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
Oct 14, 2024
War in the Middle East is spreading by the day.
This war started in Gaza a year ago with a brutal massacre of 1,200 Israelis by Hamas. The Israeli military responded by carpet bombing and invading Gaza, resulting in the mass slaughter of 42,000 Palestinians and the wholesale starvation of two million Palestinians, more of whom are dying every day.
This war set off other long-simmering conflicts and wars. Israeli pogroms of Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank multiplied. In September, the Israeli military invaded neighboring Lebanon, bombing Lebanon’s cities and towns. The Israeli military also bombed Syria, Iran and Yemen. It killed top Iranian military commanders and their allies. So, Iran launched missiles against Israel. Now, the Israeli military is threatening war with Iran.
Throughout these wars, the U.S. government and military has backed the Israeli military to the hilt. It has provided Israel with tens of billions of dollars in military aid and the latest weaponry, as well as the full support of vast U.S. military forces in the region, including 42,000 troops, hundreds of U.S. warplanes and several naval armadas.
Both the U.S. and Israeli officials say they are trying to stop terrorism. And yes, the attacks by Hezbollah and Hamas against Israel are terrorist attacks. But the wars carried out by Israel are terrorism on a much vaster scale. The Israeli military drops 2,000-pound bombs on densely packed apartment buildings, hospitals, schools, market places. These attacks are aimed at killing ordinary people indiscriminately. And they are doing it with the latest, most sophisticated instruments of death provided by the mighty U.S. war machine.
The U.S. government claims that its war machine is simply defending Israel’s right to exist. This is a lie. The U.S. is not arming Israel to uphold some great humanitarian principle. No, the U.S. military arms Israel because it uses Israel as its main cop in the Middle East.
The Israeli military is the U.S. military’s partner in enforcing the robbery and plunder of the Middle East and its workers of the wealth that they produce. Certainly, the Israeli military is not doing anything different than what the U.S. military has done in that region in an even bigger and more monstrous way. Just look at the U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria: the U.S. military totally destroyed those countries, murdering millions.
These wars are always presented as ethnic and religious wars, Israelis against Arabs, Jews against Muslims. These wars are supposed to be eternal conflicts, going back thousands of years. This is pure fiction. These wars have nothing to do with peoples’ different beliefs, customs or cultures. These wars are about power and money. Which group of thieves will dominate this region? Who will profit from the oil? Who will profit from all the commerce and trade that passes through the Middle East, which is located at the strategic crossroads between three great continents?
This is what is behind the rivalry of all the powers, the big powers from the U.S. and Israel to France, Germany, England, Russia, and China, as well as all the dictatorial regimes in the area that are linked to them. They are all lying thieves and murderers, who try to use their own peoples to grab a bigger piece of the pie for themselves. It is these rulers who are fueling one war after another. As for Hamas and Hezbollah, the guerrilla groups linked to Iran, their aim is not to end the poverty of their own peoples, but to gain recognition by the big imperial powers.
The real enemy of the working class and oppressed masses throughout the world are their own rulers who foment these wars. The real enemy of the Israeli working class is not the Arab workers and poor—it is their own government and rulers. The same goes for the Arab masses. Their real fight is against their own governments and rulers, who have to be defeated and overthrown. And this fight must begin, of course, right here in this country, by the working class in the U.S. against the biggest super-power and war monger of them all.
There is only one way out of this bloody trap. The working class and oppressed masses throughout the Middle East and the working class inside the big imperial powers have everything in common with each other, and nothing in common with their own rulers, governments and military.
Oct 14, 2024
This French film (with subtitles) shows the lives of workers who eke out a poverty existence cleaning businesses, including a large ferry. The pace of the work is excruciating and back-breaking: they must clean 200 rooms in two hours.
The story of these workers is told by an undercover writer who conceals her identity and works side by side with them. The film at its best shows the humanity and spirit of the women: their friendships, their support for each other, the love for their children. But the film also spends too much time on the guilt of the lying journalist, when instead it should be posing and questioning what kind of society is based on this cruel exploitation. Still, it’s worth a look.
Through fiction, this book tells the story of actual historic events in Egypt through the eyes of different people, giving us multiple perspectives of the 2011 uprising against the repressive Hosni Mubarak regime.
We see the brutality of the military and the corruption and hypocrisy of the ruling elite. We get glimpses of workers organizing and taking control of their factories, and even considering taking power.
