Over the following years, the workers went on many more strikes. There was a second waterfront strike in 1936–37, which lasted 99 days, which helped the expansion of the union into unorganized sections of the working class, such as the warehouse workers.
But these strikes didn’t have the explosive character of the 1934 strikes, in which the workers took the initiative. Instead, the strikes began to follow a more predictable path under government regulation, and with the collaboration of a new group of union officials.
Nonetheless, the 1934 longshoremen’s strike, which culminated in a city-wide general strike, shows us the power the working class has when it mobilizes and fights back together as a class—not only the power to defend its interests in the face of exploitation, but also to collectively run the whole society.
Jul 1, 2024
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) will hold its summit in early July, where it is expected that Ukrainian president Zelensky will continue to push for Ukraine to be allowed to join NATO. But the U.S. government is again indicating that NATO will not invite Ukraine to join right now.
The U.S. organized NATO 75 years ago as a military threat against the Soviet Union. NATO was originally made up of the governments and military forces of the U.S., Canada and most of the countries of Western Europe.
After the Soviet Union broke apart in 1991, many of the former Soviet dominated states in Eastern Europe were pulled away from Russia and brought into NATO. The U.S. and other NATO countries have built military bases and stationed troops in former Soviet territories, right up to the very border of Russia. They have missiles that are aimed at Russia.
It was this growing military threat from the U.S. and NATO that provoked Putin to launch his brutal invasion of Ukraine.
While the U.S. claims to be helping the Ukrainian people defend themselves, in reality, the U.S. is using this war for their own reasons, in order to weaken Russia. Russia, along with China and Iran, present a problem for the U.S. because they are able to take some independence from U.S. imperialism. As the U.S. prepares for a possible third world war, they seem to want to weaken Russia by extending the war in Ukraine.
The U.S. and NATO are perfectly fine to keep this war going today by supplying weapons and money. They are perfectly fine that hundreds of thousands of people, soldiers and civilians have been killed on both sides. But they are not ready to send in their own troops, at least not yet. The U.S. and NATO want to be able to decide when and how to intervene in this war and future wars, based only on what serves the interests of imperialism.
For U.S. capitalism, Ukraine is just a pawn to be used in a world that they want to dominate.
Jul 1, 2024
This article is translated from the May 31 issue, #2913 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
On April 25th, Bogdan Syrotiuk, a Trotskyist militant with the Young Guard of the Bolshevik-Leninists, was arrested by the Ukrainian political police, the SBU. He has been held since in a high-security prison in the city of Mykolaiv, in the South of the country.
Bogdan’s political tendency, the International Committee of the Fourth International, made it known that he was accused of publishing texts “sponsored by a Russian propaganda agency.” The Zelensky regime thinks nothing of offering implausible accusations against those who oppose them in the name of communism, Trotskyism, the October Revolution, and who, during this war, defend the community of interest of the workers of Russia and Ukraine. For Kyiv, these ideas and positions are forbidden by law. They may mean 15 years in prison for Bogdan Syrotiuk.
The imperialist powers have tried hard to paint the Ukrainian government, which they arm to fight Russia, as democratic—this regime which tolerates no voice speaking about the class struggle or socialism. They pitilessly hand years in prison to those who deface monuments erected in honor of Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian Nazi leader of the ’30s and ’40s. Kyiv has in fact made a national hero out of this man, Bandera, who massacred Jews, Poles, Russians and communists.
All political persecution of socialist and communist militants in Ukraine must cease. Free Bogdan Syrotiuk NOW!
Jul 1, 2024
This article is translated from the monthly La Voix des Travailleurs, issue #315, published in Haiti by the Organization of Revolutionary Workers (OTR-UCI). It was published before the arrival of the first contingent of 400 Kenyan police officers on Tuesday, June 25.
Like hordes of barbarians, gangs have shattered the traditional ties that bind them to the dominant classes. Over-armed and exploiting the poverty of young people in the slums, which provides them with numerous adherents, they unleash violence in the capital and in certain provincial cities. Desperate, the wealthy classes are calling for help.
