But anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification, for it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine enemies. — Audre Lorde

For years, there was a popular notion in American politics that we should “respect the office, if not the man,” meaning that, no matter who is president, we should extend them respect merely because of their position. Thankfully, in recent years social media has reflected a growing sense that we should respect neither the man nor the office. Like the Trump administration before it, the Biden administration has been subject to relentless cyberbullying on basically every social media platform. And while it is true that a fair share of the hate is coming from right-wing trolls pining for Trump’s return and suffering from delusions of a far-left Biden agenda, Biden and his ilk aren’t safe from criticism from the left either. From memes mocking government policy to tweets directly attacking Biden, millions of (mostly) young people are using the internet to express their anger at the Biden administration, the Democrats, and, to a certain extent, the institutions of the capitalist state. 

And that anger is absolutely justified. Surely, the Biden administration has betrayed all its main promises and is currently overseeing a homicidally irresponsible policy with regards to Covid-19 — refusing any form of shut down and telling people to “just Google” where to find Covid-19 tests. When Biden finally decided to begin providing free at-home tests, he limited it to 4 per household, regardless of how many people lived in the household — an idiotic policy that disproportionally impacts poor households with many people living at one address. 

It is perfectly normal and healthy to be angry at Biden and his government. However, as funny as they are, memes aren’t enough. We will not, as many suggest, be able to “cyberbully Joe Biden” into giving reforms.

Rather, we should take the examples of the Biden administration reversing course on unpopular decisions — refusing to extend the student loan moratorium, refusing to send masks, etc — as but a taste of the power we could have if we used our rage to get organized. Biden and his cronies are far more scared of our power as workers than they are of our tweets. So, what concessions have been given, have been given to stave off the birth of a social movement that could win a lot more.

Let’s take student loans just as one example. Biden and the Democrats in Congress won on a platform promising student debt relief — still far short of the total forgiveness which is needed — and, so far, have implemented no measures to meaningfully impact the growing student debt crisis. To add insult to injury — or, rather, injury to further injury — Biden was planning to restart loan payments on February 1, refusing to extend the pause that began at the onset of the Covid-19 crisis. However, after public backlash and the Omicron spike in Covid-19, Biden had to push the start date back to May. However, the loans still aren’t forgiven — an act Biden could do with one executive order — and Biden is hoping that he can push off the re-start date until he is on firmer political and economic ground. In this sense, we haven’t cyberbullied Biden into doing anything, we just kicked the can down the road.

Imagine, instead, if the millions of people impacted by the student debt crisis organized a debt strike or sit-in. Imagine a march. Imagine a strike. The millions of students in the United States drowning in debt could fight to cancel student debt for good and take back some of the power wrested from them by the capitalist state.  Resistance, then, would take on a material component. Put another way, angry tweets don’t sufficiently threaten Biden or the state but a combative social movement does. Because social movements — especially those that include or are led by the working class as workers — threaten capitalist profits and productivity.

The power of organization goes beyond any one issue, because organizing ourselves puts us in collaboration against a shared enemy. And that’s what Biden fears the most. 

This idea of organizing to fight for our demands during the Biden administration isn’t a pipe dream. Under Biden we saw a limited resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement after the police murder of Adam Toledo and the largest pro-Palestine movement yet in the U.S. This spirit carried over into the series of strikes, dubbed Striketober, that showed the labor movement beginning to flex its muscles again.

These strikes are incredibly important for two reasons: first, they show that workers are increasingly getting fed up with their increasingly declining conditions — the so-called “Great Resignation” and the rise of the “anti-work” subreddit are also indicators of this, though ultimately as “strategies” they are impotent, as they rely upon individual rather than collective action — essentially isolating each worker in their own individualized reaction to the current situation. Second, the strikes also showed that workers are willing to fight their established unions’ leaderships. In many of the strikes, such as the ones at John Deere and Kellogg’s,workers voted down traitorous tentative agreements that their unions’ bureaucracies offered to them in hopes of limiting the wins of the strike quickly and easily. Increasingly, more workers are realizing that their leaderships are, in fact, misleaders driving them towards reconciliation with the bosses. Breaking with these bureaucrats is a vital step in organizing against Biden because the leaderships of the unions are in bed with the Democrats and, so, are more interested in maintaining the status quo than they are actually winning better conditions for workers.

While Striketober is over, class struggle certainly isn’t. Right now, we are seeing what could be the beginnings of a new teachers’ wave of resistance, reacting to the lack of Covid-19 safety measures in schools and decades of overwork and underfunding. 

Another positive example of growing organization against Biden is the recent wave of student walk-outs. Across the country, primarily high school students are walking out of their schools to protest the criminally insufficient Covid-19 policies at most schools. This wave of student activism — organized specifically as students — shows us both that young people are increasingly refusing to be de-politicized by a system that seeks to disempower them and also the power of a fighting solidarity — walking out to disrupt the status quo —, rather than a performative one such as banging pots and pans for essential workers, for example. From the climate struggle to Black Lives Matter to this new wave of student walk-outs, students are taking a greater role in political movements than they have in many years. 

It is in this light that, on the anniversary of Biden’s inauguration, the Audre Lorde quote that opened this article rings particularly true. We are all (or almost all) so angry. All the time. Because it’s very clear that the government that swore it would protect us refuses to. The CDC is siding with the bosses to force us back to work, Biden wants to make us pay student loans when many are still out of work or underpaid, even the tepid reform of forgiving $10,000 of the debt isn’t being passed, the federal minimum wage is still $7.25, and the climate crisis still goes largely unaddressed. We should be angry. Our anger is healthy. Our anger tells us that we deserve a better world than this one.

So let us turn our anger into organization. Independent of the capitalists and their parties, without the misleadership of the social movements and unions that got us here. Let us organize to make Biden one of the last presidents of the United States. Let us organize to abolish the inherently undemocratic U.S. state and all its structures. Let us organize for a better world. Let us fight and let us win. Let us use our anger to organize ourselves so strongly that we shake the capitalists to their core.

The post Let Us Turn Our Anger at Biden Into Organization appeared first on Left Voice.

On the 49th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 that legalized abortion across the country, the Reproductive Rights Group of Michigan organized a picket outside the “Problem Pregnancy Center” in Southfield, Michigan on Saturday, January 22. The center is one of about 3,000 fake abortion clinics in the United States. These fake clinics outnumber clinics that offer actual abortion services, of which there are about 800, by far.

These fake abortion clinics get people in the door by offering free pregnancy tests and free ultrasounds, and by promising information on abortion. The Problem Pregnancy Center even imitates the pink colors of Planned Parenthood. Mostly backed by religious organizations, some even receive federal funding — while funds are withheld from actual abortion providers. 

The real motive behind these centers is to shame and scare pregnant people from considering abortion. 

One of our activists/investigators called several of these fake abortion clinics in the Metro Detroit area and was were told things such as “Your baby already has a soul” and “women regret having abortions every time,” whereas “women who give birth never regret it.” Among the lies spewed on the phone were, “Abortions lead to alcohol and drug additions.” Further, “Women are natural nurturers” and, assuming the caller was pregnant, “You are already a mother but you have to choose whether you’re a mother to a dead baby or not.”

About 15 abortion rights activists braved the 10-degree weather to call attention to the fake clinic, holding signs reading, “Beware! Fake Clinic”; “Caution, Pro-Life Clinic!”; and “Free, Safe Abortion on Demand Without Apology.” Protesters also distributed pamphlets to passers-by that included the locations of nearby abortion clinics.

A number of participants explained why they had attended the protest. Myrtle from the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) said, “I had a friend when I was in high school. She had what I call a ‘table top’ abortion. I made my sign in honor of Bonnie — because she was only 15 years old when when she had that abortion, and she died.”

Millie Hall, president of Metro-Detroit CLUW, was also there. “All of our rights, especially our reproductive rights, are under attack,” she said. “We can not lose what we gained 49 years ago in Roe v. Wade. Women have a right to control their bodies.”

David Finkel, a member of Solidarity, said, “This is crucial. It’s part of a package. It’s the same struggle as voting rights, racial justice, anything you can name. The attack is on everything at once.” He added that he hoped continued activism could “discredit the legitimacy of the Supreme Court.”

Judith Wraight from Detroit explained that she had an abortion before the Roe v. Wade ruling. “There is no way I could have birthed a child … And I don’t regret anything at all.” She pointed to the dangers of childbirth as one reason that she believes people must have the right to terminate their pregnancies.

Three days prior to the in-person protest, the Reproductive Rights Group of Michigan organized a “Yelp zap” against the Problem Pregnancy Center. Activists left Yelp reviews and one-star ratings to warn people who might otherwise unwittingly walk into a pro-life trap.

Michigan abortion rights activists plan to continue organizing in the lead-up to the Supreme Court’s decision this summer in the Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health case from Mississippi, which is likely to end the federally protected right to abortion. They are dedicated to building a movement in the streets to defend abortion and reproductive rights. 

To get involved in the fight to defend abortion rights in Michigan, contact the Reproductive Rights Group of Michigan on Facebook or scan this code to sign up for future actions: 

The post Michigan Activists Picket Fake Abortion Clinic appeared first on Left Voice.

Yesterday, at least 70 people were killed and more than 130 injured after an airstrike carried out by the Saudi-led coalition hit a prison in Yemen. Another airstrike on the same day hit a telecommunications building in the strategic port city of Hodeidah, causing a nationwide internet blackout in the country. At least three children were killed in that attack.

The attacks come in the context of an escalation in the Yemen conflict earlier this week after a Houthi-led attack on Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. The UAE, a Saudi ally and member of the Saudi-led coalition fighting the Houthis (who have the backing of Iran), have attempted to ease tensions with Iran in recent years, but regional instability highlights the complex nature of the UAE’s diplomatic rapprochement.

As the events of this week point to an escalation of hostilities, the Biden administration’s plans to end the war in Yemen and advance in the “pivot to Asia” seem distant at best. While earlier in 2021 Biden revoked the Trump administration’s designation of the Houthis as a terrorist group and ended support for what he called “offensive operations” by the Saudi-led coalition, recent moves by his administration tell a different story. 

In a press conference on Wednesday, Biden said: “Ending the war in Yemen takes the two parties to be involved to do it. And it’s going to be very difficult.” The comments come a month after his administration approved $650 million in arms sales to Saudi Arabia through Congress under the pretext that the weapons were for “defensive purposes.” In Wednesday’s press conference, Biden also signaled that he was considering re-designating the Houthis as a terror group which could exacerbate Yemen’s humanitarian crisis by making it harder for aid to reach the country. 

The Roots of the Crisis in Yemen 

Yemen, which is one of the Arab world’s poorest countries, has been the site of a devastating civil war which has roots in the processes of class struggle opened up by the Arab Spring. The uprisings in Yemen in 2011 led to the fall of the country’s long-time authoritarian president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was succeeded by his vice president, Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi. 

In 2015, after an agreement was forged between Hadi’s government and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to reduce oil subsidies to pay the country’s debts, mass protests forced the resignation of Hadi and led to the takeover of the Yemeni government on behalf of the Houthis, a Shia rebel group backed primarily by Iran. As the Houthis advanced in their offensive, a full blown civil war broke out between the supporters of the government of Hadi and the Houthis.

While Yemen is strategically important because it sits on a strait linking the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden, (through which much of the world’s oil shipments pass), above all the conflict is part of the regional power struggle between Shia-ruled Iran and Sunni-ruled Saudi Arabia. With the weakened influence of the United States in the region in the aftermath of its adventuristic interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran began to position itself more and more as a regional power to fill the power vacuums left by the United States.

With Iran’s backing of the Houthis in Yemen, Saudi Arabia decided to intervene militarily in Yemen in 2015 to save its backyard from the influence of its chief regional rival with the help of eight other mostly Sunni Arab states and importantly the material and political support from the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. 

For the United States, the conflict in Yemen was an important opportunity to ramp up lucrative arms deals with Saudi Arabia to secure profits for the vast military-industrial complex of U.S. imperialism. In many ways, Yemen also became a hallmark of Obama-era foreign policy. What the Obama administration dubbed the “Yemen model” provided a blueprint for the United States’ strategic plans to shift to confronting China by committing as few resources as possible to insurgent conflicts in the Middle East and the use of drone warfare rather than U.S. ground troops so that the conflicts were out of sight and out of mind. 

In fact, in many ways Yemen has become a “forgotten war” among the U.S. populace but without a doubt, the savage drone campaign unleashed by the Nobel Peace Prize winning Obama that killed nearly 700 people is not to be forgotten by the Yemeni people. And for us socialists, it’s a brutal reminder of the bipartisan nature of U.S. imperialism. 

And beyond the outright military support for the Saudi-led coalition, since the start of the war, the United States and the rest of the coalition has reinforced a heinous economic and humanitarian blockade which primarily affects the popular classes of Yemen. Today, despite the millions invested in the reactionary war, the Saudi-led coalition has been unable to impose a puppet regime or prevent the advance of the Houthis and other insurgent Islamist groups like the Islamic State which now control the capital Sanaa and the majorityt of North Yemen. 

The World’s Worst Humanitarian Crisis 

The United States continues to wreak death and destruction in Yemen, bringing about an unimaginable level of suffering for the Yemeni people. In December 2020, the United Nations reported that the conflict had caused an estimated 233,000 deaths, including 131,000 from indirect causes such as lack of food, health services, and infrastructure. Tens of thousands of Yemenis have been killed or wounded as a direct result of the fighting, including more than 10,000 children. 

Four million people have been forced to flee their homes and more than 20.7 million — 71 percent of the population — are in need of some form of humanitarian assistance or protection for their survival. At least 5 million people are on the brink of famine and almost 50,000 people are already experiencing famine-like conditions. An estimated 2.3 million children under the age of five are acutely malnourished, including 400,000 who are at risk of dying without treatment, according to the UN.

One out of every two people in Yemen also do not have access to safe water, which has left the country struggling to deal with the largest cholera outbreak ever recorded. This has resulted in 2.5 million suspected cases of cholera and about 4,000 related deaths since 2016. The war-torn nation has also become the breeding ground for a dengue fever epidemic since 2019. 

That’s all without mentioning the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic in a country with a nearly collapsed health system. Only half of Yemen’s 3,500 medical facilities are fully functioning and 20 percent of districts have no doctors — meaning at least 20 million people lack access to adequate healthcare.

In the face of this tragic scenario, it’s clear that U.S. imperialism has no interest in ending the catastrophe in Yemen nor in any of the other countries in the region, as the recent withdrawal and subsequent humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan showed. Moreover, workers cannot depend on reactionary bourgeois forces of any kind to find a way out of the crisis in Yemen. Instead, the struggle for peace in Yemen must rely on the power and methods of the working class, in the spirit of the masses who took to the streets in Yemen in 2011 and with support from the international workers’ movement in the tradition of the antiwar movements of the past. 

In solidarity with the struggle of the Yemeni people, working people around the world should immediately denounce the bombings and arms sales which merely serve capitalist profiteering at the expense of human lives. We should call for an end to the criminal blockade which prevents the delivery of urgently needed food and medical supplies to the Yemeni masses. And we must defend the Yemeni people’s right to self-determination in the face of foriegn interference which denies an independent path forward out of this horrifying conflict.

The post Imperialist Backed Airstrike in Yemen Kills At Least 70 People appeared first on Left Voice.

On Monday, January 17, Nohemí Martinez and Julissa Ramirez were found dead on the Juárez-Porvenir highway outside Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. They were a couple and had been reported missing by their relatives the previous Saturday. The two young women, lesbians, were the mothers of two girls and a boy. They lived in Ciudad Juárez, although some others say they lived across the border in El Paso, Texas.

