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
Jun 22, 2015
Nine people are dead because a racist, with his twisted thinking, decided to kill as many people as he could, simply because they were black.
Joining a bible study meeting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Dylann Roof waited, then stood up, spouted racist filth and began shooting. He fired and reloaded multiple times, saying “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.”
“Taking over OUR country”–that’s the type of vile racist garbage that has been peddled on websites, pushed on major TV channels, and indirectly hinted at by innumerable white politicians, mostly Republican, but not only.
Whose country? It wasn’t only whites who did the work to build this country. And it wasn’t “whites” as such, that did it, not the whole white population. The labor to build this country was carried out by the working class, the whole working class. And the hard, backbreaking productive work has traditionally been carried out by the black workers and by the most recent immigrant workers.
Roof had been making increasingly violent statements about “starting a new civil war” and “shooting black people.” These ideas weren’t just the products of a sick brain, although sick he may be–racism makes one morally sick.
But Roof was acting on a set of ideas that has been clearly articulated by organized racists at every level of society. These ideas come from the mouths of politicians and the big media, who pretend that the black population is in some way responsible for the greater unemployment, poverty and crime it suffers.
Friends and relatives of Dylann Roof said they had heard Roof making violent threats against black people and they knew he was armed and dangerous. But the friends said that they thought he was just talking. One even said he thought it was just a “joke”!
That reflects the level of racism that pervades our society and exists even in many sectors of the working class. Racist comments are the norm, even against co-workers. They are expressed with little opposition from other white workers.
Maybe the majority of white workers are not racist. Maybe. But too many do not speak up when confronted by this kind of racist garbage. By letting it pass, they tacitly accept the deep gulf in the working class, dividing people who are part of the same class, people who should be joining together to fight the ruling class that is exploiting all of us.
Racism is not going to be overcome simply because people speak up. Racism, like so many other ills of this society, is the product of a society built on the exploitation of labor for the profit of a tiny capitalist class.
And racism, like so many other ills–unemployment or poverty, for example–will be overcome only when the working class joins its forces together to fight so that every part of the working class enjoys the fruits of the struggle, the fruits of their own labor.
But the obligation lies on white workers to fight against other white workers who have been infected by the racism of their own community. How else will they find the way to fight together side by side with black workers for a common aim that only the whole working class can attain?
For several decades, the working class has remained quiet in the face of attacks coming down on all of us. The U.S. working class has not found a way to respond, to fight back, to force the ruling class to create jobs and decent wages for a start. Its power has been compromised, in part, by the very issue of racism. A class divided cannot stand, and the U.S. working class is divided.
If there is a hope in sight, it lies in the recent protests that the black population has made against the murder of black men by police.
Our hope for a better future lies in the working class being able, together, black and white, to forge a defense against the system that is attacking us. By joining in and supporting the fight against racism, white workers can take an important step toward building real unity for the future.
Jun 22, 2015
While the black community of Charleston mourns the loss of their loved ones, politicians call for “tolerance,” “peace” and “forgiveness.”
In reality, they are calling on the black community to sit back and not defend itself.
It’s obvious the racists are not tolerant, nor peaceful. In Charleston itself, different vigils commemorating the black people who died were interrupted by bomb threats. A third bomb threat was called in to the County building where the news conference was being held identifying the victims.
Racists who foment this level of hatred and violence have never listened to calls for peace and unity. And this vicious attack, in a black church that had served from before the Civil War as a center for organized black resistance, was only the latest attack on such centers.
When black people are threatened and attacked, they have every right to defend themselves—every right to defend themselves using whatever means are necessary to drive the racists back.
The lynchers did not pull back in the past because of moral speeches. They slowed down—for a while—because they were afraid of a mobilized population. They began to understand that what they had done might come back against them.
But the fight against racist violence does not belong only to the black population who are victimized by it. White workers have a duty to take part in this fight. It is in their communities that racist violence breeds—and is allowed to grow, if it isn’t fought.
Jun 22, 2015
“Not one more”: That was the slogan of a demonstration of tens of thousands of women and some men on June 3 in Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, against the murder of women. There were other demonstrations with the same slogan, on the same day, in other cities and other countries in Latin America where the murder of women is common, including Chile, Uruguay, and Mexico.
