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 16, 2015
“We will degrade, and ultimately destroy, ISIL,” President Obama declared in a speech he gave on February 11. It was Obama’s war speech, asking for war authorization from Congress.
Authorization? But Obama has been carrying out a bombing campaign in Syria and Iraq against ISIL (usually called ISIS, or Islamic State) for six months already!
No, this “authorization” was not about legalities–it was a declaration of intent that the U.S. would wage war where it wanted, when it wanted, for as long as it wanted.
Of course Obama “promised” in his speech that this would not be an endless war. Didn’t Bush say “mission accomplished” just seven weeks after the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003? Didn’t Obama announce “the end” of that war four years ago? In recent months the U.S. has sent thousands of troops into Iraq again, for the third time since 1991.
Even in this same speech, Obama acknowledged these wars are endless. Speaking of the ongoing campaign against ISIS Obama said, “this strategy of taking out terrorists ... is one that we have successfully pursued in Yemen and Somalia for years.”
Yes, for years already. And in several countries. And without “authorization”!
The U.S. has been fighting wars all over the world for decades–under Obama, Bush, and other presidents before them. And with the support of both Republicans and Democrats, without “authorization” from Congress.
Just as U.S. capitalism wrings out profit from the workers it exploits in this country, so it attempts to do in countries all over the world, exploiting lower-paid workers, robbing the countries of their natural resources. This theft of the resources of the whole world by U.S. imperialism is what’s behind these wars. To steal from others, you need muscle and weapons to back you up. That’s what the U.S. military is: muscle for a thief!
The U.S. today possesses the mightiest military machine known in history. It uses the deadliest, most terrifying weapons known in history; terrorizing and uprooting hundreds of thousands of people; killing their loved ones; throwing them into refugee camps and into misery.
Wars the U.S. started have destabilized entire regions of the world and created new wars.
War is at the root of the capitalist system we live under. It’s a system first of all based on class war, waged by the capitalist class against the working class, to squeeze more profit out of the workers. It’s a system that throws the world into one economic crisis after the other.
War is the only answer the capitalist class has for the crises it creates. The “Great Recession,” which has proved to be endless for the working class, has been accompanied by endless war abroad–just like the Great Depression of the 1930s was followed by World War II in the 1940s.
We are in another world war, a third one if you will. Except that now, unlike 75 years ago, there is only one big power trying to dominate and control the rest of the world.
Some people in this country may live in a little cocoon–for now. But for humanity as a whole, the only perspective that capitalism has to offer is a world at permanent war and the extermination of peoples. The only future–until the working class roots out and replaces the capitalist class that produces war and impoverishment.
Feb 16, 2015
Last month, Pastor J. Edgar Boyd of the First AME Church in Los Angeles compared police shootings to Ku Klux Klan lynchings. He told his church’s congregants during a service: “Today, lynchings still occur but in a different form. The Klansmen today do not raid in the night raids with robes on and hoods on. But what they do is put a blue uniform on and a gold badge and take a baton or a police weapon, and they come at the least time we expect them and they take the lives of our young black men and young brown men. They take their lives long before they’re able to learn what God has in store for them in life.”
The First AME Church is the oldest black church in Los Angeles. Top politicians and city officials of Los Angeles, like Mayor Eric Garcetti, Los Angeles Police Department Chief Charlie Beck and L.A. County Sheriff Jim McDonnell show up at services at this church looking for political support from the black community.
After a video of the service surfaced early February, all these city politicians and police department heads in chorus decried Pastor Boyd’s comments. And Pastor Boyd issued an apology.
Too bad–because Pastor Boyd correctly assessed recent police killings of so many young black men, who posed no threat, as lynchings. All these politicians and police department heads adamantly defended these killings, and the courts let police officers involved in these killings go free with no punishment.
Pastor Boyd’s judgment about the police killings is shared, felt and agreed to by many people and above all by black people, who are at the receiving end of this collective violence.
Feb 16, 2015
The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) recently released a report, “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror,” which documents lynchings in twelve Southern states during the period between Reconstruction and World War II. The report shows lynchings were part of a system of racial terror designed to subjugate blacks.
