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, 2014
Early in March, two more women’s clinics closed in Texas–casualties of legislation aimed at denying women access to abortion. This brings to 11 the number of clinics closed in Texas since 2010, leaving only six where abortions can be provided–in this whole mammoth state, with its 270,000 square miles and its 26 million people.
The picture across the country as a whole is not all that different. In Mississippi, similar legislation has closed the very last women’s clinic. Alabama and Wisconsin have only two clinics left. Missouri has only one, and 23 different bills aimed at closing it have been introduced into the Missouri legislature.
It’s a concerted attack on working class and poor women, women who don’t have insurance coverage or much money. No matter what the law reads, wealthy women have always had access to abortions and other medical care.
But for many women, these clinics were their only life-line, offering not only abortion, but also contraception, cancer screening, blood pressure and diabetes screening, treatment for sexually transmitted diseases.
Many states now require women’s clinics to be outfitted as though they were carrying out the kind of surgical procedures done only in hospitals–at the cost of millions of dollars per clinic, millions of dollars that the clinics don’t have. Such laws are not aimed at other clinics performing outpatient procedures, only at women’s clinics that perform abortions.
The most cynical and depraved law is one that requires a doctor who serves in the clinics to have “admitting” privileges in a local hospital–that is, to be a local doctor.
But few local doctors dare work in the women’s clinics because of the daily threat of violence. Doctors who perform abortions have found their homes firebombed, their children harassed or hurt. Some doctors have themselves been killed or maimed.
The legislation requiring local “admitting” privileges is a virulent bet that local doctors, facing terrorism from anti-abortion fanatics, will shut down.
Since 2010, thousands of bills aimed at eliminating women’s access to abortion have been offered into state legislatures around the country, with almost 200 of them already enacted.
These laws are not something coming up from the “grass roots.” In fact, for decades every poll has shown that a large majority of the population think women should have access to abortion.
No, the legislation introduced over the last few years by know-nothing state legislators is being mass produced and fed to them by a few extreme-right billionaires–people like the Koch brothers–who organized the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
Women are not the only target. ALEC has also mass produced bills aimed at making it difficult for people to register and vote; or the bills making it harder for workers to strike and organize unions; or bills attacking the pensions of public sector workers; or the laws whose aim is to push teachers aside, replacing them with untrained novices and a computer; or the stand-your-ground laws used to justify racist murder; or the laws attempting to criminalize immigrants who come here to work.
The attack on women’s right to abortion, as foul as it is, is part of a much larger attack on the whole laboring population, an attack being pushed by the right wing.
The right wing, endowed with money and privilege, spewing out backward religious ideas, is trying to mobilize parts of the population against other parts, attempting to keep its victims isolated from each other.
It should be obvious that the whole working class, if it continues to be quiet in the face of these attacks, will find itself pulled further backward, trampled down. The working class has no choice but to organize to defend its overall interests, including the specific interests of its various parts: women workers, immigrant workers, black workers, public sector workers, retirees and so on.
The extreme right is arming itself for battle. It would be an enormous mistake for the working class to ignore that fact.
Mar 17, 2014
On the first day of spring semester, hundreds of students at Los Angeles Valley College were shut out of their classes. Valley administrators had laid off teachers and cancelled dozens of classes for this semester–AFTER students had already enrolled in them!
The officials also cut the theater department, and the entire track and field program. They threw out four computer classes for having “low enrollment”–that is, fewer than 38 students! (Never mind that the number of computers available in a classroom limits the number of students.) The college now has a grand total of ONE physics class for its 18,000 students. And the classrooms are often filthy, because Valley officials have also reduced custodial staff drastically.
The list goes on and on. And Valley College is not alone. The number of classes in California colleges is now at a 15-year low. State officials are even threatening to close the state’s largest community college, City College of San Francisco, under the pretext that it did not get academic accreditation.
