the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Mar 3, 2025
When Ukrainian president Zelensky came to the White House, he was berated by Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. Vance said Zelensky was “disrespectful” because he didn’t tell Trump “thank you” as the U.S. government was demanding a deal in which Ukraine would hand over much of its mineral wealth. This confrontation played out in front of TV cameras, perhaps intentionally.
Trump claimed that he is all about stopping the war in Ukraine and bringing peace. He says that taking Ukraine’s mineral wealth is repayment for all the money the U.S. government gave to Ukraine during the war. But, in fact, very little of this money actually ended up in Ukraine. Most of the money ended up in the pockets of U.S. weapons manufacturers who built the weapons shipped to Ukraine.
What Trump is doing has nothing to do with peace. It has everything to do with money and profits. Today Trump is trying to cut a deal with Putin to share the wealth of Ukraine between U.S. capitalists and Russian oligarchs. He is also trying to keep competitors, like European capitalists, away from this wealth. The wealth in Ukraine that Trump wants for U.S. capitalists includes many minerals and metals that are essential to industry and manufacturing. Ukraine has very rich agricultural land that U.S. capitalists are already getting their hands on.
Trump is certainly going in a different direction on Ukraine than Biden. Biden’s bloody policy of war killed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians. Trump’s deal to end the war will strip Ukraine of its wealth and impoverish the Ukrainian people. Trump is picking up from where Biden left off; at its core, it is the same fundamental policy. Both of them have wanted to advance the interests of U.S. capitalists and U.S. imperialism, whatever the situation is.
The war in Ukraine was used by Biden and the U.S. government to weaken Russia. When Putin ordered the Russian military to brutally invade Ukraine, he was reacting to threats from the U.S. government and NATO, who have stationed troops, warplanes and missiles right up to the Russian border. The U.S. surrounded Russia by throwing lots of money at former Soviet states to pull them into NATO and the European Union and away from Russia. The U.S. supported the ouster of a president in Ukraine who was friendly to Russia. The U.S. was training Ukrainian military forces before the war started, and U.S. generals helped direct the war after it started.
For three years, the Biden administration sent weapons to Ukraine to keep the war going. So, when Trump claims that Ukraine should pay for its war against Russia, he has it backwards. This was a U.S. war against Russia, using the Ukrainians as its proxies and cannon fodder.
The U.S. government also applied economic sanctions to weaken the Russian economy. These sanctions also weakened the economies of European countries who are competitors of U.S. capitalists.
The war in Ukraine has meant carnage and destruction for millions of people in Ukraine, and in Russia. Hundreds of thousands of people have died, soldiers and civilians, Ukrainian and Russian. Several million people have been displaced from their homes. These people are the victims of the war.
But for U.S. imperialism, the Ukrainian and Russian people are just the pawns. U.S. imperialism, whether represented by Biden or Trump, uses any means against any peoples in the drive for profit of U.S. capitalists. Sometimes that means pushing a war, as Biden did in Ukraine. Now it may mean cutting a deal with Putin, as Trump is doing, a deal which will mean exploitation for the Ukrainian and Russian people.
U.S. imperialism, with the strongest military and the dominant economy in the world, tries to impose its order on the rest of the world. In doing so, U. S. imperialism, in the face of a long-standing capitalist economic crisis and competition between capitalist states, is driving the world toward more wars and bigger wars. We are headed for more poverty for the working peoples of every country, whether in Ukraine, Russia, China, Europe or the U.S.
What all working people in every country have in common is that this capitalist system is against our interests. And we have in common that the working class has the collective power to get rid of this capitalist system.
Mar 3, 2025
A total of 334 Indian citizens had been deported from the U.S. to India by the Trump administration as of February 16. They were kept handcuffed and shackled for the duration of the 40 to 60 hour military flights.
They were not convicted of any crime or accused of any terrorist acts. An Indian civil liberties group rightly calls their treatment torture and accuses Indian officials of violating the Indian constitution by accepting that Indian citizens are treated this way.
Colombia refuses to accept deportees in handcuffs and shackles, after Biden tried deporting Colombians this way in 2023. Mexico and Brazil also refuse.
It’s already torture enough for the U.S. to rip people away from the lives they have built here. Dividing working people only benefits the exploiters.
Mar 3, 2025
DoorDash made a deal with the New York Attorney General’s office to pay about 17 million dollars as compensation for delivery workers the company stole tips from. From May 2017 to September 2019, DoorDash had used tips that customers paid online to cover part of the workers’ base pay.
But the money DoorDash is supposed to pay comes to $1.50 per delivery—surely less than the amount it stole from its workers!
DoorDash is a huge company: it is valued at 81 billion dollars, and it controls 60% of the online food deliveries in the U.S. And DoorDash’s biggest shareholders include some Wall Street giants such as BlackRock, the Vanguard Group, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase.