We see the takeover and sit-ins in Tahrir Square and across Egypt by workers and students, people of all walks of life. And finally, when workers do not take control, we see the repressive regime reassert itself and violently destroy the gains that were made.
Oct 14, 2024
After the UAW strike last year against the Big 3 auto companies, the UAW president Shawn Fain declared that the agreement reached was a “record, historic” contract. Many autoworkers voted against the contract. But UAW leaders used this claim of a “record” contract to help convince a majority to ratify the agreement. Even today, the media continues to talk about how much the autoworkers won and they continue to refer to it as a “record” contract.
But the only “record” that auto workers are seeing today are record job cuts. Ford, GM, and especially Stellantis have been firing workers, laying off workers and speeding up the remaining workers. As soon as the ink was dry on the contract, Stellantis began firing 2,000 temporary workers. In the last few months, Stellantis has laid off a whole shift at one plant and announced layoffs at most of their biggest plants, planning to put more work on the workers who are left.
All of the Big 3 auto companies today are increasing their exploitation of the workers in order to increase their profits. At the same time as Stellantis was starting layoffs, CEO Carlos Tavares, with his 39-million-dollar compensation, announced another three-billion-dollar stock buyback for their ultra-wealthy stockholders. Ford and GM did the same, giving billions to their stockholders, money that rightfully should have gone to auto workers.
Auto workers gained some small raises through their strike, but it never was any “record” contract. Auto workers’ wages are still below where they were 20 years ago, when adjusted for inflation. And this contract never addressed the working conditions in the plants, which are bad and will get worse after all these layoffs.
What happened after the 2023 auto strike is similar to what has been happening for decades. The union leaders reach a contract agreement, with or without a strike, and push the workers to ratify it. Workers are told that if anything is lacking, they will have to wait for the next contract to solve it, that everything is settled for the next four years.
But for the auto bosses, things are never settled. They never wait. All the auto companies keep on doing what they do—getting rid of some workers and forcing others to work overtime hours at a faster pace.
The auto bosses use their authority to make all the decisions in the plant, to control production, to decide how many workers are needed. Union leaders tell the workers that we can’t challenge the bosses’ authority, that we can only rely on the contract to protect ourselves. They tell workers we can’t fight back beyond what’s written in the contract. But workers don’t have to accept that.
Workers can decide to make a fight any time they are ready, contract or not. When workers are organized and ready to fight, they have the power to not only challenge the bosses’ authority to control production, but even to take control of production themselves.
Oct 14, 2024
In the 2023 auto contract, Stellantis promised to reopen its closed plant in Belvidere, Illinois, in 2027. The company recently said that it plans to delay that opening until 2028, justifying it by citing agreed-upon contract language about “changed market conditions.”
The UAW leadership challenged the company’s right to break its promise on Belvidere. They filed grievances and are now talking about possible strikes at some Stellantis plants. It remains to be seen whether the union leadership follows through on this strike threat, or if they reach some kind of agreement with the company.
While this was going on, many Stellantis workers were facing an immediate crisis as the company began to lay off several thousand workers at a number of different plants. The remaining workers at Stellantis were faced with the company’s plans to speed them up. So far, the UAW leadership has not challenged those layoffs and speedup.
The UAW has organized several rallies concerning Belvidere, calling on Stellantis to “Keep the Promise.” Some Stellantis workers facing layoffs went to those rallies, hoping to hear the union leaders propose to fight the layoffs. The union leaders asked Stellantis workers to support a strike vote over Belvidere, but nothing was said about fighting the layoffs.
Delaying Belvidere in the future and laying people off today are all part of the same attack on auto workers. Workers have the power to fight both. Just because the UAW leaders are not proposing to fight the layoffs and speedup today, it doesn’t mean the auto workers have to accept that.
Oct 14, 2024
Plenty of people have felt the frustration of long waits to have their electricity restored due to an outage. A recent study showed that the poor wait longer than others, on average, according to Chuanyi Ji and Scott Ganz of Counterpunch.org.
They analyzed data from over 15 million consumers all across the U.S. receiving power from 108 different power companies between 2017 and 2020. They found that for every 10 percentile drop in socioeconomic status, people waited 6.1% longer for power to be restored. This amounts to waiting almost three hours longer, and the gap between the poorest and the richest consumers could be ten times that amount! And that was true across all racial, ethnic and housing categories.
As they point out, this can be due to poorer consumers living in more flood-prone areas or more vulnerable buildings. It could be because they live farther away from large commercial and industrial customers, to whom the power companies give higher priority.