Karla Arvizo, president of the Sexual Diversity Committee of Chihuahua, stated,

It was an exaggeratedly violent crime, and all indications are that it was a hate crime, because they were violated sexually. That is why we are considering it not just two femicides, but a hate crime against their sexual orientation.

Meanwhile, two organizations — the National Council for the Prevention of Discrimination (Conapred) and the National Commission for the Prevention and Eradication of Violence against Women (Conavim) — called on the state attorney general’s office to apply the National Protocol of Action — the country’s special law governing crimes and discrimination involving sexual orientation or gender identity.

The attorney general, however, declared that there is no reason to classify this as a hate crime, instead attributing it to “economic activity and the environment.” This is because in the state, hate crimes are not classified as crimes per se, so they are not investigated as such. This is the case despite that more hate crimes against LGBTQ+ people are committed in Chihuahua than any other state except Veracruz, according to figures from the independent online publication Letra S.

Although LGBTQ+ people can legally marry, and trans identities are recognized in the civil registry, the state does not prohibit so-called conversion therapies.

Maru Campos, governor of Chihuahua and a member of the right-wing PAN party, condemned the double femicide before the bodies had been identified, and promised that justice would be served. But her positions against LGBTQ+ rights are well known in the community. Since she was first elected to office as a member of Congress, she has opposed equal marriage and defends “natural marriage” between one man and one woman. She has also claimed that only 1 percent of Chihuahua’s population is homosexual.

As of last Tuesday, there had already been 10 femicides in the state this year. In 2021, femicides in Chihuahua increased by 34.7 percent over the previous year. Most of them — 39.13 percent — were in Ciudad Juárez.

Meanwhile, the federal government, through the Secretariat of Security and Citizen Protection, has cynically announced that under President López Obrador’s (AMLO) administration, femicide overall has decreased by 7 percent in the country, even though in December 2021 alone there was an 11 percent increase compared to the previous month. That is according to the government’s own data.

The government’s strategy, and that of Campos is to bolster militarization through Operation Together for Juárez, which involves increased patrolling by the National Guard along with municipal, state, and federal police. Time and again, this approach has failed to solve the problem of violence, and has even played a role in escalating the violence. It is no surprise that the PAN advocates this policy; after all, it was the PAN that pioneered the militarization of Mexico under the same policy that AMLO’s MORENA party is now promoting.

Unfortunately, Ciudad Juárez is known worldwide for femicides. Its history shows that border areas are the perfect breeding ground for femicide and patriarchal violence. This is because such areas are subordinate to imperialism, and it is working women who pay the price of that subordination. Huge numbers of women work in the transnational industries that have overtaken Mexico’s border areas. Foreign companies take advantage of the low production costs, subjecting mainly women workers to precarious conditions. Militarization — promoted by lackey Mexican governments obeying the orders of the U.S. White House — only make things worse.

Femicides have been strongly condemned on both sides of the border. These condemnations must be converted into organization and mobilization in the streets. In both Mexico and the United States, the women’s and LGBTQ+ movements must fight for the immediate demilitarization of the borders and of Mexico as a whole, as well as full rights for migrants — with special emphasis on the situation of migrant women.

The women’s and LGBTQ+ movements must once again take to the streets to demand labor rights, daycare, and breastfeeding centers in workplaces; an end to the precariousness that places a double burden on women and LGBTQ+ people; and full rights regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity, beginning with equal marriage rights, rights to trans identities throughout the country, and abortion on demand.

We must urgently establish shelters for women victims of violence, administered independently of the government, whose police and officials in many cases collude with human trafficking networks.

First published in Spanish on January 20 in La Izquierda Diario Mexico.

Translation by Angelique Miste Saavedra.

The post Femicides in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, Spark Widespread Outrage appeared first on Left Voice.

Fed up with mandatory in-person school attendance policies that fail to keep them safe, students are marching out of classrooms and into the streets.

Last week, hundreds of students from over 30 public high schools in New York City walked out of class to protest the unsafe conditions in city schools. Despite the latest Covid-19 wave, during which over 38,000 students and teachers tested positive COVID, school officials have insisted on in-person classes. That same week, students from a group called the Chicago Public Schools Radical Youth Alliance (Chi-Rads), formed days prior, led a walkout followed by a protest at Chicago Public Schools headquarters. Their demands included masks, tests, laptops for remote learning, and a voice at the negotiating table for COVID safety plans. 

In Oakland, California, more than 1,200 students have signed a petition to their superintendent and school board demanding the school district shift to online learning. Barring that, the students demanded N95 masks in schools for every student, testing twice a week, and outdoor space to eat lunch. Students in Massachusetts, Michigan, and Maryland also organized petitions and walkouts last week, as did thousands of students, teachers, and parents in Ireland, Vancouver, Canada, and France. 

These students march in the footsteps of so many student movements that came before them, many of which can lend not only inspiration, but also ideas for how to organize, fight, and win. There are numerous examples to draw from. The French uprising of May–June 1968 began as a student movement and grew into a massive general strike that nearly sparked a revolution. That same year, Mexico was rocked for months by university student strikes that also inspired sectors of the working class into action. 

In this article, we highlight two student movements of the 21st century, in Chile and Brazil.

Chile 

Chile has a long history of combative student movements. In 2006, the so-called “Penguin Revolution” took place — named after the black-and-white uniforms worn by students. Close to a million students went on strike in May of that year with a wide array of demands, from free subway passes for students, to the waiver of the university admissions test fees, to free public education. The Chilean Student Federation organized massive protests that included marches, flash mobs, and “kiss-ins,” and eventually occupations at over 100 schools. Students locked officials out of the facilities and used their schools as a hub for organizing protests. When the government wouldn’t give in to their demands, the students escalated their tactics and organized massive marches alongside unionized workers; some marches brought over 100,000 people into the streets. The protests were met with intense violence from riot police, who beat and arrested students. 

The movement won some of its demands, including free subway passes for low-income students (the movement had demanded this right for all students), and fees were waived for the majority of students testing into university — but the major pillars of the privatized school model remained in place. 

Brazil

In 2015, in the midst of an economic crisis, the government of the state of São Paulo, Brazil, announced the closure of over 90 schools. Hundreds of thousands of students were to be reassigned to overcrowded schools far from their homes. For many of them whose families relied on their part-time jobs to stay afloat, the added commute time meant they would have to drop out. Teachers’ unions protested, but were ignored. 

In early November, students at a high school occupied their school building. They locked the doors to the building and organized a school-wide assembly to coordinate the occupation. Then they reached out to students at other schools and encouraged them to do the same, publishing a pamphlet that explained how to do so. Within a week, 100 schools across the state were occupied. By the end of the month, the number had doubled.

The government tried to use various tricks and intimidation tactics to get the students to end the occupations, but instead the students doubled down. Some of the students Skyped with Chilean activists who had been part of that country’s student movement and received tips and encouragement. They assembled committees inside the schools to coordinate cooking and cleaning. They organized their neighborhoods in support, going door to door to explain why they were protesting and to ask for donations of supplies. The students invited community activists into the schools to teach classes and workshops on topics ranging from feminism, to drumming, to students’ rights. Some teachers were invited to return to the schools and teach classes while buildings remained occupied. After a month, with no concessions from the government, students from some schools voted to escalate their tactics; they took chairs and desks out of the schools and used them to set up barricades in the streets. They were violently arrested by the police. After this first wave of actions, the governor of São Paulo agreed not to close any schools for one year.

Results and Ways Forward 

While these examples are inspiring, organized students are not guaranteed to win. In Chile, the student movement secured only some of its demands, in the form of increased funding for public education, but tuition remained at public universities and the country continued to privatize the education system. 

In Brazil, the students in São Paulo state won a one-year moratorium on school closures, but conditions for them worsened. There were two more waves of protests and school occupations in 2016, spreading to over 1,200 schools by October. This time, protests centered on curriculum changes, funding freezes for their schools, and a proposed new policy known as “School Without Parties,” meant to persecute teachers for expressing “Marxist” or “leftist” views in the classroom (sound familiar?). College students joined in and occupied the country’s major universities. 

For many reasons, these occupations were defeated by the government, which used police violence to clamp down on protesters and evict occupiers. Importantly, the students and the labor movement did not unite in a struggle to defeat all austerity measures. They could have organized a general strike until they won. 

But not all was lost. In 2019, the Chilean student movement returned to the scene — this time unleashing the biggest uprising in decades, which ended up forcing the government to agree to convene a constitutional convention. 

These movements, and many, many others, have much to offer today’s student strikers. We encourage today’s students to draw inspiration from these movements both in spirit and in practical plans. 

Perspectives for the United States 

The Oakland student petition states that “we will strike outside the [school district] building and it will last until the demands are met.” Waging a long strike will require the support of parents, educators, and other community members. In every community where students are striking, we encourage those students to organize not only each other, but their communities as well. It is essential for teachers’ unions to support and join these student actions. Work stoppages by teachers would go a long way in uniting teachers, students, and community members and securing safe school conditions. The ongoing protests and school blockades by education workers and their allies in France — bringing together teachers, other school, staff, parents, and students — are a good example.

One way to start conversations among students, labor, and the wider community is to hold solidarity meetings (over video chat, for safety), open to the community, and invite teachers, parents, and students organizing in other areas of the country to attend. 

Today’s students can also learn from the long tradition of using democratic assemblies — large schoolwide or even citywide meetings in which everyone can make proposals, debate, and vote — to build powerful and united movements. Coordination between students in different cities, and even across the country, can be done by delegate elections to assemblies as well. 

Students should also call on organized labor to support their strikes. The 2019 Chilean example is key here: while the student movement kicked off a moment against fare hikes, the labor movement joined with its own demands and called a general strike that nearly toppled the president and forced the government to agree to a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution. This unity between students and labor is decisive for victory.

While we haven’t seen these kinds of explosive moments in the United States recently, we can be inspired by the December call by striking student workers at Columbia University, who wrote an open letter asking workers at other unions in New York City to join their picket line on a “day of action.” Truck drivers, public school teachers, nurses, Amazon warehouse workers, journalists, graduate workers at other city universities, and others answered the call that day and swelled the Columbia students’ numbers for the most well-attended picket of the entire strike. 

Some of these students are beginning to see some small wins. Four days after the NYC students walked out, the Department of Education announced a new policy allowing for a remote-learning option, where students who logged in via online portals to access class resources and assignments would not be marked absent. Of course, this is still a far cry from what students and teachers need for a safe, enriching remote-learning experience. 

These students have an opportunity to join the ranks of mass student movements throughout history, and have an opportunity to learn tactics and lessons from that history to strengthen their fight. After being failed by two presidential administrations, representing both of the bosses’ political parties, and every local government, they took to the streets. They may be about to learn that they and their communities are their only hope for keeping each other safe.

The post What Student Activists Walking Out Over Covid Safety Can Learn From Student Movements Around the World appeared first on Left Voice.

The time between semesters, especially the shorter winter break, is a time of anxiety and uncertainty for adjunct faculty, and this year’s holiday break has been especially catastrophic. Adjunct faculty across the City University of New York (CUNY) system are being laid off  because of a “70/30” mandate instituted by CUNY Central. This plan dictates that 70 percent of classes must be in person, regardless of the desires of students. Just like at the beginning of the pandemic, when thousands of adjuncts were laid off in the summer of 2020, thousands of adjuncts again face the possibility of losing classes they need to pay rent and maintain their eligibility for health insurance. This inflexible and dangerous reopening, despite reassurances from Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez and provosts across CUNY, is a plan fueled by a desire to return to campus no matter the costs. 

Though the leadership of the CUNY faculty union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY), rebuked the 70/30 plan in December, citing gross mismanagement during the entire pandemic, that statement was released well after the registration period for Spring 2022 classes. By that time, the “one-size-fits-all” solution had already been put into place, backed by the ideological messages of now-mayor Eric Adams, whose rhetorical position on Covid since winning the election in November has been that “we are tired of being prisoners to Covid.” This shortsighted and harmful posture has sent disastrous ripples through New York’s public K-12 schools as well, where teacher burnout and student absences are creating a pandemic of learning loss all its own. Leading the fight against these layoffs are PSC rank-and-file members. Adjuncts, staff, students, and full-time faculty are organizing actions in the wake of the union leadership’s failure to do so, putting together a rally at CUNY’s central offices on Monday, January 24 and a #BrunchWithFelo event planned at the chancellor’s residence in Pelham on Saturday, January 29. 

What is crucial to underscore again is that no adjuncts have to lose their jobs. This crisis is a choice — one made by administrators and carried out by a byzantine network of provosts and department chairs who, depending on the school, have differing degrees of flexibility to assign classes as they see fit. This is another in a litany of structural failures inherent to CUNY, and grist for the mill of administrators. Although the argument is that people want to return to campus and that students and faculty want to be back in classrooms, the reality is much different. Right now, enrollment at the CUNY community colleges is at 58 percent, and data from CUNY’s own registration system show that students do not want to return to campuses. For example, at Laguardia Community College in Long Island City, 100 percent of online classes are filled, while only 4 percent of in-person classes are filled. Other community colleges show the same pattern. 

Since the beginning of the pandemic, when CUNY switched from in-person to online learning in about a week, adjuncts have had to fight for their jobs every semester. We’ve been asked to adapt our classes for online learning before we even know if we will be assigned a class, and have worked more hours teaching online between maintaining Blackboard sites (or equivalent online learning technology) and preparing and grading extra material for students to complete in asynchronous sessions. In those first weeks, there was a feeling of solidarity, that we were all pulling together to create spaces for students to learn in a world turned upside down. Not long after the Spring 2020 semester ended, thousands of adjuncts were laid off, and the weak response from PSC-CUNY signaled to management that adjunct jobs were expendable. What we see now is the fallout from that failure: the administrators do not fear action from PSC-CUNY because of a pattern of weak responses from the union leadership. 

This fresh wave of adjunct exploitation is nothing new; the neoliberal adjunctification of universities in general, and at CUNY in particular, has seen a steady stream of chancellors and provosts creating an at-will workforce to teach the same courses as the full-time faculty, but with much lower pay and negligible benefits. According to a report from American Federation of Teachers, “25 percent of adjunct faculty members rely on public assistance, and 40 percent struggle to cover basic household expenses.” At CUNY, beginning in August of this year, adjunct lecturers will be paid only $5,500 per course in accordance with the current contract — a contract the PSC-CUNY has touted as “the biggest gain in equity in the union’s history.” At other universities in New York City, adjuncts make as much as $7,000 per class (Fordham) ad $9,000 (Barnard) per course.

It is well documented that adjuncts are underpaid, but what is rarely discussed is how we are overworked. More importantly, our passion for teaching and learning is used as a cudgel to force adjuncts to work more and strive to please department chairs. Adjuncts, an already atomized workforce by the very nature of the job, are pitted against each other, vying for precious courses that have become ever more rare due to course minimums that are dictated not by educators, but by administrators. 

I have been an adjunct in the CUNY system for five-and-a-half years. During mhe majority of that time, I worked at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, where just last week a large number of adjuncts in the English department were unceremoniously laid off when the adjunct coordinator informed everyone,by email, that only adjuncts on three-year contracts would be given classes. Again, this didn’t have to happen, but it did — and it is just one more tragic event in a long history of adjunct exploitation before and during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

I began as an adjunct because I love teaching, and I hoped it would be a path toward full-time employment in the college system where I did my undergrad work. But five years in, the only path forward to pay equity and the ultimate dismantling of the adjunct system is a total restructuring of the current model through the organization of rank-and-file university workers outside the service union model, fighting against the calcified bureaucracy inherent to such a union and against these layoffs and any future cuts to CUNY.