So, this is how Wall Street billionaires make their fabulous fortunes: stealing from workers who are not even paid the minimum wage.
Mar 3, 2025
They keep saying Musk is making the government more efficient. But he’s just getting rid of workers without looking at what they do. Already the government had to re-hire some workers in the FDA, Nuclear Regulatory Agency, and other agencies.
Now federal workers are supposed to say what they did last week in 5 bullet points. How about this:
Mar 3, 2025
Agencies across the federal government are cutting offices that enforce civil rights and antidiscrimination laws, making it even harder to protect workers’ rights and prevent discrimination.
The Social Security Administration announced it was closing its Office of Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity. Other agencies are severely REDUCING their in-agency equal opportunity offices that are mandated by law to ensure equal opportunity “regardless of race, sex, national origin, color, religion, disability or reprisal for engaging in prior protected activity.”
In other words, they’re cutting the programs that prevent discrimination.
The Trump administration’s stated goal is “to forge a color-blind and merit based” society. To do this, the administration is telling schools what they can and cannot teach. Erase slavery and Jim Crow from history or at least put a happy spin on it. Supposedly, learning about slavery will make children feel bad, and that is considered a legitimate reason to not teach the truth in school!
The administration wants to say there are no “groups,” only individuals. At the same time the administration is banning transgender people—a whole group of people—from the military, not based on merit but simply because they are part of this group. One of Trump’s first executive orders was to say there are two sexes, male and female. Two more groups. Which is it—are we all individuals, or are we grouped as females, males or transgender?
Now it is encouraged to view all women and minority workers as DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) hires. The message is that they do not have merit to be in those jobs, simply because they are women, or black or another minority.
The fact is, everyone needs a job that pays the bills. But this economic system cannot and will not provide that job for everyone. Not even close.
We are not all the same. Some people own the means of production: the factories, banks, offices. The rest of us have to sell our labor-time to those owners.
In the past, huge mass movements were needed to make changes allowing more black workers to get better paying positions, for example. Only a collective struggle of workers, of ordinary people against the wealthy class, can make changes. But a mass movement cannot stop at crumbs; the working class must take power to put an end to the capitalist class’s drive for profits.
Mar 3, 2025
A water main broke in Southwest Detroit. The resulting flooding damaged nearly 400 homes, going up to the first floor in some, and destroying water heaters and other appliances in many. The swirling 5-foot-deep river pushed many cars down the flooded streets, destroying or severely damaging many.
Officials expect it to take six weeks before all repairs are done. One week after the break, close to 700 people were still living in local hotels, depending on donations for water and food, much of which was substandard.
This break is nothing new. The pipe that broke was a 54-inch transmission line installed in 1930. The city has thousands of miles of water mains that were made between the late 1800s and the 1940s. It constantly has crews working to replace the lines, but they can’t keep up enough to prevent more from breaking.
In winter, the ground freezes and shifts, and some old pipes inevitably break, damaging people’s homes and cars and disrupting many lives.
The city of Detroit may be making efforts to replace the water lines, but they should have been replaced long ago. The city admits these cast-iron pipes are expected to have about a 50-year lifespan. But instead of fixing the city’s infrastructure, the politicians are too busy giving tax breaks to the big corporations and billionaires like Dan Gilbert and the Ilitches. What a joke!
Mar 3, 2025
Elon Musk has been all over the news this month, on his “quest” to make indiscriminate cuts to the federal government. But Elon Musk owes many of his billions to direct subsidies from the federal government to his companies.
The Washington Post reported this week that Musk’s companies received at least 38 billion dollars, making him “one of the greatest beneficiaries of the taxpayers’ coffers.” Nearly two-thirds of that money was handed over just in the last five years. And Musk’s companies are slated to receive 11.8 billion more in the next five years. Moreover, Post reporters noted Musk companies receive contracts with the Department of Defense and similar agencies whose amounts are not publicly available—so the amounts are even higher.
Much of that money was key to the development of his companies, in particular Tesla and SpaceX.
In 2008, Musk applied for a 465 million dollar loan for Tesla from the Department of Energy. He was only able to land the loan through the direct intervention of the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson. The loan came in in 2010, allowing the company to buy a factory in Fremont, California, and to engineer and assemble its Model S sedan. According to a former high-level Tesla employee, without that, “Tesla would not have survived…. It was a critical loan at a critical time.”
Tesla received 11.4 billion dollars in regulatory credits from federal and state governments; they get these credits because their cars are electric. They sell the “credits” to other companies that do not produce enough “clean” vehicles. Tesla’s first profitable quarter in 2013 was due to those credits. In 2020, Tesla would have shown a 700-million-dollar loss for the year, based on sales revenue. But with the government subsidy, the company instead booked 862 million in profit—its first profitable year. About a third of Tesla’s 35 billion in profits since 2014 came from these credits.