Whatever the exact reason, this results in poorer customers, least likely to have insurance or other resources, are more likely to lose refrigerated food, have no running water, and be unable to use fans to dry things out and prevent mold damage to their homes.
Somehow the corporate media have managed to completely ignore these statistics for all these years. Don’t hold your breath waiting for the power companies or the politicians to do anything about it, either!
Oct 14, 2024
When Jordan High School students arrived on campus this fall in working-class Watts, Los Angeles, they met with an ear-splitting boom and plume of smoke emanating from a metal recycling plant located next to the school. Its owners have operated this dangerous plant, which induced many such explosions, for over 70 years.
Soil samples taken from Jordan’s campus have indicated excessive concentrations of lead and zinc. Exposure to high levels of lead can damage the nervous system, causing problems including hearing loss, seizures, and learning disabilities.
The community living next to the plant, and the students, have been complaining about this plant for more than 20 years. The recent demonstrations against the company’s dangerous and heedless operation pushed the so-called authorities of the City of Los Angeles to act. As a result, the metal recycling plant operated by S&W Atlas Iron & Metal was charged in a 25-count indictment for endangering the life of students. Its owners were charged with 23 felonies.
These court charges look hefty. But the plant continued its operations.
“The explosion that occurred during the first day of school makes clear to me that only the worst perpetrators of environmental crime would feel compelled to continue operating business as usual while students are being exposed to toxins,” said Genesis Cruz, a 2023 graduate of Jordan High and a community activist.
Businesses always have the upper hand against the health and safety of the working class. Only our organized fight against the businesses can stop what these dangerous companies are doing to us just to gain profits.
Oct 14, 2024
The University of Michigan President Santa J. Ono was caught on a hot mic explaining that the Federal government has been pressuring him and other university presidents to focus on “antisemitism” on campus—to the exclusion of Islamophobia.
The pro-Palestinian campus group Tahrir Coalition released an audio recording of the president to social media last week. In the recording, Ono says, “The government could call me tomorrow and say in a very unbalanced way, the university is not doing enough to combat antisemitism, and I could say it’s not doing enough to combat Islamophobia, and that’s not what they want to hear, so the whole situation is unbalanced. … The question from Congress is not balanced. It’s focused almost entirely on antisemitism, which I think is an issue, but there’s also Islamophobia as well.”
Also in the audio clip, Ono indicated that the university could lose two billion dollars in federal funding if it doesn’t follow government orders.
The message is clear: the federal government is orchestrating a clamp-down on any protests against Israel’s attacks on Palestine—and calling any such protests “antisemitic.”
Oct 14, 2024
On October 1, Iran fired about 180 ballistic missiles at Israel. While the missiles were in the air, Israeli air defenses coordinated with U.S. naval ships in the Mediterranean Sea to shoot down the vast majority of them.
This kind of coordination and information sharing on a very tight timeline illustrates that the two countries’ militaries are integrated with each other to an enormous degree.
While it hides the total numbers in many ways, the U.S. has spent at least 17.9 billion dollars on military aid to Israel over the last year. The U.S. has also spent about five billion dollars in stepped-up U.S. military operations in the region, including deploying aircraft carrier battle groups and additional troops.
But U.S. support for the Israeli state goes beyond simply giving money for military supplies or putting U.S. forces in the region.
The U.S. is committed to helping Israel maintain what it calls a “Qualitative Military Edge” over any other country in the region—including many U.S. allies like Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. To do this, the U.S. gives the Israeli state its most advanced weapons. For instance, while Ukraine had to beg to get F-16 fighters, developed in the 1980s, Israel was the second country to get the most advanced plane in the U.S. arsenal, the F-35, after only the U.S. itself—and it has even received more of these planes than Great Britain.
The U.S. military is also committed to developing what it calls “interoperability” with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). This means that their people, equipment, computer systems, and intelligence are organized to work in conjunction with each other. This is what allowed the U.S. and Israeli forces to decide who would shoot down which missile on October 1, in the few minutes those missiles were in the air. To do this, U.S. and Israeli forces regularly carry out joint training exercises.
The U.S. and Israel also have integrated military-industrial complexes. For instance, the IDF developed their own variant of the F-35, for which Israeli companies produce the outer wings and head-mounted displays. According to the U.S. State Department, U.S. assistance “has helped transform the Israel Defense Forces into one of the world’s most capable, effective militaries and turned the Israeli military industry and technology sector into one of the largest exporters of military capabilities worldwide.” Of course, the Israeli state sells no weapons without the permission of the U.S.
