the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Feb 21, 2011
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s plan to cut public workers’ wages and benefits and break their unions has exploded into massive protests that have shut down school districts across the state and brought the capital in Madison to a standstill.
Walker’s proposal calls for requiring government workers to contribute 5.8% of their pay to their pensions, and to pay at least 12.6% of their health care premiums, more than doubling the amount they now pay.
It also limits the unions’ collective bargaining rights only to the issue of wages, and even then forbids total wage increases to exceed the official inflation rate–that is, the grossly undercounted rate.
Finally, it prohibits employers from collecting union dues; and requires yearly votes to recertify the unions.
Whatever the reasons union leaders had for calling these protests (and they probably had a lot to do with protecting the unions’ dues income), they called on their memberships to make a statement: we refuse to be the scapegoats for your mess.
But once they put out the call, they got a flood of a response from all over the state: 10,000 showed up one day, then 20,000 the next, then 30,000. Not only public workers and teachers, but students and parents heeded the call. Inspired–many of them said–by the protests in Egypt, they packed into the State Legislature building and refused to leave. Their chanting and drumming reached the noise level of a buzz saw. They made it impossible for the legislature to carry out its business.
Smaller but still sizeable protests have taken place in Ohio and Indiana, where similar attacks are being pushed.
We’ve been hearing for decades that workers no longer have the means to fight, or even that workers are not willing to fight. No, it’s not that workers wouldn’t. The fact is that up until now, the leaders of the only large-scale organizations of the workers–the unions–have refused to organize a fight like this.
But the massive protests in Wisconsin have finally broken down the dam. Not only will workers fight–these demonstrations hint at the real force workers can have when mobilized.
Now what? It’s obvious workers can’t depend on the Democrats, who proved in the past two years that they are just as willing as Republicans to push through attacks when they are in the majority, and only begin objecting when they’re in the minority. In fact, Democrats lost the majority in states like Wisconsin and Michigan because they WERE supporting attacks on their workers. In states like Illinois and Maryland, where Democrats are still in the majority and holding the Governor’s seat, they are pushing through attacks every bit as ugly as those in Wisconsin.
Obama may say he supports workers in Wisconsin–but he just cut federal workers’ pay and proposes to cut Social Security.
Finally, how can we depend on the union leaderships–including those who called these protests against Republican governors? They continue to campaign for Democrats who have attacked us and even defend–as less bad–the attacks the Democrats carry out on us.
What counts now is that workers in Wisconsin have felt what it means to bring their forces together, and the rest of us have seen that strength–even if only at long distance.
The only force workers can depend on to protect themselves is their OWN forces. And the massive mobilization in Wisconsin is showing us just how many want to use those forces.
Feb 21, 2011
The Obama administration and the media keep referring to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid as “Entitlement” programs. Implying we haven’t earned them and we don’t deserve them.
Let’s review:
1) We are paying for these so-called “entitlement” programs.
2) Social Security wasn’t just handed to workers as a gift from the bosses. Workers in this country in the 1930s fought in the streets for it.
3) The real “entitlement” programs are the bailouts and TARP which hand over our money to the bosses who didn’t earn it and don’t deserve it.
Feb 21, 2011
Baltimore City school CEO Andres Alonso and other school officials are trying to trick or force 750 high seniority teachers to take an early retirement buyout package. They claim it’s because of a budget shortage. Of course there’s a budget shortage–they have been robbing the schools for years.
Some positions won’t be filled. Others would be filled with inexperienced teachers. Some parents immediately spoke out against it, expressing concern over possibly larger class sizes. Every school and the children would be deprived of the valuable expertise and classroom experience. One parent said, “City school students have suffered long enough because of strictly business decisions.”
That’s right–and why every student, teacher and parent has a reason to protest, to come out in force to back them down.
Feb 21, 2011
A woman almost fell into a collapsing escalator at the Foggy Bottom Metro station in Washington, D.C. The metal treads literally fell off leaving a gaping hole. The woman was pulled to safety by other riders just before her leg was about to get mangled in the mechanical parts of the escalator.