When, starting in 2008, California cut funding for community colleges drastically, officials blamed it on the recession. But it was an excuse. The real reason for the cuts has always been to free more money for the state government to hand out to big business. These most recent cuts prove that, because now officials themselves say there is money. In November 2012 California Democrats, led by Governor Jerry Brown, passed Proposition 30, a sales tax increase, with the promise that they would put more money into education. And the State of California now officially has a 4.2-billion-dollar surplus. But officials have not restored the classes they have cut–to the contrary, they happily continue to swing their heavy ax for more cuts!
On top of all this, these same officials now have a Godfather-style offer students “can’t refuse”: If you can’t get into a class you need to graduate, pay $249 per unit–instead of $46! The state legislature, controlled by the Democrats, passed a law that allows this two-tier tuition system, and it has already begun at Long Beach City College (about 25 miles south of Los Angeles) as a “pilot program.”
Five times more tuition for fewer classes available??? It’s a sure way to put working-class students in big debt–if they still want to get a college education.
Mar 17, 2014
It’s March in Chicago, also known as testing season in the city’s elementary schools. But this year may be a little different. 1500 parents so far have opted out of the ISAT test for their children. And teachers at Saucedo Academy, an elementary school in Little Village, and Drummond Elementary on the North Side, voted to boycott the test.
The ISAT test was used to decide whether students would advance to the next grade, as well as to rate schools. Low test scores were the excuse used to close dozens of Chicago schools. With such high stakes, education in Chicago, as in the rest of the country, was distorted to teach to the test.
But the ISAT this year is a “no stakes test”–it will not be used to rate students or schools. That’s why parents and teachers targeted this test, which takes several days to administer. But they did so to make a bigger point: the students in Chicago deserve to be taught more than just how to take a test. Students at working class elementary schools have been more and more subjected to an education that focuses on tests like the ISAT, to the exclusion of real learning.
Some of the charter schools take this even further. Students’ entire education at Noble Street and other charters centers around tests like the ISAT.
Students who refuse this test will be able to learn something–and maybe teach the leaders of Chicago Public Schools a thing or two about education.
Mar 17, 2014
In Washington, D.C., the number of families with children who need winter emergency shelter has more than doubled in one year. With all the homeless shelters already overflowing, the city has been putting up families in communal recreation centers. On Friday, March 7, a judge ordered those recreation centers shut down for being “traumatizing” to children.
As if the lack of housing created by the authorities isn’t already traumatizing!
The politicians are unraveling the last shreds of public housing just as affordable housing virtually disappears. The waiting list for public housing has 70,000 names and is not accepting new applicants. Six thousand Washington families have been designated as on the verge of homelessness, or “precariously doubled up” in public housing. Thousands more are uncounted. Twenty per cent of D.C. residents spend more than half of their income on rent or mortgage. Evictions and foreclosures proceed as normal, even during the coldest winter months, adding to the overburdened shelters.
Homelessness is one of the most degrading attacks of an uncivilized society.
Mar 17, 2014
Authorities say there’s a homelessness crisis in Washington "not seen since the 1980s."
How ironic! It was in the 1980s that things were supposed to have changed somewhat for the city’s homeless. A group of homeless advocates led by Mitch Snyder had set up a "Reaganville" tent camp in Lafayette Park, and staged protests, hunger strikes, and civil disobedience. These actions helped win the use of a federal office building to turn into a large shelter with 1,000 beds. The building had been unused and abandoned for years before the government finally gave in! The Federal City Shelter grew to be the largest homeless shelter in the country, with 1,700 beds. But it still turns people away every night.
The same homeless activists also worked to get a measure on the ballot in 1984. "Initiative 17" was supposed to guarantee the "right to shelter, to all people, at all times." It passed by a landslide 72%.