It is the popular classes who bear the heaviest burden of the rise in gang power. They suffer the brunt of massacres, heinous crimes, rapes, gang wars, roadblocks on national highways, territorial conquests by gangs, arson in popular neighborhoods, skyrocketing prices of essential goods, arson in private and public hospitals, destruction of public markets, and more. But the wealthy classes suffer too.
On Tuesday, June 4, 2024, an attempt to hijack two large gasoline tankers turned into a catastrophe. Having missed their target, the bandits did not hesitate to shoot at one of the trucks, which caught fire in the middle of a crowded market.
A week earlier, a couple from a wealthy American family was murdered in a suburb of the capital. Their bodies were extracted after tough negotiations with a gang leader for whose capture the American government has offered a bounty for over two years.
Upon the announcement of the deployment of foreign soldiers, gangs destroyed several police stations with bulldozers over several days. Freight trucks are constantly hijacked on the roads. Showrooms and warehouses are set on fire. Boats are intercepted at sea. The Toussaint Louverture Airport in Port-au-Prince, closed for three months, only resumed operations after the intervention of the American army.
Isolated from the rest of the world and unable to rely on the police, many of whose members are under the control of gangs, the bourgeoisie has turned to its international allies for help. The Multinational Security Support Mission (MSSM) is a reinforcement for the bourgeois state and its failing police force.
For the popular masses, the problems will remain unresolved. Their security in neighborhoods and on the roads, the issues of unemployment, high cost of living, wages, housing, and healthcare will persist as long as this system of exploitation remains in place. Only their struggles will allow them to mitigate these issues.
Jul 1, 2024
On June 25, waves of protests rocked Nairobi, the capital of Kenya. The spark for these protests was the introduction of a new finance bill that would levy punishing taxes on everyday essentials, including sugar, bread and cooking oil—a policy that would hit poor Kenyans the hardest.
To try to quell the demonstrations, the Kenyan government unleashed brutal repression, while also extending a few concessions. The police and other government forces arrested, kidnapped, beat, shot and tear-gassed protesters, killing over two dozen people. At the same time, Kenyan president William Ruto announced that he would not sign the finance bill that contained the much-hated tax increases, claiming that he was “listening keenly to the people of Kenya.”
But Ruto’s U-turn over the tax bill was not enough to quell the protests. On June 26, demonstrators announced a “One Million March,” calling for roads leading to the capital of Nairobi to be blocked. Others threatened to occupy government buildings, including the president’s official residence.
Most of the protesters are young people in their teens and early twenties. For years, they had been demonstrating against the severe lack of jobs, big cuts to funding for education and health care, and the rising cost of living, especially food and fuel prices.
Less than a year ago, in July 2023, the government announced a doubling of the fuel tax. This provoked several days of anti-government demonstrations in Nairobi, the capital, and 13 of Kenya’s 47 counties. The Kenyan police killed 23 people and arrested hundreds more.
Certainly, the young people in the streets were battling rampant corruption of top government officials and the ruling elite. For example, the bill contained extravagant expenditures for construction projects for the very rich, including the renovation of the president’s residence.
But Ruto and those around him are merely the guardians for the big imperial powers, starting with the U.S. banks and financial companies.
Currently, Kenya’s domestic and foreign debt comes to a staggering 80 billion dollars. This accounts for three-quarters of the country’s entire economic output. Interest payments alone eat up 27% of all the tax money collected each year.
Just two weeks before the latest protests, it was the International Monetary Fund that had imposed this latest round of tax increases on the Kenyan government, in the interests of the big international banks and financial companies. Imperialism is bleeding the country dry—just like all of Africa.
The fight of the young people in Kenya isn’t just against one corrupt government, but capitalist and imperialist domination.
Jul 1, 2024
What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters, during the week of June 23, 2024.
At a U.S. Senate hearing in mid-June, Boeing CEO David Calhoun personally apologized to relatives of the 346 people who died in two crashes of brand-new Boeing Max 737 jetliners five years before.
These planes were supposed to be the safest in the world. But the reality was the exact opposite. The planes were so shoddily built, their own safety systems forced them to slam nose first straight into the ground right after takeoff. And the fact that in January 2024 a door plug flew off of another brand-new Boeing Max jet proved that little had changed.
