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 17, 2025
On March 8, Homeland Security agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University student activist who took part in protests against the massacre in Gaza. The Trump administration is trying to deport him, even though he has not been accused of a crime and is a legal U.S. resident. Since then, agents have removed at least two more students. Trump promises these arrests are the first of many, that “agitators will be imprisoned/ or permanently sent back to the country from which they came.”
The Trump administration has also cut off 400 million dollars in funding for Columbia and published a list of 60 universities it is investigating. To get their 400 million back, the Trump administration told Columbia it would have to crack down on protest and a whole academic department it didn’t like. In response, on March 13, Columbia announced it was expelling some student protestors, and it even revoked the earned degrees of a few.
Like the Biden administration that pushed Columbia and other universities into smashing student protests and arresting protestors in the first place, Trump justifies all this by claiming that these protests constitute antisemitic attacks on Jewish students. It is undoubtedly true that some protestors cheered on Hamas, which carried out the terrorist attack of October 7, 2023. But others were demonstrating to oppose U.S. involvement in the Israeli state’s massacre of Palestinians.
It is not antisemitic to criticize the murder of tens of thousands of people in Gaza. One of the first groups attacked as antisemitic for organizing protests was a group called Jewish Voice for Peace, which organizes Jewish people to support the rights of Palestinians. In fact, it is antisemitic to claim, as Trump does, that all Jews must identify with the bloody policies of the Israeli state!
No, these claims of antisemitism are just an excuse to justify attacking the right to speak out against war and massacre.
Students at places like Columbia might be from more privileged layers of the population, disconnected from the working class. But they have sometimes been the first to react to the outrage of war. They do not have the power to stop wars, but they have inspired others to act, including the working class which potentially has that power. The attack on these students is thus aimed at forcing the U.S. population into line behind the murderous war Israel has carried out for the last year and a half with U.S. support—and behind the wars to come.
Trump is not the first president to attack protestors or to arrest people for speaking out—especially against a war. During World War I, Eugene Debs, leader of the Socialist Party, was one among many jailed for saying the truth, that workers had no interest in that war. In the run-up to World War II, the government imprisoned members of the Socialist Workers Party for speaking out against war. During the McCarthy period after World War II, communists and those accused of being communists were run out of the universities and unions. Some were locked up, some deported—and others killed.
The repression was aimed well beyond those it directly targeted. It was aimed at scaring the whole population into falling in line behind the wars the U.S. state apparatus carried out in the interests of its capitalist class, whether against Germany, Japan, or Italy, or against nationalist struggles for independence in Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere.
Trump may be particularly crude. But behind Trump is a whole state apparatus, and a whole capitalist class served by that state apparatus. With this system sliding toward more and bigger wars, the U.S. state is looking to expand its control over resources and populations including by the threat of wars, or actual wars. Trump expresses this most bluntly in his demands to take over Canada and Greenland, to extort Ukraine’s mineral wealth, and in his trade wars against anyone and everyone.
War always means demanding sacrifices from the population and repressing those who organize against those sacrifices. And imperialist wars like those they are preparing rest on lies, trying to get workers to line up behind their own bosses, their own state, to fight against workers in other countries.
Workers have no interest in going along with any of this. The attack on the universities is part of a drive to get the whole population to fall into line. But the working class has the numbers and central place in the economy to give it the possibility to refuse being led quietly to the slaughter.
Mar 17, 2025
President Trump has suddenly become the champion fighter against antisemitism, practically threatening Columbia University’s mere existence for the role some of its students and faculty played in last year’s pro-Palestinian protests. The Trump administration is demanding Columbia expel them.
Seriously?
This is the same billionaire-trash Donald Trump who praised neo-Nazis who carried out a torch-lit parade on Charlottesville, Virginia during his first term, shouting, “Jews will not replace us!” and saying there were good people on all sides there.
This is the same Trump whose unelected hatchet man Elon Musk has made his antisemitism crystal clear. In his inauguration day speech, Musk twice gave the audience what appeared to be a stiff-armed “Heil Hitler” salute. Days later, Musk responded to criticism of his gestures, by cracking puns using the names of Nazi mass murderers like Rudolf Hess, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels and Herman Goering. Then, Musk traveled to Germany to show his support at a campaign rally for the far-right party Alternative fur Deutschland, telling the crowd, “There is too much focus on past guilt....”
How dare these powerful scum pretend to be defenders against antisemitism? When will they be brought up on charges and made to suffer the consequences? Only when the working class organizes to hold their feet to the fire!
Mar 17, 2025
Elon Musk and President Trump put on a big show by having five Tesla vehicles delivered to the White House lawn. It was all a stunt set up for Trump to provide free advertising for his soon-to-be-trillionaire buddy Musk’s EV company. Trump got into one of the cars and declared that he planned to buy one.