In Argentina, three murders caught people’s attention. A man slit the throat of his wife, a nursery school teacher, in front of her children. A pregnant 14 year old was killed and buried in her family’s garden. A jilted lover riddled his ex-girlfriend with bullets on the terrace of a café.
The murders of women have multiplied in recent years in Argentina. According to the non-profit that organized the demonstration, 53 women were burned alive between 2010 and 2012. 2013 was the most deadly year, with 295 women killed. The province of Salta, where two female French students were killed in 2011, had to take emergency measures by reinforcing its courts and establishing women’s crisis centers.
The demonstrators waved signs with the names of women who had been killed. In addition to machismo and the violence of men, they denounced other aspects of the oppression of women, like the fact that women are paid less than men for the same jobs.
Cristina Kirchner, the Peronist President of Argentina, saw an opportunity in supporting the demonstration. Her administration made “femicide” an aggravated crime according to Argentine law. Homicide is punished with 12-25 years in prison, but femicide can be punished with life in prison, like in other countries in Latin America.
The Argentine laws to protect women against violence may seem strong, modern and liberal–for instance, same-sex marriage is legal. But nonetheless, in this country where so many women and young girls are the victims of macho attitudes, Cristina Kirchner continues to march hand-in-hand with the Catholic Church and to oppose the right of abortion except in emergencies.
Jun 22, 2015
Mariam “Shadé” Adebayo was murdered on June 1st in front of the Germantown Target, near Washington, D.C. She was killed by her ex-boyfriend, Donald Bricker, who had told her he wanted “closure.” So she agreed to meet him in a public place. But that was not enough to protect her.
Women should be able to end relationships without fear of being shot to death!
But in a society that still presumes women are property, and imbues men with the idea that they own “their woman,” women still have to fear for their lives.
Jun 22, 2015
The prices for Lantus and Levemir, the two most frequently used medications for diabetes, have been raised 13 times over the last five years. With straight faces, corporate spokespersons from Sanofi and Novo Nordisk, makers of these two drugs, pretend competition is what keeps these prices going up and up. And usually they have raised their prices within days of each other.
Apparently, for diabetes patients at least, capitalism drives down the price only in other countries. While these two drug-makers charge about $450 a month here in the U.S., in France the same amount of either drug costs diabetic patients $70.68; in Norway, the same pack costs $77.26.
If generic copies of diabetes drugs were made in the U.S., prices would be lower–for a market of almost 30 million people facing diabetes. Professor Jeremy Greene, at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, pointed out, “If any drug should be available generically, it’s insulin.” After all, it has been used for about a century!
But generic drugs might cut into profits–slightly. And in the U.S., capitalism’s center, profit is king. So generic versions of these drugs aren’t available here.
Jun 22, 2015
The city of Bloomfield Hills decided once again to thumb its nose at the Detroit area’s regional bus system.
The city commission voted 3-2 to continue opting out of the SMART bus system servicing Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties. This wealthy suburb apparently decided that $750,000 a year–or $300 added to their multimillion-dollar mansions’ property taxes–was too much to pay!
The two commissioners who voted for bus service pointed out that while few Bloomfield residents take the bus, the service would help those who work in the city but live elsewhere. You know–all those who actually do the work for the residents of Bloomfield Hills.
Maybe that’s the problem for those who voted against bus service–they don’t want any working class Detroiters coming out to their fine rich suburb.
So let them do all their own work for themselves!
Jun 22, 2015
The 2022 World Cup is supposed to be held in Qatar, a small, oil-rich emirate half the size of New Jersey. Foreign workers make up close to 90 per cent of Qatar’s population of 2.2 million. Construction has been booming in Qatar because of the World Cup, and the construction workers there are mostly low-paid migrant workers from the Indian subcontinent. The conditions for these workers are so bad that the Nepalese ambassador to Qatar described the emirate as an “open jail.”
Under Qatari law, companies have the right to hold foreign workers’ passports, cancel their residency permits, and forbid them to change employers or leave the country. The working conditions are very harsh, causing a very high rate of workplace injuries and deaths. The Qatari government admitted to 964 deaths among workers from India, Sri Lanka and Nepal in 2012 and ’13–the real number is probably higher.