The report also points out that the lynchings have been replaced with capital punishment: “By 1915, court-ordered executions outpaced lynchings in the former slave states for the first time. Two-thirds of those executed in the 1930s were black, and the trend continued.”
“As African Americans fell to just 22 percent of the South’s population between 1910 and 1950, they constituted 75 percent of those executed in the South during that period.”
“Race remains a significant factor in capital sentencing. African Americans make up less than 13 percent of the nation’s population, but nearly 42 percent of those currently on death row in America are black, and 34 percent of those executed since 1976 have been black.”
“More than eight in ten American lynchings between 1889 and 1918 occurred in the South, and more than eight in ten of the nearly 1400 legal executions carried out in this country since 1976 have been in the South.”
Lynching today is carried out under the guise of legality of capital punishment.
Feb 16, 2015
The effect of all the media fear mongering over ISIS can be seen in several recent attacks here in this country.
In one week: a white man shot and killed a young Muslim woman, her sister and her husband in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; two white men attacked and beat an Arab-American Muslim man at a supermarket in Dearborn, Michigan; and a Muslim school was burned in Houston.
A witness to the Dearborn attack said the attackers shouted insults just before they assaulted the man: “I hear ‘ISIS,’ I hear ‘terrorist,’ I hear ‘go back to your country’ and ‘raghead.’ Then all of a sudden, the man is punching this Arabic man, fists started flying.” The Arabic man’s young children watched helplessly.
The rulers of this country depend on war to enforce their control over the world. To gain support for these wars, or at least acceptance, they stir up fear, suspicion and hatred in the population.
If any workers allow themselves to be duped into that fear and hatred, they are being played for fools. Our REAL enemies, those who profit from these wars, will be laughing all the way to their blood-soaked bank!
Feb 16, 2015
In Hazel Park, Michigan, a 69-year-old Vietnam veteran, struggling with cancer, was found dead of hypothermia on February 1. Consumers Energy had shut off gas heat to the home on January 19–due to two months of unpaid bills.
Pretending to do something, the State of Michigan ordered Consumers Energy to send them a report about why this man died.
Yet Michigan makes it perfectly legal for profitable utility companies to shut off power in winter. Michigan shovels millions in grant money to energy companies, allegedly to help pay poor people’s bills! In addition, Michigan lets utilities collect a monthly fee to fund assistance to “low-income customers.” Where is THAT money going?
The cause of this man’s death? A combination of corporate greed and government protecting profits over people!
Feb 16, 2015
On February 10, 15-year-old Jamar Nicholson stopped in an alley at 7:40 a.m. on his way to school. Jamar and his three teenage friends were rapping and dancing around when he heard someone shout “Freeze!” He turned around and saw a gun, and then fell to the ground with a bullet in him.
Jamar was probably shot before he even turned around, because he was shot in the back, near the spine. The shooter, a cop, and his partner were in plain clothes and had arrived in an unmarked car.
The cops claim they shot because they saw one of the teenagers holding a gun. Jamar acknowledged that one of his friends was holding a toy gun, but he disputes practically everything else in the cops’ story. Jamar said, for example, that he did not hear any command for his friend to drop the gun, as the cops claim they did before shooting. A neighbor, Colliene Carter, also said she never heard a command to drop the gun, although she heard everything the cops said after the shooting clearly.
Residents said they were used to teenagers stopping in the alley on their way to school. And the school’s principal said Jamar and his friends rarely missed school.
Perhaps the two cops did not know all this. But even if that’s the case, a big question remains: would they have pulled the trigger so quickly, shooting into a crowd from 20 feet away, if the four teenagers were white?
Of course not!
Feb 16, 2015
There have been numerous commemorations of the liberation of the concentration camp at Auschwitz in Poland on January 27, 1945. The camp was created in 1940 as a place for Nazi exterminations. More than a million men, women and children perished there. Nine hundred thousand went to the gas chambers upon their arrival; many others died from the atrocious conditions of forced labor there.
The genocidal plan of the Nazis claimed some six million victims, whether massacred by the SS or killed in the extermination camps. The immense majority were Jews. Between 300,000 and 400,000 of those who died were of Gypsy background. The murderous madness of the Nazis sent 100,000 mentally handicapped people to the camps, of whom at least 30,000 died. The same was true of homosexuals. And hundreds of thousands of worker militants who opposed the Nazis throughout Europe were sent to the camps, from which none returned.