Trump and Musk’s antics make perfect sense when you consider that Tesla’s stock exchange value has dropped almost 50% since December, due to declining vehicle sales. It remains to be seen whether Trump’s free-of-charge endorsement results in anyone besides himself actually buying one of Musk’s ugly-assed cars.
Mar 17, 2025
Despite a public outcry from residents and local officials, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is refusing to test the soil for toxic substances in areas affected by the recent Los Angeles wildfires. FEMA officials say that removing six inches of topsoil makes it safe for residents.
But past experience tells the opposite. It is well known that, when household items burn, they release all kinds of hazardous substances into the air and soil. And heavy rains, as they occurred in the L.A. area after the fires, take these substances deeper into the soil and underground water.
Sure enough, tests done by universities and water utilities have found high levels of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), such as benzene, in the air and groundwater in the fire zones—as much as five times higher than in areas without wildfires or heavy traffic. Tests also found dangerous levels of lead and arsenic in the soil, including below six inches.
The results of these initial tests definitely call for more testing, because of the serious health risks involved. VOCs form very fine particles which, when inhaled or ingested, can cause respiratory illness, heart disease and cancer. As for lead and other heavy metals, they are not only highly poisonous to humans, but even very small amounts of lead can stunt a child’s development, both physically and mentally.
FEMA itself was testing the soil in wildfire zones until about five years ago—and often finding high levels of lead and arsenic in the soil, including below six inches. But still, FEMA reversed that policy in 2020 and stopped testing the soil in burn zones.
And why? Because, FEMA officials say, those poisonous substances were probably already there before the fires started. As if it makes any difference to poisoned residents when the poison got into their backyard!
These officials’ complete disregard of people’s well-being is outrageous, but not surprising. These are the same officials, running the same government agencies that constantly cut the budget, lay off workers, and eliminate services that people, and especially working-class people, need—all so that government officials can transfer more of the tax money they collect from working people into the coffers of big companies.
Mar 17, 2025
Deporting immigrants turns out to be big business worth billions for companies close to the government. Federal agency Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has paid between one and two hundred million dollars per year to private companies to fly immigrants in handcuffs out of the country since 2004 or so, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. There are thousands of these flights per year, costing up to $12,000 or even $35,000 per immigrant. The companies keep these planes rundown and under-maintained, but the government as usual looks the other way. ICE also pays to deport immigrants on commercial airlines like United, American, Delta, AeroMexico, and Alaska Airlines.
This year while contracting for over 100 private flights in February alone, Trump very showily added 42 military flights using massive C-17 and C-130 planes. It turns out they were also very expensive: $28,500 per hour, $20,000 per immigrant. In early March, Trump quietly handed all the business back to the for-profit contractors.
These expulsions are barbaric at any price. But the ridiculous amount they’re paying shows they have no shame when it comes to handing money to their corporate buddies.
Mar 17, 2025
See how happy Mr. Musk looks on TV? As well he should. Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump say Musk’s work at the unelected and unappointed DOGE, Department of Government Efficiency, has no connection to his work, so there is no “conflict of interest,” haha.
Musk promised to find trillions in government fraud and waste, and his good buddy, Mr. Trump, has been laying off federal workers, as we hear every day in the media. Eleven federal agencies were involved in 32 investigations into Mr. Musk’s companies and his own financial affairs. Coincidence?
Musk said something unprintable about the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) which has brought three complaints against him that proposed millions in fines. The Republicans will soon have a majority on the commission overseeing the SEC, as the two Democrats on that board have left—voluntarily, no doubt.
Tesla has hundreds of complaints over problems with electric cars in front of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Oh yes, the CFPB no longer exists.
During the election campaign, Mr. Musk offered voters a million dollars in certain states, “to encourage voter registration.” The Federal Election Commission (FEC) received complaints that Mr. Musk’s actions broke federal election law. Oh, the chair of the FEC just got fired.
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) just had some higher-ups fired, so they don’t have the required number of people to rule on certain labor cases. Quite by chance, some Tesla employees have brought suit to the NLRB against the company for discriminatory practices.
Well, that DOGE is certainly working on government waste and fraud, isn’t it! Truly, it needs to be renamed as DOPE, the Department of Profitable Excess.
Mar 17, 2025
The leadership of the United Auto Workers (UAW) put out a statement supporting Trump’s tariffs against Canada and Mexico. They claim that Trump’s tariffs will save the jobs of auto workers in this country.
