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
Apr 14, 2025
Donald Trump’s plan to place sweeping new tariffs on almost every country and island in the entire world has disrupted trade and sowed economic chaos. Workers now face more big price hikes on food, clothes, cars, insurance, etc. There are already signs of more job cuts, bankruptcies and plant closings. Retirees also risk their retirement savings going up in smoke, as Wall Street’s promised safe investments blow up.
Trump’s promises about bringing jobs back to the U.S. by putting up trade barriers are complete nonsense. The economy long ago outgrew national borders. Big companies like Boeing, GM, Ford, Exxon, Walmart, Nike, Amazon, Intel, Nvidia, Apple, Coke, Pepsi, Netflix—you name it—operate on a world scale. The famous iPhone, for example, is a product of the entire world, with materials, components and software produced in dozens of countries on every continent. The same is true of distribution, services and sales. And there’s no going back.
What should represent a huge step forward for humanity instead only brings more suffering, poverty and wars to the working class. The entire world economy is under the control of a tiny minority, the capitalist class, which uses that control to increase its own profits and wealth off the backs of the working class and the plunder of the world’s resources.
It’s true that jobs are disappearing in the U.S. and workers’ standard of living is dropping. But it isn’t because jobs are going overseas. Workers everywhere face job cuts and worsening exploitation. And in the poorer countries it is much worse than it is here, with civil wars and famines that force people to uproot themselves and migrate to other countries in order to survive.
In the hands of the capitalist class, a tiny minority of ultra-rich billionaires, it’s a dog-eat-dog economy, filled with crisis and war, with the capitalists competing with each other for control. And the longer this goes on, the worse it gets.
The tariffs and trade barriers are just one more symptom of this worsening crisis. In fact, they are going up everywhere in the world. When the global economic pie stops growing, individual capitalists rely on their own governments to fight to defend their own private interests. Workers all over the world are paying the price. All Trump has done, given his “me-first” style, is greatly aggravate the situation.
And that’s not all. “A tariff is an act of war,” said Warren Buffett, one of the richest billionaires on the planet. “It may not draw blood immediately, but make no mistake—it’s an act of aggression that invites retaliation.”
That’s what history shows. The trade wars and tariff barriers of the 1930s Depression were the prelude to World War II. So, too, have Trump’s rapidly escalating tariff barriers against China brought the two biggest economic powers into a head-to-head confrontation. No one knows how it will end. But it certainly brings the possibility of an all-out war much, much closer. This is a war that the U.S. government has been already preparing for, surrounding China with its own military forces, as well as those of its allies. The Chinese government has responded with its own military build-up.
They are turning the economy into a wartime economy, with big hikes in military spending, which Trump confirmed last week. He announced a trillion-dollar military budget for the first time. Working people pay for this, while the capitalist class fattens its profits off military contracts.
The cuts carried out by Musk and DOGE are just the beginning of planned cuts to jobs and social programs to make the working class pay for this war. Trump’s attacks on immigrants and dissenters, the growing powers of the police and government authorities, are also a preparation for war.
This is sheer madness. But it is a madness that comes out of the very functioning, the very logic of the capitalist system and its organization of society. And it is proof that the capitalist system has far outlived its “expiration date,” and that the working class has got to get rid of it.
Apr 14, 2025
Private equity companies and hedge funds destroyed Sears, Toys ‘R’ Us, Payless Shoes, RadioShack and many other retailers by buying them up and sucking out the money they needed to operate. These parasites have found a new target: health care.
In 2010, the same Cerberus Capital Management that helped destroy Chrysler bought six Catholic hospitals in Massachusetts. They founded a new for-profit hospital company, Steward Health. Then, the company sold the land the hospitals were located on, so they had to start paying rent. Steward used the money from the sales to buy up more facilities and run the same scam.
To pay rent on land they had long owned, the hospitals cut money from staffing, building repairs, and even cleaning sheets. Patient death rates for common conditions climbed sharply.
In May of 2024, Steward filed for bankruptcy, closed two hospitals, and announced plans to sell 31 others—but meanwhile, Cerberus walked away with a profit of 790 million dollars from the deal.
Private equity companies like Cerberus now own over 450 hospitals in the U.S. and oversee more than one third of staffing in U.S. emergency rooms. They’ve been buying up nursing homes and all kinds of specialized medical facilities.