This is how big multinational corporations make billions of dollars off the soccer World Cup, and not just from construction. Companies like Coca-Cola and Budweiser secure exclusive selling rights through “sponsorships,” which are commonly obtained through bribes–most of which are legal.
In the end, all these big profits are stolen from workers, whose labor creates all wealth. Stolen from workers who put their lives–sometimes literally–into their work and get nothing in return.
And that’s the real scandal–in soccer as in any other business in this capitalist world.
Jun 22, 2015
At the end of May, Ramadi, the regional capital of Anbar Province in Iraq, fell to ISIS forces. With ISIS forces now within 70 miles of Iraq’s capital of Baghdad, the Obama administration announced it is sending 450 more U.S. troops to Iraq, bringing the total number to 3,550. It also announced that it was planning to establish a network of U.S.-run bases, what General Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is calling “lily pads.”
Of course, the U.S. military claims that these are not supposed to be “combat” troops. They are just supposed to be for “training.” But train what? The Iraqi military hardly even exists anymore. It collapsed like a house of cards almost a year ago. The U.S. even admits that one of the training bases that the U.S. has set up has no Iraqi troops at all.
No, the U.S. military is increasing its troop presence in Iraq ... once more to impose its domination over the country. The effort goes back to at least 1990-91, when a U.S. led coalition of powers carried out a devastating war that left Iraq in ashes, with much of its infrastructure destroyed. The U.S. then followed this up with a suffocating economic embargo that starved the country, and then with a bombing campaign. This left more than a million dead. This all served as the prelude to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. This war destroyed what little had not been destroyed before and murdered hundreds of thousands of people.
To further impose its rule, the U.S. relied on the old imperial policy of divide and rule, provoking a power struggle over who holds sway in Iraq and the broader Middle East. This was not just a fight between different strongmen and militias, who appealed to their various ethnic groups for support. It was a proxy war between such regional powers as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey and the Persian Gulf states, who are rivals over who is the top dog after the U.S.
Today, apologists for U.S. policy try to make it sound like the main conflict in Iraq is religious, between Sunnis and Shiites, a conflict that is supposed to go back centuries. This is a lie. Before the U.S. invasion, the different ethnic groups lived together and intermarried. What changed this was the “civilizing” force of the U.S., along with the other imperial powers and their regional allies.
When the civil war grew worse in 2005 and 2006, the U.S. military carried out a “surge”–that is, a big increase of its troop presence. Under the guise of stopping the fighting, the U.S. encouraged ethnic cleansing, often relying on various militias and strongmen to carry out attacks on other groups, Sunni or Shiite. The U.S. claimed this was necessary to separate the warring parties.
When Obama took over from Bush in 2009, he even claimed that this surge was such a success it paved the way for the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops. On December 14, 2011, Obama told a military audience at Fort Bragg that the U.S. war in Iraq was coming to an end. “We’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq. The war in Iraq will soon belong to history.” That speech was Obama’s version of Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” declaration in 2003.
Of course, the U.S. never really withdrew from Iraq. The U.S. just ran its occupation through the State Department, rather than the Pentagon.
Instead of U.S. troops, the U.S. brought in mercenaries, the CIA, and who knows who else. The Shiite government rulers, who the U.S. favored, tried to consolidate their rule against their various rivals, especially the Sunnis. The Iraqi military, which the U.S. had spent years supposedly training, arming and equipping, was little more than a vast corruption machine that fronted for murderous Shiite militias.
When the equally murderous Sunni-backed ISIS militias responded with an offensive last year that took Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, the 100,000 troop-strong Iraqi military collapsed.
The U.S. and its allies appealed to the Shiite militias to carry out a new holy war to stop the ISIS offensive.
So, the Iraqi population is caught between two barbaric forces, Sunni and Shiite warlords, who impose their rule through brutality, beheadings and ethnic cleansing. This violence is getting worse. In 2014, 17,000 Iraqis were killed, according to Iraq Body Count, the worst year by far since the peak of the violence in 2006 and 2007. And over the last 18 months, more than three million Iraqis have been driven from their homes and now face starvation, according to U.N. refugee experts.