There is no doubt that many UAW auto worker jobs have been lost. The UAW once had a million and a half members, most of them working at the Big Three auto companies. Today there are less than 150 thousand UAW workers at Ford, GM and Stellantis. Where did the jobs go? The UAW leadership says the problem is that most of these jobs were shipped out of the country. They are not telling the truth. The truth is that many hundreds of thousands of UAW auto worker jobs have been lost to outsourcing INSIDE this country, as the auto companies moved much of their production to low-wage parts producers.
The truth is that hundreds of thousands more auto jobs have been lost to speed-up pushed by the auto corporations. UAW president Shanw Fain said that auto workers have been “bleeding jobs.” But what he doesn’t say is that auto workers are still “bleeding” jobs every single day right now as the companies continue to eliminate jobs and push more work on fewer workers.
Auto companies have always pushed speed-up to increase their profits. Auto workers often have had the reaction to resist this speed-up. But the UAW leadership is not proposing to save jobs by organizing a real fight against this speed-up. This is not new. This goes all the way back to the 1950s when UAW president Walter Reuther tried to stop auto workers who were organizing their own “wildcat” strikes against speed-up.
For many years since then, the union leadership has not proposed a fight against speed-up and outsourcing. Instead, the UAW leadership tries to shift the blame off of the corporations who are responsible for the lost jobs.
The UAW leaders, like leaders in other unions, want workers here to put the blame on workers in other countries for taking jobs. The union leaders want workers here to think we are in competition with workers in other countries. They want workers here to think workers in Canada and Mexico and other countries are our enemies.
No! Our enemies are those capitalist bosses who underpay us and overwork us. Over 150 years ago, Karl Marx said “the working men have no country.” That’s as true today as it was then.
When workers are ready to use our power to make a fight against our bosses, we will have no use for union leaders who try to cover up for the corporate bosses. When workers are ready to make a fight, we will have to find our own leaders who tell the truth and stand on our side.
Mar 17, 2025
The administration at Columbia University has expelled multiple students who took part in protests last year against the slaughter of the Palestinian people in Gaza.
One of the protesters expelled was Grant Miner. Miner helped organize protests at the university, and he also helped organize a union for student workers at Columbia. He is president of the UAW Local 2710, which represents 3,000 student workers at the school. Miner was not only kicked out of school, he was also fired from his job. There was no evidence against him. He just spoke his mind.
This outrageous attack did not just come from Columbia. It came from the Trump administration which pressured the university to do this. Trump and his crew accused protesters of antisemitism, even though Miner himself is Jewish. He is a student at an elite university, an organizer and a union president who was fired and expelled because he was speaking out against a bloody massacre of women and children in Gaza. This is not just an attack on Miner. If they can attack him, they can attack everyone. No one is safe anywhere. We all should protest this outrage.
Mar 17, 2025
This article is translated from the March 14 issue #2954 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
When Russian tanks threatened Kyiv in February 2022, president and former TV actor Volodymyr Zelensky was able to play the role of little David facing giant Goliath and embodying Ukrainian national resistance.
But, after the initial period of sacred national union passed, more and more Ukrainians came to understand that the regime ruled in the service of the rich and only of the rich. After all, Kyiv had constantly attacked working people before the war.
Cases showing the regime’s rottenness come to light periodically. These range from the privilege that allows the wealthy to leave the country to avoid conscription, to the bribes other affluent people pay to elected officials and officers to escape the front. People view this rot as routine.
In the region around the second-largest city Kharkiv, news broke revealing colossal embezzlement by contractors in favor with the administration. Even while the region is under intense bombardment, its road repair budget has “strangely” increased eightfold since 2024. This without any calls for bids and for no apparent reason other than to deliver fresh new roads for Russia’s tanks and bombs. Destruction requires reconstruction—government orders for construction companies which reap enormous war profits. The road budget for Donetsk Oblast, at the heart of the fighting since 2014, has shot up twelvefold this year.
As for the super-rich, the oligarchs, they generally live abroad. They are well sheltered, you could say. They have managed to capture a good part of Western “aid” to Ukraine, with the complicity of the highest echelons of the government. The details are unknown. Even when Soviet-era factories and resources these oligarchs seized were destroyed, or came under Russian control, they managed to hold onto their wealth. They aim to keep it if and when the guns fall silent.
Faced with the extent of such scandals, Zelensky was forced to fire all regional “reconstruction” officials last year. We see how effective this was—not!
Zelensky also regularly fires his highest-ranking generals. He has to shift the blame for military failures on them. He has to try to make people believe he is a bulwark against corruption. But in fact corruption is rife in the military hierarchy. This is all the more revolting for citizens whose standard of living has collapsed and who are called on to give their lives “for the fatherland.”