Wherever they go, care gets worse. One study found that, after hospitals were acquired by private equity firms, Medicare patients were more likely to suffer falls and contract bloodstream infections. In some of them, patients were “forced to sleep in hallways, and doctors who spoke out were threatened with termination,” according to a former president of the American Academy of Emergency Medicine. Another study found that if private equity acquired a nursing home, its residents became eleven percent more likely to die.
That is 21st century capitalism in a nutshell: making profit by destroying the basic services we all need.
Apr 14, 2025
Measles continues to spread in the U.S. at an increasingly rapid pace, to 712 cases by early April. The overwhelming majority of these cases were in unvaccinated people, including the two children who died.
An effective vaccine against measles was introduced in the U.S. in 1963, and the disease was considered to have been eliminated in this country by 2000. But with fewer people getting the vaccine, it has come back.
In the midst of the outbreak, President Trump appointed Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy has spread mis-information about vaccines being linked to autism, which many studies have shown to be false. When a 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa killed 80 children, Kennedy falsely claimed the measles vaccine probably caused the deaths.
Kennedy responded to the current outbreak by saying: “We have measles outbreaks every year,” and called the first child’s death “not unusual.” He repeated, falsely, that the Mumps, Measles, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine causes deaths every year, even though there have been no known deaths from the MMR vaccine since its introduction in 1970!
After the death of the second child from measles this year, Kennedy reluctantly admitted that, “the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine,” which is true. Reported cases of measles dropped by 97% between 1965 and 1968 following the introduction of the first measles vaccine.
But last month, following Kennedy’s appointment, officials at the National Institutes of Health terminated around three dozen grants for research to study why people are hesitant to get vaccines!
While there may be risks associated with vaccines, they are much smaller than the risks of contracting diseases among those who aren’t vaccinated. In the case of measles, 97% of those who are vaccinated with two doses of the MMR vaccine will be protected from ever contracting the disease, and those who do will have a milder form.
Apr 14, 2025
In January, the Pasadena Unified School District (PUSD) lost five schools in the Altadena area, which was largely wiped out by the Eaton fire. The district, located northeast of Los Angeles, reported that two-thirds of its students had to evacuate, and that 987 families lost their homes in the fire—as did 120 district employees.
And yet in February, when the fire’s ashes had barely cooled down, PUSD officials dealt some of these fire victims another devastating blow: layoffs!
The PUSD announced that, by June, it would be eliminating 151 positions. Of the 117 teachers who got layoff notices, about a dozen have lost their homes in the fire, according to the Pasadena teachers’ union.
PUSD officials say they have no choice. They say they are not only short of money, but that the state will further cut their funding because their enrollment will drop as a result of the fires. In other words, instead of providing extra funds to help fire victims, California authorities are actually cutting money from schools in the fire zones!
Pasadena is not alone. West of L.A., the Palisades fire caused heavy damage to four schools run by the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). And like the PUSD and about 40 other school districts across California, the LAUSD has also notified many teachers that they may be laid off in June. Unlike other districts, though, the LAUSD has not disclosed the number of pink slips, as layoff notices are known, that it issued.
Pink slips have become an ordeal California teachers go through every spring. Even when some of the pink slips are rescinded, they obviously cause a lot of extra stress and anxiety among teachers and their families, and their students as well.
Even this year’s catastrophic L.A. fires were apparently not reason enough for California officials to spare schools from this havoc, and not even in areas devastated by the fires—when everybody knows that schools are one of the few places where disaster victims, and especially children, can find support.
Apr 14, 2025
At least half a million people attended over 1,000 protests across the U.S. on Saturday, April 5. Demonstrators held up signs supporting federal workers and postal workers. Some said, “Hands off” Social Security and Medicaid. Some attacked DOGE and Musk and called Trump a dictator. Some decried the brutal attacks on immigrants.
While the Democratic Party did not put itself forward as organizing the demonstration, nor on the hundreds of hand-made signs, Democrats clearly helped to organize the rallies and their leaders spoke at some of them. The Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin raised the issue of Trump and Musk being a dictatorship. The Minnesota Democrat Ilhan Omar raised the issue of the rule of law. A union leader called the current administration “the biggest assault on collective bargaining rights we have ever seen.”
Of course, it’s true that the current Republicans have acted like dictators, do ignore the laws, have attacked unions and immigrants. But the Democrats have done exactly the same thing, without the “Shock and Awe”! Joe Biden told the railroad workers they could not strike against their hours and hours of overtime. Barack Obama deported more immigrants than Trump—so far. Democrats Kennedy, Johnson, Truman, and Roosevelt dictated the U.S. population would be dragged into wars.
