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
Sep 2, 2024
The world is going through one of the hottest summers on record. We just experienced the hottest June, and July 2024 was a close second behind July of last year.
Summer 2024 is also on track to become the most humid summer on record, in the U.S. and the world (hotter air can hold more moisture). Experts are warning that heat and humidity, combined, are pushing some parts of the world to the limits of survivability.
The effect of heat on the human body is cumulative—the body does not begin to recover until the temperature drops below 80 degrees. That’s why heat waves and sustained high temperatures are so dangerous. August 25 was the 91st consecutive day in Phoenix where the temperature reached 100 degrees or more, making this city unlivable without A/C units running day and night—if you can afford the electric bill.
And people are already dying from extreme heat. In Maricopa County, where Phoenix is located, 175 deaths were linked to heat in June, an 84-percent increase from June 2023. In 2023, the hottest year on record so far, there were at least 2,325 heat-related deaths in the U.S.—certainly an undercount, since many heat-related deaths are listed under other causes.
Then there are all those disasters fueled by heat—like the huge, fast, uncontrollable wildfires in the West, the powerful floods in the South that sweep away entire towns, and the smoke from Canadian wildfires that covers cities hundreds of miles away, like New York and Detroit. In 2020, during a 30-day streak of wildfires in Northern California, doctors reported a 43-percent increase in strokes and other cardiovascular illnesses in the region.
In many parts of the world, especially the underdeveloped world, it’s even worse, because there is less infrastructure there to provide people some measure of relief from extreme heat and weather-related disasters.
Climate change is here, there is no escape from it. Such a deep, global crisis requires a response at the level of the whole world, so that human beings can survive. But don’t expect that response under capitalism.
At the simplest level, when it’s extremely hot, you need cooling to survive. But under capitalism, it’s left to each family to find a way to cool its home. Perhaps buy an A/C unit. In underdeveloped parts of the world, a big majority of the population can’t afford that.
But in this country also, millions of people don’t have access to A/C for various reasons: landlords don’t provide it, electricity is expensive so people don’t turn it on—or, more and more commonly, utility companies simply cut off electricity because their grids, lacking upgrades and maintenance, are not able to sustain large power loads.
With surging temperatures and heat waves, that can be a death sentence for tens of thousands of people. But for the rest of us also, a life indoors 24/7, sustained by A/C—is this the kind of life we want?
The capitalist system, which organizes the economy to make individual profit-making easier, has no interest in organizing the whole society to protect human beings from peril—not even in the face of the deepest crises. Not from COVID, for example, which has killed over 1.2 million people in the U.S., and over 7 million globally. And not from climate change either.
It is workers who get sick, and die, from extreme heat in fields, factories and homes. It is in our interest to make sure everybody can survive the heat, so that we and our families can survive also. It is in our interest to make sure everyone has access to A/C when temperatures become unbearable—or to make sure that people in the hottest regions could be relocated.
But society also needs to address the underlying causes of climate change. Society needs to take effective measures to curb the emission of greenhouse gases in industry and transportation. Car engines should be built more efficiently, so that they produce less pollution. Reliable and efficient mass transit systems need to be built.
Scientists and engineers know how to begin to address these problems, and they can develop solutions. But the capitalist class, which today controls society’s resources, has never provided the funding necessary for such research. The capitalist class is interested only in its own profit.
But it doesn’t mean we are powerless against these crises. We can turn things around. The power to do that lies with the working class.
Organized together as a class, the working class can address and solve the crises facing the whole society, including extreme weather—if it wrests the power from the capitalist class and uses its control over society to make humane choices.
Sep 2, 2024
Medicaid (government insurance for low income people) is not an option for people with bills to pay! For a single person to qualify for Medicaid in Illinois, they can’t make more than $1,366 a month (and $1,845 for a couple)! As of August 2024, the average rent for a studio apartment in Chicago, Illinois is $1,490 per month, according to Apartments.com.
Capitalism gives people choices: the choice between healthcare and rent!
Sep 2, 2024
Amid increasing attacks on abortion rights and women’s healthcare, women need birth control more than ever. The Pill can leave a long string of side effects, so the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recommends the IUD. But getting an IUD inserted is an extremely painful and invasive procedure.
New CDC guidelines recommend that healthcare providers give women lidocaine shots for pain relief when they get an IUD. But this shot itself can hurt more than the IUD insertion. So, many places like Planned Parenthood just tell women to take ibuprofen.
Women’s pain is just not a priority in this society.
Sep 2, 2024
A hazardous waste dump in Belleville, Michigan is being permitted to receive radioactive nuclear waste and radioactive ground water to store on its site.