And then it was systematically dismantled by Democrat after Democrat in the mayor’s office and City Council, until it was finally completely rescinded in 1990. The legislation that followed required shelter only during "hypothermia alerts" and only for D.C. residents. A spending cap was added. Restrictions were placed on families, allowing them to be kicked out of shelter sooner. And all this was going on just as rents were climbing through the roof.
And that’s not even to speak of enforcement of the law. A "shelter," for example, is required to have beds, clean linens, restrooms, and showers. Yet this winter, the city threw open some unused Metro buses on cold nights and called them a "shelter"!
Mar 17, 2014
Last year in April, someone used machine guns to knock out 17 giant electrical transformers near San Jose, California. These transformers were distributing electricity to Silicon Valley. To avoid a blackout, electric-grid officials rerouted power around the site.
Last year, this attack briefly made it to news. At the time, PG&E, which owns the transmission substation, said the transformers had been hit by vandals. Nobody was arrested or charged in the attack.
Now, one year after the attack, it is widely discussed in the news. Over time, the utility executives, the federal officials and politicians upgraded the attack from vandalism to sabotage, and are now spinning out this attack as an act of terrorism, and many politicians picked up on this. Who knows what really happened.
However, each year, there are more than 1,500 unplanned outages in the Western Power Grid. And these outages have nothing to do with terrorism or vandalism, which are extremely rare events.
Weather is often the immediate cause of outages. But the power system should be modern and flexible enough to prevent or minimize the effects of such outages.
Meanwhile, the power stations that generate electrical power and the electric grid that distributes power are very aged, prone to frequent malfunctions and failures. The average age of U.S. commercial nuclear reactors is about 33 years, close to their retirement age of 40. Most large transformers that regulate power transmission, like those attacked in California, were designed with life spans of 40 to 50 years. Yet the average age of transformers is 42 years. Any loose screw or fried wire could very easily knock out these transformers.
Thus, the power stations and the grid are in dire need of being modernized. But, power companies are not willing to do it, since modernization would cut into profits. Shifting the focus to terrorists is a scheme to cloak this greed for profit that is the basic cause of power outages on a massive scale.
Mar 17, 2014
When oil giant Chevron’s shale gas well exploded near rural Bobtown in southwestern Pennsylvania, the fire burned for four days.
State regulators who previously argued that fracking well pads could safely be 300 feet from homes and schools–were “grateful” no one lived within half a mile of the dangerous explosion!
A young worker went missing that day: Ian McKee, age 27. It was a week later that state police announced bones believed to belong to Ian were found–located between a charred crane and a tank, the last place Ian had been seen. This marked the 6th worker death from a Pennsylvania gas well fire since July 2010.
The story only made national news when Chevron gave out 100 coupons for a free large pizza to nearby residents, to “apologize” for traffic after the fire.
A local resident contacted CNN to say, “It felt like a huge slap in the face.” Another wrote: “Nice community relations: If you are frightened by fire and explosion, relax, have a pizza!”
Chevron made 21 billion dollars in profits in 2013. It is mind boggling that free pizza was their public relations response.
Yet in a way, Chevron’s stunt worked in their favor. Once the pizza story hit the airwaves, the whole national discussion became about pizza. The dangers that fracking presents for workers and residents ended up hidden behind a pizza sideshow smokescreen.
Mar 17, 2014
The following two articles come from a presentation made at a Spark Public Meeting in February in Detroit. It explains why we have decided to present candidates in the 2014 elections.
For 40 years this country has been mired in an economic crisis. One recession has followed another—in almost all the cases, each one was worse than the one before, each one came faster than the one before. We know what it means to live through these crises. But some people have done well for themselves. The capitalist class and their bankers have been able to protect themselves from this crisis they created; but at the expense of the population, driving down our standard of living in order to increase their profits.
The banks have robbed people of their homes. Corporations have eliminated jobs, cut wages and benefits. Governments have eliminated jobs, cut pensions and health care, gutted social programs, and given away the store in the form of tax breaks to big corporations and bank bailouts. All in the name of getting the economy going again. But the economy isn’t going again.