Representatives of the French, German, Italian and U.S. governments, among others, came to the commemorations at Auschwitz, claiming they honored the memory of all those who died. They limited themselves to a formal condemnation of anti-Semitism, often putting the responsibility on people themselves, in particular, the Germans. But they avoided the most important question: how was it possible for Hitler and his band of thugs to come to power in Germany, one of the most civilized countries in Europe? How could they impose this abominable dictatorship that led to death camps?
The Nazi dictatorship was not born solely from the murderous idiocy of Hitler and his brown shirts who hated Jews, communists and the workers’ movement. Nazism came to power as a monstrous byproduct of capitalism.
In 1929, Europe’s populations had not yet recovered from the nightmare of World War I when the capitalist economy plunged into crisis. In a few years, American production collapsed, leading to a fall in production in all capitalist countries. In 1932, Germany had six million unemployed, with most of the population living in misery. In this situation, the German bourgeoisie decided to support the coming to power of the Nazis, a step along the road to another war. But above all, they wanted to suppress the risk that a powerful workers’ movement represented for the German bourgeoisie.
At the beginning of 1932, the bankers, capitalists and industrialists helped the Nazis by financing their take-over. Hitler’s party consisted of hundreds of thousands of militants, often from the petty bourgeoisie, who hated their own social decline, who hated and blamed workers and communists, who thirsted for vengeance in a society that left them with no future. They were ready to impose Nazi rule by violence and crime. At the top of the German state were such big bourgeois families as the Krupps, the Thyssens and the Siemens, who saw Hitler as their savior. The decision to name him chancellor was taken on January 3, 1933, in the villa of a big banker at a secret meeting between Hitler and Von Papen, who was then chancellor.
The capitalists ensured there was no hindrance to Nazism, totally unmoved by the barbarous bloodbath they had brought to power. Some capitalists found the Nazis useful in providing slave labor for them from those in the Nazi camps, and some took part in working out how to create an industrial method for coldly murdering millions of victims.
For the capitalists, the Nazis would protect their interests, and prepare for a war from which they would profit–no matter that they unleashed a horde of hysterical thugs who created genocide. Even if these capitalists didn’t decide on the anti-Semitic policies that the Nazis carried out first in Germany and then throughout Europe against Jewish populations, they are responsible for a political process that resulted in the death camps.
Like the German bourgeoisie, the rest of the imperialist leaders didn’t worry too much about the Nazi dictatorship, at least not until 1939. Their so-called democratic convictions went right along with hysterical anti-Semitism, violence against Jews, the first concentration camps, and the killing of “heretics.” The British, French and American rulers knew all that was going on. But they were content that Hitler had brought down one of the most powerful working classes in Europe, so long as the competition between the German bourgeoisie and the other bourgeoisies had not yet led to actual war. They didn’t care about the fate of so many Jews and all those others transported to the death camps.
Up to the end of the war, President Roosevelt refused to bomb the railway lines that led to the death camps, from which those who escaped had already brought out numerous proofs and maps. And nothing was organized for those trying to flee from Europe, even though they faced almost certain death in the camps. As for the Stalinist USSR, it also held back from liberating the death camps. The Red Army waited to advance until after the insurgent Polish partisans were crushed by Hitler.
Seventy years later, we must not forget the unspeakable barbarity of the Nazi regime. But it’s dangerous to forget that it was the capitalist crisis that made it possible.
It’s impossible to foresee today what horrors the current economic crisis of capitalism might unleash. But it’s clear that the capitalist system represents a mortal danger for all of humanity.
Feb 16, 2015
Seventy years ago, the U.S., allied with Britain, unleashed a massive firebombing of the city of Dresden, leaving behind an enormous massacre in a place that had no military or industrial objective for ending World War II. From February of 1942 until the end of the war, a thousand German cities suffered American and British bombardments, reducing some cities and their people to ashes. The bombers didn’t aim at German industrial sites, except occasionally; nor did they bomb the railway lines leading to the concentration camps. Their targets were residential, aiming at the working populations, with an estimated 600,000 German civilians killed during these bombardments.