Protests can result in some protections against some attacks and alert the general population to existing dangers. But to stop the attacks requires a strategy beyond electoral solutions.
Granted, the Trump administration’s attacks are hitting hard and fast and are not evolving behind closed doors. But the Democratic Party has no answers to the problems facing the majority, whether we are born here or born elsewhere, whether we are in unions or colleges, whether we are black or white, or old or young.
Both parties defend the interests of the capitalist class. We need our own political program, one that fights for all of us, not for millionaires to become billionaires. We need an organized working class and we need a working class party.
Apr 14, 2025
Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers (UAW), has very vocally supported Trump’s tariffs for the auto industry. Fain said that Ford, GM and Stellantis have unused capacity in their plants and that Trump’s tariffs would force the auto companies to move work out of Mexico and Canada and into the U.S. In other words, Fain proposed that jobs be taken away from Mexican and Canadian autoworkers!!!
Is this really what someone who claims to be a working class leader is proposing? That workers have to fight each other over jobs?
Big 3 autoworkers know a lot of their jobs have disappeared. At one time, Ford, GM and Chrysler/Stellantis had over 900,000 UAW workers. Today, there are less than 150,000. Where did the jobs go? Fain claims the problem is that “free trade” caused jobs to be being moved out of the U.S. But many of these supposedly lost jobs weren’t lost at all. They were just moved inside the country. Ford, GM and Chrysler/Stellantis have outsourced almost all of their parts work. Today there are almost a million people working at independent parts suppliers in the U.S. They work for much lower wages, generating higher profits for the Big 3 auto companies.
And yes, there also have been many jobs that were actually eliminated in auto and other manufacturing. But the vast majority of those jobs were lost to speed up and automation, not to workers in other countries. Today, because of speed up, the auto companies produce more cars and trucks with many fewer workers, working people to death.
When Fain says the answer is tariffs, he is lying to the workers and he is covering up for the corporate bosses. He is covering up for their speed up and their killing working conditions.
Fain doesn’t propose it, but there can be a real fight for jobs. There doesn’t have to be unused capacity in an auto plant. If a plant is only running one shift, then cut the line speed in half and hire another whole shift. If workers are working insane overtime, then bring back all those workers laid off and work everyone fewer hours for a full paycheck.
In the past, autoworkers have led militant fights of the working class. They did it, not by fighting against other workers, but by fighting together against their bosses. Big 3 autoworkers, Canadian autoworkers, Mexican autoworkers, transplant workers and parts workers together number maybe two million workers in North America. That is an immense power that could make a real fight to stop speed up and crazy overtime, a fight for more jobs for all workers.
Apr 14, 2025
A catastrophic three-day ice storm caused so much damage in northern Michigan that some counties had 100% of people without power. A National Weather Service spokesperson said, “You have to go back to 1922 to find a catastrophic storm even remotely close.… In terms of infrastructure, the power grid will likely have to be rebuilt from the substations out to the neighborhoods.”
Snapping from the weight of too much ice, more utility poles had to be replaced in two weeks than normally get replaced in northern Michigan in one year. Disaster recovery electric workers commented that it looked like a category 5 hurricane had stalled over the area for three days. Some have been without power for going on three weeks!
As happens in natural disasters, residents did not wait on the government but immediately banded together. Fallen trees were cleared. Neighbors helped neighbors to have food and water. It is this amazing ability of ordinary working people—to activate and pull together when disaster hits—that gives a tiny glimpse of the creative power the working class possesses to build a better society as capitalism crumbles.
Apr 14, 2025
The following is excerpted from a presentation given in Chicago on April 6, 2025.
Immigrant workers today are under attack by the U.S. government led by Donald Trump. The undocumented immigrant community lives in constant fear of being stopped and arrested by ICE (Immigration Agents) to be deported.
Since the start of the month of February here in Chicago, after people heard there were some arrests being made by ICE, people stopped going out shopping like they used to do, people were afraid of going to work, or to take their kids to school. Many of these immigrants have been in the country working many years. They have set up their lives here, seen their children grow up.
Tom Homan, the head of ICE, said that they would go after the criminals that are in the neighborhoods. But the tactics they are using are scary. They are not only using the ICE agents, they use the FBI, ATF, U.S. Marshals and they want the local police to help them as well.
Many of us have seen people in chains on TV or social media, being sent to different detention centers including Guantanamo prison, and more recently prisons in El Salvador.