A year or two ago, the courageous wives, mothers, and sisters of soldiers who protested against remaining at the front until their death seemed isolated. Today, the informal movement against “busification” (the busing of men abducted from the street to the army by local military recruitment brigades) is in every city. Almost every day, videos show “recruiters” attacked in the street by outraged passersby trying to free their human prey. The phenomenon has grown so widespread that the authorities denounce it as “terrorism” and threaten harsh sentences for these street-level “terrorists.”
Officially there are 140,000 deserters—probably more—living and trying to find work while hiding out. But they couldn’t do this if they didn’t have the support of huge numbers of ordinary people.
Mar 17, 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.
When Trump demands that Ukraine give the U.S. exclusive right to the country’s resources and infrastructure to the tune of 500 billion dollars, he crudely puts into words one of the stakes of the war since the start: the sharing of Ukraine’s wealth between American capitalists and Russian oligarchs.
These riches are many. Thousands of square miles of very fertile agricultural land called “black soil” made Ukraine the world’s fourth largest agricultural exporter until 2022. The war accelerated the takeover of these lands by a handful of agri-businesses run by Ukrainian oligarchs but controlled by Western capital, some American, like Goldman Sachs, and some European, like BNP. The war allowed Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to pass a law authorizing companies with foreign capital to buy these lands. Laws inherited from the Soviet period had prohibited this, and successive Ukrainian leaders had never managed to impose this “reform.”
The Ukrainian subsoil is full of minerals essential to modern industrial sectors, such as electric batteries and telecommunications. Titanium, lithium, and certain metals called “rare earths” are particularly coveted. Ukraine also has uranium, which is essential for nuclear power plants. The stakes of the ongoing negotiations, with Trump holding a revolver to Ukraine’s head, are the financial and legal conditions under which American capitalists will be able to exploit and maybe own the mines and factories that extract, process, and refine these minerals. Negotiations are moving forward. In February, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister said that Ukrainian and American teams are in the final phase of negotiations over these minerals.
Control over the Ukrainian economy also takes other forms. Westinghouse has taken over the nuclear sector, the pillar of electricity production in Ukraine. French-owned Crédit Agricole Ukraine became co-owner of the main land-line telecommunications provider and is the third largest cell phone operator in the country. French bank LCL was voted the leading bank in the country for car loans last year. LCL is not the most powerful Western predator to set its sights on Ukraine’s economy. Other capitalists such as retail giant Auchan are very present in Ukraine … and ALSO in Russia.
By negotiating one-on-one with Putin, Trump and his team kill two birds with one stone. They displace European capitalists from the Ukrainian trough, or leave them only with second-choice slops. And they place themselves in first position to resume their dealings in Russia which were hampered by the war but which never fully stopped. Putin said this explicitly on February 23: “We are ready to attract foreign partners to the historical territories that have been returned to Russia…. We are ready to work with our partners, including Americans, in the new regions.”
After three years of war, hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian deaths, and a gulf of hatred dug between two sibling peoples, now bureaucrats, oligarchs, and capitalists are flocking around the juicy Ukrainian prey.
Mar 17, 2025
This article is translated from the February 7 issue, #2949 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
Last month the heir to the KGB in Ukraine, the SBU, carried out a “special operation” in the regions of Kiev, Dnipro, Odessa, Poltava and Kharkiv.
According to the SBU, the operation was aimed at arresting individuals planning to set up “an insurrectionary movement” and “soldiers’ committees” to organize a collective boycott of the fighting among those mobilized and those who might be mobilized.
In a press release, the SBU announced that it had arrested five activists of the Workers’ Front of Ukraine (RFU), a far-left group known for defending communist and internationalist ideas. According to investigators, they allegedly acted on behalf of the Russian Federation by calling on the population to “rise up against the authorities and lay down their arms.” The SBU accuses them of having urged those liable for military service to refuse conscription and soldiers not to carry out orders from the command and to desert.
These defendants, who are aged between 20 and 32, have been imprisoned or placed under house arrest with electronic surveillance. However, despite what the Ukrainian special services claim, they do not appear to belong to the RFU.
On the other hand, it is obvious that the Ukrainian government has fabricated this case in order to frighten public opinion, as opposition to its war policy is gaining ground within the country. The consequences are very real for Zelensky when, almost every day, his troops have to abandon positions to the opposing side. The case of the 155th mechanized brigade, known as Anne of Kiev, is symptomatic. Deployed at the hottest point of the front, in Pokrovsk, and equipped with the latest war machinery, it was supposed to have 2,000 men, most of them trained in France. However, it recently came out that the unit has lost more than half of its personnel, between those who have not returned to Ukraine and those who refuse to fight on the spot.
