the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Feb 3, 2025
Bodies are still being recovered from the Potomac River after an American Airlines jet and Black Hawk helicopter collided at Reagan National Airport on January 29, killing 67 people. Officials are said to be scrambling to figure out how this horrific accident could have happened. In fact, there are glaring problems that likely played a role in this crash which pilots, air traffic controllers and others have warned about for years.
The airspace over Reagan National airport (DCA) is overcrowded with airliners and helicopters. There are over 100 helicopter flights daily that crisscross the area. Army helicopters frequently ferry cabinet officials, lawmakers and other V.I.P.s across the area—in other words, the military runs a taxi service for the federal government. “I cannot imagine what business is so pressing that these helicopters are allowed to cross the path of airliners carrying hundreds of people! What would normally be alarming at any other airport in the country is commonplace at DCA,” one pilot wrote in a report to the Aviation Reporting System after a near-collision with a helicopter. This report was way back in 2013!
Reagan National Airport has the busiest runway in the country, with over 800 flights daily. This means that some flights get diverted to a less busy runway—runway 33, that often intersects with the helicopter highway, as it is known. The American Airlines flight that crashed was diverted to this runway for its final approach.
National Airport is on a small stretch of land with development on one side and the river on the other. It was not designed to handle 25 million passengers a year. Yet in May, when President Biden signed the FAA Reauthorization Act, five more round-trip flights were added. Lawmakers from both parties constantly push to add extra flights for their convenience to get home quickly. They cannot be bothered with using Dulles or Baltimore-Washington airports because they are less convenient. They add all these flights without doing what would be necessary to make them safe, like adding air traffic controllers.
Just the opposite: according to a preliminary FAA report on the collision, “staffing at the airport on Wednesday evening was not normal for the amount of traffic and time of day.” On that evening they were short-handed—meaning one air traffic controller was handling commercial airline traffic AND helicopter traffic. One worker was doing the job of two.
And it’s not just that evening. National airport does not have all the air traffic controllers that the FAA says the airport requires. In fact, nationwide there are not enough air traffic controllers. According to the FAA, the nation’s airports are short 3,000 controllers. This shortage is often made up by having controllers work 10 hour shifts, six days a week.
Every worker knows when you are exhausted, mistakes can and do happen. Cutting back on air traffic controllers is absolutely dangerous—they know this, and do it anyway.
None of these problems has anything to do with the vile and absurd things that President Trump said caused the crash. He made up those lies to distract workers’ attention from the real problems.
In recent years there have been a growing number of close calls that have occurred in the airspace around National. Just one night before last Wednesday’s crash, during the same 8 p.m. hour, a passenger jet had to abort its final approach to avoid colliding with a helicopter. A similar scrapped landing happened a week earlier.
No. The officials know what the problems are, and they chose to ignore them because they could. They have gotten away with it until last Wednesday. Only after the deaths of 67 people did the FAA put a temporary pause on most of the helicopter flights.
This society that gives privilege to a few at the expense of everyone else produces one disaster after another. Workers everywhere are overworked, doing the jobs of two or more, putting all of our lives at risk. Only the working class, unified and organized to take power away from the wealthy privileged class, can change this situation.
Feb 3, 2025
Dozens of units at Parkway Gardens Apartments in Greenbelt have lacked heat since October because a boiler wasn’t working. The maintenance supervisor told management about the problem in May—eight months ago! The last inspection expired in February 2023.
That maintenance worker knew what the problem was. Management wouldn’t spend the money to fix it.
Feb 3, 2025
The U.S. president pardoned the two D.C. cops who chased 20-year-old Karon Hylton-Brown during a traffic stop in October 2020, causing his death. They violated department procedures not to chase for a traffic stop.
Politicians from both parties want us to think a cop can do no wrong. But it’s not right to kill someone for a traffic stop—not a 20-year-old, not a black working-class man.
Feb 3, 2025
Big surprise! The Michigan Public Service Commission agreed that DTE could increase its electricity rates—AGAIN. In other words, more money out of our stretched pockets!
But when you read the details about what the $217 million is going to be used for—surprise again! $17.6 million of these funds are to be used to “support electric vehicle charging infrastructure.”
Wait a minute. There’s no way we should be paying for these charging stations. It’s companies, like Ford, that are pushing these electric vehicles and making profits off of them. Let them pay!
Feb 3, 2025
Can workers revoke outrageous executive pay and bonuses like Trump is revoking the executive orders of past presidents?
That would really make a difference for the working class.
Feb 3, 2025
American brought in 13.7 billion dollars in revenue last quarter—they racked up 54.2 billion for the whole year. The shareholders are taking home 808 million dollars in profits for the quarter. The money is there—to get more tractors, say. Our work rolled up those profits.