The U.S. and Israeli militaries are so integrated because at the most fundamental level, the interests of their ruling classes align. Israel relies on the support of the U.S. for its very existence as a state for Jewish people and not the other people who live in Palestine. To maintain a state for some of the people who live there but not all, the Israeli state has turned the country into an armed camp, and it needs the most advanced arms it can get.
On the other hand, the U.S. needs this totally reliable ally in a region from which U.S. corporations extract enormous wealth, while leaving most people in abject poverty. As the Iranian revolution of 1979, the Arab Spring movement of 2011, and countless other upheavals have shown, none of its other allies in the region can be totally counted on to the extent that Israel can. Of course, the Israeli state occasionally acts in ways the U.S. leaders might wish it didn’t. But fundamentally, the interests of that state and of U.S. imperialism align.
Today, the Israeli state apparatus is essentially an extension of the U.S. state apparatus. The wars in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon—and who knows where next—are not just Israeli wars. They are U.S. wars, from beginning to end, fought by a military that is integrated and interoperable with the U.S. military itself.
Oct 14, 2024
What follows is the editorial written by The SPARK on October 8, 2023—one day after the Hamas attack on Israel that initiated the current war. Hamas militants killed about 1200 people and kidnapped hundreds more on that day. Their attack gave the signal for Israel to begin its murderous war on the entire population of Gaza—not to speak of the West Bank and now Lebanon.
When this editorial was written, all the details were not yet known. But the reasoning remains the basis on which The SPARK understands what is continuing to unfold in the Middle East.
Hamas, which has controlled Gaza since 2006, launched a military offensive on Israel. Armed commando groups, breaching the military barriers that divide Gaza from Israel, attacked Israeli civilians, taking hostages. Rockets rained on heavily populated areas, including the capital of Tel Aviv.
Israel’s military was apparently taken by surprise. But it quickly mounted a vast response. Its chief of staff warned that Israel’s “enemies will pay a price beyond anything ever seen before.” The words were aimed at Hamas, but the weapons used by Israel were aimed at the Palestinian people.
By the end of the first day, over 500 people had been killed, both Israelis and Palestinians. On that same day, the Israeli army warned all civilians to leave Gaza. Most Palestinians have no place else to go in Israel’s apartheid framework. So, they will be a target in Israel’s military “cleanup” of Gaza.
The Hamas offensive may have been prompted by a threatened Israeli-Saudi Arabian deal that could challenge Hamas control over Gaza. But it flows from long-term Hamas policy, whose main aim has been to force Israel and the imperialist powers to recognize Hamas as a legitimate part of their world.
By attacking Israeli civilians, Hamas may be aiming to shake support for Israel’s government. But just as in earlier wars in the region, the resulting mayhem is more likely to drive Israelis back into the arms of their government, with its vicious apartheid-like policies. And Hamas, with its organized terrorist violence, gave no perspective to the Palestinian people, only the likelihood of becoming unwitting victims of the violence coming from both sides.
Israelis are also caught in the dead-end trap of nationalism—the idea that Israel can maintain itself only by carrying out organized violence against the Palestinians. This gives the Israelis themselves no perspective other than living in a permanent state of war. It shows that a people who oppress another people cannot live in freedom themselves.
Israel came out of the attempt to build a refuge in Palestine for the Jewish people, themselves victims of Europe’s most atrocious racist violence. But the state of Israel was founded through violent attacks on the Palestinian people to drive them from their land. It guaranteed that Israel would live in a constant state of warfare with all the peoples in the region.
Based on a policy that divided it from its neighbors, Israel became an outpost of British and American imperialism. In exchange for weapons and economic funding, Israel turned itself into one of imperialism’s cops. Its military and advanced weapons were used to control the hotspots that regularly broke out in the Middle East.
Israel wasn’t fated to play this role. And the Jews, who had been severely oppressed or killed in Europe, were not fated to become the oppressors of the Palestinians. There were many socialists among the Jewish refugees from Europe’s violence. Their perspective was to emigrate to Palestine, to try to build a multi-nation country together with the Palestinians already living there.
But the socialists were not organized, and the Jewish nationalists were.
Seventy-five years ago, the nation-state of Israel was born as a specifically Jewish state, a religious state. Most Palestinians were driven out. Those who remained were relegated to an inferior status. Given that violent founding, all of the populations of the region have lived in a constant state of war ever since.