At this rate, with weeks having been spent solely on negotiations regarding a possible ceasefire, Zelensky could find himself in a situation where he has little left to negotiate with Putin. Even if Trump is no longer boasting that he will “make peace in 24 hours,” even if it means forcing Zelensky’s hand, and if the war drags on, extending its procession of horrors, deaths and destruction on both sides, this is not necessarily good for the government in Kiev. It is even weakened by it, because NATO can flood it with weapons, but it still has to find the men to use them. And for them to accept it, they must at least feel strong popular support behind them. And that is no longer the case.
Zelensky is therefore trying to keep up appearances. Using a trick that he has been using and abusing for the three years that this war has been going on, he has just dismissed a string of generals. And since he hardly seems to believe that the population will hold them responsible for the situation, he is attacking the “enemy within.” In this case, it’s the RFU, which said at the end of February 2022: “Whoever the oligarchs are who win this war, the working class certainly has nothing to gain from it.”
Mar 17, 2025
The following is excerpted from the February 28, 2025 issue #2952 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
On the third anniversary of the start of the war in Ukraine, European states presented a motion to the United Nations demanding the immediate withdrawal of Russian troops. The U.S. voted against it, as did Russia, of course. They voted against it again in the U.N. Security Council….
The Kremlin making common cause with the White House is nothing new. Far from it. For Russian president Vladimir Putin, like his predecessors at the head of the Russian bureaucracy, seeking common ground with the global bourgeoisie and its leaders has been a constant in their policy….
A recent example: just before Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine began in February 2022, the Russian army was sent to suppress major strikes and a mass uprising in Kazakhstan that January. Putin saved the Kazakh bureaucracy and the interests of Western corporations active in the zone of Russian influence where the U.S. could not have intervened directly.
Now, American imperialism has decided that it would be more profitable to reintegrate Russia into the U.S. game. Washington pulls the strings by dropping support of Ukraine in order to stop the inconvenient war as quickly as possible, by dealing only with Russia, and by associating Russia with a possible reorganization of the world order.
This pivot fulfills the dream that the Russian bureaucracy has had since its origin a century ago: to find its place in the capitalist world, to be recognized, and to be able to take full advantage of the wealth Moscow drains from its zone of influence and the exploitation of workers under Moscow’s thumb. Whether this will happen is another question. American imperialism has not abandoned its old project of one day making Russia suffer the fate of Ukraine, which Washington has made dependent and is plundering.
Can the American–Russian talks lead to a truce in the coming weeks? That remains to be seen. But to believe that this would usher in an era of peace, as some say Trump will do, is a serious mistake. War is an indispensable tool in a global capitalist system dominated by the race for profit. Any “peace” is only a truce between two wars.
Mar 17, 2025
This article is translated from the March 14 issue #2954 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
Nearly 1,000 civilians and 500 armed militants were killed on March 6 and 7 in the predominantly Alawite area in western Syria. This comes three months after the overthrow of Syria’s president and dictator Bashar al-Assad by a coalition of militias led by former jihadist Ahmed al-Sharaa, known as al-Golani. These massacres were perpetrated by the most brutal Islamist militias allied with al-Sharaa. They carried out manhunts on ethnic and religious grounds. Al-Sharaa’s militias came to crush a military rebellion organized by officers of al-Assad’s ousted regime, al-Assad being an Alawite.
Al-Sharaa traded his jihadist uniform for a suit and tie when he took power. He has repeatedly called for the inclusion of all Syrian communities and for respect of all minorities in order to end the civil war. But the troops with whom he seized power are no less than before brutes who massacred people and sowed terror for years.
Faced with the outcry over the massacre, al-Sharaa denounced “abuses against civilians” and appointed a national commission of inquiry that is allegedly supposed to “bring the culprits to justice.” This won’t reassure the threatened Alawite population. Nor will it reassure women and other people who fear the new regime will become a fundamentalist religious dictatorship. Al-Sharaa might be a warlord who imposed himself on others. But his power and his room for maneuver are limited. Syria is bled dry, starved, and destroyed by 13 years of civil war. Syria also remains the arena of rivalries between regional powers and imperialist countries.
In the south, Druze militias refuse to disarm or merge into the new Syrian army. Israel is manipulating them as well as repeatedly bombing and sending ground forces under the pretext of protecting them. In the northwest, Syrian National Army militias which are armed by Turkey continue to wage war against the predominantly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), attempting to regain control of a number of towns. The SDF “independently” administers northeast Syria but has been supported and armed until now by the U.S. On March 10, SDF commander-in-chief Mazloum Abdi signed an agreement with al-Sharaa agreeing to merge the civilian and military institutions of Syrian Kurdistan with al-Sharaa’s regime by the end of the year. This agreement was signed under intense pressure mostly from the U.S. on the Kurds.