The waste HAD been stored since 1944 in another state. It is waste from the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb.
In 1992, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that trash—such as radioactive waste—is “articles of commerce.” The Supreme Court decided states are NOT permitted to block corporations from making money off this “commerce.”
Sep 2, 2024
Instead of addressing the problem of homelessness, the City of Los Angeles is criminalizing it, citing and arresting homeless people, removing them from visible public spaces, denying them basic services and sanitation, confiscating and destroying their property, and putting them into jail-like shelters.
After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last June that it’s legal for cities to ban homeless encampments, even if no shelters are available to house them, California Governor Gavin Newsom ordered cities to remove them. Then, the Mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, denounced this criminalization, called it “disappointing”, and said it “must not be used as an excuse for cities across the country to attempt to arrest their way out of this problem.”
But this is precisely what the city is doing. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) cited and arrested homeless people for sitting or lying on public sidewalks, drinking alcohol in public, littering, loitering, and violating park regulations. From 2016 through 2022, nearly all LAPD citations went to the homeless. From December 2022 through March 2024, the LAPD destroyed 42 encampments. This is a war waged by the City of Los Angeles against the homeless.
Previously, Bass had touted her Inside Safe program, under which the LAPD, by force, clears homeless camps and temporarily moves the homeless to hotels. The supposed goal is to eventually place the homeless in permanent housing. But this is far from happening.
The city moved only 2,482 homeless into hotels within the last two years. Of those people, just 440 had been placed in permanent housing. Considering that over 75,000 people live on the streets in the county of Los Angeles, what the city is doing is not even a drop in the bucket.
This program is quite expensive, costing the city more than $300 million only in 2023, which included more than $3,500 per month for each hotel room, making business buddies of the city politicians richer than ever.
In sum, such treatment of the homeless by the City of Los Angeles is brutal, besides being very costly. But this cruel treatment temporarily conceals signs of homelessness and extreme poverty in the well-off areas of Los Angeles, making these areas attractive to real estate developers and profitable to businesses.
The root causes of homelessness are the high cost of housing and meager wages, which result from the activities of these very same businesses searching for profits.
Sep 2, 2024
A Baltimore City sanitation worker collapsed on the job and died recently. He was only 36. His death was due to the heat, and to how the Department of Public Works didn’t have ways to cool off everywhere it was needed for workers. The temperature that day reached 99 degrees.
Baltimore City Mayor Brandon Scott is proposing to pay a Washington, D.C. law firm to investigate what happened. But guess what? This law firm doing the investigation has specialized in representing employers who oppose strong regulations.
This investigation is a hoax.
Sep 2, 2024
The day the DNC opened, hundreds of nurses picketed University of Illinois Hospital on the near westside just blocks from the Convention Center.
They were angry at contract stalling tactics and unfair labor practices. The nurses are sick of overwork and walked off the job demanding better staffing, decent pay raises, and safer working conditions.
The 5-day strike was timed to coincide with the DNC to put a national spotlight on their issues and build public support.
But the DNC wasn’t paying attention to the striking nurses and ignored them instead. Not a word of support came from inside the Convention Center and nobody from inside joined them on their picket line. Because any attention to protests outside detracted from the slick marketing campaign the Democrats were orchestrating inside.
Sep 2, 2024
At least 9 people died of listeria bacteria infection and 57 were hospitalized after eating deli meat processed this summer at the Boar’s Head factory in Jarratt in southern Virginia.
As customers sued, the company recalled more than seven million pounds of hot dogs, sausage, bacon, and liverwurst, and then suspended operations at the plant for disinfection and retraining. It’s too little, too late.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service found 69 hygiene violations at the plant last year, including rotten chunks of meat all around, pools of rancid bloody water, mold, mildew, flies, and ants. But the agency carried out no enforcement actions against the company.
The government is very respectful of the profits of the Brunckhorst and Bischoff families which have owned Boar’s Head for over a century, racking up fortunes worth hundreds of millions of dollars from the company’s billion dollar a year revenue. For these bosses, hiring enough maintenance and cleaning workers would clip their profits.
This is capitalism, where your father’s trusted favorite sandwich just might sicken him to death one day.
Sep 2, 2024
Do you like seeing an NFL team play? Too bad, unless you have plenty of dough. Tickets in 2024 average $160 per person, not including what’s charged for food, parking and t-shirts.
Think you can watch on local TV? No more. Last year, Thursday night football was streamed only for people who bought Amazon Prime.
It’s all about the dough. NFL team owners are the billionaires who control the Dallas Cowboys, the New England Patriots, the Kansas City Chiefs, the New York Jets, etc. Their money comes from how much they have already screwed all of us. These people own Microsoft, Ford, Johnson and Johnson, Hunt Oil, and many other big companies. We already paid to make them millionaires and billionaires in the first place!