Moreover, it is obvious that everything the bosses did made the impact of the crisis worse on us. And it’s made the real economy worse. When jobs are cut, people don’t have money to spend. When people can’t buy anything, this cuts other jobs as well. All these cuts don’t overcome the crisis—they aggravate the situation. The only thing they actually do is increase the profits of the corporations and the banks.
That is the whole point of what the capitalist class has done over the last 40 years—to enrich themselves at the expense of most people living today.
The capitalist class has no way to get us out of this crisis. No way, that is, but what they did to get out of the crisis of the 1930s at the time of the Great Depression. To get out of it, they went to war. For all the talk of the New Deal, in fact, it was World War II that got the capitalists out of the economic crisis they created. That war killed almost 50 million people, destroyed an enormous amount of cities and factories in Europe and Japan and other parts of the world. The capitalist economy revived, but only for a few decades.
Today, we’re in another crisis, like that of the 1930s. It’s why we say that until the working class fights on a massive scale and puts forward its own solutions, there is no way out of the crisis, not only for the working class but for the whole population.
But everyone knows that the working class isn’t fighting, and hasn’t been on the massive scale needed. We’re mired in a dead end.
There is no magic answer. But one thing is sure: Someone has to say the truth—that the only solution out of this crisis is for the working class to fight—and to say it as broadly as possible, to as many people as possible. One way to do that is to carry out an election campaign based on this reality.
This country may today have technical marvels—computers, smartphones, internet, exploration of space—but socially, this country is behind where it was 94 years ago when Eugene Debs, sitting in prison, amassed a million votes. The laws have become more backward and restrictive since then, so backward that it’s difficult for anyone other than the two rich man’s parties to be heard.
We have to try to break the hold on who has the right to discuss political ideas in this country. It shouldn’t just be the rich that have that right. It shouldn’t just be groups like the Tea Party....
It’s why we have decided, without pinning down at this moment the particulars of who will run in what candidacies, we have decided at the size we are, to the extent we are able, to organize an election campaign.
We will use it to put forth a program in the interests of the working people. Our candidates will stand for a working class policy, for a working class fight. They will insist on this necessity: the workers should not pay for the bosses’ crisis.
No, we won’t have the media behind us, like the twin capitalist parties, the Democrats and Republicans, do. No, we won’t have their Political Action Committee funds of millions or even billions of dollars. On that level we can’t compete. Our goal is to get out there and raise the working class banner in these elections. On the level of ideas, we can compete.
Certainly we won’t have what Eugene V. Debs had when he ran: a large Socialist party rooted in the working class and farming population. But someone has to start breaking the hold as to who has the right to discuss political ideas in this country.
In different cities, and even in this city, different socialist or communist organizations have put up socialist candidates or working class candidates. We ourselves ran an election campaign, Workers Against Concessions, in 1988. All of those campaigns were a start. But a voice for the interests of the working class needs to be heard regularly.
Republicans and Democrats campaign in order to get a post for themselves, to get lucrative contacts. We want to campaign to let a working class policy be heard. We already do that with our newspaper, our workplace newsletters, at the markets, and in our political meetings. This year we want to add an election campaign that will allow us to be heard by people who otherwise don’t know us.
Working people should not pay for the crisis created by the corporations and the banks.
That means, everyone who wants to work should have a job. No company making a profit should be allowed to lay off a single worker. If companies don’t want to create more jobs, then force them to divide up the work, with no loss of pay to anyone. Everyone could have a job, everyone could work fewer hours AND workers’ weekly wages would not have to go down.
In fact, most wages need to go up. We should all be able to live comfortably, with adequate wages for all of us, wages that are indexed so that as soon as prices go up, our wages go up too, keeping pace with inflation.
