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Yemen & Middle East wars mean mass terror for workers
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- 22 February 2018 28 hits
The current war in Yemen has created one of the worst capitalist crises the world has seen. Since 2015, Saudi Arabia has been bombing and blockading Yemen into collapse and misery, using billions of dollars of U.S.-supplied weaponry. The U.S. military is also refueling Saudi bombers in flight, to complete their deadly missions.
According to the UN, in this country of 27 million people, more than 10,000 have been killed, more than 2 million have been displaced, about 7 million are on the brink of starvation and 14 million lack access to clean drinking water and sanitation.
Over half a million people are infected with cholera, the largest outbreak in the world in 50 years, and 2,000 have died. Malnutrition has increased the threat of the disease, while massive bombings have targeted water and sanitation facilities, bridges, factories and hospitals. Over 30,000 health workers and many civil servants haven’t been paid for over a year.
Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East, borders Saudi Arabia and the Bab-el-Mandeb—the two-mile strait between Yemen and Africa through which millions of gallons of oil pass each day. In addition, Yemen could have undeveloped oil reserves, perhaps greater than Saudi Arabia.
The Yemeni Houthis of the North, seized power. They are supported by Iran. Saudi Arabia is attempting to prevent the spread of Iran’s influence in the region, especially on its border. This war between two regional powers is a reflection of the decline of U.S. imperialism and the growing instability that has engulfed the Middle East, which has the potential for leading to another world war.
You could say, that war has already begun. If you pull the camera back for a larger view of the Middle East and Horn of Africa, you see the U.S., Russian and Chinese imperialists jockeying for power and position in the midst of growing war and a string of failed states. The net effect has been the worst refugee crisis since World War II, 65.6 million people, many from these countries.
Syria: More than 400,000 dead in a 6-year civil war, 11.3 million displaced. Recently, as many as 200 Russian soldiers were killed by U.S. forces, the first direct military contact between the two imperialists since the Vietnam War. All of the major imperialist and regional players are colliding here. The U.S. wants to transport oil from Qatar to Europe. Russia and Assad want to build a pipeline from Iran instead. Syria has been destroyed in the process. China is also increasing its involvement on the side of Assad, providing training to the Syrian military, opposing UN sanctions, and increasing investments in the country.
Iraq: As many as one million civilians have died since the U.S. invasion in 2003 to try to keep control of the world’s third largest supply of oil.
Afghanistan: 27,000 civilians dead, 1.3 million displaced. While not rich in oil, it is a prime pipeline route between the oil and gas rich Central Asian republics and Turkey, Europe, and Asia. After the U.S. invasion, Afghanistan was also found to have deposits of rare minerals necessary for cyber technology. Since the U.S. decreased the number of troops here, China has added troops and increased financing.
Somalia: Civil war, famine, a cholera epidemic and a tsunami have killed or displaced at least 3.5 million Somalis. Somalia also lies along the sea lanes that transport oil and may itself contain huge oil and natural gas deposits.
Sudan/South Sudan: 490,000 displaced; murder, sexual violence and repression are rampant. In the Sudanese civil war, China is supplying arms to the government in order to secure joint exploration and pipeline projects.
Libya: Another failed state, in chaos since Qaddafi was toppled by a NATO- led invasion in 2011. Once the ninth-largest oil producer in the world, exporting mainly to Europe. Russia is now looking to re-open oilfields, build a base on the Mediterranean, or become an international mediator (Foreign Policy 9/14/17).
Gaza: Israel, armed with nuclear weapons and the world’s largest recipient of U.S. military aid, is allowed to continue its 50-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza with mass terror. More than 3,500 Palestinians were killed in the last two sieges out of a population of 1.5 million. Currently this “outdoor prison” has become unlivable, with only two-four hours of electricity a day and 90 percent of its water undrinkable. Health services are broken down due to infrastructure damage and lack of supplies, over 700 schools are inoperable, and waterborne diseases are increasing due to lack of sewage treatment plants.
China, the world’s fastest-growing economy, is the number one gas and oil importer from Iran while also selling arms for oil to Saudi Arabia. China is also building oil and gas pipelines from Russia (Foreign Policy, 1/26).