Feb 3, 2025
On the night of January 18, TikTok went dark. At least for half a day….
Both parties in Congress had passed a law requiring that the app be sold to a U.S. company or be banned. After the Supreme Court ruled that this law should go into effect, TikTok shut down.
TikTok gathers up as much personal information as it can. It profits by selling that information to advertisers. And it’s designed to be addictive—the more time people watch it, the more profit its owners can make.
But that’s not why Congress banned it—no, they say that it is owned by a Chinese company, and maybe the Chinese government can access all this personal information of Americans!
This is just one more part of the anti-China propaganda war. As if China is the threat to our freedom and our privacy! U.S. companies like Meta (that owns Instagram and Facebook) and Google (that owns YouTube) do the same thing. And in this country, it’s the U.S. government, not the Chinese government, that has used that information to track and arrest people who they consider a threat.
Seeing an opportunity, Trump swooped in and “saved” TikTok—even though last time he was president, he supported a ban. But he only saved it for 75 days—the law that TikTok must be sold to a U.S. company is supposed to be enforced after that time.
Maybe a U.S. company will buy it. Or maybe it will be shut down, and TikTok’s U.S. competitors will pick up the market. Or maybe Trump will decide to just ignore this law.
Whatever the outcome, none of these people are looking out for working people. Not the kajillionaires who own every social media company; not Trump who poses as TikTok’s savior; and not the politicians of both parties who are trying to gear us up to see China as our enemy. No, all of these people are our real enemies—and they’re right here in the good old U.S.A!
Feb 3, 2025
Child care workers and advocates delivered a petition with the signatures of over 1,800 Chicago residents to the office of Mayor Brandon Johnson, calling “to make child care jobs good jobs” and “to ensure every Chicago family has access to child care.” One child care worker noted that she had lost her home to foreclosure after 17 years.
Child care workers receive some of the lowest pay, despite how vital—and demanding—the job can be. And, as their pay fails to keep up with the cost of living, fewer workers are able to live on these jobs. This can mean more work for those left on the job and fewer children who can be cared for.
Since 2020, Chicago has lost nearly a third of its licensed child care centers—from more than 800 to less than 600 centers today. And this trend began well before the pandemic and extends well beyond Chicago. Over the past decade, Illinois also lost a third, or nearly 4,300 providers. So it’s harder for parents to find child care in their neighborhood, as local centers either close or institute long waiting lists.
At the same time, parents across the country are having to spend more for child care—typically around 15% of their pay—and, on average, $14,070 per year, per infant. For some parents—typically mothers—this expense means it doesn’t even make sense to take a job out of the home.
How does that add up? This society is not organized to care for working-class children. Many jobs don’t pay enough to afford child care. Federal and state programs are designed to subsidize care for only a slice of working-class families. And these programs are only funded to aid a small fraction of those children who qualify.
Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker promised, back in 2019, to make the state the “best in the nation for families raising young children.” But the state has lost 1,300 more child care providers in the years since.
Child care was hot enough for both presidential candidates to talk it up on the campaign trail as well. But, the election is over. Don’t hold your breath on any solution there either.
Working people produce more than enough wealth to fully fund child care and all the services we need. But the wealthy class of this society diverts an increasing share of that wealth into their profits, and the politicians help them do it.
Every social service we’ve won came only through massive, organized and determined fights. And that’s the only way we’ll build a society that serves us.
Feb 3, 2025
The headlines read: “Nearly 5 years after schools closed, the nation gets a new report card.” And test scores in math and reading are getting worse.
The report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, sometimes called the “Nation’s Report Card,” is based on a standardized test of student learning which is given every two years to a broad sample of students in 4th and 8th grades. From 2024, it concluded: Nationally, students are still behind where they were since before the pandemic.
Michigan’s scores reflect what national results show—Michigan students are also struggling. Detroit is even FURTHER behind—it’s at the bottom compared to other large cities.
This report goes through page after page of statistics. But if you stop wading through all the numbers and percentages, its findings reveal NOTHING NEW: children in poorer areas have lower test scores than children in more privileged areas. And such disparities in test scores among different groups of children existed LONG BEFORE the pandemic—going back multiple decades—as long as standardized tests have been administered. And the main dividing line between who is “high performing” versus “low performing” is social class.
Tests can be a measurement of the degree to which children have had access to the knowledge—the math, the vocabulary, the language, the science that allows them to be efficient at test-taking. They are a measure, of sorts, of what children have learned. And it’s children who come from privileged backgrounds who have had access to higher quality education.