Tesla has also received outside handouts from state and local governments. For example, nearly three billion dollars from the state of Nevada, and 750 million dollars from New York, because it opened a medium-sized factory in Buffalo.
Tesla also benefits from the $7,500 credit given to buyers of electric vehicles. But Musk wants to end this credit—Tesla is established now; in his own words, he thinks ending the credit “will be devastating for our competitors.”
Similarly, Musk’s SpaceX was nurtured in its early years by both NASA and the Department of Defense, benefiting from advice and money long before sending anything into orbit. NASA gave SpaceX more than a billion dollars to ferry astronauts and materials to the International Space Station. The president of SpaceX herself said in an interview, “I don’t know what life would look like without that program for SpaceX…. We wouldn’t have this beautiful factory; we wouldn’t have this beautiful conference room with these incredibly comfy chairs. Yes, this is as much NASA as it is SpaceX here.”
Jeff Bezos, Musk’s competitor—and owner of The Washington Post—was undoubtedly jealous when he said, “Elon’s real super power is getting government money.”
Mar 3, 2025
In the U.S., the five largest egg-producing companies supply half the nation’s eggs. These huge producers took advantage of their position in 2024 to raise their profits over 250%—two and a half times!—compared to 2023.
The largest producer, Cal-Maine, increased their profit by 340%, from 323 million dollars in 2023 to 1.2 billion dollars in 2024.
Cal-Maine is the only publicly owned corporation that must file its financial reports. The other four are privately owned and keep their figures close to the vest.
An Arkansas professor explained that when an egg shortage develops, the biggest producers are in a position to hold out for the best bid from stores like Kroger or Walmart. It’s extortion. They hold the eggs for a king’s ransom.
Several lawsuits against the big producers’ price-fixing have been filed in the past 20 years. Kraft and General Mills sued in 2011. In the court case, lawyers found an actual letter to the United Egg Producers, stating, “There should be a core segment of the industry that is willing to reduce egg supply in order to achieve profitable egg prices.” In other words, they fix egg prices like OPEC fixes oil prices.
Bird flu for them is just another opportunity to use a small shortage to make large profits. To the public, they can blame bird flu for a shortage and pretend that prices just naturally have to rise.
In 2024, the combined profits of the top five egg producers soared to 1,477,000,000 dollars MORE than the profits they made in 2023.
Mar 3, 2025
When big, devastating fires hit Los Angeles in January, the L.A. Fire Department could not even deploy all the firefighters who had reported to work. The reason? Dozens of aging fire trucks were broken and lacking parts.
L.A. fire officials said that about 100 fire vehicles, more than half the department’s fleet, were out of service in January, along with 40 other vehicles, including ambulances.
It’s not just L.A. Fire departments across the U.S. have to wait for years for new trucks they have ordered to arrive—parts for broken trucks can take up to a year to be delivered, the New York Times reported recently.
And prices have soared too: ladder trucks that cost 1.3 million dollars just a few years ago, now go for 2.3 million dollars.
It’s all because of monopoly control of the industry: only three companies make about 70 to 80% of the specialty vehicles (fire trucks, ambulances, street sweepers, etc.) in the U.S. These companies have been jacking up prices and taking their time to deliver orders.
About 25 years ago, there were many relatively small fire vehicle manufacturers in the U.S. When some of these companies began to fail, Wall Street investment firms moved in to buy them at a low price. They then merged companies and cut back wherever they could to increase profit. One of these companies, Rev Group, cut down production by about one-third in 2021 by closing two plants. Today, Rev Group, which controls 30% of the fire truck market, has a backlog of orders worth 4 billion dollars, and tells fire departments delivery will take two to three years!
But while fire departments scramble to get their aging trucks to work, Rev Group’s profits have soared. Its parent company, the private equity firm American Industrial Partners, awarded its shareholders a special dividend of 180 million dollars in 2024—80 million of it to itself—before selling nearly all of its shares.
January’s fires in the L.A. area destroyed more than 16,000 structures, including 11,500 homes, and killed at least 29 people. How many of these homes and lives could have been saved if Wall Street firms had not been gutting the fire truck industry?
Mar 3, 2025
60 years ago in February, Malcolm X was assassinated while speaking to a meeting of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), an organization he had recently helped found. Whoever pulled the trigger, the U.S. government was involved, at least indirectly, and maybe directly—as recently opened FBI files would indicate.
Born Malcolm Little, he had seen his father lynched in Michigan. Like many others of his generation, he gained his first education in the streets, becoming involved as a teenager in street crime, gambling, later burglary, for which he was sent to prison. While in prison, he read and learned from Elijah Muhammad’s newspaper, Muhammad Speaks. Nation of Islam militants were the first people he heard call on black people to defend themselves.