The U.S., in a permanent state of war since 2001, has been either directly at war or arming and supporting regional and local players in all of these conflicts. Like a wounded beast, U.S. imperialism grows more desperate and more dangerous, transcending party politics. Trump’s anti-Muslim travel ban, in effect until the case is heard by the Supreme Court, has left Muslim families torn apart by the collapse of the region, with thousands stranded in refugee camps, unable to proceed to the U.S. This anti-Muslim racism is vital to winning the population and soldiers to sacrifice for this new permanent state of war, while Muslims are targeted for government surveillance and victimized by hate crimes.
It wasn’t so long ago that the capitalists were celebrating the end of communism and the victory of the free market. These are the fruits of their catastrophic victory. Sooner rather than later, we will all be living in Yemen. The slow but steady rebuilding of the international communist Progressive Labor Party is the long-term solution. The building of international solidarity now can ultimately turn the next world war into the last.
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It’s not just predator Nassar; sexism integral to Olympics
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- 22 February 2018 26 hits
Sexual predator Larry Nassar abused at least 256 women while he was the medical doctor for USA Gymnastics (USAG) and the Michigan State University Athletic Department. He will spend the rest of his life in prison as Judge Rosemarie Aquilina proclaimed that she was glad to “sign his death warrant.” But it’s not just Nassar and the many other sexual abusers that are being exposed. The whole damn capitalist system has to go!
Sexism inseparable from Olympics
As doctor for USAG, Nassar travelled to many Olympics with the team. The Olympics are capitalism at its’ worst. Money and nationalism rule. Corruption is rampant. At this year’s Winter Olympics much of the Russian team was suspended for doping up their athletes with performance enhancing drugs (PEDs). Nassar did his vile abuse at the Summer Olympics, where often young girls are the stars. But it was not just Nassar. “… In 2004, journalist Scott Reid let us know that gymnasts training for Team USA were subjected to near-starvation diets—900 calories per day to fuel a world-class athlete. The purpose of this was to delay the onset of puberty, when the natural development of a woman’s body makes her less adapted to acrobatic tumbling” (Washington Post, 1/26).
Though some of the brave women that are coming forward and confronting their abusers are famous entertainers or athletes, most are working class women who have had very little recourse in a depraved capitalist world. Sexual predators are all over the world because capitalist culture promotes it. The profit motive is primary and this goes beyond sports. Women are particularly vulnerable because of the imperialist wars around the world as capitalists fight to control valuable resources. They make up a huge proportion of refugees worldwide living in deplorable conditions. According to a United Nations report, during the Clinton administration, U.S. bombing of Iraq killed 500,000 women and children. Women are used as sex slaves and their bodies are mutilated in many parts of the world.
Many of Nassar’s victims and some journalists express sentiments that point to a systematic failure. Charles Pierce says “Burn it all down” (Sports Illustrated, 1/24). Survivor Kyle Stephens despairs that “I have received messages from survivors all over the world detailing their abuse and isolation… When an Instagram message is the only place that victims can speak their truth, we are failing” (Washington Post, 2/16).
Democratic politicians, no ally of workers
Cynically politicians, mainly Democrats, are stepping in to coopt this uprising against sexual abuse into a vote for me movement. New York Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is calling on the Justice Department to investigate the Olympic Committee. Michigan Democrats are calling on Judge Aquilina to run for the Michigan State Supreme Court. But the Democratic Party has been integral to sexual abuse from President Bill Clinton and his intern to Democratic Party donor Harvey Weinstein. It really is the whole damn system that has to go.
So here we are with another Olympics full of divisive nationalism, poisoned by drugs, awash in corruption, and driven by money, a perversion of sports. Sports should be for everyone to have fun and stay healthy. There was a brief glimpse of this in the early days of the Soviet Union and China after their socialist revolutions. There were sports clubs everywhere, often attached to factories. Workers were given time to exercise during work. That was before the restoration of full-blown capitalism in those countries. Now we are facing the ultimate capitalist depravity, world war. Women standing up to each and every sexual predator is a big plus. Let’s take the struggle one more step to rebuild a communist movement for a decent, egalitarian world. Then we can build healthy relationships between men and women.
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170th Anniversary: Lessons from The Communist Manifesto
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- 22 February 2018 44 hits
In late 1847, a secret European propaganda society, the Communist League, requested Karl Marx and Frederick Engels to write up a statement of purpose for the organization. In February 1848, the document appeared. It was called the Communist Manifesto (click here for a copy, available in 80 languages).