This was the third serious incident reported on a Metro escalator. An escalator with worn and oily brake pads slid backwards at L’Enfant Plaza station causing passengers to land in a pile at the bottom. And in November, riders at Tenleytown station encountered a hole where steps should have been.
Metro’s escalators either don’t work at all or they become vicious and horrifying like something from a Stephen King movie, attacking unsuspecting riders.
This is absolutely unacceptable–but predictable!
Metro’s workforce for maintenance has dropped relative to the growing number of machines, leading to two-thirds of the escalators and elevators breaking down. No matter which party is in control–Congress and the White House have been starving it for money while providing big bucks to the banks and the wealthy.
There is no justification for government if it can’t provide needed public services.
Feb 21, 2011
A family home burned to the ground in Silver Spring, Maryland–a suburb of Washington, D.C. during the January 26th snowstorm. There was no power, wires were down and the landlines were down. The family had been frantically trying to call 911 on their Verizon cell phone. Neighbors were also trying to call on their cell phones. But to no avail. It took more than thirty minutes to get through to 911. Way too late.
Verizon blocked 10,000 calls to 911 that day in Montgomery and Prince Georges’ counties
What went wrong?
Verizon claims the outage was triggered by a “mass call event.” What? Isn’t 911 exactly for such emergencies? A snowstorm brought it down?
This was not the first time something like this happened. In July and December of 2010 and as recently as February 18th (last Friday), 911 calls routed over Verizon’s network were also dropped in the Washington, D.C. area.
Obviously, Verizon’s infrastructure is seriously lacking. Either they should deliver what they promise–or emergency service needs to be taken over and fully funded.
Verizon: Don’t tell us people must burn to death because you’re too busy making a profit.
Feb 21, 2011
The two leading candidates for mayor, Rahm Emanuel and Gery Chico, certainly lead lives way different from workers. After leaving the Clinton Administration, Emanuel was hired by an investment banking company. He aided ComEd to buy up the Philadelphia power company Pepco. The new company then laid off 3,350 workers. Emanuel was then awarded 18.5 million dollars over two years.
Chico had 2.9 million dollars in income in 2008 and 2.7 million dollars in 2009. He owns four homes. All this came from using his political connections to do legal work for many companies having dealings with the city.
These candidates not only serve the wealthy class that lives off the labor of workers, they are part of it!
Feb 21, 2011
In California, gasoline prices leaped by more than 10 cents a gallon in just seven days, and are now 53 cents higher than a year ago.
The oil companies blame the price increases on the mass upsurges in Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries–even though gas prices have been rising for over a year, well before the social upsurges broke out.
And these prices are rising despite the fact that demand has been falling recently, according to surveys by Triple A.
No–it’s not Egypt and it’s not “supply and demand.” Prices are rising for one simple reason: the oil companies are trying to push their profits sky high–and then higher still.
Last month, ExxonMobil, the world’s biggest oil company, announced that profits already were 60% higher than a year before. “That’s a profit level not seen since the third quarter of 2008 ...” marveled the Wall Street Journal. And prices are hitting a record high for mid-winter.
At Chevron, the second biggest U.S. oil company, profits for 2010 were almost twice as high as the year before. “Financially and operationally, 2010 was an outstanding year,” boasted Chevron Chairman and CEO John Watson.
The third largest U.S. oil company, ConocoPhillips, announced on February 11 that it was literally bursting with money. So, it boosted its quarterly dividend by 20% and decided to spend 15 billion dollars buying back its own stock. “Shareholders always like it when cash is given back,” one analyst told Bloomberg News.
That’s capitalism pure and simple: no matter how much profit they already made, they want still more.
Feb 21, 2011
The following was taken from a presentation given in Detroit at a Spark public meeting in January.
Governors across the country are trying to sell us the seriously delusional idea that if the business tax is reduced by about half and a state loses a billion or so in income, then that will create jobs.