The last thing the U.S. forces seek is the improvement of these people’s lives. To the U.S. policy makers, the Iraqis are just “collateral damage” in the ongoing U.S. war to control the oil rich and strategically vital Iraq that lies in the center of the Middle East.
Jun 22, 2015
This article was translated from the June 19 edition of Lutte Ouvrière, the revolutionary workers group of that name in France.
Tens of thousands of women and men who risk their lives to try to set foot in Europe are hunted, harassed, and beaten. In Paris, there has been violent destruction of migrant camps. In the city of Calais, immigrants face police brutality. French police are setting up a wall against refugees who want to enter the country. And the Minister of the Interior talks about humanity!
Stopped in trains or trucks when they travel, kicked out of the places where they sleep for “illegal occupation of public space,” the immigrants can’t move, and they can’t stay still.
It is inhuman and absurd. These women and men won’t dissolve in the air, and nothing will stop them, because they have no choice but to keep coming.
The immigrants’ conditions illustrate Karl Marx’s expression that “the workers have no country.” What is the country for the Iraqis who fled Mosul when ISIS took it over? What is the country for the Syrians caught between the barbarity of Assad and that of the Islamist militants? Or for the Eritreans who risk life in prison?
These women and men cannot live in their home countries anymore, but in Europe they are rejected as undesirables.
Never has Europe more deserved the name “fortress.” The European governments are not content to multiply the walls and barbed wire around Europe. Now they are reestablishing borders inside of it.
Using the pretext that the Dublin convention requires asylum seekers to register their request in the country where they first enter Europe, France and Austria, for example, have closed their borders to block immigrants from Italy.
The European leaders love to talk about cooperation and solidarity. In words, they recognize that it’s necessary to welcome the refugees. But they leave it to Italy and Greece to deal with the emergency. The hell that they condemn the immigrants to in Calais isn’t enough; they are trying to recreate the same thing in Vintimille, in Rome, in Greece!
In this despicable game where different European countries pass refugees around like a hot potato, the French government wins the prize for cynicism. While it denounces the anti-immigrant demagogy of the right and the National Front, the so-called “socialist” government of Hollande turns the refugees into pariahs and denies them the right to request asylum or to freely move about the country.
The refugees don’t ask for the moon, and many don’t want to stay in France. But the government denies them even the most minimal emergency shelters and provisions.
The government justifies this restrictive and repressive policy with the pretext that “this would create an incentive for people to come” and that “we cannot accommodate all the poverty in the world.” This excuse cannot hide their crime: denying aid to people in danger.
“We don’t have the means of welcoming new immigrants.” But they have the means to welcome new millionaires and satisfy their whims!
“We don’t have the means of welcoming new immigrants.” But they are ready to lay billions on the table for the Olympic Games!
All these politicians mock poor people. They mock the immigrants, just as here in France they mock the working class, and they don’t budge a finger to alleviate their suffering. Enough of these fake arguments to defend inequality, exploitation and injustice!
We must fight those who are really responsible for unemployment and poverty: the capitalists. Against them, the refugees are sisters and brothers of our class. This is why fighting deportations and demanding the legalization of undocumented immigrants who want to stay here must be part of the demands of the working class.
We must also demand the right for people to move freely between countries. Capitalist Europe guarantees this right for merchandise and for capital, but it multiplies the obstacles for workers.
For rich foreigners, like the sharks of finance, the doors are wide open. For those who don’t ask for anything more than to be useful to society, they are shut out. This is a clear picture of a rotten society!
Capitalism mixes workers from the whole world. When conscious of belonging to one international class, the working class can be a force that can revolutionize this rotten society from top to bottom.
Jun 22, 2015
Mexico now deports more Central American immigrants than the U.S. does. Between October and April, Mexico detained nearly 93,000 Central Americans, while the U.S. detained about 70,000 non-Mexican immigrants for not having papers. Just a year before, between October 2013 and April 2014, the U.S. had detained nearly 160,000 undocumented “other than Mexicans,” more than three times the number of Central Americans held in Mexico.