U.S. imperialist leaders like everyone else would like the new regime to demonstrate the ability to reunify and stabilize Syria. But imperialism has been fueling chaos and instability for decades. Recently, Trump’s decision to cut funding to USAID shut down all mine clearing operations in Syria and all health programs and water and food distribution, especially in Syrian refugee camps. This abrupt halt comes on top of the U.S. embargo which has continued despite al-Assad’s fall. This makes everyday life hell for the population. Lines in front of bakeries and clinics are growing longer throughout Syria. The shortage of vital goods feeds inflation and corruption. Millions of Syrians cannot leave the refugee camps because their homes are destroyed or they remain under threat.
Under al-Sharaa’s new power, which guarantees nothing, the population risks paying dearly for the years of maneuvers and war imposed by the great powers.
Mar 17, 2025
This article is translated from the March issue #325 of La Voix des Travailleurs (Workers’ Voice), the journal of the Organization of Revolutionary Workers (Organisation des Travailleurs Revolutionnaires) active in Haiti.
Armed gangs continue to lay siege to Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, looting, burning, and massacring with impunity. But a breach is emerging in the very heart of this chaos. The residents of the Solino neighborhood have been driven out of their homes for nearly six months. The gangs threaten terror on them, while the authorities are inactive and complicit. But now the residents refuse to submit. They are choosing the path of resistance and struggle. They raised their heads and took to the streets twice in a week. They openly defied the gang dictatorship and police repression, and they demanded their legitimate right to return to their neighborhood.
On February 13, they took to the streets and demanded that the cops and foreign troops fulfill their alleged mission to “protect lives and property.” The corrupt and rotten Haitian police allow the bandits to impose their law. The cops even give them weapons, ammunition, and information. As for the “multinational security force,” it is nothing more than a tool of imperialist control, busy ensuring the stability of the interests of the great power countries and the local owning classes.
On February 20, the residents forcefully blocked strategic roads and erected burning barricades, paralyzing traffic. Protesters sent a clear and furious message: they want to return to their neighborhood, not the unsanitary encampments they say are like cattle pens.
Haitian police are faithful to their mission to repress the victims rather than the perpetrators. The cops responded with tear gas. This brutality only fueled protestors’ anger, instead of intimidating them. They threw stones at police vehicles and accused the cops of colluding with the gangs and leaving the population to their fate.
These events went almost unnoticed, but they could be a signal, a starting point. Criminals can only control people by keeping them in fear. When the masses unite and rise up, they can make criminals fear them.
The residents of Solino have overcome their fear. This is a moral victory. Now they realize that no one will come to rescue them and that only the mobilization of thousands of displaced people can break the gangs’ stranglehold.
They understand what the ruling classes are trying to erase from people’s minds: oppression is not opposed by submission and fear, but by organization and collective struggle.
But to achieve its desired results, this movement must spread to all the families of Solino and transform into a profound, conscious, and determined revolt. The more the mobilization grows in scope and intensity, the more it will reach displaced people from other neighborhoods and cities. These revolts could merge in a single outcry: Let’s return to our neighborhoods! That is the only way forward, not sterile negotiations with criminals, and not equally sterile and illusory anticipation of a savior. The organized revolt of the oppressed masses is the only force capable of crushing the barbarity of the gangs—and of overthrowing the system that nourishes gangs.
Mar 17, 2025
This article is translated from the March 14 issue #2954 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
Negotiations for the second phase of the Gaza ceasefire began in Doha, Qatar on March 10. Far from ending the 16-month all-out war against the Palestinians, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is increasing the pressure and sowing death on all fronts.
Israeli pro-government website i24news proudly announced as much with its headline: “One dead in Lebanon, five in Gaza and three terrorists eliminated in Jenin.” The war continues in all its forms. Israel blocked the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza on March 4, stopped the supply of bread and basic necessities, and closed the main crossing points into the enclave.
Israel’s energy minister decreed the shutdown of Gaza’s electricity supply on March 9. The territory’s main water desalination plant has to supply drinking water to hundreds of thousands of Gazans but can’t operate without electricity.
Gaza’s residents are long accustomed to using their own generators if they have them and to getting by for hours without power. Having returned to their ruined neighborhoods, they are once again dependent on the meager quantities of available fuel. The Israeli far right in the person of former minister of internal security Ben-Gvir demands the banning of all fuel entry into Gaza and the bombing of all of Gaza’s fuel tanks. (He resigned his position because he rejected the idea of any ceasefire.)