This does not need to be humanity’s future. We can build a different one. We can be part of a common struggle by all the oppressed. We can fight, all of us, against our own leaders and against the wealthy classes they serve. This was possible in Palestine in 1948. It is possible in this country today. It is possible around the world, the only level where such a struggle will finally succeed.
Oct 14, 2024
Since the Israeli State began its most recent war a year ago, Gaza has been all but destroyed.
According to the Gaza Health Ministry, more than 42,000 Palestinians have been killed—though this is almost certainly an undercount. More than 90% of the 2.3 million people still alive have been forced out of their homes, living in ruins, under tarps or in tents without running water, electricity, or regular access to food. The majority of the buildings, roads, and electrical infrastructure has been destroyed. The hospitals have been levelled.
The details leak out because reporting on Gaza is almost impossible—at least 128 journalists and media workers have been killed, mostly by the Israeli military. So instead, reports come from medical workers who recount the horrors they’ve seen: dozens of children shot in the head or chest. Severe malnutrition among the entire population. Newborns dying from dehydration or easily preventable infections. And of course, the severe psychological trauma among children and adults that comes from living in a war zone.
Even as the Israeli state expands this war into Lebanon, it is continuing military operations in Gaza, with no end in sight.
This is first of all because the Netanyahu government in Israel has determined to continue its offensive. But behind the Israeli state lies the U.S. state, which shows by its unblinking support for the Israeli state that this enormous scale of death and destruction doesn’t trouble it in the slightest.
After all, terrorizing people and carrying out mass slaughter are the methods U.S. imperialism has long used to maintain its domination. Sometimes it carries out these massacres with its own forces, as in the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. Other times, it uses proxy forces, as in the wars in Central America in the 1980s—or the current wars carried out by Israel.
Oct 14, 2024
On October 4, the U.S. bombed Yemen once again, this time hitting the capital, Sanaa, and the major port city of Hodeidah.
Yemen has been engulfed in a civil war for more than ten years that has killed almost half a million people through violence or famine. Different powers have backed different sides in this civil war: one group, the Houthis, is backed by Iran, while the other side is backed by Saudi Arabia and the U.S.
“In solidarity with the Palestinians,” the Houthis have launched a few missiles at ships travelling near Yemen. They also claim to have launched drones and a missile at Israel, though none appear to have struck a target.
At the same time, throughout the Yemeni civil war, U.S.-made bombs have been regularly dropped by U.S.-made planes on the country’s cities. The U.N. estimated that Saudi Arabia’s bombing of civilian areas in Yemen killed or injured about 20,000 people—carried out with U.S. support, and with U.S.-made weapons. Israel bombed Yemen last month. And for about a year, the U.S. itself has been occasionally bombing the country.
Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen—the list of Middle Eastern places laid waste by U.S. imperialism and its proxies seems to grow by the day.
Oct 14, 2024
Thirteen days after Helene struck Florida, Milton slammed south of Tampa Bay with a 10-foot storm surge. This left no time for recovery. Huge piles of debris left by Helene became serious hazards in Milton. Even before Milton made landfall, it spawned over a hundred tornadoes—many in places where people evacuated to escape Milton. Homes destroyed, workplaces destroyed, lives destroyed or left in shambles.
Ahead of the storm, the mayor of Tampa Bay warned people: “Leave or you will die.” Those ominous words were not an evacuation plan. They do not give people the means to evacuate. Even some of the first responders recognized that there were economic reasons why people could not evacuate on command.
Nineteen years ago, Katrina slammed into New Orleans. Officials left it up to the population to evacuate, knowing full well that many people did not have cars. Then, those same officials cynically blamed people for dying. “They refused to leave.” They didn’t refuse to leave—they had no means to leave.
This is not a case of government officials not learning the lessons of the past. No. This is the result of how capitalism is organized around profit. The government funnels taxpayers’ money into enriching the capitalist class. It is simply not organized around human needs, including disaster preparedness, which requires planning ahead as well as funding. For example, military forces could have been used to evacuate people. City buses, school buses, private charter buses could have been utilized. Motels and hotels could have been free. But none of that can happen in a society organized around profit for a tiny minority.
This was a hurricane, during hurricane season, but the disaster it left in its wake was anything but natural. Capitalism and its drive for profit magnifies the destructive power of every storm.
Oct 14, 2024
Hurricane Helene hit the southeastern U.S. with enormous power. But as powerful as Helene’s winds were at landfall, the storm’s destructive power was, in the end, in the torrential rains and deadly floods it caused—hundreds of miles inland, where the storm hit mountains.