The number of women and children among these immigrants is very high–in 2014 alone, more than 46,000 unaccompanied minors from Central America entered the U.S. And everyone knows the reason for this mass exodus: these are poor, working-class people who are trying to escape unemployment, poverty and violence. But the U.S. and Mexican governments arrest, imprison and deport them. They criminalize poor immigrants, in other words, including children.
To avoid the embarrassing publicity about all this, the U.S. government asked the Mexican government to stop the flow of Central American immigrants, and promised to pay for it. Mexico established more border checkpoints and sent 5,000 more federal police to its border with Guatemala. Mexican authorities increased the raids on northbound trains.
So instead of imprisoning poor people in the U.S., the U.S. government wants them to be imprisoned in their country, in the poverty and violence they are caught up in.
Jun 22, 2015
More than 200 immigrants held at Eloy Detention Center in Arizona began a hunger strike on June 13 to protest the death of a fellow inmate, 31-year-old Jose de Jesus Deniz-Sahagun.
The protesters said that guards beat Deniz-Sahagun, maced him, stripped him naked and threw him into solitary confinement before he died. Authorities acknowledged that Deniz-Sahagun had head injuries, but they denied he died as a result of the beating. They claimed he probably committed suicide by swallowing a sock, even though they admitted that they didn’t know where he would have gotten the sock while being alone in a cell.
The authorities denied that there was a hunger strike either. But members of Puente, the immigrant rights group that publicized the hunger strike, said they watched through a fence how prison officials locked the hunger strikers out in a yard in 100-plus-degree temperatures for six hours without shade or water, in retaliation for the protest.
Besides the death of Deniz-Sahagun and another inmate recently, detainees are protesting a whole series of abuses at Eloy. These include denial of medical attention to detainees; chemicals in the water that make them sick; beatings; and the fact that detainees are paid only one dollar per day for eight hours of work.
So while immigrant workers, criminalized for crossing the border to find work, are terrorized, capitalists make a nice profit off their work even when they are imprisoned. Not to mention the big profits they make from running some of these immigrant prisons: Eloy Detention Center is operated by Corrections Corporation of America, a private company contracted by the U.S. government.
It sounds like the perfect scheme for bosses. It sounds like capitalism!
Jun 22, 2015
In May, the Los Angeles City Council voted to raise the minimum wage from 9 dollars an hour to 15 dollars an hour–by 2020. This is only a gradual, step-by-step increase, spreading over five years. Similar minimum wage increases were approved in Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle.
But price increases take their toll now. In 2014, meat prices increased by 9.2 percent, eggs by 8.4 percent, and fresh fruits by 4.8 percent, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. The yearly rent hike was 4.9 percent in 2014. Considering that the average L.A. County apartment rental price is $1,716 a month, rents are well above the affordable range of minimum wage earners, even without such yearly rental increases.
So, these minimum wage increases may keep up only with the price increases at best, without changing the poverty level of the minimum wage workers.
This is no increase at all. Workers need a real increase–right now!
Jun 22, 2015
The Los Angeles County Federation of Labor applauded the city council vote last week to raise the minimum wage to 15 dollars an hour by 2020.
But the union heads want to opt-out union workers from the minimum wage ordinance, to allow the unions to negotiate with the businesses for wages lower than that mandated by law! They’re proposing a sub-minimum wage for unionized workers!
In Oakland, San Francisco and Chicago, the union heads successfully pushed to incorporate similar opt-out provisions into the minimum wage ordinances of these cities.
As one MTA bus operator commented “It [this opt-out proposal] does not make sense. They should be fighting for higher wages for everybody.”
Yes, it does not make sense for the workers. But, it makes a lot of sense for the union heads who want to act like bosses in partnership with the business bosses. These heads see their business as selling workers to a lowest bidder in exchange for a seat at the table and union dues.
Jun 22, 2015
Last week some 2,000 teachers wearing red shirts had a spirited rally at the State of Illinois’ Thompson Center, and then marched to the Board of Trade. They are angry at the Board of Education’s demand that they take a 10% pay cut. One chant was, “Pay cut, no thanks! Take the money from the banks!” Many teachers appear to be willing to strike, if Emanuel wants to continue his attacks on schools and students.