The post CUNY’s Reopening Plan is a Nightmare for Adjuncts and Students appeared first on Left Voice.

On December 14, the Associated Press released the results of its investigation into “every potential case of voter fraud” in the six “battleground” states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) whose 2020 election results the Trump campaign disputed. The review “found fewer than 475 — a number that would have made no difference in the 2020 presidential election.”

These votes, the AP states, “could not throw the outcome into question even if all those votes were for Biden, which they were not, and even if those ballots were actually counted, which in most cases they were not.” Further, the review “showed no collusion intended to rig the voting. Virtually every case was based on an individual acting alone to cast additional ballots.”

It doesn’t matter, though. Actual, consequential “fraud” has nothing to do with the rationale behind the attacks on voting rights that are sweeping the United States. It’s the illusion of fraud that is being constructed, promulgated, and used to justify the most concentrated attempt to liquidate U.S. bourgeois democratic norms in more than 150 years.

Voting Rights Won through Struggle, Not Congress

We are witnessing at this moment a wholesale assault on voting rights in the United States, deeper and wider than at any time in the country’s history since the concerted destruction of radical Reconstruction in the period after the Civil War — which established decades of Jim Crow segregation and oppression. Don’t be fooled by the mainstream media, which tells you this assault is the work of one party. While it may be the Republicans who are leading the charge in nearly every case, the Democrats have done nothing to stop them. That’s because democratic rights such as voting are never secure in a bourgeois democracy.

You might be interested in: “The True Nature of the U.S. Regime”

In his “Theses on Bourgeois Democracy and Proletarian Dictatorship” (1919), Vladimir Lenin wrote that “even the most democratic bourgeois republic is nothing but the instrument by which the bourgeoisie oppress the working class, by which a handful of capitalists keeps the working masses under.” He went on to cite “Marx himself, who placed the highest value on the historical significance of the [Paris] Commune, who in his analysis of it demonstrated the exploiting character of bourgeois democracy and bourgeois parliamentarianism, under which the oppressed class is given the right, once in several years, to decide which deputy of the possessing classes shall represent and betray the people in Parliament.”

U.S. bourgeois democracy is profoundly undemocratic. Well before the current assault on voting rights, the rulers established all sorts of restrictions, exceptions, exclusions, and obstacles to ensure that when the oppressed do vote, their choices are largely limited to candidates who represent bosses and who aim to strengthen the institutions of bourgeois rule. American democracy does not even come close to the mathematical formula that underpins the bourgeois democratic concept of “majority rule.” Consider the Electoral College and U.S. Senate representation, both of which give inordinate amounts of control to tiny segments of the overall population. They squeeze out the vast majority of working-class people and the specially oppressed, who mostly live in the states with the greatest numbers of inhabitants. Simply put, “the U.S. pseudo-democracy doesn’t even rise to the level of many other capitalist democracies when it comes to rights.”

You might be interested in: “It’s Time to Abolish the Racist, Voter-Suppressing Electoral College”

Still, voting rights matter, because they matter to the working class and oppressed, which won them through struggle. Voting rights will be central to the proletarian democracy for which revolutionaries fight. As Leon Trotsky wrote in one of his last letters, workers “wish to defend and improve democracy,” and the Trotskyists “wish to go further.” Going further does not mean that we do not fight to expand democracy for workers and the oppressed as much as possible under the capitalist system.

Women and Black people, in particular, struggled for the right to vote in this country. Upon the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1789, states exercised their power to set voting requirements. Generally, they limited this right to property-owning or tax-paying white males, who comprised a mere six percent of the population. It wasn’t until 1870 — five years after the Civil War ended — that the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting states from denying a citizen’s right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous servitude.” Another 50 years passed before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. Fifty-one years later, the Twenty-sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution lowered the voting age from 21 to 18.

Freed slaves and their supporters demanded the Fifteenth Amendment. Women waged a suffragist movement for 42 years before winning the right to vote. The movement against the Vietnam War was key to the voting age being lowered; tens of thousands of young draftees lost their lives, and those who fought and survived demanded a say in setting policy through the ballot box, raising the slogan “old enough to fight, old enough to vote.”

In between all of that, a deadly struggle was waged to reverse the voter suppression that was part and parcel of the Jim Crow system across the U.S. South. Having lost the Civil War and thus the effort to keep Black people enslaved, Southern racists succeeded in overturning the Reconstruction that had granted voting rights to emancipated people — and that led to the election of many Black representatives in Southern state legislatures and even the U.S. Congress. Since slavery couldn’t be reestablished, Southern racists chose to institute a combination of structural segregation and denial of rights, along with a reign of terror by the Ku Klux Klan. For decades, the Civil Rights movement fought to eliminate the poll taxes, literacy tests, and outright violence that kept Black people from voting, and blood was spilled. Eventually, this mass movement forced the federal government to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (specifically aimed at enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment), which until a few years ago made it next to impossible for states to establish barriers to voting.

The 1965 law put entire states — Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Virginia — and nearly all of North Carolina under federal review and gave the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division broad powers to intervene everywhere else — which it did routinely in other states of the old Confederacy, notably Florida and Texas, as well as in individual counties and municipalities throughout the country. But in 2013, ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, the U.S. Supreme Court rendered the Voting Rights Act largely toothless, eliminating the federal “preclearance” of jurisdictions’ new voting rules — often aimed at imposing voter discrimination in the form of redistricting, changing and eliminating poll locations and hours, and so on. The ruling shows precisely why we cannot rely on the institutions of the bourgeois state to protect our rights. The argument of the Supreme Court boiled down, essentially, to the ridiculous claim that racism no longer exists in the United States.

While federal review secured some voting rights for several decades, and substantial research shows that preclearance was directly responsible for increases in Black people voting and minority representation in federal and state legislatures, it is an inescapable fact that the government — which represents the rulers — offers no real, sustainable protection for working class and oppressed people when it comes to any of our rights. To this must be added the Democratic Party’s complete failure to protect the rights of the people it claims to represent in government. Just look at what has happened since the Shelby ruling.

A Wholesale Assault on Voting Rights

It seemed like only minutes after that ruling in Shelby that southern states in particular began to implement new voter restrictions, freed from the burden of federal preclearance. Alabama almost immediately redistricted to pack Black voters into fewer state legislative districts as a way to limit their votes. North Carolina imposed voter ID, eliminated same-day registration during early voting, and so on; a federal Court of Appeals found the state targeted Black voters “with almost surgical precision.” The Republican majority in North Dakota’s state legislature passed an ID law that kept many Native Americans from voting.

By 2018, though, nearly 1,000 U.S. polling places had been closed by racist election officials, mostly in predominantly Black voting districts. College-age voters have had their rights stripped away with rules making it impossible to vote in their “adopted” locations — where they go to school — rather than back “home.” Both groups of voters tend to cast ballots overwhelmingly for Democratic Party candidates, and nearly every new voting restriction has been enacted and implemented by Republicans. 

Meanwhile, Democrats — the other party of the ruling class — have mostly sat idly by without taking any meaningful steps to protect voting rights while continuing to assume they can always count on these votes, no matter what. Meanwhile, in some heavily Democratic states such as New York, the party has erected registration and voting obstacles expressly aimed at thwarting progressive challenges to candidates of the party establishment.

Unlike most of the rest of the world, U.S. elections take place on a working weekday, thus already making it difficult for workers to vote. Few working people have time to wait for hours to vote, or can afford to take time off work to exercise a basic right. Moving voting locations far away makes things worse.

The 2016 presidential election was notable for its oppressively long lines at polling stations, and had nothing to do with the pandemic, as in 2020. To add insult to the injury of long waits, Florida has criminalized sharing water and food with people waiting in line at polls. The voter ID laws are an even sharper blow, often requiring forms of identification that many working-class and especially the poorest voters find difficult to obtain. Getting them may mean a full day off work. States that require driver’s licenses to vote are directly discriminating against the masses of people who rely on public transportation and don’t have this form of ID. And just to prove which voters are in the crosshairs, Georgia has closed many offices of its Department of Motor Vehicles located in areas that are predominantly Black, rural, and poor. Meanwhile, Texas and Georgia, for example, have cut back early voting hours on Sundays, a day when Black voters often bring “souls to the polls” after church.

In 2021, all of this expanded tremendously — largely a Republican response to Donald Trump’s inability to overturn the presidential election results from the year before. According to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, “at least 19 states passed 34 laws restricting access to voting” between January 1 and December 7 of last year. Beyond that, “more than 440 bills with provisions that restrict voting access have been introduced in 49 states in the 2021 legislative sessions.” The Center has been tracking voting legislation since 2011, and reports that these “extraordinary” numbers mean that state legislatures “enacted far more restrictive voting laws in 2021 than in any year since.”

A Qualitative Shift in the Scope of the Assault

During the 2016 presidential election, Trump — who has been diagnosed by a large group of psychologists as a malignant narcissist — went to great lengths to tell voters that his loss would be the result of a “rigged election.” When he won — which was a surprise even to the Trump campaign — his supporters began a concerted effort to undermine the norms by which U.S. bourgeois democracy has functioned in the post-Voting Rights Act era that goes well beyond the gutting of the act by the Supreme Court. Then, facing polls that indicated he would lose his 2020 reelection bid, Trump made the same claims about a rigged election during that campaign.

Behind these claims, there has been a qualitative shift in voter suppression efforts, from enacting restrictive rules to changing the way votes are counted, and by whom. The focus is now at least as much on keeping people from voting as it is, as the Brennan Center writes, to “interfere with election processes or even reject election results entirely.”

After allowing “partisan actors” rather than nominally nonpartisan election administrators to review 2020 outcomes in some states (like the infamous Arizona “audit”), there are efforts underway to have Republican elected officials decide whether votes are “legitimate.” If the party’s candidates fail to get the most votes, they could declare elections void — thus turning Trump’s false claim about “rigged” elections into a reality. It is how one of the bosses’ parties has decided to address the U.S. demographics that make its electoral future seem so bleak. It is taking the effort to subvert the Electoral College vote count on January 6, 2021, with a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol, to a new level. Mark Brewer, an election lawyer and former chair of the Michigan Democratic Party, put it this way: “They’re laying the groundwork for a slow-motion insurrection.”

As the Associated Press writes, Republicans are “taking hold of the once-overlooked machinery of elections,” running candidates who deny Trump’s 2020 loss “for offices that could have a key role in the election of the next president in 2024.” The AP describes how Michigan Republicans are “restocking members of obscure local boards that could block approval of an election, and GOP-controlled legislatures in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania “are backing open-ended ‘reviews’ of the 2020 election,” modeled on the Arizona “audit,” that are “poised to fuel disinformation and anger about the 2020 results for years to come.”

The latest move is to establish special police forces to oversee elections, something proposed by Florida governor Ron DeSantis and being discussed in other states. In Florida, the force would “investigate, detect, apprehend, and arrest anyone for an alleged violation” of election laws, acting on tips from “government officials or any other person.” The old name for an armed body of men empowered to keep people from voting: the Ku Klux Klan.

We Don’t Support Democrats, So Why Should We Care?

While the description of how this assault is playing out may seem to make taking sides a matter of choosing between Republicans and Democrats, that couldn’t be further from the truth. The sides are actually between the working masses and the most oppressed on one side, and the powers of capital on the other.

As Trotsky wrote in 1940, “It is the duty of revolutionists to defend every conquest of the working class even though it may be distorted by the pressure of hostile forces.” The right to vote is a conquest of the oppressed and marginalized. It didn’t exist before feudal property relations were overturned by ascendant capitalism, and it wasn’t granted to the masses without the fights mentioned earlier. Even if in a bourgeois democracy who we get to vote for is limited, the right to vote that we have won must be defended and preserved. It is part of the much broader democracy that we seek as we fight to replace the capitalist system of exploitation with socialism.

The assault is aimed at Black people, Latinos, and Indigenous people — most of whom vote for Democrats. It is also aimed at reducing turnout among working-class whites and young people who oppose the rightward shift epitomized in the Trumpist agenda, but that is not limited to the Republicans. When we defend the right to vote, we are defending a democratic right of the majority of people, not supporting who they ultimately choose to vote for. When we defend the right to vote, we are defending the limited democratic spaces we have wrested from the bosses under capitalism, in which we do all of our other political work. Those spaces include our own electoral campaigns, waged without illusions about the ballot as the path to replacing the capitalist system and its exploitation and oppression, but entered into as a means to engage with working-class voters and put forward a political perspective that points to fighting for our rights and for socialism independently from the ruling class and the political parties that serve their interests.

Without the voting rights working people around the world have won through struggle — that is, not as some sort of “gift” from the bourgeois state — revolutionaries such as Left Voice’s co-thinkers in Argentina would not have been able to run a campaign that won 1.3 million votes and four seats in that country’s Congress — helping advance the revolutionary consciousness of the working class in the process, without sowing any illusions that the electoral path is the way to overthrow the capitalist system.

One thing this assault in the United States has revealed is just where the Democratic Party really stands. It has completely failed to pass any legislation at the federal level to protect voting rights, allowing two insufficient pieces of legislation to languish throughout 2021 while Biden and his administration played footsie with two Democratic U.S. senators who have made clear all along that they have no interest in protecting voting rights: Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Meanwhile, the misleaders of the Left who embraced Biden as the lesser of two evils have continued playing their role as the facilitators of channeling movements for social change into the Democratic Party graveyard, this time expanding that to include movements that could have been built to defend an existing right. It’s the same with voting rights as it has been with abortion rights. Where are the protests?

If the ruling class, or even a section of the ruling class, can so easily take away the right to vote, what will stop it from a full frontal assault on all sorts of other democratic rights working people have won through struggle?

We ought to be in the streets fighting to keep our voting rights. Yes, we know that the United States is not a true democracy, and it is certainly not the democracy revolutionary socialists aspire to build. We are committed to upending and replacing this system based on oppression and exploitation that metes out “rights” unequally depending on class and race and gender and sexual orientation. But the Left — the entire Left — has a responsibility that we are failing to meet. 
We can fight to defend voting rights without endorsing Democrats. We need the political space that democratic rights afford to continue to make the principled argument that it is only by self-organizing independently of the parties of the bosses that we can defend what little we enjoy under bourgeois democracy and extend our rights to a new society free of exploitation.

The post The Right to Vote Is a Conquest of the Working Class. That’s Why We Defend It appeared first on Left Voice.

On April 25, 2004, upwards of a million people protested the Bush administration’s attacks on reproductive rights in a march on Washington. A mile-long crowd of protestors in purple shirts filled the space between Capitol Hill and the Washington Monument to listen to Democratic politicians, celebrities, abortion movement leaders, and other high-profile figures speak in defense of legalized abortions. At the time, the March for Women’s Rights was the largest demonstration for reproductive rights in the history of the United States. While it was far from radical — both Hillary Clinton and Gloria Steinem spoke, and the name itself ignores the fact that trans men and nonbinary folks also get abortions — the march at least showed the importance and power of a mass demonstration. 

Eighteen years later, and the current abortion rights movement seems to have forgotten that lesson. The organizations that planned the 2004 march — the Feminist Majority Foundation, NARAL Pro-Choice America, the American Civil Liberties Union, Black Women’s Health Imperative, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, the National Association for Women, and Planned Parenthood — need to once again put all their money and organizational resources together in order to mobilize their bases in support of reproductive rights. We need another mass march for abortion rights now. But we need more than a one-off march if we are really going to win and defend the right to an abortion and other reproductive rights. A mass march is just the starting point of what should be a mass movement that brings together feminist groups, healthcare worker unions, and leftists to defend Roe v. Wade and win free abortion for all on demand. 