It’s crazy, a businessman’s fantasy. How much money do they need? Here’s a recent Wall Street Journal headline: “GE, Apple, Toyota: The Top 50 Cash Hoarders.” The top 50 public companies NOT EVEN COUNTING banks and hedge funds are HOLDING BACK more than a TRILLION dollars in reserve until they see better investment opportunities. IF they already have $1.08 trillion and they are not creating jobs, HOW MUCH MORE DO THEY NEED?
How has that policy of giving gifts and tax breaks to corporations been working out for us? The companies have taken their gifts from taxpayers and have broken their “job creating” promises left and right.
Nationally the official unemployment rate is said to be 9.4%. But even that horrendous figure is doctored with the rosiest colors. If we include those who are totally discouraged and no longer looking for jobs, and if we then include those 26 million who are stuck in part time work and can’t find full time, then in reality, almost one fourth of us have an unemployment problem.
You can’t open a paper or listen to a radio without some idiot peddling the fantasy that we are in a recovery. Last weekend A Detroit paper had a two page spread about the huge recovery in the restaurant industry. A Subway shop hired 10 people. It made headlines. Ten people–when in Michigan there are 600,000 actively looking for work!
There is one recovery that is not a fantasy. Corporate profits. Already in the third quarter of last year, U.S. business overall earned profits at an annual rate of 1.659 trillion dollars. That is the highest level of profits recorded in 60 years. It is even higher than the record set in 2006 during the speculation boom in sub-prime mortgages!
A few days ago, a New York Times economic columnist wrote the following: “The jobless recovery is the third straight recovery to begin with months and months of little job growth. Why? One obvious possibility is the balance of power between employers and employees.... American employers operate with few restraints.”
An amazing burst of honesty from one of the bosses’ most important newspapers.
Everybody in the world of wealth and power knows exactly what the situation is. The working class is not using the power it could use. We are not fighting for OUR bailouts, the way the banks and the auto companies fought for theirs.
Downhill for a Long Time
The working class economy has been on a gradual downslide for many years. There are several dates a person could pick for a milestone, like maybe 1981, when Reagan broke the air traffic controllers’ union and organized labor didn’t fight it. But let me pick a more recent year, the good old days of 2005. Now we are going to talk a little UAW here since I have been UAW since 1972. I retired in 2002–still the good old days you might say. Yes we had taken concessions but “little ones.” Few people understood where the concessions road would take us. Now here comes 2005. The UAW agrees to re-open the contract for just a “small concession.” Just to help out us retirees, it was said, active workers would defer a mere 17 cents COLA and the 2006 annual improvement wage increase. This was done during a big hue and cry about GM going bankrupt–the beginning of the big bankruptcy fear campaigns.
The majority of active workers, a small majority, gave in to this new small concession. None of them imagined then how far backwards the UAW would go in five years.
Who could have believed the transformation of the UAW from a union that had always maintained a common base pay for all unskilled members, and a common base pay for skilled workers into a union of two tier and three tier wages?
Who could have believed the way that us Big Three retirees would be reduced to living on a knife edge of uncertainty about our whole retirement? Being nickeled and dimed to death on our health care–health care that was guaranteed to us, without cost to us for life, if only we would work 30 years for one company. So they said. I sat in that courtroom where the UAW lawyers and the GM lawyers read from exactly the same script to a federal judge who then released GM from those definite contractual healthcare obligations and allowed GM to limit its contributions no matter what it would do to the retirees’ benefits! That was done under the cover of saying it would be safer for retirees that way if GM went broke!
And who could imagine when GM first spun off Delphi in 1999 that Delphi–this enormous subsidiary to this enormous profit-making GM–that Delphi would go ahead and declare a sham bankruptcy in 2005? And then colossal GM itself would get the government to finance its own “quick rinse” bankruptcy. And even more unimaginable, that part of the “quick rinse” would involve workers being saddled with a no strike clause and a wage freeze until 2015! It would give the company the right to unlimited new hiring at two tier: half pay, few benefits, and no traditional pension at all! Worse than the conditions in the Southern transplants, where there is no union.