So, the negotiations for the second phase of the ceasefire don’t stop Netanyahu from continuing his war. He has the firm support of his ally Trump. The Israeli army has deployed in the West Bank, is driving Palestinians from their homes in the Jenin refugee camp there, and is supporting attacks by far-right Israeli settlers. Israel’s army is sending killer drones into Gaza.
The residents of Gaza expected food, construction supplies, and the planned withdrawal of Israeli troops from the buffer zone on the Egyptian border. But once again they live under constant threat.
Mar 17, 2025
What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters, during the week of March 10, 2025.
Trump’s on-again, off-again, on-again tariffs were called off—once again—just as the UAW supported what it called Trump’s “aggressive action” to end the “free trade disaster.”
Whatever Trump’s “aggressive action” finally will be, we can be sure that Trump will enrich himself. But his primary aim will be to let the capitalist class protect itself against the long-term economic crisis its own policies have created. And that has nothing to do with protecting workers’ jobs and standard of living, which grow worse by the month.
How did we get here? The UAW, like other unions, blames it on “free trade,” which supposedly shipped our jobs overseas, putting us in competition with low-paid workers in other countries, reducing our standard of living.
It’s true, the policy of U.S. capitalism ever since the end of World War II was to open up the whole world for its trade and investment. That eventually led to a global system of production and services organized by an increasingly global financial system.
Could this have benefited the peoples of the whole world? Well, the world’s resources taken altogether could be used to make production and distribution more efficient. But this system was organized on a capitalist basis, so they were used to let the capitalist class amass more profit, profit stolen from the work of the world’s laboring population, leading to greater impoverishment.
And that includes here. The U.S. may be the wealthiest country in the world, but the average standard of living is lower here than in most other developed countries. Life expectancy is shorter. Access to food, habitation and medical care is worse. And the gap between the very wealthy and the rest of the population is bigger here than elsewhere, and growing bigger by the year.
Why did it happen this way? It wasn’t fated.
Look to history. When the world was reconstructed after World War II, the working class might have used its forces to organize an economy whose aim was to benefit the population. But to do that, it would have had to organize its forces for a fight. It would have had to wrench control away from the capitalist class. In some countries it tried. But nowhere did the working class succeed.
And nowhere in the world did the unions ever propose it. They couldn’t imagine the working class might organize its forces to fight to get rid of capitalism and build a working-class power.
Instead, the unions called on workers to compete, to improve the situation of their own capitalists. Look overseas, they said, that’s supposedly where “our” jobs went.
"Our” jobs did not go “overseas.” They got lost in the push for greater labor productivity—and that’s how we still lose them today. So long as capitalism is in control, it pushes to use our own productivity against us to cut jobs.
Well, this time, things need to be different. This time, the workers need to fight for our own policy, which is neither “free trade,” nor “tariffs.” Whether or not the unions are ready, working people need to fight to keep the benefits from our own increasing productivity at work. It can be used to shorten the work day, used to give more vacation and days off, used to increase wages. Productivity can be used to organize work in a humane way.
When Trump says he will “make America great again,” he doesn’t mean America. He means American capitalism. Sucking up to Trump, the UAW is ready to hide that fact of life. Just like it did over the years, when it worked to tie the working class to Biden and Obama.
We don’t need a capitalist America. We need an America the working class will create—which will be part of a socialist world that workers everywhere will build.
Mar 17, 2025
In 1932, in Atlanta, Georgia, Angelo Herndon, a young black communist organizer, was bringing together black and white unemployed to demand restoration of their unemployment benefits. Hundreds of black and white workers came together and demonstrated, and their benefits were restored. This raised the ire of the rich, and Angelo was arrested and charged under Georgia’s Insurrection Act.
The law was so broad, they charged him not for what he said or did, but for the books and pamphlets in his room! The book details the legal fight against the charges, all the way to the Supreme Court. The fight against the trumped-up charges and death penalty of the Scottsboro Boys was occurring at the same time.
While the book focuses on the legal fight, you see the strength of the communist movement in this country in the 1930s rising from the Russian Revolution, and the workers’ struggles and organizing against the horrific hardship of Jim Crow racism and the Great Depression.
Mar 17, 2025
Airport Transportation Security Administration (TSA) workers have been told by the Department of Homeland Security that their union contract is CANCELLED and all existing grievances are terminated.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said that as of March 7, the agency would “cease using its payroll system for collecting union dues.”
Roughly 45,000 TSA union members who work at more than 430 airports will no longer have 200 full time union reps to help them. All union reps have been ordered back to work during the next 90 days.
Homeland Security announced it would get rid of any type of seniority or longevity system at TSA. Employees will now work under a new system, based on “performance” and enhanced “productivity.” In other words, they plan to squeeze more work out of every TSA worker!