The huge amounts of rain that Helene dropped rapidly swelled rivers, destroying bridges and highways, toppling houses, wiping out towns and cities and leaving behind at least 220 dead—certainly many more, since hundreds are still missing.
Some of Helene’s most severe flooding occurred in southern Appalachia. We all saw the horrible images of Asheville, North Carolina, being wiped out by the powerful flooding in the steep mountainous terrain.
In that region, dozens of small, poor rural communities are the ones that have been suffering the most, both during and after the storm. These were some of the poorest communities in the whole country already before Helene hit. The trailers and shacks people lived in did not stand the slightest chance in the face of the raging water down the steep slopes.
As the storm and rain were approaching, authorities told people to flee—by their own means. With the nearest city hours away and the roads jammed, people had nowhere to go. And now, after the flooding, these communities are plagued by a severe lack of basic necessities—water, food, electricity, gas, hygiene supplies…. Authorities say it’s because of the roughness of the terrain, where disaster victims can only be reached by helicopter.
So what??? As if the U.S. military doesn’t have thousands of state-of-the-art helicopters! But no, those helicopters are not intended for rushing supplies to disaster victims. Those helicopters are for war—for dropping bombs, creating even more destruction, more victims around the globe—so that the big capitalists who run the U.S. economy can control the whole world.
More profit, more power, more control, for a tiny minority at the top—that’s the only principle capitalism operates by. As destructive as natural disasters can be, the worst disaster to befall humanity is this capitalist system.
Oct 14, 2024
Hurricane Milton struck Florida’s west coast with sustained winds as high as 180 miles per hour. Those winds nearly doubled in just a day, after traveling across the Gulf of Mexico. And this just two weeks after hurricane Helene came up Florida’s west coast in the Gulf.
This year the water in the Gulf has been at near record levels. The heat in the water causes moisture to evaporate into the air above it. When that water vapor forms into cloud droplets, it releases that heat energy, fueling the hurricane. More heat stored in the ocean’s surface means the hurricane can take up more water and have higher wind speeds.
There have been as many category 4 or 5 Atlantic hurricanes to hit the U.S. in the seven years since 2017, as there had been in the 57 years before 2017. Scientists say that global warming is a big contributor to these stronger storms. The warming climate will continue to mean more flooding and more destruction from powerful storms like Helene and Milton. The capitalist class has to be stopped from warming the climate by burning fossil fuels. And even then, it will take time for the environment to recover.
Who will stop them? The working class has the power to bring their system to a halt and to impose controls to protect the environment. Waiting for capitalist reforms is a dead end road.
Oct 14, 2024
Two plants—one in North Carolina, the other in Florida—produce 85% of the nation’s supply of IV fluids. The North Carolina plant was shut down by Hurricane Helene. The Florida plant was in Milton’s path, although they were able to truck some of the inventory north ahead of the storm.
The IV solutions are used for in-home dialysis and for people who rely on IV nutrition, including premature babies and people who rely on tube feeding to survive. The U.S. now has to ration these life-saving IV fluids. Hospitals are now only getting around half of their typical supply. U.S. officials have approved airlifting more from overseas manufacturing plants.
Even before these storms, supplies were tight. Over-concentrating production of these vital fluids is a recipe for shortages. The problem is that few companies are willing to produce these low-cost and, more importantly, low-profit medical products. This reveals a critical flaw in capitalism: production for profit, instead of production for human need. And this inevitably means that some people will die.
Oct 14, 2024
Bertha Mendoza, a 56-year-old grandmother, was one of the 11 workers who were swept away by Hurricane Helene’s flood waters at a plastics factory in rural Tennessee on September 27. Only five could be rescued. The bodies of five of them, including Mendoza, have been recovered. Twenty-nine-year-old Rosa Maria Andrade Reynoso remained missing at the time of writing this article.
Earlier that morning, when the factory’s parking lot was getting flooded, workers told supervisors they had to get out quick. But supervisors at Impact Plastics told workers to continue to work until management gave the green light.
When the workers were finally told they could leave, it was too late. The rising water had already begun to sweep cars away. Drivers in 4x4 trucks were able to rescue people. But surging water tipped one of those trucks over, taking 11 workers with it.
As Robert Jarvis, one of the surviving workers, put it, the company should not have made the workers come to work that Friday in the first place. Multiple warnings about life-threatening storm and flooding had been issued for the area in previous days.
About his six co-workers who did not make it, Jarvis said: “I worked with them every day, and we were like family.… It broke my heart to see that they died and they didn’t make it, all because of greed….”