It Won’t Stop until We Stop It
The rapid decline of the UAW is paralleled in the snowballing pressure on workers everywhere. President Obama froze federal workers’ pay for two years. It’s not the end of such attacks. Postal workers have been under a barrage of threats to their jobs. GE’s CEO Jeffrey Immelt says the economy needs to be reset. Jeffrey was just appointed to President Obama’s jobs council. This is what they mean: they want the workers’ economy reset DOWN so the bosses’ economy can reset UP.
Having disposed of the auto union they are moving on to the public workers: States, cities and school districts all cry to high heaven that they are in deficit and they cannot afford overpaid union workers. About the tax breaks to nowhere they have nothing to say.
So now the public schools in Detroit have a so-called financial manager, trained and paid by private financial interests, closing 52 more schools and proposing to cram 60 kids into a class. In the past five years, 124 Detroit public schools have been closed. And they dare to claim this will improve education!
In Detroit and every other working class town and city, the parks and recreation centers and afterschool programs disappear. The fire stations close and consolidate, the EMS services shrink.
How long will this retreat go on? How long will the wealthy grab up everything in sight? There is only one answer: until we decide to stop retreating. It won’t stop until we stop it. It’s just that simple. The longer they convince us to wait, the more they can take from us.
I’ve seen them use the fear tactic over and over to persuade people to just put up with a small or medium cutback today because “otherwise the plant might close,” “otherwise the company will go bankrupt,” “otherwise you’ll lose your job.” They make it believable–like you dare not take a chance–but it’s always a lie.
The lies are wearing thin! Ford workers turned down a national contract for the first time in 2009. City workers and state office workers came out in the streets last year to protest cutbacks. Are we at a point of change? How long will it take? What will it take? No one knows.
We have patterns to look back on, right now. The Great Depression. We all know it started in 1929. But even before, in 1926 there was a recession in jobs, people were laid off. But the banks kept on speculating like mad, and then came the big 1929 stock market crash. Banks went out of business overnight. The depositors lost all their money because the banks had taken the deposits and speculated with them and suddenly the game collapsed. Sounds like 2008 and it was.
The unemployment that started in 1926 jumped much higher after 1929. The first real protests didn’t begin until 1932, when the Bonus Army of unemployed World War I veterans marched on Washington. And the unemployed Detroit workers marched to Ford in the Hunger March, where Ford’s private army killed five unarmed marchers. There was a rubber workers strike in Akron. But the protests didn’t generalize.
Workers endured two more years of hard times until, in 1934, the San Francisco longshore strike, the Minneapolis Teamsters strike, and the Toledo Auto-lite strike broke the logjam. These were outright victories. The battles didn’t generalize. But they did prove that workers could win if they stuck together.
For over two more years the working class stayed quiet–on the surface. But finally, after 11 years of waiting, at the end of 1936, came the GM sit-downs. Forty-four days of taking over GM’s property and not letting go. The victory of the sit-downs loosed the flood. The working class all across the industrial Midwest sat down too. Waitresses, cigar molders, everyone. The bosses gave in almost immediately, over and over again. The working class finally forced a reset upwards in their wages and conditions across the board.
What’s the Difference–1937-2011?
Going into that sit-down surge, the working class of the 1930s had a very important advantage that is mostly lacking today. The important milestone strikes of 1934 were led by socialist and communist militants who belonged to relatively small organizations. They don’t teach this history in history. The auto sit-downs, too, were led by communist militants. Those militants might have been in different organizations–the Communist Party or the Communist League of America or the American Workers Party or, to a lesser extent, the Socialist Party–but they were confident in the capacities of the working class when it finally moved.