Paroled from prison at the age of 27, he joined the Nation of Islam and threw himself into activity to win new people, first in Detroit, where he was chiefly responsible for tripling the membership in less than a year, then to Chicago, where he studied with Elijah Muhammad. He was sent to help establish other temples in both Boston and Philadelphia, then Harlem, which was to become his base and provide him with a permanent platform.
His influence eventually outpaced that of the Nation of Islam. The assassination was aimed at smothering it.
He was undoubtedly one of the most powerful and militant popular speakers this country has ever known. With his directness, the analogies he took from daily experience, the biting humor he used to confront his audience about their own hesitations and illusions, he found the way to speak to the poor black masses in a way that no one else had done.
He defined himself in a famous analogy he often used: that of the house slave and the field slave. (This version is from Message to the Grass Roots.)
There were two kinds of slaves, the house Negro and the field Negro. The house Negroes—they lived in the house with master, they dressed pretty good, they ate good because they ate his food—what he left. They lived in the attic or the basement, but still they lived near the master; and they loved the master more than the master loved himself. They would give their life to save the master’s house—quicker than the master would….
If you came to the house Negro and said, ‘Let’s run away, let’s escape, let’s separate,’ the house Negro would look at you and say, Man, you crazy. What you mean, separate? Where is there a better house than this? Where can I wear better clothes than this? Where can I eat better food than this? ...
On that same plantation, there was the field Negro. The field Negroes—those were the masses…. The field Negro was beaten from morning to night; he lived in a shack, in a hut; he wore old, castoff clothes. He hated his master. I say he hated his master. He was intelligent…. When the house caught on fire, he didn’t try to put it out; that field Negro prayed for a wind, for a breeze. When the master got sick, the field Negro prayed that he’d die. If someone came to the field Negro and said, Let’s separate, let’s run, he didn’t say Where we going? He’d say, Any place is better than here.
You’ve got field Negroes in America today. I’m a field Negro. The masses are the field Negroes. When they see this man’s house on fire, you don’t hear the little Negroes talking about our government is in trouble. They say, THE government is in trouble. Imagine a Negro saying, OUR government!—that’s a Negro that is out of his mind, a Negro that is out of his mind.
Malcolm X took his uncompromising stance toward a racist society from the Nation of Islam of that period. While still speaking for the Nation in 1963, Malcolm X was asked, “Do you hate the white man?”
He responded: “How can anybody ask us do we hate the man who kidnapped us four hundred years ago, brought us here and stripped us of our history, stripped us of our culture, stripped us of our language, stripped us of everything that you could use today to prove that you were ever part of the human family, brought you down to the level of an animal, sold you from plantation to plantation like a sack of wheat, sold you like a sack of potatoes, sold you like a horse and a cow, and then hung you up from one end of the country to the other—and then you ask me do I hate him? Why, your question is worthless.” (From The Black Revolution, a speech given at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem.)
Over the years, Malcolm X’s ideas evolved. He began to qualify his denunciation of white society. For example, in a speech given in Detroit, April of 1964, Malcolm X had this to say: “All of us have suffered here, in this country, political oppression at the hands of the white man, economic exploitation at the hands of the white man, and social degradation at the hands of the white man. Now in speaking like this, it doesn’t mean that we’re anti-white, but it does mean we’re anti-exploitation, we’re anti-degradation, we’re anti-oppression. And if the white man doesn’t want us to be anti-him, let him stop oppressing and exploiting and degrading us.” (From The Ballot or the Bullet)
But whatever changes he went through, he never adopted the cynical patriotism of American society, he never celebrated its so-called “democracy.” For example, in that same speech, he declared: “No, I’m not an American. I’m one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy. So, I’m not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter, or a flag-waver—no, not I. I’m speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.”
From its beginnings, the Nation of Islam had insisted that black people had not only the human right, but also the moral duty to defend themselves and their community. The Nation of Islam established self-defense squads to protect its own activities and its own members. In general, the police did not touch activities organized by the Nation of Islam and left their temples alone. This was noticed in black communities which had long suffered under the arbitrary and vicious use of police violence. The defense squads, called the Fruit of Islam (FOI), reinforced what Malcolm said in his speeches: the black population should not let itself be pushed around. “We do not look for trouble. In fact, we are taught to steer clear of trouble. We do not carry knives or guns. But we are also taught that when one finds something that is worthwhile getting into trouble about, he should be ready to die, then and there, for that particular thing.”