Different immigration lawyers, schools, churches and community groups advise people what to do in case they are stopped by ICE. They tell people not to open their doors in case ICE agents knock on their door, unless agents have a warrant. But who can believe the agents won’t break the doors as has already happened?
They say they’re going after criminals. But who can trust them? For them, anybody who looks Mexican or Venezuelan is a criminal suspect and if stopped, they better have a way to prove that they are legal in the country.
Donald Trump says more than 12 million people are criminals, rapists, the worst type of people who came from mental institutions. During his presidential campaign, he promised that if elected, on day one he would start a mass deportation.
So far though, Trump hasn’t deported more people per day than Biden. And many fewer than Obama. Who knows how many they will actually deport? In fact, the big companies and rich people like Trump himself need immigrant workers. But already, people are scared. And that is really the point because scared workers are less likely to stand up for themselves.
Every president, Democrat or Republican, in recent years has deported many people. President Barack Obama, a Democrat, pretended to be more friendly to immigrants but deported more than two million people. Then, President Biden also deported people.
During the pandemic, the border was basically closed. Then the Democratic politicians promised asylum or temporary protection to some new immigrants from countries like Venezuela, Haiti, Ukraine and some others…. It just so happened that they let all those people in, right when the companies started complaining that they needed more workers in 2021. Then, in January of 2024, Biden ended that program and said no more asylum. Before Trump took office, the border was basically closed.
In fact, that’s always what happens. Immigrants have always been a big part of the working class in this country, let in when the bosses needed more workers, and blocked or deported when they didn’t.
For about 100 years the bosses wanted all the immigrants they could get, and during that time mostly anyone who could get here could be a citizen right away….
… Up until the 1920s, the U.S. tried to bring over as many people from Europe as it could get, to form the workforce the companies needed to build industry.
During World War I, few workers were coming from Europe. And the factories needed workers. So finally, they would hire black workers. Millions of black people came to the North from the South looking for work between 1914 and the 1970s. They formed another big part of the workforce.
It was also during World War I that the first big group of workers from Mexico came. But starting in 1929, the Great Depression hit. Companies didn’t need all those workers. So, they deported about a million people to Mexico—including many U.S. citizens who were born here.
In the 1970s, companies started the big attack on workers that is still going on. They wanted another wave of desperate workers. And that’s when millions of people started coming from Mexico. Most were kept undocumented—meaning the companies could take even more advantage of them than the rest of the workers.
I came to the U.S. in the 1980s myself. When I was working in Mexico the pay was very low—less than the Mexican minimum wage. One of my jobs was working for a rich family in Mexico City as a gardener—or really, a servant. I worked six days a week, and my only free time was when I was asleep. I had to wake up at 5:30 to wash my bosses’ cars, and then I was on call the rest of the day. They didn’t pay me nearly enough to have my own place—they gave me a room to sleep in and fed me, beans and eggs every day….
… My first job here, I was working more than 12 hours a day. I was a dishwasher and busboy, supposed to get tips—but the boss took them all. From then on, I’ve worked in one factory after another. At first, I made minimum wage—$3.35. That was much more than I made in Mexico: I felt rich at that time. But then I realized how much it cost to live over here!
If I could have made a decent living in Mexico, I would have stayed in Mexico. So how come I couldn’t make a decent living in Mexico?
Mexico has a lot of resources. It has a lot of factories. It produces cars, medical supplies, and all kinds of other stuff. But there is no Mexican car company. A huge share of the wealth produced by workers in Mexico is taken by the U.S. capitalist class.
For a time, the Mexican government tried to limit how much the country was exploited by U.S. businesses, in the interests of its own rich people. But then, between 1970s and 1990s, the U.S. forced Mexico to completely open itself to U.S. business. Millions of Mexican farms failed as the country was flooded with cheap U.S. food. Small stores were driven out of business by companies like Walmart, the largest retailer in Mexico.
Even as U.S. companies set up thousands of factories in Mexico, the wages are extremely low compared to those in the U.S.
It’s not just Mexico: suppliers of clothing in Central America and Asia have been set against each other to provide ever-cheaper goods to the U.S. Plantations and mining corporations have grabbed land from small farmers all over the world. The U.S. worked with the drug cartels to fund wars in Central America in the 1980s and in the 1990s. For decades, Haitian politicians and the very rich, backed by the U.S., used gangs as their own private armies to impose control over the population. Now all these gangs and cartels have gotten out of control.
U.S. imperialism has made these countries almost unlivable for many people.