This is a necessity. And there is no reason a program like this could not be implemented immediately. There is more than enough wealth to pay for it! The big corporations today are sitting on at least three trillion dollars, hoarding it or speculating with it. The big Wall Street banks are sitting on how many trillion more? No one knows for sure, which is why the working class, when it begins to fight for aims like this, also will have to fight to impose its control over the bookkeeping, all the secret records the corporations never reveal.
What it all boils down to is that the working class has to fight to impose its needs.
The working class has never fought on demand, because somebody wanted it to fight. But throughout the history of capitalist society, sooner or later workers reached their boiling point—they no longer accepted the conditions that the capitalists expected them to live under.
So we know that at one point or another, the same thing will happen in our time—the working class will erupt, moving to fight for what it needs. When that happens, it’s important that the working class have its own goals to fight for—not the ones the bosses and their media put out in front of us, not the ones that trade-union leaders pushing co-operation advocate. When workers do begin to fight, it’s vital that they not settle for “reasonable” gains, that is, for the crumbs, while leaving capitalist exploitation in place. It will be vital that workers fight to transform society in their own image.
That’s why it’s important now for there to be a voice for a working class policy, a working class fight.
Mar 17, 2014
An election campaign, organized to put forward a program of struggle for the working class, is not new. But it has been over a century since a militant working class leader in the United States, Eugene V. Debs, who had led an important railroad strike, ran for president on the Socialist Party ticket in 1912 and received 900,000 votes. He did not expect to win, knowing then, just like today, that big money controls the outcome of elections in capitalist society. But he ran to let the voice of the working class be heard. “I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.”
Six years later, in 1918, he was put on trial for speaking out in favor of the workers’ revolution in Russia in 1917 and for having opposed the first big imperialist war, World War I. He was jailed in federal prison for presenting the working class viewpoint. But the fact that Debs and other militants like him raised these ideas was one of the things that helped pave the way for a massive strike wave in 1919 in the United States.
In 1920, while still in federal prison for his views, he ran for president again and garnered nearly a million votes. While in prison, of course he couldn’t lead a strike, he couldn’t be out in the streets addressing the workers. But others campaigned for him on the basis of what he was saying, and this allowed these ideas to circulate, to resonate throughout an important part of the working class.
Mar 17, 2014
Author David Finkel spent eight months with an Army unit in Iraq for his first book, The Good Soldier, and this book follows the same soldiers once they have returned home. For many soldiers, the “after-war” that Finkel describes is just as chilling as the war itself.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan created 500,000 “mentally wounded” U.S. soldiers, and this book tells the stories of a handful of them. The main character, Adam Schumann, is suffering from extreme Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and crippling guilt. When he first comes home, his wife vows to have “infinite patience” with him. But as financial problems mount, and after Adam accidentally drops their baby son and puts a shotgun in his mouth threatening suicide during one of their many fights, she descends into despair herself. She is alternately stricken with guilt for letting down her husband and with anger at him for letting down their family.
In fact, the Schumanns deal relatively well with the “after-war” compared to some other soldiers in Adam’s unit. A number of soldiers commit suicide, one of whom cannot get past the images of a little girl he thinks he shot. One severely wounded and lonely soldier, missing limbs, tries to find a date on the internet. He gets just one reply, from a woman who writes only “Thank you for your service.” Another of Schumann’s friends in the army and another “good soldier” is assigned to a special unit for mentally wounded soldiers. He tries to rejoin his military unit despite suffering from such severe mental illness that he almost kills his wife.
Almost all of the soldiers in the book come from working class backgrounds, and so the book shows one of the prices the U.S. working class pays for this country’s imperialist wars to dominate the world.
Mar 17, 2014
Pete Camarata, a long-time militant in the Teamsters union, recently died of cancer. He was only 67 years old.
Pete was active in the big Detroit local of the IBT, and played a leading role in a wildcat strike by drivers in 1976 that pushed the trucking companies back. As a result of his activity in the strike, he was elected a delegate to the IBT convention in Las Vegas. That convention became notorious–in part because then IBT President Frank Fitzsimmons declared, “To those who say it is time to reform this organization, and it’s time officers stopped selling out their members ... I say to them, ‘Go to hell!’”