Just after the war, the conquerors made the German people collectively responsible for the catastrophe and horrors of Nazism, refusing to distinguish among the torturers in power and the population victimized by the dictatorship. For several decades, it was forbidden to complain about the suffering of the population during the war and under the Allied occupation, a suffering presented as a rightful punishment.
And for 25 years the neo-Nazis spit out their lies and used the tragedy of Dresden to justify their nauseating ideology. Every year around the date of the firestorm, they organized in Dresden, pretending to honor the dead, pretending the Nazi regime was victimized by the imperialist powers, daring to talk of a “holocaust of bombs,” in a way designed to deny the extermination of millions of Jews.
This has become the main gathering of neo-Nazis. In recent months, numerous anti-immigrant demonstrations were organized there by Pegida, an extreme right group.
On the night of February 13, 1945, the U.S. rulers organized an incendiary bombing of Dresden for 14 hours, destroying the city methodically in a type of bombardment unknown up to that moment—even though the war was already lost for Germany. The city numbered 630,000 inhabitants before the war; by February of 1945, numerous children evacuated from other bombed out cities, 25,000 prisoners of war from the Allied side, workers doing forced labor from several countries had been added. And an estimated 600,000 refugees had fled there to escape the war in previous weeks, including women, children, the elderly and the sick fleeing from the east as the Red Army made its offensive westward toward Germany. So Dresden held between 1.2 and 1.4 million people, including hundreds of thousands who had no shelter to go to in case of air raids.
At a time when many German cities were already destroyed, there was a tenacious rumor circulating that the Allies would never bomb Dresden, one of the most beautiful of all German cities, with no military or industrial significance. Dresden had numerous hospitals filled with civilian casualties and refugees. The German authorities, also assuming Dresden would not be targeted, had placed their anti-aircraft guns in regions more in danger of Allied bombing in the weeks prior to February 13. It’s the reason so many had fled there in the previous months and weeks, to a city known as “Florence on the Elbe River.”
The shock of those first hours of bombing was enormous, as three waves of British-American bombers razed Dresden that night. Many Germans had thought that if the Allies were bold enough to bomb Dresden, there was no place they would not bomb; people should expect much worse. A sinister joke circulated amid the ruins of the destroyed German cities: make the most of the war—the peace will be worse.
On the night of the 13th of February, waves of bombs were dropped by the U.S. and Britain—in a tactic called a “firestorm,” using both explosives and incendiary bombs. Some 460,000 bombs smashed buildings, blowing out doors and windows. Then came the incendiaries, laced with phosphorus to spread a terrifying firestorm throughout Dresden. The fire, of a violence previously unknown, unleashed a hurricane of fire from which nothing could escape, reducing tens of thousands of inhabitants who had disappeared into their homes to ashes. Those taking refuge in caves or underground shelter died of asphyxiation. Then more planes flew low over the city to machine-gun ambulances and fire trucks and columns of refugees trying to flee the burning city. Dresden burned for seven hours. The number of victims could never be firmly established, but estimates count more than 200,000 dead that one night.
What was the reason for this crime, for unleashing a war of terror against the people? It was not retaliation for the crimes of the Nazi Third Reich, whatever some said afterward. A Communist Party militant, writing in 1944 from the Ravensbruck concentration camp where she was incarcerated, put it: “In German cities lived people I loved and people I knew who were enemies of Nazism. I am sure most of them died, because incendiary bombs and phosphorus bombs make no distinctions.”
The deliberate murder of civilians and wounded people, the catastrophe suffered by Nazi supporters and opponents alike, caused hatred to grow against those who had bombed them, and even brought an amount of support to the Nazi regime. The masses of people felt plunged into terror, demoralized, resigned, without an alternative to the Nazi regime.
In reality, the bombing campaign was a terrible blow to those in Germany trying to resist, who had been waiting years for the moment when they could act against the Nazi dictatorship. The Nazi state was collapsing: the general chaos could offer a chance to the working class to organize, to intervene, to try to take power—as it had tried to do at the end of World War I in 1918.