Sep 2, 2024
Jewel-Osco, the biggest grocery store chain in Chicago, has been cutting hours, forcing their employees into quite the predicament! Workers no longer qualify for company insurance, yet make too much to qualify for Medicaid.
This system gives these workers two bad choices: Get private health insurance, which is confusing, expensive, and often low quality; or go without health insurance altogether.
Sep 2, 2024
Thousands of Maryland homeowners, farmers, and environmentalists packed public meetings in July and August to oppose electric power grid owners’ plan to build a 70-mile high-voltage power line through three counties in central Maryland.
The transmission line would carry electricity through central Maryland to massive data centers being planned in northern Virginia, where residents also organized in opposition.
The line as planned would cut through many family farms instead of following existing power lines, meaning the project threatens to seize access to big strips of farmers’ land through eminent domain. And Marylanders would pay hundreds of millions of dollars for it.
We all need data and electricity, and we use more all the time. But the companies want to grab land to build the line with minimal expense—meaning they want us to pay for it, including with increased electric bills that are already too high!
Sep 2, 2024
Three weeks before the start of classes, the president of Columbia University stepped down. She joins the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and Cornell, all of whom were pushed out over the last year.
These elite college presidents came under immense pressure from Congress and rich donors to shut down the student protests against the massacre in Gaza. The president of Columbia had even banned several student groups, fired administrators for sending text messages criticizing students complaining of antisemitism, and called the police on protesters twice—but she was still criticized for not being hard enough.
All this pressure is being applied in the name of protecting Jewish students from antisemitism. Of course, some protesters said stupid things, defending Hamas’ terrorist attack for instance. But protesting against the massacre of Palestinians and the brutal apartheid system that they live under is NOT antisemitic. On the contrary, identifying the murderous policy of the Israeli state with Jews in general is a big cause of antisemitism. Within Israel itself, there are many people who oppose the current war in Gaza, and many Jewish students participated in the protests. One of the first student groups kicked out of Columbia for protesting was a Jewish group, Jewish Voice for Peace.
But claiming that criticism of the massacre being carried out by the Israeli state is “antisemitic” plays a very useful role in justifying U.S. imperialism’s policies in the Middle East. After all, it is very convenient for warmongers to pose as victims.
And while students at elite colleges like Columbia and Harvard don’t have the power to shut down a war, movements that start among students can spread to broader layers of the population. The pressure on these university presidents to crack down on student protests is thus part of a more general push to squash opposition as the U.S. prepares for a bigger war, in the Middle East or elsewhere. The attacks on protests at campuses are in this way threats against the whole population.
After all, when police are sent against protests organized by some of society’s most privileged students, it is that much easier to justify sending them against ordinary workers when they demonstrate or strike.
Sep 2, 2024
The following is the text of a joint speech given at the Spark Festival in Detroit on August 11 by Working Class Party candidates Andrea Kirby and Gary Walkowicz.
This is a very important year for us. The working class has the opportunity to make a statement by not only voting for Working Class Party Candidates, but also by helping to build the party that will change the world.
I could spend hours telling you why we need our own party. Our wages are too low. Prices are too high. We live in a society that doesn’t provide a real public transportation system, but they make it almost impossible to afford a car, let alone the insurance. Housing expenses—regardless of if you rent or own, your costs are going up. Each year, they are going up on the rent, sometimes hundreds of dollars at a time. Home tax assessment values are going up each year, valuing the same home you had the year before at more and more, requiring more and more tax money. You or someone you know makes the choice every day between eating and medical care.
There are no good jobs for adults, let’s not talk about our youths and young adults. We see signs all over, “we are hiring,” but I know people personally that apply and never get called. You can go into the establishment and they can’t help you, you have to go through corporate HR. There is no number or email for HR, you just have to wait. Then they tell the media that no one wants to work.
Our overall standard of living is going down by the day. You all live it, so I don’t have to explain it. Neighborhood schools closing. Hospitals closing. No grocery stores. Pharmacies closing. Fast food restaurants closing. The cost of an education is growing by the semester. Our daily lives are becoming more and more about surviving and less about living and growing.
Every day, Washington decision makers are preparing us for war. No one wants to talk about war because war means death. And it will be the working class, not just in this country but all over the world, that will suffer. The working class will be sucked into war that will only destroy and have no benefit for any of us.
This starts long before soldiers hit the battlefield. Money has been diverted from social programs for decades. In 2023, the U.S. had a record breaking 858-billion-dollar military budget, not including the homeland security budget or veteran benefits. That budget is three times more than China’s military budget and 13 times more than Russia. It’s nearly 300 billion dollars more than the budgets for the 10 largest U.S. cabinet agencies all put together—including Education, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, State, and Transportation.