Of course, at the Senate hearing, the Republican and Democratic senators put on a show of pretending to be angry and shocked at Calhoun and the rest of Boeing management for their complete disregard for human life. Meanwhile, Calhoun went through the motions of repeatedly pretending that Boeing is focused on safety.
In fact, top Boeing management and U.S. politicians, top officials and regulators are partners in crime.
In the decades before the two Boeing plane crashes, Boeing management systematically got rid of experienced workers, inspectors, techs and engineers. Boeing further disorganized production by outsourcing as much work as it could.
In other words, Boeing carried out a class war against the very people who actually do the work and build the planes. And it did it for one simple reason: to increase its profits. Those profits were then recycled back into the pockets of its largest shareholders, that is, the capitalist class.
This class war against the very people who make the plane also undermined and sabotaged quality and safety. Or, as one senator put it: Boeing strip mined its own company for profit.
And anyone who dared to come forward, dared to question what was being done was moved, ostracized, fired. One important whistle blower was recently found dead the day before he was supposed to testify. The police called it a suicide. But who knows?
Over all this time, the government and its various regulators that are supposed to assure the safety of the planes, sat on their hands and did nothing. That is because regulators serve the same master as Boeing: the capitalist class. They are just there to reassure the public and help smooth the way for bigger corporate profits.
Over the last five years, Boeing promised to clean up its act, while the government promised to crack down on Boeing’s unsafe practices. All lies. Boeing and its contractors continue to build the plane as cheaply as possible. Recently, some whistle blowers have exposed how the company uses cheap counterfeit parts and falsifies paperwork. They document how Dawn dish soap is used as a lubricant and hotel key cards are used as measurement tools.
The problem isn’t just one company. It’s an entire system. Everything is sacrificed to serve the interests of a few billionaires and capitalists. The capitalist drive for profit destroys workers’ standard of living. It destroys the environment. And competition between different capitalist cliques leads to ever greater wars, wars that kill millions, wars that threaten humanity’s very existence.
Working people have no reason to accept the disastrous rule by a tiny minority of billionaires over society. Working people have every reason to end this madness. And the working class has the power to do it. After all, the working class does all the work and makes things run. Moreover, it is the working class that staffs the government and military. When workers organize together as a class, they can take the power away from the capitalist class and their government and run society collectively in the interests of all humanity.
Jul 1, 2024
This is a deeply researched telling of the large slave revolt outside New Orleans in 1811. The author first creates a picture of the times, including the slave revolt in Haiti, the many renegade communities of escaped slaves and Native Americans hiding in the swamps, and the tortuous life of a slave on a profit-driven sugar plantation. The author takes what snippets of history he can find to fictionalize the day-by-day momentous events of the largest slave uprising in American history. The book truly enables one to see these events as they unfold, and to see the violence the slave owners had to use to force people back into chattel slavery.
This is a full-length documentary of events that occurred 30 years ago: the murder of a black man by police which resulted for the first time in charges and a guilty verdict. It was produced by years of investigative work by WDIV’s Paula Tutman.
Malice Green was an unemployed steelworker who was beaten and killed by two Detroit police officers, November 5th, 1992. The two police officers Nevers and Butzel were infamous for their abusive behavior in this neighborhood, cruising in their unmarked car and harassing residents. Malice Green was pulled over and refused to open his hand. The two cops struck him 14 times on his head with a police-issued large flashlight and killed him. As the film shows, numerous neighbors witnessed it, and bravely testified at the trial.
The film goes on to document the murder of unarmed black men and women by police since then. The film is a sobering comprehensive study of systemic abuse.
Jul 1, 2024
On June 23, Baltimore Mayor Scott and 150 other people jumped into Baltimore’s Inner Harbor during the city’s Harbor Splash event. It was supposed to be a celebration of the cleaning up of the water in the Inner Harbor.
Instead, it was a sad joke—a P.R. event.
Immediately after the Splash, officials made it clear that the water was dangerous to public health. A year ago, water where the Splash took place didn’t meet clean water standards 40% of the time. The officials warned people not to swim in it.