It was communist militants who went to work every day, who discussed with workers they worked with about the real class situation and what could be done–communist militants who built up small networks of people who could depend on each other, who could lead struggles when workers would begin to move. They did this work during the quiet years. They did it in many more places than San Francisco or Minneapolis. They didn’t know when or how or where things would open up. But when things broke, they were ready for it.
If they could devote themselves to that work, it was because of their convictions that communism was the workers’ politics; because of their organizations, made up of devoted militants to the cause of the working class. They were never very many compared to the working class’s millions. But in those particular battles, they made all the difference.
When I was in high school and then college, you never heard the word communist except as a threat to what they called our way of life. There was no one saying any different. The combination of McCarthy repression plus the disappointments of Stalinism plus the temporarily high working class standards of living all conspired to make it unmentionable.
One of the real advantages gained in the social struggles of the 1960s was that big parts of the iron curtain of McCarthyism were torn down. In particular, during the Sixties, some activists who went through different sorts of experiences in different movements–civil rights, peace movement, trade unions, women’s movement–became communists. There are communist militants in the working class today. Yes, not many. Yes, for sure, not nearly enough. But when the working class does begin to move, it will have resources. It will not need to start totally from scratch.
There is simply no exit from capitalism, no answer to the problems of class society, except by taking the road of socialism and communism. To proceed along that road depends on the working class becoming active and learning through its experience that it has the capacity to take command of society and finally run it in the interests of the whole laboring population.
Feb 21, 2011
A “little bird” told reporters that Chrysler and GM executives at the very top will get bonuses of 50% of their base pay!
Managers below that super-special level will “average” $10,000 in bonuses! In other words, the next-to-the-top rung of management will get enormous bonuses and ordinary salaried workers will get crumbs.
Ford has not yet announced how big executive bonuses are, but all news accounts expect as high or higher as at Chrysler and GM.
And yet, they expect union workers to be grateful for bonuses.
So what are workers getting?
For Ford’s 40,600 hourly workers, bonuses will average $5,000–before taxes.
Some of GM’s 45,000 hourly workers will get bonuses of around $4,000, based on hours worked. Workers who were on layoff all last year–like at Orion Assembly–will get nothing.
At Chrysler–which pretends not to be profitable at all–21,000 workers got a tiny $500 max after taxes.
Do they think we forgot how much was stolen from us in that fraudulent 2007 contract vote and in that fake 2009 bankruptcy scam? We know full well we have not had a raise in five years. We have not seen a cost-of-living adjustment. Our overtime pay was stolen. We know we lost scheduled bonuses and a holiday.
Not to mention, two tier and all that retirees are losing.
And what does this add up to? Even UAW President Bob King is forced to admit that workers have lost as much as $30,000 and we can expect he is underestimating.
Guess what?! Workers want it all back!
Only because it’s a union contract year are workers getting a tiny bit more bonus in an attempt to trick us into inaction.
The companies are looking over their shoulder at the strength of that national NO! vote that happened at Ford in 2009. They are looking at the NO! vote of GM parts workers in Indianapolis in 2010. It’s clear auto workers are disgusted with concessions.
By all means, workers at other auto workers should rightfully thank their friends who work at Ford and their brothers and sisters at Local 23 in Indiana for these bonuses.
Feb 21, 2011
Unheard of in past decades, the auto companies have been able to be profitable in a bad economy.
Ford reported a 6.6 billion profit. GM is expected to report a profit of more than 5 billion. Chrysler reported an operating profit of $763 million.
Auto sales were 12 million in 2010–remaining down from the decade long 16 million yearly average.
How is it possible that these companies are so profitable when sales are way down? Only one thing has made these previously unheard of profits possible–the depth of concessions stolen from workers!
Workers getting half wages of $14 an hour have barely started to figure into current profits. Once sales increase, and the numbers working at $14 an hour increase, the auto companies will be even more extremely profitable.
They have no intention for workers to regain what was lost. According to Sean McAlinden, of the Center for Automotive Research, the bonuses are an “incentive to convince workers to eliminate cost-of-living adjustments and ... [raises.]”