And in some countries, it is much worse. The U.S government has carried out wars all over the world in the interest of its corporations….
… The U.S. government has also supported countless repressive regimes and military overthrows in the interest of its corporations….
… The U.S. government has undermined countries that try to take even a small slice of independence from U.S. corporate domination of their economies, like the two U.S.-backed military coup attempts in Venezuela, and the harsh sanctions the U.S. has imposed, that have made it almost impossible for that country to sell its own oil and buy food, medicine and other goods.
All this creates poverty and desperation in the young people, giving them two options: to join the cartels or immigrate to the U.S. So, No! Immigrants are not coming from prisons, mental institutions or insane asylums as Donald Trump says.
People have been coming because they are desperate.
These people crossed jungles on foot, with small children walking from South America to the border or braving the sea on leaky boats, taking a chance to be raped, robbed or killed by different cartels or gangs along their way here….
… Cities like L.A. and Chicago have serious homelessness problems, and offering shelter to these new immigrants created resentment among Black and Hispanic workers already in these various communities.
This resentment creates division among workers. When this happens, the bosses are the only winners.
The capitalist class benefits from immigrant workers. It benefits from keeping them desperate, keeping them scared. When workers are scared, they are more likely to keep quiet. And that benefits the bosses.
The capitalist class also benefits when workers blame each other. When workers in Chicago fight over who will get to stay in the homeless shelter, the rich people laugh all the way to the bank.
Immigration in general is just part of life. Workers have no country. Workers should have the right to go wherever they want, just like rich people can.
The working class is international: wherever we are or come from, we have the same interests. We produce the wealth. We do the services that society needs. We need more people to help us. Just look how companies are working 10 or 12 hours per day, or night, in many cases 6 or 7 days a week. I did many of these jobs. I have worked over 40 years in this country working with Black, Chinese, Indian, Italian and all kinds of people.
We all need to have the same rights, the same benefits. To be treated equal, with dignity. When a group of workers are afraid, they are used and abused by the companies. Companies like to have this kind of worker because they can pay them less money, and these workers are easier to exploit. That hurts all workers—which is why we need to demand that everyone here have the same rights.
We need to stand together. We need to fight against the bosses who make us believe that immigrants need to be deported. The capitalist system and the super-rich are our only enemies. They are the parasites that suck our blood and live off our work. They are the only ones who need to be deported.
Apr 14, 2025
On March 27, ICE agents arrested a woman and three children near Sackets Harbor, New York.
Workers at the children’s school did not accept to see them disappeared. They mobilized through the teachers’ union and called state officials, federal representatives, advocacy groups—whoever they could think of, to try to get the family released.
When Trump’s Border Czar Tom Homan defended ICE, the school principal released a statement to the press calling out Homan’s lies: “We are in direct communication with our students. Let me be clear: They are not being ‘medically evaluated.’ They are not being ‘questioned as potential victims.’ Calling a detention center by another name does not change what it is.”
The local Democratic Party jumped on the bandwagon and helped organize a demonstration to coincide with the rallies Democrats were organizing nationwide, aimed at pulling opposition to Trump’s policies behind themselves. This Sackets Harbor rally drew about 1000 people. Tom Homan has a house in town, and the demonstrators marched to it, shouting “bring them home.”
Less than two days later, ICE released the family, and on Wednesday morning, the kids were back at school.
The workers at this school showed that we can stand up for each other, and sometimes, even succeed. Whatever politicians try to take credit for our mobilizations, this is the only way to defend ourselves from the growing attacks and brutalization aimed at different parts of the working class, ultimately carried out by both parties.
Apr 14, 2025
This article is translated from the April 11 issue #2958 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
All food aid deliveries to Gaza have been stopped since March 2. Since the beginning of the war on October 8, 2023, Israeli bombings and ground assaults have already killed 53,000 Palestinians, 70% being women and children.
The survivors pitch their tents in fields of ruins, wherever they can. They are deprived of everything. No drinking water, electricity, or sewer service. Unvaccinated. Children infected with polio. They are forced to move again, as in Rafah, where Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to seize land. In fact, he plans to reoccupy a quarter of the territory and establish “security zones,” including Israeli roads Palestinians may not cross, dividing the narrow territory into so many narrower strips.
Despite protests by Israelis when Netanyahu visited Hungary and then met with Trump, Netanyahu ordered an intensification of the war. He claims this will exert pressure on Hamas to release its remaining Israeli hostages. Israeli ground assaults in Gaza resumed, along with targeted assassinations by bombings.