Events in Los Angeles in 1962 brought the Nation to a kind of watershed. Although there had already been signs to the contrary, black people in and out of the Nation of Islam had believed that the Nation would not allow an attack on itself to go unanswered. But in April of 1962, Los Angeles cops raided and shot up the Los Angeles temple, killing the secretary of the temple, and wounding seven other Muslims. The seven wounded men and seven others were placed under arrest and later tried. Muslims congregated at the temple; and not only Muslims, people from the neighborhood came there also. Muslims from all over the country streamed into Los Angeles or phoned, saying they were ready to come. But not only did the Nation not organize any kind of response to this aggression; Malcolm X was eventually sent out to Los Angeles to demobilize the Nation’s militants, ordering them to wait on Allah for vengeance. For Malcolm himself, it felt like a betrayal of those he had long addressed.
For a whole period, the Nation of Islam, on the basis of its uncompromising stance, had attracted the most radicalized section of the black population. But just when the population was becoming even more radicalized, the Nation of Islam began to retreat into its religious side, and to make its first obvious compromise with American society. Malcolm’s voice began to be stifled.
When John F. Kennedy was killed in November 1963, Malcolm was asked about it. Denouncing U.S. involvement in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo and Ngo Dinh Diem in South Viet Nam, he commented, “Being an old farm boy myself, I was never sad to see chickens coming home to roost.” Elijah Muhammad disciplined Malcolm X, ordering him to keep silent for 90 days.
Whatever differences had been evolving inside the Nation, this brought them in the open. In March of 1964, it became obvious that Malcolm X would not be reinstated. He announced the formation of The Muslim Mosque Inc. In May of 1964, he announced the formation of a non-religious organization, the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU).
Nine months later he would be dead.
In the last year of his life, Malcolm X made it clear that he was ready to bring down American society, if that was what it took for black people to escape oppression. “We have to create a situation that will explode this world sky high unless we are heard from when we ask for some kind of recognition as human beings. This is all we want—to be a human being. If we can’t be recognized and respected as a human being, we have to create a situation where no human being will enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. (From The Second OAAU Rally)
He only indirectly said—and that only at the very end of his life—that the poor black population, the masses, could never be free until that society was brought down.
If Malcolm X had lived, would he have come to the point that he could have given the clear goal of overturning capitalist society to the black masses? Would he have developed the perspective that the black masses, almost all of them workers, could have led the assault on capitalist society in which all the laboring poor would have an interest?
No one can say for sure. In that time period, such a possibility existed. And Malcolm himself had already gone through some important changes in his thinking. What he could have done, we can’t know.
But we do know that he addressed the poor masses as a leader worthy of their respect, someone like themselves. He gave them the concrete aims needed in the fight to defend themselves. The struggles that broke out rested on those aims—starting in 1964 with the Harlem police riot, followed by Watts and others in 1965, Cleveland in 1966, Detroit and Newark in 1967, and widespread in 1968. To a very important extent, the people out in the streets in that period were Malcolm X’s legacy.
Yes, the ruling class of this country wanted him silenced. But his words remained. His legacy lives—for new generations to make their own and go beyond.
Mar 3, 2025
The following is excerpted and translated from the January 29 issue, #2948 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
After the ceasefire in Gaza, Israel’s war waged on the Palestinians in the West Bank has escalated.
As soon as the truce was signed on January 19, far-right Israeli settlers multiplied their attacks against Palestinian villages in the north of the territory and became increasingly violent.
These armed gangs exercised terror to drive out the villagers; they have been reinforced by the exactions of the Israeli army itself. Bombings and drone attacks are now systematically accompanied by ground operations, using tanks and bulldozers. The war in the West Bank is being intensified by the “Iron Wall,” the name given by Netanyahu to the warlike attack launched on January 22.
A large proportion of the 18,000 inhabitants of the refugee camp near Jenin, home since 1948 to families driven off their land, have fled the camp. It is now almost uninhabitable, according to an UNRWA official.
While it continues in Jenin, Netanyahu’s military operation extends to other areas, in Tulkarm, Nablus, Hebron, Bethlehem and Dura. The Israeli state thus gives support to the far right, whether or not it is still officially in government. The pretext is to “eradicate terrorist groups” and in fact consists of murdering Palestinian fighters and, beyond that, attempting to terrorize the entire population to the utmost. Since October 7, 2023, attacks by Israeli soldiers or settler groups have killed 853 West Bank Palestinians.
The attackers can only feel strengthened by a bill recently passed by the Knesset’s Law Committee which could facilitate the purchase of real estate and land in the West Bank by Jewish settlers. Settler activists have stepped up their attacks and sniper fire, stealing livestock and poisoning wells, destroying fruit trees and crops, homes, roads and infrastructure.
Actively aided on the spot by Israeli soldiers, these extreme right-wing militants are encouraged not only by Netanyahu’s government, but also by the major powers, who continue to support them politically and financially when necessary. As soon as he was sworn in, Trump showed this by announcing the lifting of sanctions that Biden had levied on violent settlers.