Reproductive Rights: Then and Now

Let’s be clear: George W. Bush carried out major rollbacks on reproductive freedom. On his very first day in office, he reinstated the Global Gag Rule, which bars funding to international family planning organizations that provide, or even talk about abortion. He signed the so-called Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act in 2003, which banned “dilation and extraction” abortions, and the horribly named 2004 Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which classifies embryos and fetuses as victims if an act of violence is committed against a pregnant person. 

Feminist Majority and the six other organizers of the march correctly responded to the Republican president’s actions by working for almost a year to mobilize their bases to march on Washington D.C. They were hoping the sheer number of demonstrators would “send a wake-up call” to people across the country that abortion rights were under attack. It was indeed a show of force. But to really beat back the abortion restrictions, it needed to kick off a mass movement for abortion rights, not just a one-time march that was meant to act as a push to the polls in the year of a presidential election. 

In fact, Cinton herself said the following during the 2004 march:

We didn’t have to march for 12 long years because we had a government that respected the rights of women.  The only way we’re going to be able to avoid having to march again and again and again is to elect John Kerry president.

It’s no coincidence that this march took place during the year of a presidential election and during the Bush administration. It was a way for them to mobilize their base to vote for John Kerry in the upcoming election.

This strategy didn’t work. Much more is needed to effectively block right wing attacks on abortion rights. 

Since 2004, many states under Repubican control have enacted restrictions on abortions. Examples include mandatory waiting periods and targeted restrictions on abortion providers (TRAP) laws, that place medicaly unnecessary restrictions on abortion access. According to the Guttmacher Institute, as of December 2021, 33 states have mandatory counseling, 26 have mandatory waiting periods, and 21 states require at least one parent to consent to minors receiving abortion services. This year on September 1, Texas Senate Bill 8 went into effect, banning abortions after six weeks by leveling a bounty on anyone who gives, receives, or even drives someone to an abortion in the state of Texas. These laws have all but taken away the right to an abortion around the country. On December 1, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, in which the conservative majority suggested they would uphold Mississippi’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks.

There is a real chance that Roe v. Wade will be overtturned in 2022, moreso than in 2004 — we are more poised to see a de-facto or legal overturn of Roe v. Wade, and therefore, the right to an abortion around the country. Yet the seven pro-abortion organizations who planned the 2004 march don’t seem to think that the the situation is dire enough to again mobilize their bases and take to the streets in a mass demonstration. While there have been several smaller rallies and marches organized in response to the court’s actions — most notably, the October “Bans Off Our Bodies” National Day of Action that Planned Parenthood and the ACLU helped organize — these events were much smaller than the 2004 March for Women’s Lives and much smaller than the 2017 Women’s March. Together, the 600 demonstrations held around the country on October 2 might have pulled in numbers similar to the 2004 march, but none individually amassed more than several thousand attendees. And the messaging in 2021 was anarchronistic, focused on an anti-Trump message as if the Democrats don’t control the Congress and the Executive branch. And the message was entirely devoid of urgency. The October 2 protests did not demonstrate the overwhelming support for legalized abortions in America—59% of adults support legal abortion now. 

Instead of marching, the nonprofits that organized the 2004 march have attempted to mobilize their bases around donating to abortion funds and the organizations themselves. Click on the Reproductive Freedom tab on the ACLU website and a huge “Fight Unconstitutional Abortion Bans” banner pops up with a link to donate to the ACLU. The message on the NARAL Pro-Choice landing page — and the Take Action page — reads, “Our reproductive freedom is on the line. We’re giving this fight everything we’ve got. But we need your help. Can you vote for NARAL to win a grant from CREDO Mobile?”

Interspersed with the constant calls for donations are calls for people to “vote” or to contact their senator and pass the Women’s Health Protection Act — legislation meant to protect the right to an abortion. The ACLU, NARAL, and the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health have all focused on calling on Senators to pass this bill. The Take Action page on the ACLU website leads to an email template: “Send a message to your senators urging them to pass WHPA.” These organizations cannot possibly believe this is a real way to fight for abortion rights. Yet they amass millions in donations by people who place their hopes in these organizations to fight for them. 

This is, of course, when they’re trying to mobilize their bases at all. The overwhelming response to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization by the seven organizations who once planned the largest pro-abortion march in the country has been to post tweets and issue press releases condemning the Supreme Court’s actions. These press releases are couched in vague language that does not adequately outline what steps these organizations are going to take in response to the anti-abortion legislation. “The Supreme Court must uphold the rule of law, affirm the precedent established by Roe, and protect our Constitutional right to abortion care,” NOW wrote in response to Dobbs. “Anyone – healthcare providers, friends, well-meaning strangers – seeking to help women do what is best for their health… beware. There’s a $10,000 bounty on your kindness,” Black Women’s Health Imperative wrote in response to Texas’s SB-8. (As of this writing, BWHI has not addressed Dobbs on their website or social media accounts.) 

The seven organizations that organized the 2004 march are essentially offering three ways to counter the fight on abortion rights: donate, call your senator, or do nothing and ask the Supreme Court nicely not to take away abortion rights. In an interview on the podcast “At Liberty,” Jennifer Dalven, Director of the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, was asked if there was a future for pro-choice activism outside of the courts. Dalven said: “We will have to turn to the political strategies. We will have to turn to electing representatives that actually represent us.” It’s clear: they are funneling people’s anger at the current political climate toward electoral politics — even though the Democrats already control both houses of congress and the presidency and Nancy Pelosi herself said Democrats don’t have to be pro-choice. Last year, the Democrats did nothing to stop the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, allowing there to be a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court.  Early in Obama’s term the Democrats had a supermajority in Congress, and have not passed any abortion legislation, neither have they passed any legislation with their current majority in Congress.

The Democrats are the graveyard of social movements and this is just one more example of how this works. As one sign from the 2017 Women’s March states, “If Hillary was President We’d Be at Brunch.” But the problem isn’t the attitude of individual liberals; it’s that the organizations that have the power to mobilize millions of people are choosing not to do so. 

The Way Forward is to Build a Mass Movement 

The future for pro-abortion activism isn’t in the Democratic Party or electoral politics. The future of the movement is in the streets. It’s in the organization of a mass march to kick off a mass movement capable of fighting not only for abortion and reproductrive rights, but for free healthcare, childcare, and parental leave as well. The ACLU, Planned Parenthood, Black Women’s Health Imperative, National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, Feminist Majority, NARAL Pro-Choice, and NOW thought a mass march was the correct response to Bush’s abortion policies. Why is now any different? Is the onslaught of anti-abortion legislation not enough? Is the bounty on anyone who helps another person get an abortion in Texas not enough? Is the possible overturning of Roe v. Wade not enough?

These seven organizations again need to mobilize their bases to fight for reproductive freedom. The activists and supporters of these organizations need to call on these organizations directly to mobilize in the streets. We also need them to be joined by healthcare worker unions and other unions who understand that abortion is healthcare and healthcare is a right. We need another mass protest that showcases the power of the working class and the popularity of the struggle for abortion rights. 

But we cannot leave the future of the movement in the hands of these non-profits that have already shown that they are more concerned with electing Democrats than supporting abortion rights. We need activists to organize open meetings to discuss and vote on next steps to really defend abortion rights. This is the strategy that worked for the abortion rights movements in Argentina and Ireland.  We need to bring together healthcare workers, the Black Lives Matter movement, and labor unions — all have a role to play. The right to free, legal, accessible abortion on demand for all will not be won in the courts or at the ballot box. It will be won in the streets. 

The post Mass Action Will Protect and Expand Our Abortion Rights, Not Politicians and PACs appeared first on Left Voice.

A volcanic eruption in the Tonga Sea, across the Pacific Ocean, caused an oil spill in Peru on Saturday, January 15. The spill, at the maritime terminal of the La Pampilla refinery owned by the multinational Repsol, has been severely affecting the ecosystem of the coastal area near the district of Ventanilla. Repsol’s lack of foresight contributed to the effects, and the central government in Peru has been very slow to act.

At first, Repsol minimized the spill, reporting that it was equivalent to a laughable 0.16 barrels of oil — a barrel holds 160 liters — and affected a mere 2.5 square meters. The real impact, though, can be seen in the photos from the media and complaints from those who live in the surrounding area: the quantity spilled is much higher than Repsol’s initial claim.

The oil spill was produced when the tsunami-like waves generated by the volcanic eruption in the Tonga Sea caused the vessel Mare Dorium — an Italian tanker onto which oil was being loaded — to spill its contents into the water. This happened as activities along the Peruvian coast proceeded as normal after the natural disaster across the ocean; had the Peruvian Navy released adequate information, the tanker might not have capsized as a consequence of the strong waves. Further, the two people who lost their lives on the beaches of Lambayeque might still be alive today.

It took four days from the tanker capsizing before Rubén Ramirez, Peru’s Minister of the Environment reported — after meeting with company representatives — that an estimated 6,000 barrels of crude oil had spilled into the sea off Callao, directly affecting the natural ecosystems of the National Reserve System of Islands, Islotes and Puntas Guaneras, Islotes de Pescadores, and the Ancón Reserved Zone and surrounding areas.

This figure has been confirmed by the National Service of Natural Areas Protected by the State (SERNANP), which reported that the oil spilled has had a severe impact on the area’s ecosystem and that dead birds and other contaminated species have been discovered.

According to the Agency for Environmental Assessment and Enforcement (OEFA), “Repsol has two days to identify areas affected by the displacement of oil and 10 days to clean up the soil. It also has five days to contain and recover the oil that floats in the sea.”

The General Directorate of the Peruvian Coast Guard (DICAPI) stated that “the incident was quickly attended to by the company and the corresponding authorities,” which is clearly far from the truth. The facts, corroborated by newspaper reports, reveal that the company does not have a policy of fast and effective action to carry out the work of cleaning and recovery of the oil found in the sea.

The work undertaken by the municipality of Ventanilla, north of the capital Lima, is also insufficient. Mayor Pedro Espadaro’s complicit silence in not pointing out Repsol’s responsibility for not adequately reporting the amount of oil spilled leaves much to be desired. It is made worse given that he comes from the ranks of Fujimorism and, therefore, has great affinity with companies engaged in extraction and commercialization of energy resources.

The population of the affected area, along with fishermen, have been organizing protests demanding that Repsol be sanctioned and that it assume full responsibility for cleaning up the beaches. Protesters are also demanding immediate attention for the birds that survived the oil spill, and that fishermen be compensated for the damages that not only affect their basic economic activities, but also their health and that of their families.

First published in Spanish on January 19 in La Izquierda Diario.

Translation by Scott Cooper

The post Multinational in Peru Makes the Environmental Disaster Caused by Oil Spill Even Worse appeared first on Left Voice.

If words were actions and promises were deeds, Joe Biden would perhaps be one of the most pro-union presidents to ever sit in the Oval Office. According to the Washington Post, Biden made almost as many pro-union statements in his first 99 days in office as Barack Obama did in his entire first term, and far more than Presidents Bush or Trump. Since taking office, he has spoken out in favor of the unionization efforts at Amazon and has criticized the use of scabs to break the Kellogg’s strike. On the campaign trail, he rallied with striking Stop and Shop workers in Massachusetts and put forward a wide range of legislative reforms supposedly designed to improve the position and increase the power of labor and the lives of working people. Along with Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, Biden has promised to “check the abuses of corporate power over unions,” to “encourage and incentivize union organizing,” to “increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour,” and to “increase workplace safety and health,” among a number of other proposals and policies. But words are, as they say, cheap. Despite all the rhetoric, and there has been a lot, the President has so far failed to deliver on practically any of these promises, and looking ahead, it seems very unlikely that he ever will. Worse, in stereotypical Biden fashion, the president has already back-tracked, glad-handed, back-patted, and otherwise compromised his way out of almost every chance he has had to actually improve the lives of working people. 

That Biden has failed to deliver on this front is no big mystery to anyone who has paid any attention to the history of U.S. labor politics. Like so many Democrats before him, Biden needed labor to win, but in a period of radical unrest and instability — and in the midst of a battle over how and when to return to work — any attempts to rebuild the legitimacy of the U.S. state and reopen the economy would have to involve the further co-optation of labor. And this is exactly what Biden did. Using the bureaucratic leaderships of the nation’s biggest unions, including the AFL-CIO and the American Federation of Teachers, Biden was able to redirect labor’s anger away from workplace struggles and into get out the vote efforts designed not only to win the election, but to further bind union leaders and activists to the party. This is one of the reasons why, until recently, we have seen so little criticism of Biden from labor, despite the total lack of movement on issues most important to unions and working people. And this is why unions and their members must break with the Democrats if they ever wish to rebuild a fighting labor movement. 

A Litany of Failures 

Biden came to office with a laundry list of supposedly pro-labor legislation, almost all of which has either been defeated, compromised, or remains unrealized. Though he engaged in some high level firings of Trump labor appointees shortly after taking office, and though he has managed to pass some legislation that has received applause from the labor bureaucracy, such as the massively watered-down infrastructure bill, the general consensus, even among the bourgeois press, is that Biden has largely failed to deliver for labor and working people. And this failure is by design. While it’s tempting to blame the Republicans, or Joe Manchin, or Kyrsten Sinema for Biden’s failures, the fact is, his promises to labor, like other Democratic presidents before him, were never meant to be realized, but are part of a generational co-optation of the union movement by the apparatuses of the state that has left working people with practically no independent institutions to represent their interests. 

Want to discuss Biden’s first year?  Join our online event to discuss these ideas and more on Saturday, January 22, at 3pm. 

At the center of Biden’s labor policy is the long-stalled, and likely now dead, Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act). Hailed by labor bureaucrats and reformists alike, The PRO Act is effectively a collection of revisions to the National Labor Relations Act, and if passed, the legislation would place unions even further under the control and management of the U.S. state, a problem regularly overlooked by its proponents on the Left. However, it does have some provisions that would make unionization efforts easier. In particular, the PRO Act would help to eliminate independent contractor status of employees at companies like Uber and Door Dash; it would limit the ability of employers to force workers to attend anti-union meetings; and it would make first contracts somewhat easier to negotiate. Democrats sat on the bill for all of 2019, and it wasn’t until after Biden’s election that it narrowly passed the House. The bill, which has been residing in limbo ever since, has yet to be brought before the Senate, where it would need to get 60 votes to pass. Indeed, like its more robust forerunner, the Employee Free Choice Act, touted first by Barack Obama, and then Hillary Clinton, the PRO Act may never pass. 

Meanwhile, the long-awaited and hotly-debated infrastructure bill — which was supposed to include significant gains for labor in the form of high paying union jobs to build bridges, tunnels, and green energy — was reduced by more than half of its original proposed budget before being passed. The stripped down bill, originally intended to include more than two trillion dollars in investment, now includes a little more than $500 billion in new spending spread out over 10 years. This is less than seven percent of the U.S. Defense Budget request for 2022 alone. Despite the many compromises needed to get the bill through Congress, it still provides very little for green infrastructure, while giving billions in subsidies to big businesses. Worst of all, it includes provisions for increased privatization of U.S. infrastructure in the form of “asset recycling,” which allows corporations to privatize public assets such as bridges and toll roads, a practice that is most certainly not in the interests of working people.

Like the Infrastructure BIll, the Build Back Better Bill, also likely dead in the Senate, was intended to be a boon for unions. Not only was it supposed to include job-creating social infrastructure, increased taxes on the rich, paid family leave for private employees, and more robust penalties for labor violations; Democrats also promised to include many of the provisions originally outlined in the PRO Act. Few of these provisions, however, even made it through the House version, which is unlikely to ever reach the Senate, and which will certainly be even more reduced if it does. Despite this, labor has refrained from offering even mild criticism of the President’s handling of the failed negotiations over the bill. 