While the U.S. is growing their military arsenal, they are using their propaganda to demonize China, Russia or any other country that the U.S. may be preparing to go to war with.
The money the working class creates is being put in the pockets of a few and fueling the many wars going on across this planet. And I mean many—there is more than just the war in the Ukraine, and Israel and Gaza. Working-class populations are dying in the Congo and other regions in Africa, Haiti, all over South America and so many other places. It is what they don’t show us on mainstream media.
As Andrea said, working people are facing a crisis. We know that. We feel it every day. But rest assured, “help is on the way.” Or at least that is what we are being told right now. We have an election coming up in which the two main political parties, the Republicans and Democrats, are both telling us that if we vote for them our lives will improve. Both parties are promising us that if we elect them, they will fix all the problems that we are facing. Does anybody believe that?
We are told that we have a choice between which of these two parties we want to address the problems. Really? We have a choice? What choice? The Republicans and the Democrats say they are different from each other. Maybe the two parties don’t always talk the same. They may sound different. Sometimes one party or the other party will put up a new candidate, someone who sounds different, someone who says they represent something different.
But while the candidates may change, the two parties stay the same. While the candidates come and go, the two parties continue on the same path. Between them, the Republicans and the Democrats have been running the government of this country for going on almost two hundred years now. Sometimes they are in office together: one party has the presidency, and the other party has the majority in Congress. Sometimes the two parties take turns running the government. The Republicans hold the presidency and Congress, and then they get voted out and the Democrats get put in. Then the Democrats hold the presidency and Congress for a minute, and then they get voted out and the Republicans are put back in.
It is a merry-go-round. We end up right back where we started from. Nothing ever changes. What has either party done for working people over these last 200 years?
Nothing ever changes, because these two parties both serve the same master. Both parties serve the people who finance their campaigns. Together both parties serve the capitalists—the bankers, the corporate owners, the handful of rich people who own and control most of the wealth.
Both parties serve the very bosses who exploit the labor of working people. Both parties serve the capitalists who raise prices and lower wages. Both parties serve the capitalists who cut jobs, who take away full-time jobs and turn them into part-time, temporary jobs. Both parties take our tax money, away from schools and roads and medical care, and give that tax money to the corporations and the banks. Together both the Republican and Democratic parties serve the capitalist class.
I say that it is time for something different. The capitalists have two parties. I say that it is time that the working class has its own party. And I believe that a lot of people agree with that.
So, let’s talk about the Working Class Party. This party did not just fall out of the sky. Some of you have been around for the journey, but it is a story worth telling again. In 2016, a handful of individuals petitioned and got over 50,000 signatures to put the party on the ballot. This was an indication people agreed that we need our own party.
We have received as many as 229,000 votes in one candidate position to remain on the ballot here in Michigan. This year, we had 5 more candidates than we did the last election cycle, totaling 15. The Working Class Party is now running campaigns in 3 more states, California, Maryland and Illinois.
This is a start toward building what the working class needs. It is an important start to building a mass working-class party. A party everywhere built by workers everywhere.
What would a mass working-class party do? What would it look like? A working-class party would be a party that would lead a fight of big sections of the working class at the same time. It would lead a fight of the whole working class. It would organize a fight to go up against the power of the capitalists.
The capitalists have power based on the labor done by the working class. The capitalists make the decisions on how our labor is used, and they take most of the profit produced by the working class. The capitalists run the economy for their own benefit.
But the working class sits at the heart of this whole economy. We are the economy. We make everything run. As they sing in the song “Solidarity Forever,” “without our brain and muscle, not a single wheel would turn.” That is power. That gives us a power greater than what the capitalists have—when we use that power.
Because we make everything run, we can also decide to make everything stop. A working-class party would use that power to organize a fight for workers to get what we need and get what we deserve.
A mass working-class party would not hold back the power of the working class as the union leaders do today. A working-class party would use the force of the working class to impose the higher wages we need, so that when prices go up, our wages would go up—immediately. A working-class party would lead a fight to divide up the work so that everyone who wants a job can have a job, and no one is forced to work themselves to exhaustion.
A working-class party would lead a fight so that public money is used for public needs—schools, roads, hospitals—instead of being given away to the billionaires of Wall Street, like it is today.
A mass working-class party would lead a fight for a better future for every working person. Such a party can even lead a fight to get rid of this system that exploits working people. We can build a decent society for all. This is what a mass working-class party could do.