Yet, in the face of this imperialist war machine, the Palestinian population, in Gaza as well as the West Bank and East Jerusalem, continues to give the lie to the odious declaration of Trump’s newly-appointed American ambassador, who presumptuously advanced a few years ago: “Palestinian, there’s no such thing!”
Mar 3, 2025
The following is translated from the February 28, 2025, issue, #2952 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
With 28.6% of the vote, the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union bloc led by very right-wing millionaire Friedrich Merz came out on top in the German elections. Merz’s bloc will lead the next government coalition, even though this vote is almost the lowest in the bloc’s history.
The vote is above all a punishment inflicted by voters on the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD)/Green/Liberal coalition, which has managed to make itself widely hated in three years of a falling standard of living. The SPD led by former chancellor Olaf Scholz plummeted to 16.4%, the lowest vote in its history.
The most striking thing in this election is the vigorous rise of the far right. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party took second place nationally. AfD rose to 20.8%—it doubled its vote in just three years. Voter turnout was very high, six percent higher than previously. Many of the new votes were for AfD candidates.
AfD’s rise is cause for concern, since the party continues its rightward march. AfD is even stronger in the former East Germany than in the west. In the east it won around 30%. It won in almost all the towns with the exception of a few cities such as Berlin.
Among the reasons for this rise is anger against the policies of the Social Democrats and the Greens in government. Voters hold them responsible for the sharp economic decline over the past three years since the start of the war in Ukraine. In the fall of 2024, announcements of mass layoffs flew like buckshot from automotive, chemical and steel corporations. Company after company closed, and subcontractors slashed jobs. Poverty is spreading visibly. Distress is mounting.
During the election campaign, all government parties launched into a bidding war against migrants. This was both a way to align themselves with the AfD in an attempt to raid its votes, and a way to divert attention away from all the everyday difficulties working people have. A series of violent attacks further soured the mood. They did not hesitate to draw a link between crime and immigration. Then the Trump administration weighed in, giving strong support to AfD leader Alice Weidel. U.S. vice president J.D. Vance and Elon Musk repeatedly called for a vote for AfD.
However, on the other side of the political spectrum, so-called radical left party Die Linke (The Left) made strong progress. Its vote rose from less than five percent to 8.8%. This is all the more striking since some people saw Die Linke as on life support after longtime official Sahra Wagenknecht split out her faction in 2024. She created the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), an anti-immigrant, so-called left-wing party that criticizes Die Linke for acceptance of immigrants, claiming that immigration “disserves German workers.” BSW got 4.97%, meaning it almost got into the national legislature. Die Linke’s near nine percent means that several million voters, including a quarter of young voters, chose to say no to the major parties’ policies of austerity, militarization, and the hunting down of migrants.
In January, Merz appealed for help from AfD legislators to support a bill restricting immigration and family reunification. This caused a legislative uproar, and his bill was rejected. There were huge demonstrations across the country. Hundreds of thousands of people marched against the danger of the extreme right and criticized Merz for unleashing prejudice.
Of course, protests are not enough to change things or push back the extreme right—as this election shows. For the situation of working people to stop deteriorating, workers will have to attack the employers on their own turf, the economy, and resume strikes and mobilizations by the whole working class.
Mar 3, 2025
This article is translated from the February issue, #323 of La Voix des Travailleurs (Workers Voice), the paper of Organisation des Travailleurs Revolutionaires (Organization of Revolutionary Workers), a Trotskyist group active in Haiti.
While the gangs continue to attack the population, relentlessly massacring the inhabitants of working-class neighborhoods, some politicians and media commentators propose an amnesty or a negotiation with these criminals. These speeches, under the guise of pragmatism, are nothing but a dangerous illusion aimed at morally disarming the masses and legitimizing the grip of the gangs on the country.
Those who advocate reconciliation with the gangs ignore or pretend to ignore an indisputable reality: the bandits have never paused in their abuses. The massacres continue, ever more bloody and systematic. In Kenscoff, dozens of people were massacred by armed gangs, forcing hundreds of families to flee their homes. In Grepin (Gros Morne), in Wharf Jérémie, and in Savien in the Artibonite, the same scenario is repeated: mass executions, looting, arson, gang rapes.
Asking the population to negotiate with these murderers is like asking the sheep to forgive the wolves or to live peacefully in the same sheepfold. Since when have executioners been negotiating with their victims? Since when has reconciliation been achieved between the oppressors and the oppressed?
The gangs of Viv Ansanm (“Live Together”) know that they have the balance of power in their favor. They control more than 80% of the capital, possess an arsenal of war, and enjoy the complicity of the country’s economic and political elites. Under these conditions, why would they agree to negotiate? What interest would they have in giving up their privileges and their fortunes?