But when you live in a system that systematically and consciously deprives the vast majority of children of these learning experiences—and in 2024, calls them “low performing;” or 60 years ago, labeled them as below average in IQ with the tests administered then; or 100 years ago, labeled children of the working class and poor as “feeble-minded;” the only thing that has changed is which test and which label.
What hasn’t changed is the fact that this class system of capitalism CAUSES POVERTY.
For it’s a racist class system that was built on the institution of slavery and subsequently continues to relegate the black population to be bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. It’s a system that impoverishes whole communities, whether urban or rural, when it closes factories and mines that gut the economies of whole regions. And then there is the domino effect of public schools and libraries being closed, making access to education more difficult for the children of the working class.
It’s a system that has ALWAYS had a class system of education, whereby the schools in wealthier communities have more funding, and therefore more resources. A system that has been in the process of dismantling public education for decades, and now is ramping up further attacks by threatening Executive Orders to funnel public dollars to private, for-profit schools and threatening school districts with financial disinvestments if they dare teach real history and science.
It’s this system that should have a report card of F minus.
Feb 3, 2025
According to videos recently made available to the public, a fire at the base of a Southern California Edison electric tower ignited the Eaton Fire on January 7. One surveillance video at an ARCO gas station close to the Edison tower clearly shows sparks and flashes before the fire at its base starts.
Other videos from the area residents show the fire at this tower’s base. According to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, the first reports of the Eaton fire came within seven minutes after the fire started.
This initial fire later scorched more than 14,000 acres of mainly working-class area, destroying more than 9,400 structures and killing 17 people.
Nearly three weeks after the Eaton Fire started, Edison admitted to the California regulators that its electric lines over Eaton Canyon saw a momentary increase of electrical current about the same time the destructive Eaton fire had been ignited.
According to the regulations, Edison should have informed the regulators within two hours of such an unusual electric activity. So, if the flash and fire videos around its electric tower had not surfaced, Edison would have covered up this sudden and high jump in electric current in its lines to avoid taking any responsibility.
The majority of electric lines and equipment are above the ground in California. They are ancient; some were erected nearly 100 years ago. Any natural event, earthquake, wind, etc., causes these lines and equipment to malfunction or break and ignite a fire.
These lines should have been buried underground a long time ago. Edison should have spent the profits it generated to do this. On the evening of January 7, when the Eaton Fire started, winds reached as high as 100 miles per hour, downing trees and battering electrical poles, towers, and lines.
Nobody will be surprised if Edison eventually takes full responsibility for the Eaton Fire. In the recent past, Edison fully admitted that its equipment ignited two equally devastating fires, the Thomas wildfire in 2017 and the Woolsey wildfire in 2018, scorching vast swathes of the area and killing 28 people. Edison agreed to pay seven billion dollars worth of monetary damages to the victims of these fires. And this month, while the Eaton Fire was still devastating the area, Edison asked the State of California to pass these damages to the customers as electricity rate hikes.
Edison wants its victims to pay for the crimes the company committed. Edison is undoubtedly a serial scorcher. Will they establish this “new normal,” where communities are destroyed and people killed with impunity? Or will those at risk begin a fight for the enforcement of basic human safety?
Feb 3, 2025
The following is taken from speeches given at a Spark meeting in Chicago on January 26.
Donald Trump is once again the president, and the Republicans “control” the Senate and, just barely, the House of Representatives in Congress. Many around us are, without a doubt, dismayed that this crass billionaire, one who is so virulent against immigrants, women, and black people, could win again.
It’s very important to say, 89 million voters did not vote in this election—way more than voted for either Harris or Trump. Those voters, many of them working class, did not see themselves in either the Democrats or the Republicans and sat out the election. Only a little over a quarter of the voting population voted for Trump.
Trump only won a few more votes than he got in 2020. Harris and the Democrats, however, saw a big drop-off: about six million fewer than Biden got in 2020. We can read this: it’s the Democrats that lost their own election.
Throughout the Working Class Party campaign, we heard from working people about inflation, especially for groceries, and the economy in general. Biden and then Harris tried to tell us that the economy was fine. Many voters, especially in the working class, were having none of that. They say many people voted their wallet this election—well, workers’ wallets were empty. While the inflation rate may have dropped for a moment, prices stayed high, and wages stayed low. The Democrats took the blame, since they were in office.
Harris and the Democrats, wanting to sidestep the economy, campaigned on a fight for abortion rights, among other things. Activists put abortion rights measures on the ballot in ten states in November. In eight of those states, those measures won a clear majority of voters. Nonetheless, Trump won the vote for president in many of those same states, which included Florida, Arizona, and Nevada. So even though it’s clear that the majority support abortion rights, that wasn’t enough for the Democrats to win, given all the problems workers face.