Yes, management put a bit of more profit above the workers’ safety, even in such a dangerous situation. And it was workers, in raging flood waters, who saved their co-workers’ lives. It shows, once again, that workers can rely only on their collective action to protect themselves.
Oct 14, 2024
What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters during the week of October 7, 2024.
“Collective bargaining works.”—this was President Biden’s comment when the ILA, the port workers’ union, suspended its three-day-old strike at East Coast and Gulf Coast ports.
Certainly, it worked for the Democrats, caught in the middle of an election campaign. They did not want a long strike showing them up.
And it worked for the port operators, who will continue to accumulate vast amounts of profit on the higher prices they imposed during the pandemic and continue to impose today—none of which is touched by this agreement.
But what about the port workers? Despite all the talk about a 62% wage increase over six years, it didn’t begin to touch their problems.
The media, of course, flooded the air with stories about port workers who will make $300,000 a year. (And maybe they found a flying pig!)
But here is today’s reality facing dock workers: top rate at some ports is $39 an hour—but most of the ports have lower top rates, and so do many job classifications. Port workers start at $20 an hour, and many never get beyond $20, due to mysterious rules that limit seniority.
That’s not all. While some dock workers work full time at only one company, many others have to line up every day at a hiring hall, just to see if there is work at any company that day.
But wait, there’s more. Most of these jobs carry only a minuscule pension, with none at all at ports like Houston, Miami and Philadelphia.
And still more. The jobs are dangerous. Port workers fall to their death or are crushed.
Work is intense. When a ship comes in, workers are on the job until the ship is unloaded, 20 hours or more. Not only was no stop put to this ungodly practice, the deal requires the union to take part in efforts to “improve efficiency”, that is, to squeeze more work out of fewer workers.
So no, this “wage settlement” is not a “victory” for the port workers, as the head of one of the bosses’ associations called it. Nor is it a “win”, as Labor Notes declared.
It is simply one more time when so-called “collective bargaining” disarms the workers, keeping them from using the full strength of the force they could have.
The bosses and their political agents in the two parties lined up against the workers. Florida’s governor mobilized his state’s National Guard. The Biden administration—even while pretending it didn’t want to use the Taft-Hartley law to end the strike—kept raising the possibility. Remember that Biden pretended he didn’t want to use the Railway Act—right up to the moment he used it to block the 2022 railworkers strike. And every bit of the media played on the misery caused by Hurricane Helene, trying to shame the dockworkers back to work.
The bosses do not fight alone. But with “collective bargaining”, workers fight alone.
Nothing ordains that. Nothing says workers must fight alone, one industry, even one company at a time. Everyone assumes this is how strikes go, and contracts are written to enforce it.
But something else is possible. We all face common problems, and all of us have reason to join a common, “collective fight”.
A mass mobilization is needed to change the situation facing the working class today. It can’t succeed in just one industry or just one company. But it could start at just one—IF there are militants in place, IF their aim is to spread their fight as widely as possible, IF their goal is to have the workers break free of the shackles created by the unions today, IF they push for the working class to organize itself politically.
Workers, whether in unions or not, occupy the center of the economy, making everything run, keeping everything going. Our class can use this position to take control of the economy away from the capitalist class. It’s not enough just to stop work. Workers can organize work to answer their own problems, and the larger problems of society.
This, we in SPARK believe.
Oct 14, 2024
Last September, an Orange County (California) public works crew moving boulders with heavy machinery sparked a brush fire. This limited fire was ignited less than two miles from the U.S. Forest Service’s Trabuco Station, but the station was unstaffed by federal firefighters.
Had the Forest Service adequately staffed this station, this small fire could have been immediately contained. Instead, this so-called Airport Fire flared from steep slopes into forested areas, burning a 23,000-acre area into ashes, destroying 160 structures, and injuring 22 people. At its peak, the Airport Fire threatened 20,780 structures before it was contained.
The Airport Fire was the third large blaze to break out within a 40-mile radius in Southern California in four days, which followed the Line Fire near the San Bernardino National Forest and the Bridge Fire in the Angeles National Forest. More destructive fires in increasing numbers hit the U.S. and California every year.
Although we desperately need more firefighters against such ever increasing danger, the U.S. Fire Service is understaffed. The agency’s base pay is a miserly $15 an hour, barely matching the minimum wage, which hampers efforts to recruit new firefighters to this dangerous work. At the same time, low pay and long work hours cause experienced firefighters to leave the agency. The U.S. Fire Service has lost nearly half its permanent employees within the last three years. And the remaining firefighters are overwhelmed, eventually causing further workforce losses.