If the gangs had, even for a moment, shown signs of truce, one might be tempted to justify the idea of a negotiation or an amnesty. If they had lifted the blockades on the national roads, stopped kidnapping passengers, opened public markets and put an end to illegal toll booths, then some might have seen a desire for dialogue. But this is not the case. On the contrary! They are accelerating their criminal enterprise. Their grip on the country is expanding day by day, they are multiplying attacks on the population, expanding their areas of control and perfecting their methods of terror. They are warlords, not repentants.
By advocating amnesty and dialogue, these politicians and commentators are trying to put the masses to sleep, to disarm them psychologically in the face of their executioners. This propaganda aims to keep the population in submission and to legitimize the impunity of criminals.
What these illusion-makers forget is that the working classes have already proven that they can turn the tide. In April 2023, exasperated by the gangs’ atrocities, thousands of residents rose up and neutralized hundreds of bandits in a wave of spontaneous popular revolt. The only force that the gangs fear is the mobilization of the masses.
The inhabitants of working-class neighborhoods are in the majority. They know the terrain, they know where these criminals are hiding. It is through mass organization, a generalized response, that the gangs will be defeated. They will not leave with speeches, but under the pressure of a determined popular uprising.
Mar 3, 2025
In the space of a month, Donald Trump has made it clear how he intends to govern: with a heavy hand, with as much power as he can grab.
Trump’s executive orders all have one thing in common: They are claiming more and more power for the president.
Trump claims he has the power to fire independent inspectors general for no reason. He says he can take control of departments and agencies that Congress had created to be independent. He and his buddy Elon slash budgets and jobs, stopping money that Congress allocated.
Trump also claimed the power to interpret the Constitution above and beyond the Supreme Court with his order ending Birthright Citizenship.
Trump’s billionaire backers subscribe to the idea of the “Unitary Executive”, the idea that the president IS the Executive Branch, and so should have direct control over every department within it. They say that Congress and the courts don’t have the right to control any aspect of the Executive Branch; only the president does. The goal is to put the president above the other branches and give the Presidency massively more power.
How much power he is able to grab for himself remains to be seen. Congress does not seem to be in any hurry to grab back the powers Trump has claimed for himself. Republicans are going right along with it, and Democrats are making only weak protests. Various judges have already blocked a number of those executive orders, but those are likely to move up to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has already made clear how it leans with its ruling that presidents are immune from prosecution for anything they do while they are president.
Even by trying these moves, even if not successful, Trump is testing the waters for what might be possible in the future. And even if not successful right now, these moves could set a path for the gathering of even more power—dictatorial power—in the hands of one person.
But this is not just one person’s desire for power. There is a whole administration working through a whole plan. And behind all of them, there is a whole class, the bourgeoisie, saying that this flirtation with dictatorship is okay.
This is the mark of a society in crisis. The Capitalist class knows that for them to keep increasing their profits, the working class is going to have to suffer more and more. Protecting their profits produces more instability in their system, needing more attacks on the working class—producing more anger. They know they will need a heavy hand to come down on the working class, and they are ready to accept a dictator in the Oval Office if they feel they need it. When the time comes, they know they can’t afford even the mirage of “democracy” that this government provides. Trump’s moves pave the way, no matter how far along the path he gets.
This is true on the world stage, too. Trump demanding Ukraine’s mineral resources, ordering Europe around, threatening tariffs on Mexico and Canada—this is the American State, and the American capitalist class, telling the world that the mask of diplomacy is off. The American capitalist class is hungry—hungry for resources, hungry for profits. That also can produce only more instability, with the real possibility of widening wars. Again, the working class—of the world—will be the ones to pay, and again, the capitalist class will have even more need for a strongman government.
The only thing that makes sense for the working class to do—is to get ready to protect itself, collectively. And NOT to expect others, Republicans or Democrats, to save us. Whatever they do, it is not in our interests. And whoever is president, they will use that power against us.
This system, the world, is headed to greater crisis. We can’t stop that from happening, but we can be ready to fight for ourselves, using the collective power WE have.
And we can wrest a new society from the crumbling of the old.
Mar 3, 2025
For years the Phenix Lumber mill in Phenix, Alabama was the deadliest workplace in America, measured by injuries per worker. Although the sawmill never employed more than 50 workers at a time, 28 workers experienced horrible injuries in the last 15 years, including three gruesome deaths. In one fatality, only 23 pounds of a worker’s body was recovered from a machine.
This lethal workplace is owned by the richest capitalist family in eastern Alabama, who also built subdivisions and owned a local bank. A state forestry board member said they “taught me the art of making money.”