Trump may have been able to pull some working-class voters by claiming “prices will come down.” But he didn’t even wait to take office before throwing out those promises, pivoting instead to talk about buying Greenland, calling to end birthright citizenship, and saying he will carry out massive deportation raids in Chicago and other places. Bringing down prices—for groceries, for cars, for rent—would mean cutting into the profits of the ruling class. Trump is no more willing to do that than Biden was.
The economic crisis that has continued for fifty years has pushed back the working class—our standard of living has been cut dramatically in that time. The unions, our only large organizations, are much weaker—they organize a much smaller part of the working class now and have carried out only small and scattered fights for decades. The working class is not organized to fight back against the blows rained down on us by a rotting capitalist society. This creates a real and serious political danger for the working class in this moment.
This country’s working class has always included a large portion of people who were not born here. And the ruling class of this country has always played on anti-immigrant sentiment, as a way to divide the working class. They lay the blame for the crisis and the economic situation at the feet of immigrants, who are fleeing wars and economic disasters created by capitalism in their own countries. Trump has put attacks on immigrants front and center since he entered politics.
Trump’s talk is, for now, mostly talk. Bush, Obama and Biden all deported more people than Trump—they just weren’t as loud about it. Still, Trump’s rhetoric has an effect. Workers have been “lying low,” wanting to try to avoid the raids that Trump keeps announcing. The fear he instills intimidates many working people—it can mean people will accept worse situations, that they will be less likely to push their bosses. When any part of the working class is made to accept less, that’s an attack on the entire working class. Lower conditions for one section of the working class mean worse conditions for everyone.
The issues that we face were not up for a vote in the election. Neither party proposed a way out of the problems of the working class. If any of our issues were discussed, it was only to use our problems as a talking point. Or to blame everything on immigrants or transgender people or whatever their current scapegoat may be.
But even if a Working Class Party candidate was elected, we wouldn’t be able to fix our problems that way. Voting in one or another person will not be the way to make a change. The problem is the capitalist system that we live under, which is organized to create profit for a small group of billionaires. Politicians do not have the power to change this system because the state apparatus is set up to run for the interests of these billionaires.
Everything is organized to help corporations profit as much as possible. So even if our candidate was elected, the system is set up in a way that we wouldn’t be able to change much. But there is a force that can change things: the working class!
The wealth of society is created by workers. We manufacture the parts. We assemble the cars. We build the houses and fix the roads. We deliver the packages. We take care of our sick. We make and serve the food. Yet we are living worse and worse. That’s because corporations have been carrying out attacks on workers for decades, so that they can give even more money to their shareholders to increase their billions.
It’s the parasitic shareholders who reap the lion’s share of all the benefits of all of the new technology and increases in our productivity that have happened over the past five decades. Yet they do none of the work! It’s our backs that are hurting, while they just pocket much of the wealth that we’ve sweated over.
But we workers are not just victims. Because we make everything run, we are key in how this economic system functions, and that’s how we have power. If we stop working, everything stops running.
This might sound far from where we are now, but that’s because we’re made to feel powerless. The boss can fire any one of us at any time. I, by myself, can’t make my boss give me regular hours or slow down the pace of work. Layoffs can happen at any time. If they decide that it would be more profitable to close a plant or warehouse down, they do it with no regard to how that impacts workers’ lives.
We are made to feel like we have no power. Individually, that’s true. One worker against a giant corporation has very little power.
They reinforce this by blaming individuals for social problems. Can’t afford rent? Your fault. Get another job. You’re depressed because you don’t see hope for the future? Too bad! Get a therapist, take a pill and get back to work. If your kids aren’t doing well in school, it’s your fault. You should spend more time with them. Got pregnant in Texas? Your fault. Should’ve kept your legs closed.
But these problems are created by society: unaffordable housing, mental health crises, declining quality of education, reproductive rights getting taken away. This means that we need social answers rather than individual ones.
I don’t make this system run by myself. We all participate. Capitalism has organized the economy in a collective way. I load a truck, someone drives it off, someone else unloads it. The system relies on people outside of the warehouse too: those who assemble the trucks, transport gas, grow food so we can stay alive, teachers who teach us to read.
Many people are connected through their role in the economy. I’m not just an individual against a giant company. I’m part of a giant class, the class that makes everything in society run: the working class. But while the work is organized collectively, only a small handful of people, the capitalists, reap the benefits. And that’s crazy!
But it also gives us a possibility. Because the system is organized collectively, we have the possibility of taking it on together and fighting for a different society. We have to find a way to come together to fight for our common interests.
As a class, workers have common interests because we play the same role in the economy. We face the same problems. Yet we’re divided by different companies. Union vs. non-union. Native born vs. immigrant. White vs. black. Old vs. young. We’re in different states. We’re in different countries. But all workers have the same interests.