That was what the U.S. and Britain were afraid of; that was the reason they tried to destroy the German population with their bombs. They didn’t want to leave the slightest hope. The allied forces were not coming to liberate the German people from dictatorship, but to treat them all as enemies they had conquered. To kill, terrorize, demoralize, and disperse the population—to leave them in a condition to make them accept this fate and to put up with the occupation to come.
Feb 16, 2015
On February 10, thousands of Los Angeles city workers briefly walked off their jobs at more than 70 work sites to protest big concessions that officials are trying to ram down their throats. These include a three-year wage freeze and big increases in what workers pay for health and pension benefits.
City officials claim that the city is broke; there is no money. No kidding! The banks, big developers, airlines, shipping companies, entertainment conglomerates, major retailers and other corporate honchos have been bleeding the city dry. One example: a recent report by a coalition of municipal unions, including SEIU Local 721 and AFSCME District 36, revealed that a few Wall Street banks collect more than 300 million dollars in transaction fees and commissions from Los Angeles ... every single year! And that’s not counting all the interest and principal payments that the city pays out on its debt.
Those giveaways to big business are growing bigger. The day after the walkout, Mayor Eric Garcetti signed into law a series of increasingly large tax cuts for the biggest businesses over the next three years.
City officials expect workers to pay the bill. During the recession, government officials had already cut 5,000 municipal jobs, imposed furloughs and increased what workers paid for retirement pensions. Reacting to the new concession demands, Marshall Tucker, a 58-year-old truck driver, told the Los Angeles Times, “We did everything the city asked. Now the economy is getting better and they’re asking us to do more and more.”
Just like for workers everywhere, the only way for municipal workers to defend their interests is by organizing and fighting back.
Feb 16, 2015
After Apple announced record profits of 18 billion dollars in three months, Apple CEO Tim Cook said, “the cash we don’t need, we want to give it back. We are not hoarders.”
Of course, it’s to the wealthy investors–the capitalist class–that Apple is “giving back,” not to the consumers who bought Apple’s overpriced products, not to the viciously low-paid workers Apple exploits around the world. Over the last two years, Apple has given away over 100 billion dollars to the very wealthy. It did this by boosting its dividends, and boosting the price of Apple stock by buying up a lot of it. Nonetheless, Apple’s profits have been growing so quickly, the company can’t give this money away to the capitalists fast enough. Estimates are that Apple’s cash hoard increased from about 130 billion dollars last year to about 145 billion dollars currently.
Apple is not alone among the biggest U.S. companies in collecting cash faster than it hands it over to capitalist investors. Last year, financial analysts at Moody’s estimated that U.S. firms were sitting on some 1.6 trillion dollars in cash at the end of 2013, nearly double the level of 2008. And that’s not counting the big financial companies and banks–which have much, much more.
Indeed, as Moody’s pointed out, the cash piles of some of the biggest corporations rival those of some of the major governments around the world. “Putting that number into perspective,” said one Moody’s analyst, “the cash hoard of corporate America is greater than the total international reserves of Japan.”
Thus, the wealth produced by workers all over the world increases the power and wealth of a few big companies, and enriches a few wealthy capitalists and speculators.
Feb 16, 2015
The story of James Robertson, the worker from Detroit who walks 21 miles each day to get to and from his factory job in Rochester Hills, made news around the country. He rightfully won sympathy of people who could understand his plight and collected more than $350,000 in his honor.
His boss called Robertson his “model” employee and says he sets his attendance standard by Robertson.
Few in the media asked why this man, who has worked there for at least 10 years never missing a day of work, is making only $10.55 an hour! And even fewer in the media asked why the Detroit area has no public transit system!
Robertson may be a model employee, but his employer is a model of plain old capitalist greed.
Feb 16, 2015
On February 7, Ed Hershey spoke at an election rally at the National Museum of Mexican Art in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago’s 25th ward.
Thank you all for coming on this cold day.
My name is Ed Hershey. I teach science at Lindblom High School in Englewood, where I’ve taught for nine years. I’m running for 25th ward alderman. I’m running to say that we need a working class fight in this ward, and in this city.