Said one 22-year TSA employee, “Nobody wants to work in a place where you have no rights or workplace protections.”
On March 14, a federal lawsuit was filed by a coalition of three labor unions. It seeks to stop the termination of the union contract of TSA workers.
The president of the main union filing the lawsuit, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), called this attack “an assault on the rights of every American worker.” The Communications Workers of America and the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA joined this lawsuit. These two unions rightly recognize what is happening as an attack on every union contract.
From the standpoint of the billionaires running the federal government, if airports are thrown into chaos, they have no reason to care. Trump and Musk skip the long lines and fly on Air Force One or a private jet when THEY need to travel!
Mar 17, 2025
House Republicans called the mayors of New York, Chicago, Boston and Denver to Washington, D.C., in order to grill them about their cities’ so-called “sanctuary policies.” For the Republicans, it was an opportunity to make grandstanding attacks on immigrants—and to beat up on the Democratic mayors.
For example, the Republicans repeated the lie that immigrants are responsible for a “crime wave.” Chicago mayor Johnson pushed back, saying that overall city crime numbers were down during the last two years, when more than 50,000 immigrants were bused to the city from Texas. Immigrants to the United States commit fewer crimes, as defined by the capitalist laws, than do people born in this country.
Anti-immigrant talk from Trump and other Republicans has created widespread fear in immigrant communities. This intimidating rhetoric is itself an attack on the working class. Fear of losing a job makes immigrant workers less likely to push back on their employers; it tends to make people accept worse conditions. And that worsens the situation for all working people—an attack on one is an attack on all.
But we need to remember what the Democrats actually do. People in Chicago remember the frightful conditions faced by the immigrants bused to Chicago. Waiting for weeks or months in the lobbies of police stations, or in a waiting area at the airport. Or the polluted field on the South Side that Mayor Brandon Johnson proposed as the site for a tent camp—they were going to live a Chicago winter in a tent camp!
In fact, Democratic presidents have generally deported more people than Republicans. Barack Obama deported three million immigrants—more than any other president to date.
Trump is setting up Guantanamo Bay to warehouse immigrants. But not so long ago, Bill Clinton sent thousands of Haitian immigrants there.
The Democrats’ talk on immigrants is different. But, in fact, they carry out the same policy as the Republicans.
Mar 17, 2025
In early March, Donald Trump signed an executive order creating what he calls a national stockpile of bitcoin and other digital currencies—a big step in what Trump claims will make the U.S. “the world capital” of cryptocurrencies and make Trump the official crypto president.
In fact, cryptocurrencies are little more than another get-rich-quick scheme that is often found advertised on late night television.
The first crypto currency, bitcoin, was invented just over 15 years ago by computer scientists who wanted to use the internet to set up reliable, anonymous currency transactions and payments, outside of both the banking system and government controls. But it soon became apparent that the only practical use of bitcoin and other crypto currencies was to launder dirty money or evade taxes, making it a favorite tool of gangsters, drug traffickers and mafias around the world.
But as more and more swindlers and gangsters relied on bitcoin to make their payments and move money around, they drove up demand, resulting in increased prices. These price increases attracted financial speculators, who saw bitcoin as a source of significant and fast profits—pushing up the prices even further.
Bitcoin had hit the big time.
But the price of bitcoin was based solely on the confidence of millions of speculators, big and small, who bought it in the hopes of making a killing. Once this confidence evaporated—as it did during the financial panic of 2020—the price of bitcoin collapsed and it became a national joke.
But bitcoin did not go away. Over the last several years, the price of bitcoin once again took off. This was soon fed by major Wall Street financial companies that began offering bitcoin and other cryptocurrency type of investments to their customers, even roping in retiree pension fund money. By the end of 2024, cryptocurrencies ballooned to a combined value of 4 trillion dollars, producing bitcoin billionaires, who in turn spent heavily in election campaigns in order to literally buy their favorite politicians.
None of this was lost on Donald Trump. As late as 2019, Donald Trump had opposed bitcoin, calling it a scam. But over the last couple of years, Trump completely reversed himself. He created his own crypto currency and platform, not to speak of crypto watches and sneakers, as did his wife and several other family members. Several crypto fraudsters under investigation and prosecution bought tens and hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of Trump’s crypto instruments in order to buy influence in the Trump administration. The rest of Trump’s administration is also up to their necks in bitcoin and crypto. Secretary of Commerce, Harold Lutnick, a major Wall Street player, is a big investor and booster of crypto.
What better way to increase their fortunes than to get the official support of crypto by the U.S. government!
The irresistible rise of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is certainly a sign of the times. For rather than use the wealth created by the working class in productive investment, various capitalists squander it in speculation, gambling and swindling.