Jun 22, 2015
Early in June, the Albany Police Department in Georgia charged and jailed a woman for taking a known abortion pill and killing her fetus. Kenlissia Jones, a black woman, took Misoprostol to terminate her pregnancy at 22 weeks. A hospital social worker called the police to report Jones for terminating her pregnancy. The police charged Jones for murder with malice, which can carry the most severe punishments under Georgia law, including life in prison or the death penalty.
Later, the District Attorney dropped the charges and released Jones from jail, explaining that “Although third parties could be criminally prosecuted for their actions relating to an illegal abortion, as the law currently stands in Georgia, criminal prosecution of a pregnant woman for her own actions against her unborn child does not seem permitted.”
But, this did not end the city officials’ attack on Jones. Now, she faces a charge of possession of a dangerous drug.
Misoprostol (marketed as Cytotec) is a known drug, approved by Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for usages to reduce the risk of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, including aspirin and ibuprofen. So, Misoprostol is not a “dangerous” drug.
Misoprostol is also known to induce labor. World Health Organization (WHO) recommends the use of Misoprostol for safe medical termination of pregnancies up to 12 weeks from last menstrual period (the first trimester). After 12 weeks, the use of Misoprostol for abortion can cause health complications, including uterine rupture and bleeding, according to the FDA. For this reason, the health organizations advise the use of this drug under the supervision of medical personnel for termination of pregnancies after 12 weeks.
Georgia could and should have provided this medical supervision to women like Jones as a public service. Georgia should have treated abortions as a health issue, NOT a criminal act.
Instead, Georgia attacks the abortion rights of women in many ways its officials invent. In May of 2012, Georgia passed a law banning abortion providers from performing abortions for pregnancies after 22 weeks. It had been 26 weeks before this law became effective in January 1, 2013. Georgia is the 10th state that has a 22 weeks ban.
Also, Georgia prevents health insurance policies from covering abortion unless women’s health is endangered. Federal law has long banned Medicaid from covering abortion. This makes abortion inaccessible for low income women.
Now, Georgia wants to turn a known abortion drug into a “dangerous” drug.
Georgia aims to criminalize abortion rights of women, like Jones, who have the courage to take their future into their own hands. Its officials, like those in other states and the Federal government, are the ones acting with malice–against women, particularly those with low incomes.
Jun 22, 2015
The State of Louisiana continues to hound a man who has spent 43 years in solitary confinement, 23 hours per day, 4 days a week. It objects to the release of Albert Woodfox, who was accused, along with two other inmates, Robert King and Herman Wallace, of killing a prison guard at the notorious Angola state penitentiary. The three always denied killing the guard.
For the authorities, not only were the three men black, and denying responsibility, they had joined the prison chapter of the Black Panthers. After a racist frame job, they were sentenced to life in prison.
After having spent 29 years in solitary confinement, Robert King was finally freed in 2001 and his conviction overturned.
After a campaign by Amnesty International, Herman Wallace was finally freed on October 1, 2013, after 40 years in isolation. He was 71 years old and fighting liver cancer, and was taken to a hospice in New Orleans. Despite his being near death, the State of Louisiana re-indicted him for the same crime just two days later. Wallace died the next day.
Finally, on June 8, a judge ordered the release of Albert Woodfox. The State of Louisiana appealed the decision, and won a stay of the judge’s decision, keeping Woodfox in prison during the appeal. He has already been tried twice, and both times his convictions were overturned. Despite those decisions, Woodfox is now awaiting, always in isolation, his third trial!
The evidence in his defense has been destroyed, while the witnesses against him have been discredited over the years. The widow of the guard now says she does not believe in his guilt, but the authorities refuse to listen.
The outright racist stubbornness of the authorities and their hatred toward the oppressed when they revolt illustrates the barbarism of the so-called “Great American Democracy.” Despite the torture he has suffered, Albert Woodfox has affirmed: “I thought that my cause, then and now, was noble. They might bend me a little bit, they may cause me a lot of pain, they may even take my life, but they will never be able to break me.”
Free Albert Woodfox immediately!