Today we do not have a mass working-class party. The WCP in Michigan and 3 other states is not the party that we need. But what we do in WCP can be a step forward toward building that mass party. What we can do today is to use elections to reach as many people as possible. We can continue to build what we have started here.
Even if none of our candidates get elected, we can accomplish something important. We can use the election to tell the truth. We can say that working people deserve better. We can tell workers that there are answers to the problems that working people are facing. The money is there. We can tell workers that elections don’t change things, but the working class can change things.
The working class has the power to fight for what we need and to impose on the bosses to get what we deserve. Every campaign that we carry out gives us another opportunity to reach more workers. And by voting for us, it gives more workers the chance to say that they agree with us, and it shows them that they are not alone.
We don’t have the millions of dollars that the Democrats and Republicans have, to be on TV every 5 minutes. But we have all our connections within the working class, our co-workers, our families, our friends and neighbors. Every single person sitting here can be part of something that would contribute toward building a mass working-class party and can contribute to the fight that the working class can make in the future.
Honestly, money is very important, but you as a person are more important. The success of the Working Class Party depends on each and every one of you, your money and your voice. You talking to people you know. Friends, family, coworkers. People in the grocery store, at the mall. This will spread the message.
Money is very important, but the strength built by the real human connections is just as important, if not more. It will be those connections that will make us strong during the attacks. Commercials and Tik-Tok videos may spread the name, Working Class Party, to the world, but that is all it will do. We need the working class to physically build the ties that will create the Working Class Party. The message of the Working Class Party needs to spread to all 50 states, not just in a few states. Like the old but wise saying goes, there is strength in numbers.
Sep 2, 2024
This article is taken from the monthly La Voix des Travailleurs, issue # 317, August 10, 2024, published in Haiti by the Organization of Revolutionary Workers (OTR-UCI).
In what almost felt like a moment of liberation, the first Kenyan soldiers of the Multinational Mission to Support Security (MMSS) arrived in Port-au-Prince at the end of June. However, despite their presence to participate in the dismantling of criminal gangs as stipulated by a U.N. resolution, these gangs have continued to advance, arm themselves, and attack the population ever since.
While the Kenyan soldiers have prudently stayed within their barracks since their arrival, the bandits, on the other hand, are on a war footing. Their vigor is bolstered by the government’s bluster, the denials, and the lies of the imperialist powers who are provoking the tiger without the will to kill it.
Throughout the month of July, the gangs marched over the population of the Gressier neighborhood while consolidating their presence in the Mariani neighborhood. Their target along this route, National Highway 2, which connects the capital to the four departments of the Grand South, is the town of Léogane.
In Croix-des-Bouquets, the bandits set fire to the Ganthier neighborhood’s police station and torched a customs office. In the Artibonite, the gang “Koko rat san ras” commits massacres, and in the Northwest department, gangs emerge and perpetrate atrocities against the population.
In the territories they occupy, the gangs further entrench their domination over the people. Preparing for police attacks, they block roads to halt the progress of armored vehicles, set up barricades elsewhere, and construct tunnels for protection. On social media, they portray themselves as nationalists, as saviors who will protect the population of the slums from the bullets of police armored vehicles. The irony could not be more profound.
In their own ways, both sides are perpetuating the suffering of the masses with massacres, displacements, killings, the high cost of living, unemployment, etc. The populace should trust neither side. The only viable solution is for the exploited masses to take matters into their own hands. Indeed, they can defeat the gangs by fostering awareness and the means to incapacitate the gangs. The sooner people decide to do this, the sooner they will end their ordeal.
Sep 2, 2024
A group of “uncommitted” Democratic Party delegates organized a sit-in outside the Democratic National Convention (DNC) for more than 24 hours. Their main demand was that any Palestinian speaker be given a little bit of time, with a speech vetted in advance by the Democratic leadership.
The delegates even said their demand would help the Democratic Party, since so many people are outraged by the massacre in Gaza, and having a Palestinian speaker would allow the Democrats to pretend they care.
But even that was too much for the Democratic leadership, which refused the delegates’ demands.
Could it be any clearer? For all their posing, the Democratic Party is just as much a party of U.S. imperialism as the Republican Party. It is just as willing to back massacres of civilian populations in the name of “fighting terrorism.” It is just as willing to risk dragging the world into a wider and wider war.
Sep 2, 2024
It is just over 50 years ago, in 1973, that the U.S. pulled its last ground troops out of Viet Nam. The 20-year war that was initiated by the U.S. invasion of Viet Nam finally ended in 1975 when Saigon fell to the forces of North Viet Nam.