For example, according to San Bernardino County fire chief Dan Munsey, of the roughly 25 Forest Service stations in the county, at best only 11 are staffed at any given time. So, the majority of the stations have no firefighters.
Because the U.S. Forest Service understaffs or provides no staff to its departments, wild forest fires are left uncontrolled, destroying large swaths of the area and killing people.
The U.S. government cuts from social services vital to our living, such as firefighting, to spend our taxes on horrible wars and to further enrich the filthy rich capitalists. As a result, it creates an ash land for us, not significantly different than it does by bombing other countries.
Oct 14, 2024
The Congressional Candidates for Working Class Party in Michigan were asked about immigration in the League of Women Voters Guide for this November 5, 2024, election. The question was: “What recommendations, if any, would you propose to change U.S. immigration policy?” Below, we have reprinted these candidates’ responses:
“Immigrants and U.S.-born workers are all part of the same class and need the same things, such as jobs, affordable housing and a safe place to live, education and health care. The ruling class intentionally spreads lies to drive a wedge between people to create fear and hatred. The U.S. capitalist class created the migration crisis with war and military interventions around the world. By destroying economies in other countries, like Venezuela, it caused ordinary people to flee to safety. The capitalist class is responsible for the chaos and propaganda about ‘invasions’ and ‘open borders.’ It gives them cover to blame immigrants for the problems that workers in the U.S. face.”
“All working people must be able to move freely to find the work we need. Corporations benefit when they can underpay workers who are forced to live in the shadows, without documents. All working people need full legal rights so we are not at a disadvantage in the workforce. Dividing the working class between ‘foreign’ and ‘native’ weakens our strength as workers. All who want citizenship should have it!”
“We need to stop demonizing immigrants. We are all either immigrants or descendants of immigrants. The politicians are using the fear of immigrants to get elected to hide the real problems that we all face.”
“The United States was founded on the backs of immigrants and slaves. The economic success seen in this country can be attributed to the many immigrant workers that have come here seeking a better life or to escape oppression in their home country. Immigrant workers, like many U.S.-born citizens, simply want to work, contribute to their communities, and provide a safe environment for their families and children. The threat of deportation keeps immigrants in a submissive role, unable to speak up for themselves. Immigrants earn money that they later spend, creating more jobs and revenue. This is a benefit to the community.”
“The politicians and the corporate media want us to believe that immigrants are to blame for the lack of affordable housing and good-paying jobs. It’s a lie they want us to believe, to take the blame off the people who are responsible—the corporate elite. They want to keep workers divided against each other. Immigrants don’t come here to work for low wages. They want what all workers want—decent pay. But the bosses use their ‘illegal’ status to threaten them with deportation. It’s a scheme to hold down the wages of both immigrant workers and workers who were born here. If immigrants come here to work, give them full legal status.”
“They blame our problems on the immigrants when it’s the bosses and the decisions they make to pay lower wages that are causing the problems. All jobs in the United States should start at a living wage.”
The ONLY clear choice for the working class in this election is the Working Class Party.
Oct 14, 2024
Republican Governor Ron DeSantis’ administration in Florida is so afraid of the power of one woman’s voice, of one woman sharing her story, that they aim to try to silence her by using government agencies and taxpayer money to do so.
A threat of criminal prosecution and fines was sent out to local television stations by the Florida Department of Health. The threats said that IF these TV stations do NOT stop airing a particular television commercial in favor of abortion rights, then criminal prosecution and fines will be levied on these stations. TV station employees were threatened with 60 days in jail if the ads are not stopped.
What is this all this about? The TV ad that has right-wing politicians so agitated features a Florida mom with terminal cancer explaining that an abortion saved her life.
When Caroline was diagnosed with stage 4 brain cancer in 2022, she had a legal abortion in Florida, right before Roe v. Wade fell.
Said Caroline, “The doctors knew if I did not end my pregnancy, I would lose my baby, I would lose my life, and my daughter would lose her mom.” Caroline remains alive to this day, raising her very young daughter for a little while longer.
Caroline said in a recent interview, “This has shown me that it’s become political and it shouldn’t be. I’m personally doing this for my daughter to have the same rights as me and my mom. … And for all the women who are diagnosed with cancer.”
In November, if a supermajority of voters—60%—vote yes on Amendment 4, then Florida’s 6-week abortion ban that started in May of 2024 will end.