This work outlines the new world conception, consistent materialism, which also embraces the realm of social life, dialectics, as the most comprehensive and profound doctrine of development, the theory of the class struggle and of the world-historic revolutionary role of the proletariat—the creator of a new, communist society.
— V.I. Lenin, Karl Marx (1913)
In time, the Manifesto became the most revered document among revolutionaries everywhere. After 170 years, we in the Progressive Labor Party still take these words seriously:
“The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.”
The ruling classes understood the significance of Marxist ideas. We are still grasping its historic importance.
In 1895, Lenin wrote in Frederick Engels:
The services rendered by Marx and Engels to the working class may be expressed in a few words thus: they taught the working class to know itself and be conscious of itself, and they substituted science for dreams.
All those who wish to develop as revolutionaries should understand the Communist Manifesto and look at the similarities and differences between the early communists and the PLP. Its main points are these:
(l) Communists should openly “publish their views (and) their aims’’ to the world. Marx and Engels believed, as do we, that being bold and explicit about communist ideas is the only way to build a movement for communism.
(2) “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.’’ It has been the struggle between the oppressors and the oppressed that ultimately leads to the destruction of the oppressors and the progression of history.
(3) However, capitalism has a uniqueness to it not found before: “Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.”
(4) Capitalism has another distinct feature: “It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors,’ and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest …for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.”
(5) But with this more explicit form of exploitation were planted the “seeds of destruction” of the bourgeoisie—the working class: “In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e. capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modem working class, developed—a class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who work only so long as their labor increases capital.”
(6) Finally, the aim of communists—the issue which separates revolutionaries from pretenders—is “overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat”—the dictatorship of the working class.
As it was only the opening gun for a movement in its infancy, the Manifesto had a few major omissions. Marx and Engels more or less knew the sort of world they wanted—a world led by workers—but hadn’t the slightest idea how to achieve it. This knowledge was to come later, helped out by the brave workers of Paris in 1871 who used mass violence to set up the Paris Commune.
Marx and Engels were very vague on the role of ideology or the hold of bourgeois ideas on the working class. We have since learned that the role of communists is to demolish the bosses’ ideas among workers and students and to develop communist ideas in order to create the revolutionary army that will destroy capitalism. To do that, we need one united party all over the world. Join PLP and turn the words of the Communist Manifesto into actuality.
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Fight racist immigration reform—Workers' struggle has no borders
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- 22 February 2018 38 hits
In his racist, divisive State of the Union address, President Donald Trump did his best to scapegoat immigrants for the deepening crisis of U.S. capitalism amid sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry. To convince the U.S. working class to go to war over Middle East oil and other ruling-class interests, the bosses must increase racism against workers in other countries. Just as Hitler blamed the depression in Germany in the 1930s on Jews, Trump is trying to blame violent crime and job loss on immigrants fleeing U.S.-supported terror regimes and the economic instability of capitalism.
But workers cannot be fooled. The international working class has no borders. “Immigrants” are simply super-exploited workers who are forced by the profit system’s failures to move beyond the rulers’ arbitrary boundary lines. In the face of these attacks by Trump and the bosses he serves, we must build a revolutionary communist party to smash all walls and fences that serve the money-sucking capitalists. We must create a new world that honors workers’ labor and serves workers’ needs.
Two Brands of Fascism
U.S. capitalism is in decline relative to China and Russia. In a desperate effort to hold on to their top dog position, the U.S. bosses have plunged into wars from Syria to Afghanistan to Yemen, all in preparation for the broader global conflict to come. But the U.S. rulers are also contending with significant divisions in their own camp. The domestically oriented section of the ruling class is less invested in a prospective war over Middle East oil. It’s promoting a smaller, less expensive, predominantly white military trained as racist killers.
But the dominant finance capital wing understands that it needs a “multicultural” army for the World War III to come. These bosses see immigrants as invaluable cannon fodder, and are willing to hold out the carrot of U.S. citizenship as an incentive to recruit immigrants into their killing machine. As former President Barack Obama noted, the young immigrants known as Dreamers “start new businesses, staff our labs, serve in our military, and otherwise contribute to the country we love” (cnn.com, 9/5/17).