 This same almost total disregard for workers was shown by Biden’s betrayal on the minimum wage — an issue that labor unions have long agitated around. The popular demand, already a decade old, and far less than a living wage in most U.S. cities, was a pillar of his campaign; and yet just one month after his inauguration, in a conference call with state governors, Biden made it clear that including increases to the minimum wage in his first (and so far, only) coronavirus relief package was not going to happen. Since then, he has taken executive action to increase the minimum wage for federal contractors but done nothing to push for a nationwide increase to $15 or more. Indeed, the federal minimum wage remains just $7.25 an hour and has not been increased since 2009. And now, with skyrocketing levels of inflation, the real buying power of the minimum wage is worth less than ever.

A Pact with the Devil 

Even though Biden betrayed or failed in every one of his promises to labor, there is one area in which he succeeded. The promises on the minimum wage, on historic labor legislation, and so on did exactly what they were supposed to do: co-opt the labor movement’s energy for the Democratic Party’s own purposes.  

During Trump’s term, unions seemed poised for a new moment of struggle. In 2018, rank and file teachers in West Virginia set off a multi-state strike wave. In that state, teachers won important concessions, beating back attacks on their unions and working conditions. Driven by these events, 2018 saw a modest but important rise in the number of large strikes: 20, up from 7 the previous year; that number was 25 by 2019. 

In 2020, the number of large strikes collapsed amid the pandemic. That didn’t mean, though, that unions were sitting on their hands. Teachers in particular fought to delay school openings as the pandemic raged. In Philadelphia and elsewhere, they pushed back those openings — buying time as the number of daily deaths and infections were falling — and won other concessions like better ventilation. Some of that energy carried over into Biden’s first year in the striking of miners and factory workers of “Striketober.”   

Perhaps even more alarming for the ruling class, some unions began to link up with the anti-police uprising that shook the country in summer 2020. Some rank and file bus drivers refused to transport police to repress protesters; one transportation union’s leaders declared their solidarity with those actions; the ILWU held a BLM solidarity strike up and down the West Coast. In April of the following year, rank and filers and union officials in Minneapolis kicked the National Guard out of their union hall.  These kinds of actions were the exception, though, not the norm. Still, they were a glimpse of the kind of power that could come from unions linking up with the massive anti-racist protests. 

The union leadership, however, was fighting to contain this energy and divert it into supporting the Democrats. In other words: thanks in key part to labor’s bureaucrats, Biden has been able to accomplish what Trump could not: opening the economy at the cost of working people’s lives and health. 

For example, as the pandemic raged in 2020 — during Trump’s presidency — the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, gave some support for teachers refusing to go back into the classroom. She even floated the idea that teachers had a right to “safety strikes.” Yet the leaders of the AFT refused to actually build up and coordinate those kinds of actions on the national level. When Biden came into office, Weingarten said in no uncertain terms that schools should remain open — regardless of what was happening with COVID-19. More than this, even though some unions were supporting the massive struggle against the racist police, most union heads were refusing to offer anything more than platitudes in support of Black lives. Instead, union leaders were organizing another massive “get out the vote” campaign for Biden — one of the architects of mass incarceration and a vocal supporter of the police.  

In other words, union heads were short-circuiting their own members’ struggle for safety in the pandemic, and the fight against racism, with promises of a pro-union president — only for those promises to be, once again, betrayed.  

For a Fighting Labor Movement

The tasks ahead for our unions under Biden are enormous. Not only are union numbers low. The ecosystem is convulsing with violent climate change. Abortion rights are on the chopping block. Cops continue to murder Black people in the street with little accountability.  

Meeting these challenges means taking up the workers’ struggle in a far more militant direction: for major increases in wages; for a major decrease in hours to expand employment; for pegging pay to inflation; for PPE in all workplaces; and for the end to every law that restricts the right to unionize, strike, and stop scabs. And it means uniting these economic struggles with those  against racism; for abortion rights; against imperialism. 

Building a labor movement that can do these things means changing our unions into fighting organizations. First and foremost, that means severing our unions’ ties to the Democratic Party. 

Those ties have radically weakened labor. Our union leaders almost all aim to keep us scrambling to elect the next Democrat — and working inside the regressive labor laws of this country. And that means mostly foregoing large strikes, as we’ve seen since the 1980s. It also means foregoing a militant fight to keep out scabs when we do strike, and refusing solidarity strikes when other workplaces walk out — all to comply with a legal system designed to rob workers of their power. It’s left unions on the sidelines waiting for politicians to do something, instead of fighting for workers’ rights, for aboriton, and against racist cops. 

To cut ties with the Democrats and win real gains for our class will take nothing less than mass  rank and file organizing, from the bottom up, to build the kind of force willing to buck union leadership in going on strike, building solidarity strikes, and fighting scabs. To do this, we’ll need self-organization, rather than relying on the ready-made channels of organizing set up by our pro-Democrat union leaders.  In other words, building up our rank and file power will mean not just rank and file caucuses, but assemblies for workers in our union to coordinate with workers in other unions from below. Those kinds of rank-and-file organs will be key for another major task, too: coordinating the huge majority of low-wage workers who are not unionized, and who our union leaders have allowed to stay that way for far too long.

We need these kinds of spaces for self-organization to build up a united front of the working class. That is, we need places to connect to the movement for Black Lives, for Palestine, and for abortion rights: all the struggles that our labor leaders say they care about but do so little to support — independently of the parties of capitalism.

The post One Year Later: Biden Is Still No Friend of Labor appeared first on Left Voice.

During the Trump presidency, slogans like “Facts Matter” and “#BelieveTheScience” abounded. The idea was that, unlike the outright denial espoused by Republicans, Democrats recognize basic scientific truths about the world, such as the existence of climate change and the dangers of Covid-19. Because they “take science seriously,” it’s implied, Democrats will propose and enact more scientifically-informed policies. It’s been a year since Joe Biden took office on the promise that his respect for science would manifest in more rational policy solutions. So, now is a good time to ask: how’s that going?  

“Follow the science” was an effective campaign slogan during the Trump years, but it was only ever a slogan. On September 20, 2020, Joe Biden tweeted, “Unlike Trump, I’ll listen to the experts and heed their advice — especially when it comes to matters of health and safety.” Now, apparently, “there is no federal solution,” and “nobody could have predicted” the Omicron variant. Biden “wish[es he] had thought about ordering” millions of tests in advance of the holiday. This is a pack of lies. Public health experts presented Biden with a plan for handling the holiday surge by ramping up production and distribution of tests back in October, which was rejected. Instead of taking any meaningful federal action, he wished unvaccinated people a very merry “winter of severe illness and death,” a salutation which also presumably extends to the 20 million children under the age of 5 who couldn’t get vaccinated. 

As B.C. Daurelle and K.S. Mehta wrote at the end of last year, the entire world could be vaccinated in a matter of months, if Biden chose to exercise his existing legal powers to release the formulas and manufacturing techniques of mRNA vaccines. Biden’s refusal to do so shows just how little “trust in the science” his administration actually has. Their hyperfocus on vaccine mandates for workers in the U.S. gives away the game: keeping the U.S. economy up and running at all costs. 

Similarly, in New York, the city government constantly stresses the importance of getting tested, maintaining at least six feet of distance from others, and staying home if you feel sick; yet more than one million K-12 students, plus school employees, are being forced back into crowded classrooms with few safety precautions. Despite the Department of Education’s promises of robust surveillance testing, less than 5 percent of all students are actually being tested each week. The CDC has whittled down the recommendation for distancing from six to three feet just to allow schools to operate at higher capacity. Even with such limited testing, the positivity rate among NYC public school students in the first week of January was nearly 13 percent. New York City mayor Eric Adams, another Democratic champion of “the Science,” has admitted that numbers have been kept low by testing fewer students. The characteristically blunt new mayor is more frank than most about why schools need to stay open: “Parents can’t keep their children home. They have to work.”

Governments ignoring their own public health recommendations is only the most obvious sign that “follow the science” almost never means an actual commitment to policy-making based on material reality. “The Science” itself is politically compromised, because scientific research is subject to the same capitalist pressures as the rest of the economy, as Clifford D. Conner demonstrates in The Tragedy of American Science. Science imagined as a field of pure, unrestricted inquiry, floating free from any political context, is a fantasy— one that the Democratic Party, in particular, wants to sell to its voting base. But science exists in the material world— it is done by real people, working within institutions and networks that are all shaped by capitalist society. Socialists have a particular responsibility to continuously draw attention to the way that notions of scientific credibility and objectivity are inevitably perverted under capitalism, and to point to a better alternative. If the fullest benefits of science for human flourishing are to be realized, it needs to be removed from the influence of capitalists and their governments.

Science is shaped by politics

Political realities shape science from its very earliest stages. The process of becoming a researcher is steeped in class-based gatekeeping and capitalist indoctrination, as described by Mike Pappas with regards to medical students; similar pressures apply to all scientific programs through which expertise and credentials are earned. Particularly in the natural sciences, graduate students gain much of their experience working on projects initiated by established researchers, which severely limits the potential for new lines of inquiry.

More broadly, even the purview of established researchers’ work are delimited by what research can get funding. The source and motives for funding inevitably shapes the direction and outcomes of research. In the past half-century, the funding of high-level science has gone from almost an exclusive purview of government, to today’s arrangement, wherein government funds basic research and then allows corporations to patent and profit off of market-ready technologies. While many are nostalgic for that earlier era, its technical achievements were overwhelmingly driven by military interests whose exclusive goal was ensuring U.S. hegemony. Mainstay technological and scientific achievements credited to the era of government-backed research, like the Space Program, the internet, and VR technologies, all grew out of projects with explicitly militaristic ends. 

By contrast, today’s paradigm — more reliant on funding from companies and foundations— puts the quest for profit more directly at the heart of what drives scientific research. Particularly since the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980, even research universities have become incentivized to behave more like profit-seeking corporations, particularly in the life sciences. For instance, serious diseases that affect only a handful of people are less likely to be researched than mild illnesses that affect many people. Many of these are not baffling medical mysteries; it’s simply that funding isn’t available to study them. For similar reasons, HIV/AIDS research was a non-starter during the crisis of the 1980s, when AIDS afflicted mainly poor and non-white people. Faced with inaction from the CDC and FDA, members of ACT-UP formed the “Treatment and Data” group, which took the research into their own hands as much as possible given their limited resources. Ironically, the mRNA vaccines for Covid-19 were built using technologies that were originally developed for use against HIV.

Even the story of the Covid vaccines—touted as a miracle of scientific achievement— bears the taint of for-profit science. Early in the pandemic, there was a brief glimmer of optimism in the medical sciences: the enormity of the crisis might allow profit-seeking motives to be set aside, in the interests of unbridled scientific collaboration. But before this model could bear fruit, the shadowy villain of vaccine imperialism itself, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, stepped in to squash the effort. In its place, the Gates’ intervention produced the COVAX project, which is firmly rooted in existing IP and patent protections, ensuring gigantic profits for the private developers of vaccines, and virtually guaranteeing today’s misallocation of vaccines across the global color line.

The Misuses of Science

Even when ‘good’ research is done, the products of that research still exist in a social milieu: not all research or results see the light of day in publication and distribution. That information must still navigate a web of entities with vested interests in the ‘outcomes’ of science. Often, when a study uncovers information that certain entities (the funding agency, the university, the government, corporations in a particular industry) don’t like, they bury or discredit the study. For example, Katherine M. Flegal has been the victim of a 15-year-long campaign to discredit her research demonstrating that being “overweight” is not actually a risk factor for health. Some resistance to her work comes from the weight loss and health insurance industries, but some of it also comes from another classic abuser of “science”: Big Tobacco. When analyzing the data from another study, Flegal found that some of the perceived risks of obesity were actually due to smoking, which had not been accounted for in the original study. 

And, of course, corporations are perfectly capable and willing to fund their own studies, often laundered through partnerships with prestigious universities, to produce results tailored to serve a particular narrative. Even a smattering of evidence that casts doubt on an inconvenient scientific consensus—like the health risks of smoking or anthropogenic climate change—is a powerful weapon that corporations can use to justify nearly anything with an appeal to “science.” 

Even when new findings are made public, opportunistic misinterpretations of the findings, and even outright misinformation, abound. ‘”Scientific illiteracy” forms a structural pillar of capitalist social organization, much more wide-spread and pernicious than simple, outright science denial. Many well-educated people rely on selectively curated misunderstanding, misrepresentation, or denial just to keep doing their jobs. To take just one example, politicians like Lori Lightfoot have repeatedly appealed to studies showing the psychological harms of school closures on children to justify keeping in-person schools open at any cost. The point is not that the science they cite is any less real or reliable than the data showing the spread of Omicron, but that politicians have already settled on a desired policy outcome, and they choose which “science” to rely on accordingly. The unacknowledged political imperative, prior to and overriding any scientific considerations, is that the economy must remain open. It is therefore convenient for capitalists and bourgeois politicians to frame the issue as an unavoidable trade-off between two bad options, foreclosing any consideration of alternative solutions that are equally “scientifically” viable but less in line with  the interests of capital. 

Acknowledging the inherently political character of science is the first step towards challenging the misuse of scientific authority. When politicians tell us to “Trust the Science!”, they perform a rhetorical sleight-of-hand that dresses a narrow set of class interests in the garb of scientific objectivity. “Trust science” should not mean trusting in the benevolence of the ruling class or its governments. In this era of crises, “taking science seriously” necessitates rescuing it from the imperatives of capital. We saw early in the pandemic that researchers, scientists, and workers are able and willing to direct research and production towards the needs of people, rather than their bosses’ profits. We can daily see the fundamentally collaborative and humanist impulse of actual scientists being stifled by the interests of profit, and we can measure its cost in lives, including every life lost because “progressive” politicians like Biden refuse to waive patent protections for the “miracle” mRNA Covid vaccines. And this is only a preview of what’s to come: the challenges of mitigating and adapting to climate change are even more impossible for profit-driven science to address. This is why socialists must take up the mantle of science. We have to contest the ideological grounds on which “following the science” is said to lead to particular policy outcomes, and expose the conflicting interests at work. Most importantly, we urgently need control over the powers and potential of science to be taken away from the bourgeoisie, and placed in the hands of researchers and scientists themselves.

The post Capitalists Only ‘Trust the Science’ When It Suits Their Agenda appeared first on Left Voice.

As the Omicron variant of Covid-19 surges across the United States, universities all over the country have hastily made plans for how to respond. Many schools have chosen to begin the Spring 2022 semester fully online. Others are digging in their heels on commitments to a fully or mainly in-person semester. Students, faculty, and staff are fighting for their universities to provide high-quality masks, remote work accommodations, smaller class sizes, increased testing, vaccine access, and mask requirements.

At the City University of New York (CUNY), enrollments at the community colleges have reached record lows, tens of thousands of students are petitioning for more online classes, and in-person sections are getting canceled left and right due to low enrollment, leading dozens of part-time faculty to lose their jobs. Dissatisfied with the union leadership’s response, rank-and-file union members are taking matters into their own hands. Below, we repost their call for community members across New York City to join them in solidarity for two upcoming actions demanding a safe reopening that protects everyone’s health, studies, and employment.

***

As the spring semester approaches, CUNY faces a double crisis. The spread of the Omicron strain of COVID-19 has left many teachers, students, and staff members with questions about working safely on campus. Despite this, CUNY continues to insist on a return to 70% in-person instruction and work for the Spring semester. Workers and students are faced with the choice of risking exposure to the virus or losing their job/dropping out of college. 