It has been decades now since the local, state and federal governments said they would clean up rivers, lakes and streams. They have not done it.
Jul 1, 2024
This spring, Florida passed a law to allow doctors to perform caesarean sections outside hospitals, in outpatient facilities called “advanced birthing centers.” Advanced birthing centers were promoted as a way to expand access to maternity care in the state, where many hospitals have closed their labor and delivery departments. As of April, only two of Florida’s 21 rural hospitals were still providing labor and delivery services.
Florida lawmakers say they’re hoping to bridge the care gap for pregnant women living in rural parts of the state by passing this bill. But they are leaving out what is more than a small detail: It was private equity firms that lobbied hard to pass the new law. Women’s Care Enterprises, a private equity-owned doctor’s group with multiple practice locations in Florida, supported this C-section bill. And the bill’s sponsor was Senator Gayle Harrell, who once managed her husband’s OB-GYN practice!
In recent years, private equity firms have been invading virtually every nook and cranny of the health care system. With their ownership of these “birthing centers,” they have entered women’s health: between 2010 and 2019, private equity firms acquired 24 women’s health groups, covering 605 offices and more than 2,000 clinicians. According to the department chair of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of South Florida, Dr. Judette Louis, “I think we also can’t ignore the fact that the people promoting it and who think it’s a good idea are private equity-based companies. It’s Women’s Health Care Enterprises, and they are big money in the state of Florida, so you always have to be cautious about whether there is financial gain to be had by allowing a birth center to also do C-sections.”
Rightfully so, medical experts in the fields of obstetrics and gynecology and maternal fetal medicine have raised a red flag that this new law is a threat to the safety of women and newborns. C-sections are major abdominal surgeries where you have two patients—the baby and the mother, and there is no such thing as a low-risk patient, or a low risk C-section. C-section complications like bleeding and damage to surrounding tissue “require immediate attention and assistance from other hospital teams and resources like an intensive care unit, ventilators and additional surgical assistance,” according to one maternal fetal medicine doctor. And Dr. Louis stated: “One of the biggest predictors of maternal morbidity and mortality is caesarean delivery, so by virtue, the procedure itself really amps up the risk to the mothers. The fact that we now would be doing it outside of a hospital setting, where you can have the backup that you need should things go awry, is very concerning to me.”
Jul 1, 2024
Two recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings on abortion rights were not the victories that headlines hinted at. The attack on abortion rights is very much continuing.
With a nod to upcoming elections, in two recent rulings, the far-right majority on the U.S. Supreme Court avoided public support for a clear attack on abortion rights. A law professor observed, “Once burned by overturning Roe before the 2022 midterm elections … twice shy about letting [their] extreme anti-abortion ideology offend voters in an election year.”
On June 27, in a case from Idaho, the Supreme Court issued a decision that sidestepped a clear ruling. Federal law requires hospitals to provide care for pregnant patients in an “emergency medical condition,” but an abortion ban is blocking this basic right. The court’s June 27 ruling left protections in place—for now. But there are two dozen similar attacks on emergency room care already in the court system.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a minority position on the court, wrote that abortions can become necessary to protect a woman from “losing her uterus, going into organ failure, or avoiding any number of other serious health risks.” Jackson accused the right-wing majority of “political chicanery before the election.” Her dissent was in line with a nationwide survey conducted in March which found 82% of people in the U.S. believe emergency abortion care must be legal.
In a second case in June, the court used a technicality to kick another attack on abortion down the road. The court struck down a narrow aspect of a case that aimed to ban the abortion pill, mifepristone. The possibility of future court cases to attack this abortion pill was left open in this ruling. According to Nancy Northrup, the President of the Center for Reproductive Rights, mifepristone “is still at risk nationwide.”
Monday, June 24 marked the two-year anniversary of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade. Supporters of reproductive healthcare and abortion rights rallied in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. Clearly, restoring reproductive healthcare for all will require a mass mobilization, even a revolution to overthrow the oppressive net that capitalism has thrown over women’s very life needs.
Once a fight starts, better possibilities for protection could open up in the short run.