The problems that workers face in the U.S. are similar to problems workers face around the world. We all want to work fewer grueling hours, have access to healthy food and healthcare, have our children taken care of. And we’re also linked because we all work for wages.
We’re all exploited by this capitalist system. It may take slightly different forms in different places, but the reality is the same. The working class has the same interests around the world: getting rid of our exploitation. But this requires getting rid of the system that creates this exploitation and running society ourselves.
We could use the resources and organization that are already there. But instead of running it for profit, we could run society around the needs of humanity. We can organize things differently because we know what’s needed; we know what to do.
If workers ran society, we could prioritize everyone having a decent life. We could give everyone a way to take care of their health, create better access to education. We could guarantee that people have a place to live when they’re old, or when they want to live on their own. But for this to happen, we need to be organized collectively and not see problems as individual problems.
Our collective interests can only be expressed when we fight together. The only way that things have improved in the past have been through fights. When workers fight for our common interests, we have big possibilities of expressing our collective power.
But it won’t be enough if it doesn’t spread. One fight in one workplace is not enough. But if a fight starts somewhere and spreads, that’s when we have a chance. All workers against all companies is where the power lies.
We have to have in mind the goal of getting rid of capitalism, which is the system that puts corporate profits above all else. Once we get at the root of the problem, capitalism, we can organize society in a way that fits OUR needs, not the needs of the corporations and the banks. When we fight for our interests, we’re fighting for the interests of humanity as a whole.
We need to counter the idea that each worker is alone and has to solve their problems on their own. We have to find a way to come together. A couple of friends can reinforce each other that our problems come from society and are not an accident or individual fault. Talking with neighbors and family members. Even two people in one work place can be the start of something.
There may not be many of us, and it may be small, but it’s something. The nearly 11,000 votes that Working Class Party received in Illinois mean something. It means that some people saw the name Working Class Party on the ballot, or saw our flier, or talked to one of us out on the street and chose to vote for us.
There are other people who think that something else is possible, and we need to find them. No one else is talking about these ideas, which makes what we have to do all the more important. We have to spread the idea that the working class has power and start to build an organization of people who can see it and want to do something about it.
Feb 3, 2025
The following is excerpted and translated from the January 29, 2025 issue, #2948 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
On Monday, January 27, after the Israeli army once again authorized the crossing of the Netzarim corridor, located south of Gaza City, tens of thousands of Palestinians began moving up toward the north of the territory, showing their determination to return home.
An endless stream of Gazans, men, women and children, found themselves on the road along the coast, walking, loaded with luggage, pushing carts or in cars. According to the Civil Defense, 300,000 Palestinians had already returned to northern Gaza.
During 15 months of destructive warfare, 90% of Gazans have been forced to move, often several times, to escape bombardments or to obey evacuation orders from the Israeli army.
As soon as the ceasefire came into effect on January 19, many Palestinians tried to return to their homes, even though they knew they had most likely been destroyed. A few days later, on January 25, the Israeli authorities closed the crossing points of the Netzarim corridor, claiming that Hamas had not respected its commitments. Thousands of Palestinians had to spend the night on the ground in the bitter cold, waiting for the crossings to reopen 24 hours later.
This episode illustrates the fragility of the truce while, seeking to keep the support of the far right, Netanyahu asserts at every opportunity that he can resume the war at any moment.
While the ceasefire has enabled Gazans to resume a semblance of life, and at least no longer fear Israeli bombardments, it has not put an end to their almost total destitution. The Gaza Strip has been transformed into a field of ruins, deprived of running water and electricity, where no hospital is able to function.
More than two million Palestinians are condemned to survive, sometimes without tents or tarpaulins to protect them from the rain and cold. To feed themselves, they can only rely on humanitarian aid, the delivery of which is still restricted by the Israeli authorities. What’s more, its distribution is likely to be made even more difficult by the entry into force, at the end of the month, of the law passed by the Israeli parliament banning the activities of UNRWA, the U.N. agency providing aid to the Palestinians.
“We declare to Trump and to the whole world: we will not leave Palestine or Gaza, no matter what happens”, said one of these Palestinians on the road home, responding to a journalist who asked him about his motivations.
It is this same determination that the Palestinian people have been opposing for 75 years to the Israeli rulers’ policy of despoilment and colonization, a policy supported by the leaders of the imperialist powers that condemn the populations of the region, Jewish and Arab alike, to a state of endless war.
Feb 3, 2025
The following is excerpted from Combat Ouvrier (Workers’ Combat), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active on the Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, issue 1342, January 18, 2025.