Soon after, the bodies of 14 rescuers and a United Nations aid worker were discovered in a mass grave. Video shot by one of the victims proves they were deliberately targeted in their emergency vehicles. The vehicles were traveling together, clearly marked and with their flashers on. But their occupants were deliberately executed in cold blood, according to a Palestinian doctor. Palestinian journalists were also deliberately targeted on April 7. Two lost their lives, with one burned alive in a tent fire.
For the past 18 months, tens of thousands of Palestinians have fallen victim to Israeli terrorism armed and encouraged by Western leaders.
Apr 14, 2025
This article is translated from the April 11 issue #2958 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
The U.S. intensified its bombing of Yemen starting March 15. This worsened the situation in a country already devastated by nearly a decade of war.
U.S. bombs hit Saada in Yemen’s north on April 5 and 6. Other bombings were reported to have hit the Harib district in Marib province east of the capital Sana’a. With his trademark cynicism, Trump posted images of a bombing of dozens of Houthi fighters on his Truth Social network, with the comment: “Oops, there will be no attack by these Houthis! They will never sink our ships again!” A few days earlier, U.S. government spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt boasted of “200 successful strikes” since mid-March against the Houthi regime.
Saudi Arabia launched a war with U.S. consent in March 2015 to overthrow the Houthis and support a regime the Saudis controlled. Now the population of Yemen suffers again from the renewal of war. The decade of war caused a serious humanitarian crisis from which the country has not recovered. Yemen is in ruins. Houses, schools, and hospitals were bombed into destruction. Markets get no supplies. The remaining food is unaffordable for most families. Almost five million people are displaced inside Yemen. Many live in tent camps.
People are hungry. They have no access to medical care. According to United Nations data, more than 19 million of Yemen’s 35 million people need aid. Seventeen million are victims of hunger. UNICEF estimates that a child dies of hunger, disease, or bombing every 10 minutes in Yemen. The U.N. World Food Program (WFP) is worried about Trump’s projected cutting of emergency food aid money in 14 countries including Yemen. This “would amount to condemning to death millions of people facing extreme hunger and famine.”
These disasters afflicting millions of Yemenis are the consequences of a system where major powers impose their domination no matter the cost to the people.
Apr 14, 2025
This article is translated from the April 11 issue #2958 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
The Chinese military staged a show of force around Taiwan on April 1 and 2, simulating a blockade of the island. These military maneuvers provided the media with an opportunity to denounce once again China’s alleged threat to Taiwan’s “democracy” and to showcase an imperialist force like the French navy as protection.
Taiwan is 81 miles off the Chinese coast, a population of 23 million, and is claimed by the Chinese government in Beijing. In 1949, Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang strongmen who massacred workers and were soundly rejected by the Chinese population and defeated by Mao’s armies took refuge in Taiwan. Under the protection of the U.S. army, Chiang separated the island from mainland China. While China was under embargo, imperialism recognized not Beijing but Taiwan as the official Chinese state and gave it a seat on the United Nations Security Council. Taiwan served as a rear base for the U.S. during the Korean and Vietnam Wars. The island was portrayed as a bulwark of democracy against Chinese communism. But Taiwan was a penal colony for its working class. Martial law was imposed and was not lifted until 1987. Then the regime adopted a democratic facade from the 1990s onward. But the statue of Chiang Kai-shek still stands in the capital Taipei. The military-police apparatus lasting from the decades of terror is still the backbone of the state.
China has regained its international status today, but it has not regained Taiwan, which remains an asset in the hands of imperialism against Beijing. For over 40 years, the status quo has consisted of the Chinese regime tolerating Taiwan’s undeclared but de facto independence. Imperialism dominates Taiwan’s regime by using it as a regional proxy.
The April maneuvers are part of this power struggle between China and Western imperialism. Beijing is flexing its muscles and striking a nationalist chord with some Chinese people. On the other side, the Western powers do the same. France’s media made a big deal of maritime maneuvers in February dubbed “Pacific Steller.” French TV showed French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, U.S. Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, and Japanese aircraft carrier JS Kaga steaming by the coast of the Philippines and painted them as a necessary counterbalance to Chinese power. The report criticized “all-powerful China” and claimed, “France’s prosperity depends on the stability of the region.” The media praised French military equipment and tried to show France’s ability to wage war alongside American imperialism against China.