The groundwork for the U.S. invasion of Viet Nam was laid years before. Viet Nam had been a long-time colony of France, its labor and resources exploited by French capitalists. Viet Nam was then occupied by Japanese forces during World War Two. After the war, the French moved 400,000 troops and their colonial administration back into Viet Nam.
Many Vietnamese resisted their occupation and exploitation. A guerrilla war, resting on the mostly peasant population, fought against the French, against the Japanese and then against the French again. In the period after World War Two, the French occupiers were being bankrolled by the U.S. government, which was secretly paying up to 80% of the costs for the French army as it tried to put down the fight of the Vietnamese people for independence. But despite the U.S. support, the French army was defeated in 1954 and forced to leave the country.
After the defeat and the retreat of the French colonizers, the U.S. stepped in with its own more direct involvement in Viet Nam. For U.S. imperialism, the Vietnamese fight for independence was a threat to the new world order, directed by the U.S., imposed by World War Two. The U.S. capitalist class came out of the war as the world’s main economic and military power. But there was a problem for U.S. imperialism. The end of World War Two also saw an explosion of peoples trying to win some independence from imperialism—in China, India, Korea, Algeria, Cuba, Angola, Mozambique and elsewhere, including Viet Nam.
The success of the independence fight in one country, like Viet Nam, encouraged the fights in other countries. For the U.S. ruling class, the loss of Viet Nam meant that it would be like “dominoes” would fall. That’s what U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower said in 1954, trying to justify U.S. involvement in Viet Nam. U.S. political leaders of both parties also cited the threat of “communism” in Viet Nam and elsewhere, even though these popular rebellions were led by people who were not communists. They were nationalists who wanted to set up their own capitalist government, only trying to gain some independence from the direct domination of imperialism.
To combat this nationalist movement in Viet Nam, the U.S. set up a puppet government in the southern part of Viet Nam and quietly sent in some of their own soldiers who were there supposedly as “advisors”. When the corrupt puppet government couldn’t stop the independence movement, the U.S. continued to send in more troops. Under John F. Kennedy, the number of “advisors” increased from 875 to 12,000 in 1962, 16,000 in 1963. Then it was 23,000. In 1964, the U.S. government and the media fabricated an attack on a U.S. ship in the Gulf of Tonkin to justify expanding the war. By the end of 1965, the U.S. had 185,000 troops in Viet Nam. By 1968, there were half a million U.S. troops.
But the Southern Viet Nationalist forces and the North Vietnamese army had the determination of people fighting for independence. They had the support of most of the Vietnamese population. Despite their huge advantage in money and weapons, the U.S. military could not defeat the Vietnamese. In addition, the U.S. faced problems from its own population. First of all, there was a rebellion in the streets of their own cities by the black population. There was also a growing resistance within their own army by U.S. soldiers who were “fragging” their own officers. There was a large antiwar movement on the college campuses and a population that was against the war. So, in 1968, the U.S. government slowly started withdrawing their own troops.
The U.S. ruling class could not defeat the Vietnamese population. But they were determined to make the Vietnamese pay a price for their resistance. So, they began a bombing campaign aimed at destroying the country and the population. U.S. general Curtis LeMay said they would “bomb them into the Stone Age”. The U.S. dropped bombs and fired artillery shells, totaling 14 million tons of munitions, more than three times the number dropped during World War Two and the Korean War combined. One 500-pound bomb for each person in Viet Nam. The U.S. used napalm and Agent Orange to destroy 40% of the farmlands and forests of the country.
The Vietnamese people suffered greatly for this war. Over two million were killed, and future generations were born with birth defects due to the U.S. chemical warfare. Their population and land still has not recovered. U.S. soldiers paid a price, too. Over 50,000 were sent home in body bags and even higher numbers committed suicide after they returned home. This is the price that people paid for U.S. imperialism’s war in Viet Nam. And that was only one of its wars.
The Viet Nam war was a consequence of a capitalist system that produces wars and needs wars to continue its system. The Viet Nam war was a result of the leading capitalist power, the U.S., ready to engage in wars to maintain its domination over the world economy for the benefit of U.S. capitalists.
Since Viet Nam, the U.S. has sent its own troops into Iraq and Afghanistan and into wars in Africa and the Middle East. They have funded many other wars using their proxy fighters.
Today the U.S. government is engaged in wars in Ukraine and Gaza, providing most of the funding and weapons. The U.S. has military “advisors” who are part of these wars, aiding the Ukrainian and Israeli military forces. U.S. warplanes and ships are engaging with Iran and local militias across the region.
Today the U.S. ruling class has its military stationed across most of the world with over 750 bases outside the U.S. They have 173,000 troops stationed in 159 countries outside the U.S. The Viet Nam war showed us what happens next. Whether in Ukraine, the Middle East or elsewhere, the U.S. is poised to directly enter another war. We can learn from Viet Nam what this war will be: it will not be in our interests.