Gangs maintain their grip on the capital. Getting around in and out of Port-au-Prince is a perilous exercise, as you have to get past posts manned by gangsters, and national roads, ports and the airport have become virtually inaccessible….
In 2024, more than 5,600 people were killed by gang attacks: 1,000 more than in 2023, according to U.N. figures. These figures are certainly far below reality, as they do not take into account all those people who drown while trying to cross to neighboring islands to escape this oppression.
The number of internally displaced people fleeing the occupation of their neighborhoods now exceeds two million. They have built new refugee camps that are already saturated, with hundreds of thousands of people surviving there in abject conditions, deprived of everything.
The bandits impose their law through terror, ransacking and burning everything in their path. They now have branches everywhere. Their financial resources allow them to do so, but they are also recruiting because of the great poverty that is gaining ground and attracting new fighters to their ranks.
They have been repulsed three times in the neighborhoods they have attacked. The police were helped by the population in some cases. The government and its police were more reactive in protecting the administrations. After all, it was to the heights of the capital that public administrations moved when the administrative center district fell to gangs last year.
The population of working-class neighborhoods, victims of gang and police clashes, has been economically devastated. Port-au-Prince’s industrial park is almost deserted, with a few companies operating sporadically. Bosses call in workers to work for a few days to fill orders, then send them away until the next order comes in. In the neighborhoods, merchants, artisans, electricians, plumbers, bricklayers and others are out of business, construction sites are halted, and thousands of workers are unemployed.
The grip of gangs and this barbarism is neither inevitable nor accidental. It’s the result of a system in which the bourgeoisie rules, exploits the workers and pays its stooges to run the state in order to make ever greater profits.
For working people, for the poor, there is no solution from those in power. The perspective is the same as in the aftermath of the earthquake: the survivors must first rely on themselves, organizing to face and overcome. It is from this state of mind, from the awakening of class consciousness, that the working class and the poor will be able to build their revolutionary party. It’s the only way out. Then this party’s armed workers’ militia will stand up to the gangs and the scum of corrupt politicians and silence them.
Feb 3, 2025
It took only a couple of weeks back in office for President Donald J. Trump to threaten to set off a great big new trade war. Trump announced big new tariffs on the U.S.’s biggest trading partners, Mexico, Canada and China. Trump also made clear that he was not stopping there, that he would soon take aim at the U.S.’s other big trading partners, starting in Europe.
When Trump first announced his planned tariffs, Wall Street and the stock market basically ignored him, treating this as Trump’s usual ridiculous bluster. But that changed on Friday, January 31, after White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, insisted that Trump was putting in place sweeping 25% tariffs on goods coming from Canada and Mexico (with only a couple of exceptions named so far), and a 10% tariff on goods coming from China, which are added on top of the tariffs that the U.S. government had already put in place under Trump, and subsequently, by Biden. And she said that the tariffs would begin on 12AM Tuesday.
At that point, in late trading, the stock markets plunged. For these tariffs could be like an economic earthquake, setting off widespread price increases in the U.S. on everything from cars to food, as well as begin to disrupt trade, industrial production, consumption … and most probably corporate profits.
That is because over the last decades, the three big economies of North America have become increasingly integrated, especially auto production, as well as manufacturing in general and much of agriculture. Today, for example, most of the 30,000 parts and pieces that go into making a car cross the borders of the three countries at least eight times in the course of production.
According to Trump, the reason for these tariffs is to stop Mexico and Canada from allowing both fentanyl and migrants from coming into the U.S. This is an outrageous lie, just like all the lies about “weapons of mass destruction” that the politicians and news media told, in order to justify the disastrous and barbaric U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. That war was really about oil and greater domination of the Middle East by U.S. imperialism
It’s anyone’s guess how this U.S. trade war against Mexico and Canada will play out. Certainly, in a short time, Trump could quickly negotiate a new trade deal, declare victory and falsely claim to save U.S. jobs. Or else, Trump’s new tariffs on Canada and Mexico could get tied up in the courts, since they violate a supposedly binding trade treaty, the USMCA (formerly NAFTA), that had been ratified by Congress ... under the Trump administration and the Republicans, in 2020!
But whatever happens, this new trade war aggravates a worsening global economic and political crisis that has gone on for decades and decades, a crisis which has ramped up competition between gigantic capitalist groups for power, profits and wealth, capitalist interests that are defended by their respective governments and state apparatuses. And no matter how reckless and destructive Trump’s new trade war is, it is still the dominant U.S. superpower which is calling the shots and imposing itself on rivals and friends, alike.