The upshot of this debate means more fascism, whether it comes with an overtly racist face or a liberal veneer. Trump’s address—offering a “path” to citizenship for 1.8 million “Dreamers” while excluding family members, accelerating deportations, erecting a wall, and demonizing other immigrants as criminals—might have been a clumsy attempt at compromise between the bosses’ warring camps. The incoherence of his immigrations plans, which seem to change by the day, is a symptom of the Klansman in Chief’s volatility and shortsighted outlook. But they also reflect an essential contradiction for the capitalist class. On the one hand, all bosses need to use anti-immigrant racism to divide workers, to push down wages and stave off the mortal threat of a united working class. On the other hand, all bosses need immigrants as a source of cheaper labor. As immigration scholar Mae Ngai noted in the New York Times (1/29):
Migration is propelled by irrepressible human desires for family unification, economic improvement and physical safety….In truth, undocumented migration is not an aberration of “normal” immigration. It is the inevitable result of any general policy of immigration restriction. Restriction creates two streams of immigration, lawful and unlawful. It is a conceit of the sovereign power to think that it can have only legal immigration.
Immigration Reform: Just Another Attack on Workers
Under Trump, the attack on immigrant workers has shifted and intensified. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are acting more aggressively—detaining and deporting any undocumented immigrants they find, not just those convicted of committing crimes, as under Obama. Trump has halted the DACA (Dream Act) program, subjecting to deportation 800,000 undocumented people who entered the U.S. as children. He has done the same to hundreds of thousands of immigrants from countries that sustained natural disasters (including Haiti and El Salvador) by ending their Temporary Protected Status. Trump also wants to end the visa lottery program, which grants green cards to 50,000 immigrants a year from countries with low immigration numbers, and to stop immigrants from legally bringing in family members beyond spouses and dependent children. Trump’s plan for “merit-based” immigration from countries like Norway is a transparent move to fuel anti-immigrant racism by drawing a line between “good” immigrants—white, English-speaking people with college degrees—and everybody else. He aims to divide the working class while encouraging the white-supremacist base that elected him in 2016.
Democrats Cannot Be Trusted
History shows that the working class cannot trust the Democratic Party to defend and protect immigrant workers. In the 1990s, under Democrat Bill Clinton, the U.S. Border Patrol initiated operations called “Gatekeeper” and “Hold the Line,” which concentrated agents and technology to make “a ‘show of force’ to potential illegal border crossers” (cbp.gov) and oversaw the “first major federal move towards constructing a border fence” in Texas, Arizona, and California (cndls.georgetown.edu). The Clinton administration deported a record 12.3 million immigrants and pushed for laws that established “new grounds for deportation, penalties for the crimes of illegal entry and re-entry, mandates for detention of deportable noncitizens, and a framework for cooperative arrangements on immigration enforcement between the federal government and state and local law enforcement agencies” (Migration Policy Institute, 1/26/17).
More recently, Obama deported more than 2 million people and criminalized more immigrants than any president before him. While Trump’s crude appeals to white supremacists are more openly vile, and he has pushed to ban immigrants from mainly Muslim countries, his racist stance on immigration is essentially no different than that of his predecessors, Democrat or Republican (New York Times, 1/29). In fact, Trump deported fewer people in 2017 than Obama did in 2016 (politifact).
Fight Back Against Anti-Immigrant Racism
As communists, we welcome immigrants as fellow workers who have been among the most militant fighters against capitalist brutality and exploitation. Thousands of groups are now fighting Trump’s deportations. Union teachers have formed anti-deportation committees. New York-area lawyers demonstrated to eject ICE agents from the court system. “Sanctuary” movements are protecting immigrants and publicizing their stories. In Norwalk, Connecticut, Nury Chavarria, a mother faced with deportation to Guatemala after 24 years in the U.S., won a stay after several hundred supporters demonstrated on her behalf. An undocumented Boston student, locked in an ICE jail, was granted bail after a “go-fund-me” movement of students at his school raised the bond money. Every day, volunteers leave food and water in the Sonora Desert to save migrants from death from dehydration and heat stroke.
Communist Answer
The Progressive Labor Party calls on all workers to defend our brother and sister immigrants against deportation, and to fight Trump’s racist lies. Smash racist deportations! Let’s train ourselves and our class to fight for a world where of “no more deportees.”
Chicago, February 2—More than 70 anti-racist students and community members converged on the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in opposition to the school’s speaking invitation to white supremacist Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former chief strategist.
Progressive Labor Party comrades were there to point out Bannon’s role in the context of rising fascism, and to offer revolutionary communist struggle as the only way to crush the capitalist system that creates racist scum like Bannon and his old boss.