Sep 2, 2024
The two conventions are over. Republicans kicked it off, Democrats followed up.
Both parties tried to appear as a bunch of ordinary people. Candidates of both parties told us they grew up poor in small towns. Some said they were raised by single moms. Some talked about living in poor urban slums as kids. All of them claimed by hard work to have made a success out of their lives.
Maybe so. Maybe they worked hard. All of us work hard, every day. In any case, these special hard workers somehow got into the elite universities that turn away most workers kids. These special hard workers were hired by elite law firms, by big banks or corporate giants. Clawing their way out of the working class, they turned their back on people like themselves.
So be it. The main issue is not what class these candidates originally came from, but the policies they propose. The candidates featured at the two conventions have consistently pushed and carried out policies that favor the capitalist class.
The two parties may appear different, but both act to serve the capitalist class. Republicans gave big tax cuts to corporations and the wealthiest people. Democrats gave outsize subsidies to the corporations, which slide right down to the wealthy class which owns them. Of course, both parties pretend their budget priorities will help us but neither party takes up our basic problems: the lack of decent jobs and falling standard of living.
Trump claimed his tax cut was for the middle class. But nearly 75% of its benefits went to the upper, upper class, the wealthiest 10% of the population. Biden and Harris pretended their infrastructure plan would provide jobs, while improving water systems and schools. So far, the one thing really improved has been profit rolled up by big companies.
No, these two parties do not govern in the interest of the population no matter how many working class people they put in the spotlight at their conventions.
But, hey, yes, it’s true, working people do need our own candidates, candidates who know from their own lives the problems working people face every day. The working class needs our own candidates, workers, the sons and daughters of workers. It doesn’t matter if they are full-time workers, temporary workers, part-time workers working two jobs to survive, retired workers, disabled workers. It doesn’t matter where they work in factories, in offices, for the state, in health care, in hotels, in the schools. It doesn’t matter if they are union or not. What matters is that there be worker candidates proud of their class.
There are such candidates in 2024, in Michigan and in Illinois, running for the Working Class Party. There is a non-partisan candidate running in Los Angeles, who stands for the working class building its own party. There are people in Maryland collecting signatures to register a working class party.
Yes, these are 3rd parties. Wise-asses will tell you that voting for a 3rd party means you throw your vote away, since 3rd parties can’t win.
Well, in the first place, when working people begin to think for themselves, parties like this WILL win because working people make up the big majority of the population.
But it’s not true you throw your vote away even now. When you and others vote Working Class Party, you show how many workers want to have their own representatives. And that can be a step on the way toward getting their own party. A first step maybe, but a big step.
For more information see the independent website https://workingclassfight.com.
Sep 2, 2024
This is a full-length documentary by Haitian-American filmmaker Monica Sorelle about the Little Haiti community in Miami. The area faces encroaching gentrification.
The film’s title, Mountains, is taken from a Haitian proverb, “Behind mountains, there are more mountains.” One obstacle is overcome, but there are ever more obstacles.
The film gives a sensitive portrayal of a working class family experiencing these changes firsthand. It was filmed with a Haitian-American cast and dialogue in Haitian Creole. It is being released nationwide in select theaters now, available for streaming later this year.
The non-fiction book is a suspenseful account of a married couple who make a four-day journey to escape from slavery to the North from Macon, Georgia. The light-skinned woman dresses as a young ailing privileged gentleman seeking medical care in Boston, accompanied by her slave, who was, in reality, her husband.
The author excels at setting scenes, conjuring the sensations experienced by Mr. and Mrs. Craft at each harrowing point. She describes in vivid detail each city they passed through, the first-class travel, the hotels and restaurants for the rich, surrounded by the slave markets and the jails that serve the slave trade.
The couple makes it to Boston and joins the anti-slavery community. Their story attracts the attention of the nation, and their former masters try to capture them using the Slavery Fugitive Law of 1850. You see the collective resistance repelling their capture. But they are in grave danger, so they go to England. You even see them return to the post-civil war South.
Sep 2, 2024
J.D. Vance, prior to becoming a U.S. Senator from Ohio and 2024 Republican Vice-Presidential nominee, wrote about his roots in Appalachian Kentucky and growing up in Middletown, Ohio. Plant closings, economic decline and job loss, poverty, his mother’s addiction and being raised by his maternal grandparents were influences in his early life. These same influences affected many people and communities as part of the bigger picture.
He describes his inexperience with things that weren’t a part of his upbringing as a working-class kid such as filling out a college admission application. He got a lot of help along his way from people who reached out to help him and believed in him.