Fitzsimmons’ thugs followed up that declaration by beating up Pete Camarata because he had dared to take the floor of the convention and oppose Fitzsimmons. And Pete was told by police in that mobbed-up town, “Get out of town buddy, and get out fast.”
In the years that followed, he ran against Fitzsimmons for IBT president, helped to organize Teamsters for a Democratic Union, then supported Ron Carey who was elected IBT president on a reform slate, backed by the TDU. He never stopped being active inside his union.
For years he was active in the left of this country, and he was ready to support others who fought. For example, during the 1987 Blue Cross strike, when its leader was being attacked as a communist, and when the tops of the UAW were trying to shut down the strike, he organized a convoy of trucks to roll slowly around the whole Blue Cross building, blowing their horns, in effect setting up a roving picket line–delighting the women on the picket line. And when the leader of that strike and other militants of the Spark initiated an election campaign the next year, “Workers Against Concessions,” calling for a vote to show working class opposition to the sacrifices being imposed by the bosses, he gave his name in support of the campaign.
In an interview he gave to Robert H. Mast in 1991, Pete characterized himself this way:
“I end up being the double dissident. I’m dissident inside the Teamsters, and then I’m dissident inside the TDU. I guess through my experiences in 1976 and the understanding of how important rank-and-file organization is, I end up being on the left fringe of feeling that the organization’s major priority has to be in building at the grass roots.
“There’s always a tendency in the TDU kinds of organizations to say, ‘If we can get this guy elected to office, we’ll democratize our local and the TDU network will grow.’ The sad answer is that it doesn’t work. It’s happened over and over again where you’ll get your best people to organize for TDU and they get elected to local office, they’ll be so overwhelmed by just trying to keep their head above water being a local officer that TDU disappears.”
Anticipating retirement he said, “I’d like to go to work for the TDU, and organize full-time and build some worker fight-back all over the country. Then, too, I think it’s my job as a person with socialist ideas to spread those ideas to other people.”
Mar 17, 2014
In the latest chapter of this deadly story, it turns out that GM knew way back in 2001, when the Saturn Ion was in development, that there was a problem with the ignition switch–the same switch that, by GM’s own admissions, has led to 12 deaths and 31 accidents in the Saturn Ion and the Chevy Cobalt.
GM says that after engineers pointed out the problem, it was fixed. Fixed? Well it’s those same switches that have been the crux of the problem ever since.
An ignition switch that shuts off on its own is not a minor problem–it means that a car loses its power steering, its power braking, and all its electrical systems, as well as the deployment of airbags in the case of a crash.
How many other accidents were caused by the same problem when a car swerved off course because the steering didn’t hold? How many other people were killed because seat belts didn’t deploy? No one knows, because GM did not publicize the issue nor did it fix the problem. It just kept producing cars with faulty switches, even though its own engineers, starting in 2004, had at least twice proposed a correction for the problem.
Corrections, once a car is in production, or even early in development, cost money. Recalls cost money. And money spent on “unnecessary” items is profit lost. In the capitalist world that GM dominates, human life is apparently one of those “unnecessary” items.
Government safety regulators said that they had received more than 70 complaints about the same issue since 2003. The Center for Auto Safety, a private consumer advocacy group, found over 300 deaths attributed to faulty seat belt deployment in the Chevy Cobalt and the Saturn Ion models under investigation. But regulators didn’t even bother to look into the problem until that independent investigation raised the issue. “Not enough evidence,” regulators said, “to warrant an investigation.” How do you get evidence without an investigation?
Apparently the regulators didn’t want to find the evidence–others certainly found it. It seems that the government’s safety regulators, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, shared GM’s priorities, wherein profit trumps human life.