Schools: I’ve lived the attacks on our students, on our children, for years now. Every year they tell us that cutbacks are necessary at the schools, that there is not enough money. Because of a supposed deficit, they cut programs for students: after school programs, sports programs, art, music, libraries, things that get students engaged, things that spark their interest in school.
I’ve fought these attacks. I led the strike organizing at Lindblom [in the teacher’s strike in the fall of 2012]. I organized students and teachers who wanted to fight the school closings. I’ve spoken against new charter schools. I stood with the mothers at Whittier, when they fought for a library at their school. I was arrested when [Alderman] Solis demolished their community center. When students at Lindblom organized a protest and die-in against police violence, I stood with the students.
Privatization: We’ve had cuts in our classrooms, to allow [Mayor] Rahm Emanuel to hand school money over to private interests. The year after the school closings cut 50 schools, Emanuel opened new charter schools despite the fact that, in the same year, there was more than one charter school scandal, in which charter schools were caught handing over our tax money to their “connected” friends. And this year, Chicago Public Schools gave a contract worth hundreds of millions to Aramark to “manage” the cleaning of the schools.... It surprised no one that the schools are filthier as a result. The moneyed interests in this city use the school system as a cash cow, and they’re milking it for all they can get.
Chicago Public Schools pay several hundred million for “debt service,” that is, interest payments to the banks. Those payments amount to several times the amount that was cut out of the classrooms last year. That’s the problem with capitalist society—the bankers’ interest comes before our students’ education. In fact, they take money from our children to hand it to the banks.
They’re taking this money at the same time they let other public services decay. Emanuel has cut hours at all the libraries, where working people go to look for work. Just look at the decaying viaducts near here. How long has it been since those were repaired? They gave a big contract for red light cameras, which they use to fleece us of money, rather than trying to maintain safe speeds....
Housing: An issue we’ve heard about from residents is housing. In Pilsen, developers are moving in, raising the rents, which pushes working people out of the community. Water bills are rising for homeowners. Rising property values means increasing the rent.
I understand management at many of the developments that used to be the ABLA projects is privatized. Private companies are taking money for profit out of rent payments. People are being pushed out in various ways: being charged market rate rent “by mistake,” charged more rent to have a goldfish, etc. Certainly this area used to house many more people. It’s close to downtown, so developers want it. It will take a fight to keep housing that people can afford.
Jobs: We need to fight for jobs. We hear the most from people that there are no opportunities and nothing for young people to do. It would not be at all hard to solve this problem. The city could hire working-age young people to make the services run. That’s what I propose for jobs: if the city services we need are expanded, it would create jobs. Hire more teachers and aides in the schools; create more after school programs; extend library hours; fix the streets and infrastructure. All that would create thousands of jobs. We know there’s money for it.
Wages: In this election, the candidates talk a lot about the minimum wage. The Democratic politicians will not give us what we need. Wages will only begin to go up when the working class fights for higher wages, wages enough to live well on.
Some people tell me they don’t vote, that they never vote. And I can’t blame them. Both the Republicans and Democrats are parties of the wealthy. The Democratic Party, the only party that counts in this city, imposes the policy demanded by the banks and corporations. Working people who feel they get nothing out of voting for those politicians are right.
But I am working to make this election different. A vote for me is a vote against them—against the money interests and their politicians. It’s a vote for a fight. A big vote would make a statement that other working people could hear—it would say that there is a part of the working class that has had enough with business as usual. People would be saying, with their vote for me, that a fight is necessary. Elected or not, I will get up to support anyone who makes a fight, and I will come out and stand on the front lines.
So I hope you agree, and I hope you will vote for me, and get your friends, family and neighbors to vote for me as well. Also know that for us, this election is only the beginning. We were fighting the Board of Education before this election, and I plan to continue to do so afterward—win or lose the election.
[For more information about Ed Hershey’s campaign, see the independent website: www.workingclassfight.com]
Feb 16, 2015
Chicago will hold mayor and city aldermen elections on Tuesday, February 24, 2015. There are candidates running in all 50 wards.
Ed Hershey is running for a seat in the 25th ward. He is the one candidate who says that things will not improve for the ordinary people until the working class fights against the hold the capitalist class has over the whole society.