This has led to a cataclysmic drop in enrollment. Community colleges are currently at 58% of last year’s enrollment figures, and senior colleges at 84%. In the face of this, CUNY administrators have responded with extreme callousness, encouraging mass course cancellations and in some departments effectively firing all adjuncts who don’t currently have a three-year appointment. Hundreds of people face losing their jobs, with new cancellations announced daily.

The PSC leadership has responded to the enrollment crisis by demanding that no courses get canceled; that CUNY use federal stimulus money to cover revenue drops; and that all staff remain on payroll. They’ve responded to health concerns with a poll on what a “safe return” means for members, and have sent a letter detailing demands to the Chancellor. There is little word, however, on what the union leadership plans to do if their demands are not met. Meanwhile, over 25,000 CUNY students have signed a petition for more online course options. We need a strategy for escalating action to protect vulnerable workers and students.

Rank and File Action joins concerned CUNY students, workers, and community members in calling for action now to demand:

1. No class cancellations, no layoffs! Use federal pandemic funding to keep all classes open, all students enrolled, and all staff and faculty employed.
2. Respond to student demands by providing more online course options and meeting accessibility needs.
3. Allow staff and faculty to work remotely on request, in accordance with student needs–cancel the arbitrary mandate to keep 70% of classes and staff time in-person.
4. Prioritize safety: provide detailed ventilation information, free medical-grade masks, and free rapid testing/home tests for all students, staff, and faculty.
5. Full public funding of free tuition and support services for students, including mental wellness and accessibility; full transparency on how CUNY spends pandemic relief funds.

To expose CUNY’s outrageous disregard for workers and students and to publicize our demands, RAFA urges concerned community members to join two urgent actions next week:

#WelcomeBackFightBack Rally and press conference 

Monday, January 24, at 12 noon

At CUNY Central, 205 East 42nd Street (between 2nd and 3rd Avenues) in Manhattan

#BrunchWithFelo action at CUNY chancellor’s home in Pelham

Saturday, January 29, at 12 noon

Meet at the Metro North train station in Pelham at 11:45am to march to the home of CUNY Chancellor Felix V. Matos Rodriguez at 142 Loring Avenue. Let’s make sure the chancellor and his neighbors hear how he is harming the health and safety of CUNY workers and students with his senseless 70% in-person mandate. As long as Felo insists on making CUNY unsafe, let’s make him uncomfortable. 

RSVP at tiny.cc/CUNY2022 for either or both actions, and share the word with all your CUNY colleagues, students, alumni, and members of other unions. Share the Facebook event. Make a plan with your comrades to attend as a group! Please stay safe with high-quality masks and appropriate distancing during these outdoor actions. Events will be live-streamed for those who are unable to attend in person. 

If you are part of a labor union or a student or community organization, fill out the RSVP form to endorse these urgent actions and demands. Follow RAFA on Twitter at @RanknFileAction and include any of the following hashtags in tweets about the event: #BrunchWithFelo #WelcomeBackFightBack #StrikeCUNY #NoLayoffsCUNY

These actions are just the beginning. We need to prepare for further escalation, up to and including a possible strike. To join the conversation or to get involved in the event planning, email rafa.cuny@gmail.com.

The post CUNY Rank-and-File Activists Fight for Safe Reopening appeared first on Left Voice.

Joe Biden is not so popular these days. After a year in office, he has failed to deliver on any of his big promises, from handling the coronavirus and expanding access to childcare to combating the climate crisis and strengthening voting rights. The Quinnipiac poll shows him at a dismal 33 percent approval rating, lower than Donald Trump’s approval rating (36%) at the same point in his presidency. Many of his supporters are furious, and they have every right to be. Despite all of this, many Democrats are still wishing for him to succeed. 

After a hellish four years of Trump, which saw the onset of the pandemic and culminated with the storming of the Capitol, people desperately wanted a break from feeling like they were living in a proto-fascist nightmare. And so they settled for the small but inadequate improvements that Biden seemed to offer as a candidate: not mishandling the pandemic; protecting voting rights; and subsidizing child care. But as candidate Biden himself promised his wealthy donors, nothing has fundamentally changed. It is no surprise that 25 percent of American billionaires donated to his campaign, compared to only 14 percent who donated to Trump. Biden’s campaign also took in a record-breaking $145 million in dark money donations. 

So what does success for Biden really look like?

Biden has a long track record as a faithful servant of the capitalist ruling class. He authored the 1994 crime bill, which led to mass incarceration and deepened the racist nature of policing of Black and Brown people. In 2005, right before a recession, he voted in favor of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCA), which made it more difficult for people to file bankruptcy or to discharge their student loans, even in bankruptcy. 

Loyalty to the ruling class and protecting the working class are diametrically opposed. Even when Democrats take actions that appear to benefit the working class, they are almost always tepid half-measures that don’t draw the ire of the ruling class — the Democratic Party’s real constituency. When the interests of the bosses and workers diverge, the Democrats abandon the working class to protect their donors. No wonder Biden’s plans — like the already diluted Build Back Better bill and voting rights legislation — have failed. The working class will always be on the losing end as long as capitalists like Biden are in charge. 

Want to discuss Biden’s first year?  Join our online event to discuss these ideas and more on Saturday, January 22, at 3pm. 

In the middle of this Omicron surge, as we cross the one-year anniversary of the Biden administration, an ominous feeling of déjà vu lingers, reminiscent of the pre-lockdown Trump era. It is a feeling of uncertainty and dread about our health and our future. Rather than instituting basic public health measures, Biden has zeroed in on a vaccination only approach that has proven completely inadequate. He only recently (and quite reluctantly) approved distributing a very limited supply of free N95 masks, along with a one-time supply of a mere four rapid COVID tests per household. These measures are not part of a robust public health campaign. Biden could have authorized free masks and tests when he first took office, and for the duration of the pandemic. Instead, we’re left with feeble gestures, too little too late, that aim only to quell the growing criticism of his administration.

There is a sense of anger and betrayal among the working class, a growing suspicion that our lives are no better or safer under the “lesser-evil” Democrats than they were under Trump. Just like disposable face masks and Starbucks coffee cups, we, the “heroic” essential workers, are expendable. From the ruling class perspective, what makes us essential is that the economy needs a constant supply of workers to keep it going so they can make profit. School teachers are being forced to teach in person without adequate safety measures, while the CDC has lost much of its credibility by doing ever more transparent, politically driven bending of its own guidelines to appease the capitalists. Health and retail workers are quitting their jobs in record numbers, concluding that work in their already exploitative industries — with the added stress of bosses’ escalating demands and lack of safety provisions during the pandemic — is simply no longer sustainable. Corporate bosses don’t care about the health of workers, so long as we can show up to work. Otherwise, we can be replaced. (Consider, for example, that many employers have implemented workplace vaccine mandates “for everyone’s safety” while offering no paid sick leave to their employees.) 

The Democrats’ idea of success is very different from the hope and dreams they sell on the campaign trail. Throughout Biden’s time in office, Democratic leaders have been blaming Republicans and the right wing of the Democratic Party (Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema) for preventing them from making good on their promises. They have blamed conservative justices and politicians for taking away abortion rights. But the Democrats are neither incompetent or inefficient; they are doing exactly what we should expect when it comes to addressing crises such as homelessness, police brutality, climate change, worker safety, and so on. Actually solving these problems is antithetical to the interests that fund the Democratic Party. 

The Democrat Party is a well-oiled machine for safeguarding ruling-class interests. Consider the strength and intel Democrats use to stage coups around the world or the speed and precision with which the party apparatus defeated Bernie Sanders. 

Speaking of Bernie Sanders: After the 2020 presidential primary elections, we heard the social democrats of DSA endlessly lamenting, “We coulda had Bernie”. But we’ve always had Bernie — the real Bernie. Throughout his career, he has voted largely in favor of military interventions against other countries, including the “War on Terror.” He ran as a Democrat, and is now one of Biden’s biggest cheerleaders. Soon after Sanders folded behind Biden, leading members of the DSA released a statement titled “DSA members organizing against Trump.” Playing on fears of Trump winning reelection, the statement tacitly endorsed Biden without ever mentioning his name. 

Sanders is a big reason why, in this moment of crisis, hardly anyone is in the streets. He legitimized the Democrats by telling his supporters that the path to social change is to work for incremental reforms and within the Democratic Party. But in this capitalist system, incrementalism has but one purpose: to serve the aim of co-opting social movements and thwarting any real possibility of meaningful change. Working within the Democratic Party is, by its very nature, a process of accommodating to capitalists’ interests. It forces you to abandon your values and dreams for social change in order to “build power,” be “pragmatic,” and be “electable.” 

As the DSA has grown in membership, and with several of its members winning prominent elected offices, the rightward shift of the DSA is a logical outcome. A recent manifestation of this rightward shift was the DSA’s decision to ignore its own membership’s demand to expel Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D–NY), a DSA member, for his continued support for apartheid Israel.

As we enter the midterm election season, we are already seeing the Democrats stoking fear of Republicans winning once again. Democrats will use empty platitudes and performative gestures to garner votes and hide their own inaction. While the Democratic and Republican parties may differ in their rhetoric, they share an overarching and powerful similarity: they are both instruments of the capitalist ruling class. Regardless of which party occupies the White House, the ruling class continues to make profits through the exploitation of the working class, effectively guaranteeing miserable living and working conditions for workers, oppressed people, and immigrants. 

The evidence is before us, and we have seen this movie before.

Many “influencer” Democrats like to poke fun at working-class Republicans for voting against their own interests, without realizing that they do the exact same thing when they advocate “vote blue no matter who.” This is, to be fair, an incredibly difficult worldview from which to break. It’s beaten into us by the politicians, the media, and by the self-policing of establishment Democrats who are sure they’ve mastered the art of the “possible.” Everywhere you turn, the message is the same: the only way to improve things is to vote for the Democrats, no matter what.

Both the Democratic and the Republican parties use messaging tactics to target their bases. As their currency, Republicans use racism, anti-abortion positions, homophobia, and transphobia, under the guise of conservative Christian values and patriotism. Democrats use hollow social justice verbiage and representation politics to appeal to their base. But what happens when Democrats are in office? Their elected officials, “woke” and “diverse,” are typically as happy as Republicans to abuse the rights of immigrants, allow courts to curtail poor people’s right to abortion, and repress movements such as Black Lives Matter with the might of the police. Social justice is not a deeply held value for the Democrats; it’s just part of the brand. 

To break this cycle of ruling-class deception, we must first realize how relying on Democrats to bring about social change is a recipe for failure. In the 2020 presidential elections, 65 percent of Gen Z voters voted for Biden, 11 percent more than any other age group. Gen Z adults are also different from their elders in that a majority (54%) have a negative view of capitalism. These are voters who described their key priorities to be managing the pandemic; the economy; racial justice; and climate crisis. Here we are, a year later, and Biden has proven to be a disappointment on all fronts. 

During every election, we are encouraged by the ruling class to abandon our hopes and dreams and struggles and get in line to vote — or the other party will win! Pragmatists tell us that a working-class party is an unattainable fools’ errand, and that we should think about what we can do right now. What if right now we just began to refuse to vote for the lesser evil and started building our own political organization? Instead of waiting for politicians to do the right thing, we should mobilize — in our workplaces, communities and the streets — against unjust working conditions, evictions, pipelines, and racist police violence. We should study class struggles, new and old, national and international, and learn from them. This is some of the groundwork for building a workers’ party with a socialist program that fights against the capitalists, rather than being at their mercy. 

It is not that socialists should never participate in electoral politics. Elections are a strategic time for socialists to strengthen an understanding of the class divide among the masses. Socialists shouldn’t be running in elections as candidates of a bourgeois party of capital that serves the interests of our class enemy. Rather, socialists should run in elections to present the working class with a political vision of a society in which we realize our power as a hegemonic collective to choose how society is run. A socialist candidate running in bourgeois elections should have the sole purpose of raising the working class’s consciousness of its own power.

One does not need to believe that Democrats and Republicans are exactly the same to recognize that voting for either the Democratic or the Republican party will only keep us running on the hamster wheel of capitalism. That is why we, as socialists, don’t want capitalists to succeed. We have to realize that our struggles are bigger than the elections before us. Fundamental to all of this is a deep conviction that the old order is no longer compatible with our existence, and that it has to go.

Want to discuss Biden’s first year?  Join our online event to discuss these ideas and more on Saturday, January 22, at 3pm. 

The post The Problem of Wanting Biden to “Succeed” appeared first on Left Voice.

On January 6, 2021, the world watched in horror as a far-right mob stormed the U.S. Capitol to stop the certification of election results after the then-sitting president had called on them to do so. A mere two weeks later, Joe Biden was sworn in to the presidential office in a cordoned-off Capitol Hill. In a polarized America, Biden took office with a clear agenda — to restore legitimacy to the institutions of U.S. democracy that lay damaged after four years of Trumpism.

Shortly after taking office, Biden issued the message loud and clear: “America is back,” Biden proclaimed. “America is back. Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy.” This emphatic declaration is notable, especially given the decades-long decline of U.S. hegemony, as the crisis of neoliberalism — which was thrown open in 2008 — deepens. The four years of the Trump administration and its go-it-alone isolationist policy on the world stage had further weakened American leadership globally. As Trump withdrew from global diplomatic institutions, with his “America first” agenda, there was less faith in the United States’ ability to lead effectively. For Biden and the Democratic Party, a central project has been to reestablish the U.S. as a world leader that can lead its allies to address geopolitical crises. Yet, a year later, as Biden’s approval rating continues to fall amid a tanking pandemic response, economic instability, and deepening political polarization at home. As a result, the U.S. is now finding it harder to resolve its foreign policy challenges.

Escalating Confrontation with China

Soon after he took office, Biden sought to return to the path of diplomacy that had marked the decades before Trump’s rule. To hit the ground running, Biden recommitted to global diplomatic institutions. He not only rejoined the World Health Organization, but also rejoined the Paris Agreement, mended relations with his NATO allies after Trump’s confrontational approach, and increased the United States’ engagement within the United Nations. While divided in strategy, however, Biden has pursued the same goal as Trump, which is to confront the growing influence of China. Indeed, this has now been the developing geopolitical confrontation for world capitalism for the last decades.

Not since World War II, when the U.S. wrested the mantle from England, has the question of the global hegemon been posed so acutely. Over the last 20 years, the extraordinary growth of China’s GDP, combined with its growth of manufacturing power, has transformed China into a major player on the geopolitical chessboard. While the brunt of the 2008 financial crisis was borne by the U.S. and Europe, China encountered a huge shock in trade, with exports — a main driver of the Chinese economy — falling by over one-third and tens of millions of workers losing their jobs, especially in production. This, as Esteban Mercatante writes, led the Communist Party bureaucracy to “rebalance” the economy and find new motors to rely more heavily on domestic demand, doing so with huge investments in infrastructure. But, as consumption remains weak, China is forced to expand its markets. This has effectively pushed the Chinese government to develop projects like the new Belt and Road Initiative in an attempt to create an international market for investment and Chinese goods, thus putting China on a collision course with the interests of U.S. capital. The Great Recession brought this conflict out in the open as the U.S. and China began positioning themselves as competitors in the quest for global hegemony. In 2011 the Obama administration announced its “pivot to Asia” and attempted to shore up support for U.S. capital with treaties like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which were aimed at excluding China and expanding the U.S. influence in Asia. In his first day in office, Trump withdrew from the partnership and, in the years following, launched a trade war with China. But, while China remains the world’s main exporter, and the U.S. the world’s great buyer, the mutual interdependence complicates this conflict, and the two competitors have been unable to “decouple” this relationship.