Meanwhile the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration has been toothless since its creation in 1971. OSHA is unable to shut down or compel change at workplaces with repeated willful fatal safety violations by management. OSHA regulators issued the sawmill more than 180 citations since 2003, but it was like throwing paper in the wind. Only when the town caught the company illegally stealing water from a hydrant did anything change.
The government has never been a friend or protector of working people.
Mar 3, 2025
While bird flu has caused the loss of 115 chicken flocks, totaling 23 million birds, and corporations use this to profit-gouge on the price of eggs, the Elon Musk DOGE team fired U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) specialists fighting the bird flu outbreak.
The USDA told NBC News that “we are working swiftly to rectify the situation and rescind those letters.” The layoffs hit the National Animal Health Laboratory Network, which does critical lab work, and hit state-level support labs.
At the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, director Keith Poulsen said, “It’s creating a lot of problems.”
No kidding!
Mar 3, 2025
In late February, the Republican majority in the House of Representatives passed a budget plan that will rob tens of millions of people of vital health care, as well as aid for nutrition, housing and education in order to hand all that money—and more—to the super-rich and the biggest corporations, through massive tax breaks and other giveaways.
The biggest cuts are aimed at health care, especially Medicaid, the largest health care provider in the country. As it is, Medicaid health care coverage is extremely inadequate, and often a real horror show. Those on Medicaid often have to wait months for a doctor’s appointment or vital tests. They are often rushed out of the hospital way too early after an important operation. And they often don’t get the necessary preventive care that keeps them from getting sick in the first place.
But so much of the U.S. population is low income, one in five people in the U.S. are now on Medicaid. That means half of all children, almost half of all women giving birth, long term care for millions of the elderly and disabled, as well as working adults in low wage jobs that do not offer affordable coverage—they all depend on Medicaid. And not only that: safety net hospitals in big cities, as well as the dwindling number of hospitals that serve rural areas, also depend on supplemental financing from Medicaid in order to keep their doors open.
Thus, a trillion dollars in cuts to Medicaid would not only mean that tens of millions of people would lose health care coverage all together, but ever bigger stretches of the U.S. would become health care deserts, with no providers at all. And that means higher infant mortality rates, falling life expectancies and a worsening threat of epidemics … a real health care disaster for big parts of the population.
The Republicans’ budget plan also calls for 230 billion dollars in cuts to food stamps (now known as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP), a cut of about 20% from a program that serves 40 million people, and one in every five children. These cuts would mean that millions are thrown off of food stamps, while benefits are reduced, thus accelerating the ongoing increase of hunger and malnutrition … in one of the biggest food-producing countries in the world.
As for the 330 billion dollars in cuts in funding for education and housing—they too are aimed at the working class and poor.
And what is guaranteed is that all the cuts to vital funding for the working class and the poor won’t be enough. In a couple of years, the Republicans—as well as the Democrats—will come back and demand more. Because the giveaways and tax breaks for the super wealthy and the big corporations, all the big budget increases for the military, Homeland Security and the Border Patrol, will be so massive, the budget deficit will continue to grow and explode.
No part of this society, no part of the population can be safe from the predatory drive of the capitalist class for ever more profits and wealth, no matter what the cost.
Mar 3, 2025
A young child tragically died of measles at a Lubbock, Texas hospital at the end of February. A measles outbreak has hit at least 124 children in one month in rural Texas. It has been spreading fast in areas with low vaccination rates. This is the worst outbreak in Texas in 30 years.
In addition to Texas, nine other states have now reported measles cases: Alaska, California, Kentucky, Georgia, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Rhode Island, and Washington.
These numbers may not sound that large, but new research by Dr. Michael Mina and others has revealed that measles destroys immune cells. Even people who recover from measles lose much of their immune memory. Protections from prior illnesses and vaccinations get wiped out. The immune system takes years to recover.
Measles is highly contagious and can cause serious harm. Before an effective vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) was developed, about four million people came down with measles in the U.S. each year, of whom 400 to 500 died and about 1,000 suffered permanent brain damage.
Some medical researchers now suspect that before the measles vaccine, as many as half of all childhood deaths from disease were related to measles.
Once mass MMR vaccination of children began in the early 1970s, measles cases quickly diminished. By 2000, the World Health Organization declared measles eliminated from the U.S.
Doctors say a 95% vaccination rate is needed to prevent the spread of measles. But in recent years, vaccination rates in the U.S., as well as the world, have stayed significantly below that level.
Yes, there are parents who choose not to get their children vaccinated. Social media is inundated with false claims, especially the disproven claim that vaccines cause autism. But the fundamental reason for low vaccination rates is the lack of well-funded public health services.
Huge cutbacks in funding for public health services have gone on for decades. At the same time, public funding has increased to for-profit healthcare corporations. Both are symptoms of the fundamental disease that has infected human society in our age: capitalism.