French imperialism wants a walk-on role in future conflicts. For this, Paris must show measurable military might. Paris also has to convince its population to accept the necessary sacrifices. This will not be to defend Taiwanese “democracy” or French prosperity, but rather the wealth of French and U.S. industrialists and bankers, and to ensure their access to any future re-division of markets.
Apr 14, 2025
Kilmar Abrego Garcia was picked up by ICE on March 15th and sent to a notorious prison in El Salvador on a flight, alongside hundreds of others accused of belonging to a gang.
Garcia’s lawyers note that “Abrego Garcia has never been charged with a crime, in any country.” He lives in Maryland, raising three children with his wife. Moreover, Trump’s own Justice Department admitted that sending Abrego Garcia to El Salvador was an “administrative error.” The judge in his case stated, “there were no legal grounds whatsoever for his arrest, detention or removal,” and ordered that he be returned to the United States immediately.
But the Justice Department claims it cannot have Abrego Garcia returned—because they have no jurisdiction over El Salvador.
The Supreme Court finally ordered that the government “facilitate” his release from prison, but in the weakest possible way, citing the “deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.” We will see if Garcia ever makes it back to his family.
Just one day later, another judge declared that the U.S. could deport Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University student arrested for his participation in pro-Palestine demonstrations. This judge accepted a similar argument, that Khalil’s actions threaten “adverse foreign policy consequences” for the U.S.
The Trump administration argues that they can disappear anyone they want to a foreign country and that there will be no legal recourse. That is an open threat to all—to the entire working class, and to anyone critical of this government.
Apr 14, 2025
What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters, during the week of April 6, 2025.
Donald Trump announced Wednesday he was imposing tariffs on incoming goods from most of the world’s countries. He said they were ‘reciprocal’ tariffs, pretending that the tariffs he imposes, essentially taxes, were the same as what each country imposes on the U.S.
Not true! In fact, the formula Trump showed everyone had nothing to do with what other countries set as taxes on the U.S. Instead, a made-up number was devised. It was based on what the trade deficit with each country might be. Somehow, this tariff amount is supposed to magically rebalance the trade deficit that the U.S. has with countries where tariffs are threatened.
This tariff policy makes no sense. All economists agree that it does not address the U.S. trade imbalance. Each tariff is a number that underlings were told to come up with.
But make no mistake, Trump’s tariffs are just another step in the ongoing process of attacking the working class. Trump represents the billionaires. Protectionism, or tariffs, are designed to protect billionaires—not workers.
Trump is very clearly orchestrating what he likes to see, with every inch of his tiny ego. He loves to see the world bend the knee to his declarations, and he loves to see the world crawl and bow to him. He even said, “Every country is calling us. That’s the beauty of what we do. We put ourselves in the driver’s seat. If we would have asked these countries to do us a favor, they would have said no. Now, they will do anything for us.”
That’s part of what’s going on. But it is not everything. Trump, no matter the heavy-handed way he is going about it, is addressing a very real issue that the world bourgeoisie has been wrestling with for decades.
The U.S. has been the world’s preeminent economic and military power since World War II. It established a world order that put the U.S. on top, with European countries as its junior partners, since then. But that post-war order has been breaking down.
The world’s economy has been weakening since at least the economic crisis of 2008, when the U.S. mortgage crisis threw the entire world into a deep recession. Ever since then, the world’s capitalist classes have been wrangling to get ahead of each other, and the post-war order has been fraying. This is what Trump is actually responding to, in his stupid and heavy-handed way. Trump just declared that the U.S. will flex its economic muscles to reinforce that the U.S. is still the top dog in the world.
And despite pretending this will help workers, everything Trump is doing is done to ensure that the capitalist class is protected. The working class here and around the world will be made to pay for the attacks the ruling class brings about.
Everything Trump is doing is designed to shift blame for the bad economy that workers face, onto the different parts of the working class. Everything he’s doing is designed to get one group of the working class to blame another, for the loss of living standards that workers are feeling here and all around the world.
In the first place, those taxes will be felt by working people when we buy anything that has been imported, in higher prices. And you can bet that companies will find a way to raise their prices, even if they are not impacted by tariffs!
But in the second place, these tariffs are a way to blame workers in other countries for the attacks we have been experiencing right here. Workers have not lost jobs primarily because they have gone overseas; we have lost jobs because the major companies have been cutting jobs and making the people still working do more! But all the focus has been on this idea that workers overseas have been taking “our jobs".
But this is not a war for workers: wherever they live, workers will pay the extra costs and risk losing jobs, before being thrown into the war altogether.