Amid these challenges to U.S. hegemony, Trump’s ham-fisted “America first” approach further weakened the ability of the U.S. to impose its will. Since taking office, Biden has relied on the old tools of global partnership, leading the rest of the world in creating a diplomatic front against the force it sees as its biggest threat. The Biden administration has made it clear that it considers China its top foreign policy priority. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said in March 2021 that the administration saw China as “the only country with the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to seriously challenge the stable and open international system — all the rules, values, and relationships that make the world work the way we want it to.” While the U.S. does so under the old adage of “bringing democracy to the rest of the world,” much of this geopolitical conflict is driven by the perceived threat to the capitalist world order, atop which the U.S. currently sits.

An important aspect of this continuity is the retrenchment-minded foreign policy that saw American troops pull out of Afghanistan and the so-called end to the war on terror as the U.S. prepares for this new confrontation. To maneuver around larger, tedious, and slower-moving alliances like the 30-country NATO or even the 10-country Association of Asian Nations, the U.S. has also relied heavily on smaller alliances, such as the four-nation Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, which includes Australia, India, and Japan, as well as the bloc with Australia and United Kingdom, AUKUS, forging diplomatic defensive agreements and pivoting its military power to confront China. Biden ended the last year with the so-called Summit for Democracy, which was supposedly aimed at fighting authoritarianism and promoting human rights. This was, notably, particularly criticized globally for its invitees, which were essentially all of the United States’ anti-China allies, despite their often atrocious human rights records, and for the hypocrisy of the U.S. leading that charge, particularly when democratic rights are under attack in the country and the institutions of U.S. democracy stood delegitimized. The U.S. also announced a diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics in Beijing, which are to be held in February, citing human rights abuses — a move that was followed by Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom shortly after. This is hypocritical indeed, coming from a country with a police force that murders Black and Brown people with impunity, whose military razes countries to the ground with reckless abandon, and whose government continues to keep families in cages in detention camps on the southern border.

Managing Russia and Iran

But China isn’t the only problem facing U.S. imperialism, especially as the confrontation with Russia escalates, especially in light of the growing confrontation in Ukraine and the influence of NATO. Ukraine has long been an essential component of Russia’s defense strategy, particularly given how close it is to Moscow. While it seems unlikely that Russia wants to annex Ukraine, given the political and economic costs that come with an open war, it does want to guarantee that Ukraine doesn’t join NATO and maintains its neutrality. Over several weeks, Russia has been amassing tens of thousands of soldiers and massive amounts of military equipment on the Russia-Ukraine border as relations between the two countries continue to deteriorate. In light of this provocation, the Biden administration extended its full support to Ukraine. Over the last week, Biden has also thrown his support behind sanctions on Russian leaders, banks, and businesses if Russia escalates hostilities in Ukraine. This comes as several rounds of U.S.-Russia negotiations have stalled.

The Biden administration is also in the midst of renegotiating the Iran nuclear deal, which Trump withdrew from. Passed in 2015, the nuclear deal — known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — was signed by Iran with the U.S., China, France, Russia, Germany, and the UK Complaining that the deal was too weak on Iran, the Trump administration withdrew from it and imposed harsh sanctions that deepened the hardship of the Iranian masses. Since then, Iran too has increased its uranium stockpile and pressed on with its nuclear advances. The country also came under a new hardline leadership that is less willing to negotiate than the previous moderate leadership, which was more responsive to the pressures of imperialism. The talks for a new deal have now dragged on for months, as Iran wants the U.S. to lift the sanctions first and allow it access to billions of dollars in frozen funds, while Washington is reluctant to lift sanctions until Iran reverses the advances it has made. Now, as the timeline to restore the deal gets shorter and tensions in negotiations continue to rise, neither side is willing to back down.

Both of these relationships are further haunted by the specter of China. As the confrontation in the east increases, the U.S. faces immense pressure to deescalate the conflict with Russia and Iran. After the Summit for Democracy, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin held a virtual meeting in a show of unity. In the negotiations for a new JCPOA, China has also called on the U.S. to remove all sanctions inconsistent with the 2015 agreement. This past week, furthermore, China, Russia, and Iran agreed to hosting joint naval exercises. As nations come into conflict with U.S. interests, China becomes a pole of attraction for new strategic alliances. In the face of this, Washington is openly trying its hardest to curb China’s growing influence, and with that effort comes the need to build better relationships with Russia and Iran.

Threats of Instability at Home Undermine Biden’s Agenda

After the debacle of the Afghanistan exit, there is much pressure on the Biden administration to effectively lead and resolve the primary geopolitical disputes with Russia, China, and Iran in order to maintain credibility, both on Capitol Hill and among its global partners, especially as the three nations broker new economic and geopolitical agreements.

While Biden leads U.S. allies in this global confrontation and tries to restore U.S. legitimacy on the world stage, positing himself as a more competent negotiator than Trump, his degree of success is still an open question as he enters his second term. While he would have liked to say “America is back,” achieving that goal has been made harder, especially in light of the social, political, and economic crisis he faces.

Geopolitical alliances are only one part of the game. As China expands its influence across the world with the Belt and Road Initiative and the “race to the top” intensifies, the U.S. has to expand its own spheres of influence and lead its partners in that project. It is, in fact, this impetus that fueled much of the centerpiece of Biden’s agenda — Build Back Better. During his inauguration, Biden proposed a comprehensive infrastructure plan that would address end-to-end social, economic, and human infrastructure. Although peppered with corporate handouts, this plan included important reforms, including free community college, paid family leave, and more. Tagged at $1.75 billion, the newest version of the bill included billions for developing renewable energy and boosting the competitiveness of existing industries, including steel, cement, and aluminum. The bill was geared not only toward addressing long-overdue social spending that would help stimulate a postpandemic recovery, but also toward strengthening its position in the competition against China. In the summer, Biden also launched the “Build Back Better World” partnership with the rest of the G7 countries for the same ends. With a $40 billion price tag, the initiative was framed to “help meet the tremendous infrastructure needed in low- and middle-income countries,” particularly in Latin America, Caribbean, Africa, and the Indo-Pacific, and it was intended to boost projects in key areas of climate, health security, digital technology, and gender equality. Yet, in essence, the initiative was a mechanism of imperialism to reinforce its own spheres of influence to check China’s growth.

A year into Biden’s term, however, these efforts lay weakened, if not dead. At home, the honeymoon granted to Biden after the events of January 6 was quickly exhausted, with votes in Congress being forced on partisan lines and conservative Democrat Joe Manchin acting as a key swing vote in the Senate. In December, Manchin essentially killed Bill Back Better, saying as much in an interview with Fox News Sunday. While some Democrats still hope to resurrect this bill and bring it to a vote this year, not only will such a bill have to concede far more, but it also still faces a challenge to pass. On the world stage, there is less consensus among the G7 on how strong the pressure on China should be. As Nicolás Daneri reported, Italy — which joined the new Silk Road in 2019 — is willing to be softer on China, especially after it received several shipments of medical aid from Beijing during the pandemic while its Western allies were slow to help.

The power of U.S. imperialism has also diminished even in its so-called backyard: Latin America. Important mass mobilizations have shaken the region in the last few years, particularly against the IMF and the adjustment plans imposed to satisfy debt, most notably in Ecuador in 2019. Particularly in the Southern Cone, the geopolitical alignment seems not to favor the U.S. entirely, especially with the triumph of Gabriel Boric in Chile (a traditional ally of the empire), Alberto Fernández in Argentina, and the open possibility of Brazil’s Lula winning the presidency over Bolsonaro. All this while Biden’s orientation remains as right-wing as Trump’s: supporting Juan Guaidó in Venezuela and promoting an institutional coup, imposing exorbitant debts on Latin American countries, continuing Trump-era immigration policies through a nefarious immigration agreement with Mexico to prevent migration at the southern border coming from Central America, kept children and families in cages, and continued the violent mass deportations of Haitians.

The events of January 6 marked a huge crisis for the U.S. regime, both within and without. Biden took office not in a period of capitalist stability but in the midst of a deep social, economic, and health crisis. Plagued by the inability to pass his agenda, Biden has been unable to herald an era of social stability. The crisis opened by Trumpism continues, and among the great masses, the lack of meaningful solutions fosters a deepening anger at and disillusionment with the Biden administration. As Biden enters his second year, he is in the worst moment since taking office, with some polls giving him a 33 percent approval rating. Without “wins,” he has been forced entirely on the defensive, where he’s been able to do little more than fend off attacks from the Far Right. From voting rights to trans rights, abortion rights and critical race theory, Trumpism, arm in arm with the Republican Party that is desperate to win over its social base, has relied on Biden’s inability to pass his agenda to advance their attacks on democratic rights.

Shortly after the storming of the Capitol, we hypothesized that the tension between the national and international situation would be key in the coming months for U.S. imperialism. Indeed, that continues to be the question of the day. How can the U.S. lead the rest of the world in the fight for “democracy” when it is unable to resolve its domestic conflicts? Biden’s attempt to enlist U.S. allies in the quest to preserve the current world order and restore the country’s geopolitical supremacy faces the constant, looming threat of Trumpism and the delegitimization of the United States’ own institutions. As Biden enters his second year, one thing is clear: the crisis of U.S. hegemony in the world capitalist order can no longer be solved by the old tools of imperialism.

Want to discuss Biden’s first year?  Join our online event to discuss these ideas and more on Saturday, January 22, at 3pm. 

The post Is America Back? Biden and Imperialist Decline appeared first on Left Voice.

Joe Biden came into office with twin, competing promises. On one hand, he promised his corporate donors that “nothing would fundamentally change,” warding off fears that he might give in to an ascendant progressive wing in his party. Biden would bring back the capitalist stability that was so badly shaken by Black Lives Matter and by the Trumpist far right that stormed the Capitol on January 6. But he also promised to be a transformative President — the Franklin Delano Roosvelt of our era. 

In the first months of his Presidency, it seemed that there was a decisive break with neoliberalism. Joan Walsh gushed that Biden “wrapped up FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society, plus Obama’s good ideas and some of Senator Bernie Sanders’ better ones, into a Scranton-inflected agenda for racial and economic justice.” The Sanders wing of the Democratic party trumpeted these promises triumphantly: Faiz Shakir, Bernie Sanders’ campaign manager, praised Biden for making an “investment in working people on a scale we have not seen since FDR.”

Indeed, after the passage of a coronavirus stimulus package and an infrastructure bill, it seemed that a sort of Keynesianism was possible. Notably, it was part of an imperialist plan to compete with China, which whole sectors of the capitalist class could line up behind. And it was a way to appeal to the Trump voters who wanted infrastructure spending and the creation of American jobs.

A year later, it seems that Biden will only keep one of his two promises: Nothing will fundamentally change. 

While his promises for parental leave, canceling student debt, voting rights, and expansive climate provisions aren’t going to happen, he has increased the military budget more than any president since World War II. And while on the international stage, Biden is able to triumphantly say “America is back” and rally allies against China, even Biden must admit the reticence of former allies who say “for how long,” pointing to Trump’s popularity and Biden’s own domestic crises. Further, his Build Back Better bill was torpedoed by his own party, along with voting rights legislation. 

And it’s not just that his big plans didn’t pass. Biden’s approach to the pandemic has revealed him as more of a neoliberal than just a frustrated Keynesian. His entire approach is based on placing responsibility for the pandemic on individuals, literally saying that this would be a “winter of illness and death” for unvaccinated people. He initially backed away from any federal response, instead putting all the onus on the states, similar to Trump’s approach to the pandemic. Like Trump, Biden has acted to protect the mega profits of the pharmaceutical companies by refusing to lift the vaccine patents that maintain global vaccine apartheid. He even blatantly changed CDC guidelines to serve Delta and other big corporations, while at the same time stating clearly that “Hospitals in some places are going to be overrun both in terms of equipment and staff.” And due to the “stability” that Biden won over the past few months, he is able to force workers to the job without enough PPE or testing.

Meanwhile, capitalist wealth has ballooned during the pandemic. The wealth of the world’s 10 richest men doubled since March 2020. While Biden promised to tax the rich, that didn’t happen.

In many respects, we are going backwards under Biden. After all, while Trump and the capitalists wanted to reopen the economy despite massive hospitalizations and deaths, this dream was mostly realized by Biden. While Trump is a disgusting, explicit misogynist, Roe v. Wade is likely to be overturned under Biden. While Trump was a law and order President, police budgets are skyrocketing under Biden. And under Biden, we’ve seen the building of new migrant detention centers, the detention of more people under Biden than under Trump, and border patrol literally whipping and then deporting Haitian migrants. We’ve seen continued suport and funding for the apatheid state of Israel, despite the murder of over 250 Palestinians last spring. .

And worse still, the streets are empty: the mass mobilizations that we saw for immigrants’ rights, women’s rights, Black lives, and more have essentially disappeared or just shadows of their former selves. Of course, there were victories, like the jailing of Derek Chauvin. And a new generation of activists was forged and will play a role in future struggle. But in the short term, the graveyard of social movements has claimed another victim. 

This is exactly what the Democratic Party does. As mass movements emerge, they begin to question the Democrats and institutions of capitalism. Democrats and their proxies swoop in with big promises, and the leaders of unions and non-profits mobilize to get out the vote for the Democrats. Once they are in office, the party feigns incompetence so some people will believe they tried. 

But the Democrats aren’t bad at politics — they have bad politics. They move forward with the insidious plans of capital against workers and the oppressed, while the misleaders in social movements and labor tweet their dissatisfaction and organize small symbolic actions instead of using their immense resources to fight for progressive demands. And it’s true: many people “went back to brunch.” After all, the progressive media told them that things would be better under the Democrats. 

The Democratic Party had an insurgent left wing which, with Bernie Sanders at the helm, really gave the Democratic Party establishment a run for its money during the primary elections. However, Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC)  eventually played an integral role in shepherding people into the Democratic Party. When asked about people who don’t believe that progress will be made during the Biden Presidency, AOC indignantly responded, 

Well, I think it’s a really privileged critique … For anyone who brings [opposition to the Biden administration] up , we really have to ask ourselves, what is the message that you are sending to your Black and brown and undocumented members of your community, to your friends, when you say nothing has changed? … When you say ‘nothing has changed,’ you are calling the people who are now protected from deportation ‘no one.’ And we cannot allow for that in our movement.

In other words, anyone who criticizes the Biden administration, who correctly points out that “nothing will fundamentally change,” is not, according to AOC, allowed in the movement. That was precisely the opposite of what we were saying in Left Voice — we said we should not support Biden or trust Biden’s promises because the primary mission of the Democrats is to ensure profits for the capitalists and the maintenance of US imperialist hegemony.

And Sanders is now in Biden’s inner circle, with that whole wing rebranding into “pragmatic progressives.” But that whole strategy was a complete failure. The Washington Post isn’t wrong when it says, “The left dreamed of remaking America. Now, it stares into the abyss as Biden’s plans wither.” 

The DSA, which in the early Trump years served as a hub for activists and new socialists has both shifted to the right and become an electoral machine for the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. The organization of almost 100,000 has a growth crisis and is struggling to garner new members

In the meantime, we are seeing the resurgence of the far right. They are storming school board meetings, passing laws to restrict voting rights, and taking away trans rights all over the country. Biden’s incompetence in handling the pandemic is sure to push people further into the arms of the far right. Trump is already saying, “We gave Biden every tool he could want, yet he completely failed. The virus evolved and the strategy failed to evolve. He’s incapable of keeping up.”

At the same time, this year we’ve also seen the working class rise up. We see the seeds of class hatred in the indignant resignations of workers all over the country, documented on social media in particular, including on TikTok and on the anti-work Subreddit. Even the Financial Times has had to take notice. 