Certainly, in carrying out this trade war, Trump will appeal for support from workers and ordinary people, who forever have been told by the capitalists and all their lackeys (including the officialdom of the big trade unions) that it is foreign workers who have been costing them jobs, that the reason for rising joblessness in this country is that all the jobs are going overseas. These lies are used to try to tie the workers to their own bosses and politicians, who are really the workers’ worst enemies. It is the biggest companies that have been slashing jobs and pay in their drive to increase their own profits and wealth.
The workers in this country have nothing in common with these politicians and bosses, and everything in common with the workers in Mexico and Canada, who are confronting the very same capitalists.
Feb 3, 2025
What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters, during the week of January 26th, 2025.
Twenty-four—that’s the number of “Executive Orders” Trump issued on Inauguration Day. By the next day, it was 26. The signing of the “orders” was organized like a TV production. But behind all the hoopla was a deadly reality. Trump’s “orders” lay out the future capitalism holds. There will be more war, more enrichment of the capitalist class, and more shit and mud for what Trump in his campaign had called “the forgotten man and woman of the working class.”
Several of these 26 “orders” declared “national emergencies”—which, Trump explained, gives him the “right to do whatever I want.”
Well, what Trump wants is to act in the service of his fellow billionaires, like the ones who joined him at the inauguration—oligarchs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, as well as the “tech boyz”—Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichet, Tim Cook, and Shou Zi Chew, not to mention oil barons.
Surrounded by all that wealth, Trump forgot about “the forgotten man and woman” whom he had courted during his campaign. He issued no “executive order” to bar the growth of inflation. No order to prevent layoffs. Nothing to raise the minimum wage in a time when some have to work two or three jobs just to survive.
Trump may have adopted a populist way of speaking, but just like other bourgeois politicians, he made promises before the election, only to work afterwards to serve the capitalist class. Just like Biden and Harris and Obama did.
But there is one important difference with Trump. Trump aspires to be the dictator the capitalist class might want in a period of growing economic crisis and of spreading wars.
A number of “orders” eliminate anything that might reduce capitalist profit. For example, he cut regulations that protect workers’ health and safety on industrial jobs.
Almost one-third of the orders are designed to reduce the tax money going for the needs of the population. Some will cut the number of federal employees in departments that service people, for example, working to correct problems in Social Security checks and Medicare benefits.
The money from cuts in those programs will cover money lost in Trump’s new tax cut for the very wealthy. It will provide for more corporate subsidies. Musk will get his space rockets paid for.
Trump’s orders envision an increase in military spending—already higher than the money spent by the next thirteen military powers in the world. Forgotten was his promise to end the Ukrainian war on Day One. Forgotten was his promise to bring troops back from “foreign wars.”
Name changes—what’s that about? The Gulf of Mexico becomes the Gulf of America on Trump’s map. Alaska’s Mount Denali becomes Mount McKinley. Trump said these names would mark the return of America to a time “when it was great,” the time of President William McKinley.
America under McKinley was the time of the “robber barons,” who accumulated enormous wealth from the sweat, blood, and tears of a driven working class, when even eight-year-olds slaved in factories. McKinley’s time was also when the United States stepped onto the imperialist stage, preparing itself for more than a century of war. It’s the period when the U.S. went to war to take Cuba and the Philippines, using them as bases in its drive to control Latin America and Asia.
During the time of McKinley, the government worked to divide the working class against itself, trying to set its parts against each other, by race, ethnic origin, sex, and age.
This is exactly what Trump envisions in his executive orders. His 26 orders were a statement of intent: a warning of a more bitter class war to come, and of the push into a new global war by the chief imperialist power in the world.
The working class needs no return to the past. Through its own mobilization, through its unifying struggles, it can embody a very different future, one without dictators or capitalists.
Feb 3, 2025
In 2017, Amazon bought the Whole Foods grocery chain. Amazon is a viciously anti-union company, owned by multi-billionaire Jeff Bezos. In fact, last month, Amazon closed all four of its warehouses in Quebec because at only one, workers had beat Bezos and won a union.
But now, on January 27, workers at a Philadelphia Whole Foods market won their fight to unionize, with a vote of 130 to 100.
The president of their local, UFCW (United Food and Commercial Workers) Local 1776, said, “The fight is far from over,” and he is so right. Owner Bezos, with all his billions, is determined not to give a dime to the workers who generate those billions.
One Amazon warehouse on New York’s Staten Island managed to win a union election three years ago. But Amazon has used the wide assortment of union-blocking tools in U.S. labor law to prevent workers from getting to an actual contract. For three years!
The workers’ complaints at Whole Foods are the same as workers’ complaints everywhere. The pay is low. The short-staffing tires workers out. Doing the work of two, or three, under the threat of arbitrary discipline, puts workers in high-stress mode all day and leads to many unsafe practices. Management makes arbitrary decisions. Workers either get too few hours—or too many. The endless list we all know!