More than ever: workers around the world need to unite against our capitalists!
Apr 14, 2025
Go to the film’s website nootherland.com to see where and when it is showing. There are numerous showings across the country this spring, including one in a city near you.
This Oscar winning documentary lists four directors. One, Basel Adra, is an inhabitant of a West Bank village, Masafer Yatta, targeted for “military training” and eventually Jewish settlement. Most of the footage is amateur video that he’s been shooting for evidence since the age of 15. The film shows the Israeli occupation of his village become more and more aggressive and violent over the years.
You hear, being discussed, different strategies to fight back against this. You see one of the other directors, Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, also documenting the attacks, but yet having the freedom of movement to travel denied to the Palestinians. You hear an old woman whose house was bulldozed saying we have “no other land”; this is why we fight.
Apr 14, 2025
The social security website, SSA.gov, crashed. This happened not long after the Trump administration announced a procedure change that would have forced more customers to go to the website. Agency business ground to a halt. The downed website prevented in-person visits and telephone inquiries, too.
According to an internal memo leaked to the Washington Post, plans by Elon Musk and the DOGE team to force disabled customers to go in person to offices and no longer get help over the phone have been dropped—for now. Currently, 40% of all business with the agency is handled by phone.
A current information technology worker at Social Security said anonymously to the Washington Post that many of the most experienced computer programmers at the agency are retiring or getting other jobs, out of frustration over the turmoil. “There is nowhere near enough IT staff to actually implement changes,” the employee said.
A Social Security official confirmed on April 9 that everything previously done over the phone will continue to be able to be done over the phone.
In summary, so many people in the U.S. were worried about what DOGE was doing to Social Security that people flocked to the website, social security offices, or started calling. This tsunami of worried people caused the computer system to crash. And it crashed not just once, but almost daily.
The recent panic does NOT sound like the actions of a population that trusts DOGE to “protect” Social Security!
The population is damn right to distrust DOGE and to be on high alert for attacks on Social Security that are surely coming.
Apr 14, 2025
The following is translated from the February 21, 2025, issue #2951 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
The meteoric rise of artificial intelligence could not happen without the super-exploitation of a large number of new proletarians working alone who allow these systems to function.
A French TV report “The Sacrifices of AI” disclosed confidential information about the giant companies involved in this sector. Data workers existed before there was any talk about artificial intelligence, but there are now between 150 and 430 million of them, according to the World Bank. Google announced it will need one billion such workers in the years to come, spread all over the world but mostly in poor countries. This will make handling data the world’s leading sector of employment.
These workers are subjected to super-exploitation and a frantic pace of up to ten hours of repetitive motions per day. The workers examine thousands of files to be processed by super-computers. It’s like they’re in a dictatorship because they are bound to secrecy under penalty of prosecution, including prison, if they reveal what they are doing to anyone, even family members, let alone journalists or public servants. They are forbidden from joining unions. Their pay is hardly 200 dollars per month for work that can take up to 60 hours per week.
The few testimonies collected reveal how quickly the mental health of these workers degenerates, for example in Kenya. This is how pro-employer site Innovation.com dealt with this problem, with all the frankness and contempt to be expected: “In developing countries, AI offers new economic opportunities. Companies can outsource AI tasks, such as data or image annotation, to workers around the world. This provides income opportunities for people with Internet access, even in remote areas…. This is a bias of privileged countries, which see AI annotation as microtasking. But it is a necessary job for the AI revolution which few individuals in the world are willing to do.” For good reason!
As for “income opportunities,” they are mainly for the IT bosses, who rack up billions in profits. But the labor of all these people is wasted on a vast scale. In countries imperialism condemns to underdevelopment, how much infrastructure and equipment could be built using the valuable work of these hundreds of millions of workers? When technology advances farther, what will happen to these modern galley slaves? Their reward will be more poverty.
One of the documentary’s authors aptly summed up the problem: “We only show what AI can do, but we should have started by asking the question: how is AI made?” And AI is indeed made by human exploitation.
The lives of distress that support information technology and AI are not footnotes to the human story. But, until now, only a few members of the United Nations-affiliated International Labor Organization (ILO) have denounced the treatment of these hundreds of millions of workers, as have some associations, researchers, journalists, and the Human Rights League. They give humanitarian reasons. But the international working class, and especially workers in the rich countries, must consider these workers as sisters and brothers in exploitation and class struggle. In the capitalist world, barbarism always accompanies what would be undeniable progress in a collective society.