Attack All Fascists, Head On
On the steps of the business school, leaders of various organizations emphasized that efforts against racism and sexism needed to go beyond the immediate struggle against Bannon. Speakers addressed the University of Chicago’s racist history of displacing surrounding residents through gentrification (see box).
PLP members held signs reading “Make Racists Afraid Again” and “No Free Speech for Racists” and joined in chants of “Say it loud, say it clear, fascists/Nazis are not welcome here.” About a dozen participants took CHALLENGE and the majority welcomed our presence in the march and rally.
One comrade approached a dozen fascists who were being protected by a line of kkkops across the street from the protest. This comrade went against the grain and sharply attacked their racism head-on. Our Party confronts racists because ignoring them will not aid us in our fight against the capitalist bosses’ increasing fascism. In fact, the liberal response of ignoring racist, fascist hate speech, in the name of some ludicrous “moral high ground,” has only led to more university appearances by gutter racist speakers nationwide, along with a sharp spike in violent crimes against Black, Arab, Latin, and Asian workers.
Capitalist ”Free Speech” Benefits Only the Bosses
University of Chicago President Robert Zimmer claims the institution stands for free speech for all. But when a group tried to deliver a petition to him opposing Bannon’s invitation, Zimmer showed a lot less interest in engaging with the petitioners than he had with Professor Luigi Zingales, the fascist collaborator who initiated the invitation. The racist capitalists back free speech only when it pits working-class people against one another and reinforces the rulers’ political agenda of dividing and exploiting the entire working class. Communists, on the other hand, value only speech that has scientific and objective merit, and is used to support the interests of the international working class.
Sharpening Future Struggle
After a brief march that included taking over an intersection, the group met at a local church to strategize plans for the next action. PLP comrades called for encircling and confronting racist counter-protesters at any future action. We also proposed that the march continue to take place in low-income, working-class Black neighborhoods on the periphery of this elite university, rather than downtown. A comrade joined other attendees in pointing out the importance of focusing the protests on the Black and Latin working class, as these workers are the primary targets of the racist and sexist attacks that are provoked by fascist mouthpieces like Bannon. Although the anti-racist struggle needs to be able to engage workers in downtown Chicago as well, it was telling that some liberal organizers placed a higher priority on bringing the struggle to this wealthier area.
Going further, a veteran comrade stressed the potential worldwide effectiveness of stopping Bannon here. The comrade cited a 1985 PLP action at Northwestern University, where comrades threw red paint on Adolfo Calero, the murderous Nicaraguan Contra leader. This comrade also pointed out the inverse relationship between the strength of the anti-fascist movement and the eventual strength of the fascist state. As we prepare for revolution, we are saving the lives of millions of workers. What you do counts!
We also said the problem was much broader than Bannon or Trump, and that racist oppression worsens under liberals like Barack Obama. We must fight the entire capitalist system.
The Party will continue working with these students as we broaden our appeal to workers citywide to fight fascists like Bannon and the capitalist class that protects him. Stay tuned!
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The Racist and Imperialist History of the University of Chicago
In 1857, the University’s founding endowment was donated by a notoriously cruel slave owner named Stephen A. Douglas. The ten acres of land from Douglas were drenched in the blood of Black slaves from Africa.
In the 1930s and 1940s, the University funded racially restrictive covenants which prevented property sales to Black buyers. The Chicago Defender reported that “many of the real estate owners in that area refer to restrictive covenants as ‘the University of Chicago Agreement to get rid of Negroes.’”
The University was home to arch-imperialist economist Milton Friedman, whose deadly policies of neoliberal capitalism were taught to a generation of Chilean ruling-class agents. “The Chicago Boys,” as they were known, piloted Friedman’s policies during the fascist rule of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), when countless working-class lives were destroyed through political repression or widespread privatization of the economy (Nation, 9/21/16).
UC’s siege of gentrification and displacement remains relentless to this day—most recently in Woodlawn, a working-class Black neighborhood just south of the University. Breaking an understanding that it would not build south of 61st Street, the University is expanding by building a new charter school and the Obama Presidential Center, among other projects.
After 25 years of protests demanding a trauma center to serve the South Side, the University is finally opening a trauma center at the medical school. For years, many workers have died needlessly from this blatantly racist disregard for their lives (The Chicago Maroon, 9/15/17).