The Whole Foods workers had to be tough, smart, and dedicated to each other, in order to win this first big battle against Amazon’s anti-union ways. They hope that even though they are first, they won’t be the last. There is strength in numbers and the numbers need to grow quickly.
Feb 3, 2025
Just in his first two weeks, Trump ordered an end to birthright citizenship, stripped the legal status of thousands who entered the U.S. legally, ordered the military to send planes of deportees to Colombia and Brazil, promised to lock up 30,000 people in Guantanamo Bay, distributed images of handcuffed immigrants and mug shots of those arrested with criminal records, revoked an order barring ICE from targeting schools and churches, and issued increased “quotas” to ICE officials.
On the ground, this “mass deportation” campaign hasn’t amounted to very much. Trump’s birthright citizenship order has been blocked—so far. And as of this writing, the Trump administration had managed to deport less than half as many people per day as Obama did in his first term. Of course, that could change tomorrow.
But all these threats have terrorized millions of people. Streets in immigrant neighborhoods that are usually crowded are quiet. School attendance is down. A New York city council member summed it up: “People are keeping their kids home from school. They’re afraid to go to work. They’re just scared in general.”
These threats have also served to place blame on immigrants for the problems facing all workers. Trump wants us to believe these immigrants are the cause of crime: his Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said, “We’re getting the dirt bags off the streets.” He wants workers to believe that they are the cause of low wages, and that if all the immigrants are removed, there will be more jobs for “real” Americans, and more money for the services we need, from schools to hospitals to housing.
In fact, Trump’s threats are aimed at distracting us from the real criminals, the real cause of our lack of jobs and low pay: the capitalist system that puts profit for the billionaires above the needs of working people.
Almost every job is shorthanded. Would the hospitals be better off if all the current immigrant nurses were deported? No—they need more nurses, and every other worker! The same is true in the factories, construction crews, and everywhere else. The jobs are shorthanded because the bosses have cut the number of workers in order to wring more profits out of those they have left.
Immigrants are part of our class, the working class. Fighting amongst ourselves, blaming each other—that just lets the billionaires get away with their untold crimes against all of us. And that is exactly Trump’s point.
Feb 3, 2025
The average price of a dozen large eggs skyrocketed in California in December to $8.97, from $5.68 in late November. An increase of $3.29, close to 60%!
Price increases are not natural events like rains, fires and earthquakes. Business owners, i.e., capitalists, increase prices to profit more.
The capitalists’ newspapers, like the Los Angeles Times, tell us that this extreme price increase is because of the bird flu that killed egg-laying chickens nationwide. This is hogwash.
The U.S. had 308 million commercial egg-laying hens in 2022, according to the United Egg Producers of America. The flu killed 20 million hens, according to USDA.
So, only 7% of the hens were lost but the egg price increase was 60%.
Besides, the U.S. government already allocated $1.25 billion to compensate farmers for their losses. So, the egg farmers will get paid. But, we don’t get discounts when we purchase the eggs.
Like the capitalists say, “never let a serious crisis to go to waste.” They use every occasion to increase prices and rip us off.
Feb 3, 2025
246 starving, emaciated miners and the bodies of 78 dead miners were brought out of an abandoned gold mine in mid-January. Police had blocked off the entrances to the mine since last August—they consider the miners to be trespassers. They had cut off supplies of food and water into the mine. Desperate miners had resorted to eating cockroaches and the flesh of their dead comrades.
South Africa’s unemployment rate stands at 42%! Nonetheless, few South Africans prospect for gold dust in abandoned mines because it is so dangerous. Of 1500-plus workers who were in the mine, the overwhelming majority were poor migrants from other nations in southern Africa, such as Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Those who enter the mines are called “zama zama,” meaning “take a chance,” because they are risking their lives for the chance to make some money.
The police blockade was part of a campaign to shut down “informal” mining that they called “Close the Hole.” It ended up becoming a murder operation. A protest forced the police to allow local rescuers in—but police refused to offer any assistance themselves.
South Africa was the world’s largest gold producer up until 2007. The apartheid system was used to keep black workers in an extremely exploited position. Their labor dug these extremely deep mines, and produced gold at low cost to the South African capitalists.
The mine workers union was one of the key forces of the struggles in the 1980s that brought down the apartheid regime and brought the African National Congress (ANC) to power. Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa’s president, was a leader of the mine workers’ union. The workers’ struggles dismantled apartheid and brought in black politicians, but left capitalism in place.
Now Ramaphosa’s government starves poor migrant workers to death in order to serve the interests of the capitalists. It shows the need to overthrow not only a racist system of government, but the entire system of capitalist exploitation itself.