If workers want a chance to regain what was stolen–by collusion between the auto companies, the federal government, and top UAW officials–they will have to discuss what needs to be regained and prepare those around them for the fight which is coming.
Feb 21, 2011
A new documentary, Hot Coffee, reveals the true story of Stella Liebeck who sued McDonald’s after spilling a scorching cup of hot coffee on her lap in 1992. News and TV shows of every sort ridiculed Liebeck and her case. ABC News called the case “the poster child of excessive lawsuits.” Toby Keith recently produced a song called “American Ride,” which says “Spill a cup of coffee, make a million dollars.” Companies spent millions of dollars, using this case to change the product liability law to their advantage.
But what actually happened had nothing to do with the lies the news and companies asked us to believe.
Liebeck was 79 years old when the scorching coffee caused third-degree burns covering 16% of her body. Her treatment required skin grafting and eight days stay in a hospital, followed by two years of medical treatment. During this period, Liebeck lost 20 pounds, reducing her down to 83 pounds.
Medicare paid only 80% of this medical treatment. To cover the remaining 20%, Liebeck asked McDonald’s for $10,000. They came back with an offer of $800 and told Liebeck she could sue them if she wanted more.
It turned out that McDonald’s manual requires employees to keep coffee temperature around 187 degrees when poured into a styrofoam cup. Normal pots keep coffee below 162 degrees. To have a much higher temperature was obviously a risk to consumers and workers–a purely business decision by McDonald’s to cut costs–and improve profits.
McDonald’s produced a huge chart with 700 names in court, arguing that these people were also burned by their coffee, but this happened over 10 years. Therefore, said McDonald’s, such burns were statistically insignificant.
Simply put, McDonald’s admitted that they were knowingly burning the skin of more than one person every week and didn’t care about it. Such callousness coming from McDonald’s own mouth not only stunned the jury, but the judge as well. The judge directed the jury to consider punitive damages. And the jury agreed.
Companies are cold schemers. They need to be scorched a little bit!
Feb 21, 2011
Blue Cross is moving workers from Southfield to the Renaissance Center in downtown Detroit. No account was taken of the needs of the people who will move. This is the same Blue Cross that ripped people, many of whom lived in Detroit, out from their downtown office to work out in Southfield. Now the same company is changing its mind and moving them back. How many workers had moved to make it easier to get to work?
It is not just the company that makes moves like this difficult, but everything about the apparatus of this society. There is no public transportation that would make the commute easier–it is neither frequent, convenient, nor affordable.
The workday is not just when we are at the workplace. It also includes how much time we have to waste on foolishness like commuting. We need an 8-hour day, and that includes everything: the time it takes to get here, the time to get home, and the time getting out of crowded parking structures.
Certainly the increases that have occurred in the productivity of labor could mean that we could work fewer hours, with not only no cut in pay, but even a pay increase.
Feb 21, 2011
California politicians are accusing a federal receiver who is supposed to oversee health care in the state’s prisons of overspending taxpayer money. Since 2007, the receiver’s office approved contracts worth 82 million dollars for the construction of medical facilities, which were never built. Out of that sum, 27 million dollars went to just three companies.
The office of the federal receiver was established by a 2006 court order in response to a lawsuit by prisoners.
Conditions in the state’s prisons–such as severe overcrowding and lack of sanitation–were so bad that even the courts, which certainly are no friends of prisoners these days, had to order California to do something about it. Yet, everyone agrees, those barbaric conditions still continue in California prisons.
So yes, the elected state officials are right when they imply that the appointed federal receiver did nothing to improve prison conditions, and lined the pockets of his friends instead. But these state politicians are pointing a finger at themselves too, because that’s exactly what they did before!
The only difference is what set of business interests were favored by what set of politicians.
Don’t either one of you pretend to have humanitarian concerns! Profit for your friends is the name of your game.