He graduated from college and Yale Law School. He is a U.S. Marine veteran. He has a wife and children. Education, career, family. It looks like the “American Dream”. An individual success story.
He could have chosen to use his education and life experiences to help others who are struggling with the same things that he faced as a young person. But instead, he chose to align himself with the ruling class, the millionaires and billionaires. He does their bidding to enrich them and himself. He proved to be a fraud and a disappointment.
Sep 2, 2024
This summer, the National Transportation Safety Board issued its final report on the 2023 derailment of a train in East Palestine, Ohio. The report squarely blamed Norfolk Southern railroad for the accident, which fortunately killed no one this time. But highly dangerous chemicals were released in the derailment, threatening the health of the people of East Palestine, of whom 2,000 were asked to immediately evacuate.
The NTSB mentioned in particular the rail cars known as DOT-111 that carry hazardous materials. Ten years earlier, a similar accident happened in Canada in another town along a rail route, and that explosion from hazardous materials killed 47 people.
It is nothing new that these rail cars are not sufficient for transporting hazardous chemicals in this day and age. But unless those railroad company cronies in Congress actually force the companies to do what they should have done more than 10 years ago, these dangerous railroad cars will remain in place, endangering millions of people along rail routes, for at least 10 more years.
In addition to Congress being unwilling to hold bosses accountable, the Biden administration threatened railroad workers who wanted to strike against their terrible working conditions. Biden’s legislation passed in December of 2022, so railroad workers still face horrible pressure to work overtime, an inability to take a day off, and hazardous conditions caused by too few workers.
Norfolk Southern has proposed to pay some thousands of dollars to people in East Palestine, Ohio. Will that solve the problem of dangerous health consequences?
How many of us would like to be near a rail route on which a mile-long train has one engineer to drive and one conductor, and both of them stayed overnight in a hotel and did NOT get 8 hours of sleep? Over the last six years almost one in three railroad workers was pushed out, laid off by rail bosses who only care about profits. And the rail bosses have argued that even a one-person crew could be safe!
Even other bosses in the supply chain say they prefer trucking, which is more on time, than rail freight. It’s true that railroads could be a solution to both freight moving across the country and humans moving without clogging up the roads. But not when profit is all that matters—not workers, neighbors or customers.
Sep 2, 2024
The following is translated from the August 30 issue, no. 2926, of Lutte Ouvriere (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the Trotskyist group of the same name active in France.
On Sunday, August 25, the Lebanese Hezbollah claimed responsibility for firing hundreds of rockets into Israel, a belated and actually very measured response to the assassination of a senior member of its military wing by an Israeli strike on Beirut on July 30. Israel retaliated by immediately bombing hundreds of alleged Hezbollah military sites in Lebanon.
Since October 8, the State of Israel has not only been waging war against the Palestinian people and Hamas, but also seeking to settle its accounts with Iran, the Yemeni Houthis, and the Lebanese Hezbollah.
While the press cynically talks of “pre-emptive strikes” and “targeted assassinations” to describe Israel’s military actions in this country, the reality is quite different. The people of Lebanon are paying a very real price, with dozens of deaths and destruction adding to the catastrophic misery into which the country is plunged. And so, on August 25, the people of southern Lebanon once again suffered the terror of massive Israeli bombardments.
In response, after boasting of successful firing on southern Tel Aviv, Hezbollah leader Nasrallah declared to the Lebanese population: “Go home!” A way of saying that, for him, vengeance had been taken. And as the State of Israel, for its part, played down the impact of these shootings, Nasrallah felt obliged to add: “Benjamin Netanyahu is lying ... but that’s okay, if it means he can do less crazy things.”
For the past eleven months, Hezbollah’s preoccupation seems to have been to seek a response to the assassination of its leaders, a response capable of satisfying its base with a show of force while avoiding the military escalation it does not want. It was a similar concern that led Iran to launch a series of direct strikes on Israel, but with advance warning and to ensure that they would cause as little damage as possible.
For both Iran and Hezbollah are well aware of the extent to which the Israeli state has the support of the United States, despite some hypocritical statements by their leaders. In July, while expressing “concern about the Israeli bombardment of Beirut” and fearing an escalation of the war, American imperialism dispatched three warships to the region, and the British two.
For his part, while he has silenced the most fanatical ministers in favor of all-out war, Netanyahu is undoubtedly not unhappy with a new pretext for postponing truce negotiations with Hamas indefinitely. He has said repeatedly, threatening Lebanon, Iran, Yemen and Hamas, that Israel has no intention of stopping there. And the arsonist can count on the imperialist powers to continue covering up his destruction, exactions and provocations.