Feb 21, 2011
Even before massive protests in Egypt ousted the dictator Hosni Mubarak, the country’s ruling circles and the army, in collaboration with the U.S., gave a foretaste of what they call the “transition to democracy.” Omar Suleiman, Mubarak’s Vice President and the head of his intelligence service, began to negotiate publicly with the opposition, including the Muslim Brotherhood, a reactionary organization that uses religion. Suleiman, too, is gone now, leaving in charge Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, who has been the minister of defense and commander-in-chief of the armed forces for 20 years–the same armed forces whose violence and repression imposed Mubarak’s dictatorship on the population.
If the U.S. pressured Mubarak to step down, it certainly was not out of any concern for democracy. After all, Mubarak was able to stay the dictator of Egypt for 30 years with the support of the big powers. But dictators can serve the wealthy inside their country and abroad only so long as they have control over their own people. The resilience of the protest movement showed that Mubarak was no longer able to play that role. As a result, the U.S. took its distance and pushed for another team–one that would be able to calm the anger and reestablish order–to take over.
Now Mubarak is gone, but if the change is limited to putting in place some of his deputies to prepare new elections in six months, then the main beneficiary of the confrontation the protesters put up will be the Muslim Brotherhood. Being legal and having a part in writing the new constitution, the Muslim Brotherhood is now part of the power structure that keeps the order.
The U.S., which has been pretending that Muslim fundamentalism is its main adversary, suddenly turns out to be collaborating with it. But there is nothing surprising about that. Many times in the past already, the U.S. has relied on reactionary forces, in order to oppose other political forces that threatened certain U.S. interests. In the case of Egypt, for example, the U.S. secretly supported and funneled money to the Muslim Brotherhood for decades via Saudi Arabia, to counter some aspects of the secular nationalism of the previous dictator Nasser.
So, while we can rejoice that the protest movements have kicked out the dictators Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt, and that the movement has spread to other Arab countries like Jordan and Yemen, conscious workers have lessons to draw from what is happening in these countries.
The first lesson is that the people represent a considerable force, and that the worst of dictators can be overthrown once the fear created by terror gives place to the willingness to act. But another important lesson is that, as soon as the dictator is gone, imperialism and the local bourgeoisie will be at work to find a political solution which allows them to preserve what’s essential to them: exploitation and oppression.
The transition to democracy, advocated today by the West and the Egyptian bourgeoisie, doesn’t at all have the objective of easing the great misery of the exploited classes–caused by unemployment, and by wages so low that they amount to only one-fourth of those in Turkey, a country where wages are already very low. The transition they advocate doesn’t have the objective of doing anything about the striking inequalities between the rich and the poor. On the contrary. The goal of the big powers and local bourgeoisie is to throw overboard some leaders so that nothing changes–neither for the exploiters nor for the exploited classes.
Nor does talk about future elections mean the army’s hand will be taken off the throat of the population.
All this means that the so-called “transition” won’t bring the exploited classes bread or even democratic liberties. The exploited will get both only when they impose them themselves, by giving themselves the means for this: a policy that represents their class interests, and organizations that are determined to make them prevail.
Feb 21, 2011
For years now, countries like France and Britain have sold arms to Egypt. But the most important supplier, far and away, is the U.S. Each year, the U.S. sells Egypt arms worth between 1.5 and 2 billion dollars, a sum that goes beyond what the Egyptian state can afford. So the U.S. regularly cancels part of Egypt’s debt for these purchases.
The U.S. furnishes Egypt with used military equipment. Furthermore, 600 U.S. soldiers are permanently based in Egypt, stationed in the Sinai peninsula. The U.S. army provides training for the Egyptian military. The last “war game,” dubbed Bright Star, occurred in October 2009. Its goal was “military operations in an urban terrain,” meaning operations against popular riots. Twenty-five thousand U.S. soldiers took part in it.
The Egyptian army is almost entirely equipped and trained by the U.S. When Mubarak was called a U.S. puppet, this wasn’t simply a manner of speaking.