But the Great Resignation is also a sign of the horrible conditions at workplaces that have been increasingly attacked throughout the neoliberal era. It’s an expression of the lack of unions in most places and in the lack of fighting unions in others. We’re seeing historic resignations in healthcare and education. It’s an expression of the crisis of social reproduction, where women workers who are disproportionately responsible for childcare are dropping out of the workforce in droves. 

Contrary to what Robert Reich says, this isn’t a general strike — it’s an individual expression of anger that has not found a way to express itself in labor struggle. 

While the Bessemer Amazon union failed thanks in large part to reliance on Democratic Party figureheads instead of rank-and-file organization, we are currently seeing a wave of Starbucks workers filing to unionize. 

And there have been strikes this year — at Kellogg, John Deere, Columbia University, and dozens of smaller strikes. As Marcos, a worker from Hunts Point Market who went on strike in January, said, “We kept this place open [in the pandemic], and a lot of guys died here. … While the bosses were home, I was here working for them. We are essential workers. They got money, they got millions. They didn’t share it with us. We deserve more.” This sentiment is echoed on every picket line in 2021. Even though we are essential, the bosses, the Democrats, and the Republicans treat us as disposable. The pandemic has without a doubt changed the consciousness of the working class. Between the Great Resignation, the supply chain crisis and this change in consciousness, Rani Molla in Vox claims this is a “new era for the American worker.” 

In this context, there has been a dynamic struggle over unsafe school reopenings, with the Chicago Teachers Union taking an initial stand on behalf of Chicago teachers and all educators around the country. While the union leadership undemocratically retreated, students have taken up the struggle with hundreds around the country walking out of unsafe schools and thousands mobilizing in protest. 

As the government completely fails to address the pandemic and Biden turns back towards neoliberalism, the youth are taking notice. There is no lack of tweets, TikToks, and memes roasting the Biden administration for all of its failures. These are the same young people that prefer socialism to capitalism, and who joined the DSA and voted for Sanders. But they are no longer active and mobilized in the streets like they were during the Trump administration. And they no longer have a central organizational hub, which was the DSA. 

As we enter year two of the Biden administration and near year three of pandemic, the completely illogical and brutal nature of capitalism has never been so apparent. And every few weeks a “once in a lifetime” climate event reminds us that the capitalists are destroying the planet. It’s socialism or barbarism, and barbarism seems within sight. 

It is infuriating and it’s easy to fall into despair.

But let this radicalize you rather than lead you to despair. 

We hope the articles in series for Biden’s first year– and more broadly the articles on Left Voice– are useful to learn from and use as a basis for socialist strategy in the upcoming year. We hope they are an impetus to take the streets and to organize in your community and with your co-workers, steering clear of the Democrats’ empty promises. And we hope that these conclusions, far from despair, lead you to want to organize what we really need: a revolutionary socialist organization made up of working class and oppressed people to overthrow this whole rotten system. 

If you’re interested in this project, please reach out to Left Voice. 

And please join our online event to discuss these ideas and more on Saturday, January 22, at 3pm. 

The post The Fight for Socialism After a Year of Malarkey appeared first on Left Voice.

A large protest was held by workers from the Quellaveco mine of the Anglo American and Cumbra mining companies in the Moquegua region of Peru this Tuesday. The workers stopped all mining activities to demand that Anglo American assume the expenses and responsibilities for personnel who are infected with COVID-19. 

Workers shared with local media that there has been a massive increase in the number of infected in recent weeks. They also detailed that infected workers, especially from Cumbra, were forced to return to their homes to quarantine rather than being allowed to quarantine in hotels. As they explained, moving to their homes would cause workers to infect their families, especially their children, who have not yet been vaccinated against Covid-19.

“We want everyone to be isolated in hotels so that they can take a PCR test,” one worker explained, “This way, they can clean the camp so that we can go to work a little more protected.”

Videos showed workers walking and protesting in the Quellaveco mine camp. “Our health comes before their money,” they chanted. So far, Anglo American has not issued any official statement.

A few days ago, workers from the Cumbra company pointed out that biosafety protocols were not being followed at the Salveani camp in the Quellaveco mine. Through a public complaint made to Radio Sol, a media outlet, they detailed that workers with Covid-19 were sharing a room with healthy workers. They also indicated that the cleaning process was delayed and bed linen was not changed.

Faced with a massive increase of Covid-19 cases caused by the anti-labor policies of the mining companies, the Ministry of Labor, the Ministry of Health, and the National Superintendence of Labor Inspection (SUNAFIL), have maintained a deathly silence on this issue. With this, they do a huge favor to large employers who, once again, end up unloading the health crisis on the backs of the workers who now have to risk  their health and their lives and that of their families.

We stand in solidarity with the struggle of the Quellaveco mine workers. Their lives and the lives of their families are worth more than the profits of the capitalists. We join in their demands that the government stop prioritizing profit over the lives of the working class and that the bosses pay for all expenses related to Covid-19.

Originally published in La Izquierda Diario. 

The post Mine Workers in Peru Protest Over Covid-19 Infections appeared first on Left Voice.

One year into the Biden-Harris presidency, the gap between the politicians’ campaign promises and their actions in office could not be more stark. Despite mainstream media outlets heralding Joe Biden as a “modern FDR,” his party has accomplished next to nothing of his ambitious agenda. It can be tempting to chalk these failures up to the Democrats’ ineptitude and lack of resolve. However, the truth is more complicated: the Democrats’ aren’t bad at politics, it’s their imperialist, capitalist politics that are bad.

The latest blow to Biden’s agenda came last week when Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema effectively torpedoed his voting rights legislation by once again opposing the abolition of  the filibuster, a rule which requires 60 votes to pass most laws in the Senate. Three weeks earlier, Manchin also tanked the $1.7 trillion Build Back Better bill — the centerpiece of Biden’s agenda — despite it being whittled down to barely half of its initial amount. Beyond the pandemic stimulus package from March and November’s infrastructure bill, Americans would be hard-pressed to identify any meaningful progress on Biden’s campaign promises.

Democrats’ year-long streak of failed legislation is all the more jarring when recalling the chorus of voices claiming that Biden would be the most transformative president in over 50 years. Among his campaign promises were a $15 minimum wage, a public option for healthcare, student debt forgiveness, and other proposals that were significantly more progressive than they had been under previous Democratic administrations. Biden’s supposed transformativeness was even used as a cudgel against the Left, with pundits claiming that Biden — unlike leftists — had a winning strategy for progressive change.

Predictably, many of these “transformative” campaign promises have been watered down beyond recognition — sometimes brazenly so, as when Biden claimed that a $1,400 check, combined with the $600 one distributed during the Trump presidency, equaled $2,000 in stimulus payment facilitated by his administration. Other proposals vanished completely into the ether, like a public option for health care, paid parental leave, and cheaper prescription drug prices. Even promises that Biden could implement through executive order, like student debt forgiveness, have seemingly been nixed: loan repayments are expected to resume in May. 

And whereas Biden levied harsh criticisms against the Trump administration’s poor management of the coronavirus pandemic, saying that a president who presides over 200,000 deaths should not remain in office, but his response has been much of the same: putting corporate profits ahead of human life. Although the administration recently announced, after heavy criticism over its inaction, that it will provide 500 million free Covid-19 tests, it is refusing to take other measures that would help end the pandemic and alleviate suffering, like releasing vaccine patents or passing universal paid sick leave.  

The Democrats and the bourgeois press have had no shortage of excuses for why the Biden administration has not been able to pass its key legislation (or, indeed, almost any legislation at all). Conservative Democratic Senators Manchin and Sinema have been singled out as the “rotating villains” or party scapegoats du jour. However, the Build Back Better bill was all but guaranteed to fail when the bipartisan infrastructure bill was passed first with no strings attached. Clearly, this was a risk that the party was willing to take in exchange for a legislative victory.

Also to blame, according to Democrats, is Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, who rejected proposals for a $15 minimum wage and the party’s proposed immigration legislation. Notably, the (unelected) parliamentarian’s rulings are non-binding, and the Democrats could replace her at any time. Instead, they play the role of hapless victim at the mercy of insurmountable obstacles that are, in fact, easily surmountable.

Progressives and even leftists lament the Democrats’ poor political acumen, questioning why they don’t simply, for example, ignore the parliamentarian’s rulings, force Manchin and Sinema to fall in line, and reject bipartisanship. After all, for the first time in ten years, the Democrats hold the presidency and majorities in both chambers of Congress; why can’t they pass laws that large majorities of workers support?

But the truth is that the Democrats are neither bad at politics nor hapless victims — from the perspective of their capitalist masters and backers, the Democrats are good at politics. This is because the party’s goal is to uphold capitalism; that is, maintain capitalist stability and keep profits flowing at the expense of the working class.

In fact, it’s worth reflecting on what the Democrats have accomplished in recent years. They successfully co-opted the 2020 uprising against police violence and channeled popular outrage to the ballot box for Joe Biden. They united to block Bernie Sanders from clinching the nomination from the party’s left wing, and are skilled at stopping progressive campaigns in their tracks, like those of India Walton and Nina Turner, moving them to become “pragmatic progressives” instead. 

The Democrats are always able to pass exorbitant military budgets, most recently passing the largest one since World War II, and secure support and funding for Israeli violence toward Palestinians, even from progressives. Both domestically and internationally, Biden has been successful at shoring up support for his rivalry with China as part of his project of restoring U.S. imperialism and hegemony to its former glory. While the Democrats pretend that their hands are tied when it comes to programs to help the working class and oppressed, there is seemingly no limit to funding or political will when it comes to imperialism. 

Likewise, the Biden administration has had no problem continuing — and even expanding — inhumane Trump-era immigration policies. Last month, the president reinstated the so-called “Remain in Mexico” policy in which migrants seeking asylum in the U.S. are detained in Mexico while their applications are processed. In a deal with Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, all migrants from the Western hemisphere are now forced to stay in Mexico pending approval of their asylum applications. These squalid detention centers are dangerous, particularly during a pandemic, but the Democrats have largely succeeded in quelling outrage over kids in cages. 

Put simply, Democrats can be very effective when it comes to furthering their capitalist and imperialist interests. The reason why they don’t fight tooth and nail to pass progressive legislation — and the reason why the party will never be a vehicle for socialism — is that it’s not in their interest to do so. This is precisely why the party is the graveyard of social movements.

This is not to say that Democrats are hoping that their entire agenda fails. Some politicians have been frustrated by the lack of progress during Biden’s first year, and are hoping for a “reset” in 2022. But as always, to the extent that the Democrats care about a political issue, it’s so that they can win at the ballot box. After all, even if the party’s corporate backers are content with business as usual, its base — especially working-class voters and people of color — expect at least some crumbs in exchange for votes. The Democrats are worried that the perceived inaction will cost them in the 2022 midterm elections, where they risk losing control over the Senate, House of Representatives, or both. They are not actually worried about materially improving the conditions of the working class and oppressed. 

We cannot be under any illusion that the solution to this inaction and ostensible gridlock is to “vote harder” for Democrats. As we have written before, the Democrats perform this two-step every single time: they make progressive promises and co-opt movements to win elections, and then, once they are elected into office, break their promises and feign helplessness. Even under Democratic congressional supermajorities during the Obama administration, Democrats found excuses to avoid passing progressive legislation.

We must also refuse to put our faith in this extremely undemocratic system — one where senators can single-handedly torpedo legislation that the majority of the population supports. Instead of fighting within the undemocratic institutions of the U.S. state that exist to uphold capitalism and imperialism, we need to take our fight to the streets and to our workplaces to demand change. Neither the Democrats nor Republicans will hand the working class anything unless we fight for it.

The post The Democrats Aren’t Bad at Politics. Their Politics Are Bad appeared first on Left Voice.

Amid the Omicron surge in New York City, a Bronx-based medical resident spoke with Left Voice about how the Covid-19 pandemic exposed long-standing issues in the U.S. healthcare system, why Biden’s blaming the unvaccinated is a problem, and what a socialist healthcare system could look like.

What has Covid-19 been like at your hospital since the Omicron surge? And in the Bronx more broadly?

Omicron swept through New York City rapidly. It was first identified in late November, and a month later, cases in New York City began to skyrocket, with projections literally looking like a vertical line. At that time, the severity of the variant was unclear, and we know from the first wave and the Delta wave that hospitalization rates increase after infectivity rate, and death rates come after that. For Omicron, our hospital had already initiated mobilization plans by late December. Our Covid-19 hospitalizations increased by 10-fold between mid-late December and now — but that includes patients who are being admitted for Covid-19 and those who are being admitted for other medical problems but just happen to test positive for Covid-19. Our epidemiologists also predicted 1,200 hospitalizations by mid-January, and the projections looked scary — it was a vertical line up. This brought up a lot of traumatized feelings among the residents, who are the main supply of labor for the hospital — because it felt like March/April 2020 again with the overwhelming number of patients being admitted for Covid-19, most of whom are disproportionately impacted because the communities we serve are poor, Black, and Brown. Thankfully, and to much surprise, however, we reached a plateau as of last week. Cases are not actually rising in a vertical line anymore — we reached a plateau and are hoping this continues and then eventually decreases. This means that Omicron is probably not as severe as Delta or the original coronavirus strain — especially for vaccinated individuals. For the unvaccinated, it’s a different story. The last I heard, half of the ICU was full of Covid-19 patients, and most of those were unvaccinated.

Right now, most of our medicine inpatient floors are full of Covid-19 patients — most of whom are being managed for respiratory distress. We have also deployed a few additional medical teams to assist with the increased load of hospitalization. This means that residents from other fields like psychiatry, pediatrics, and others have been pulled off their typical rotations to staff teams dedicated to treating Covid-19 hospitalizations. For example, part of the pediatric hospital has been converted to an adult Covid-19 ward. And my colleagues in psychiatry have been pulled off their rotations to work on Covid-19 teams.

As far as I can tell, the NYC Department of Health reports that the Bronx reached its peak of Omicron cases shortly after New Year’s — at about 8,300 positive cases — and the case positivity rate has decreased since then and continues on a steady decline. I remember seeing long lines at Urgent Cares around the holidays for people waiting to get tested. Lines would be wrapping around the block as early as 7:30 a.m., and the Urgent Cares wouldn’t even be open by then! But oddly enough, it felt like business moved as usual in the Bronx. I see a lot of people wear masks, and in my own primary care clinic, lots of patients came in with Covid-like symptoms and tested positive after we swabbed them — but many of the ones I saw were vaccinated, about half boosted, and they had only mild symptoms. At first we were worried we should convert all our patient care sessions to telemedicine, but that doesn’t seem necessary — we all take precautions in the clinic, and our patients do too.

Have increased Covid-19 cases affected care for patients presenting for things other than Covid?

So far, I don’t think it has. I’m on a rotation in my hospital where I interact a lot with surgical teams, and many are still proceeding with emergent, urgent, and elective surgeries even if patients are positive for Covid-19. This is different from the first wave, where all surgeries were canceled and all kinds of doctors and specialists mobilized to assist with the mass hospitalizations that ensued. Even in the outpatient setting, patients are coming in for routine visits, and we’re able to provide that for them.

The Omicron surge has been a good opportunity to talk about vaccinations with my patients — and several have gotten their boosters and others their first dose.

What are the working conditions at your hospital like?

Ooof. This question has many long answers. They aren’t good and never work. For the longest time it has felt like everything in the hospital is breaking down and we’re just waiting for the day when the building will collapse, which is really ironic because our hospital possesses millions and millions and spends a lot of money on public relations and hospital expansion. This means that our advertisements about our hospital can be seen across New York City and we’re continually acquiring new properties in the area. But inside the hospital, we’re lacking nurses, technicians, patient care assistants, transporters, and so many ancillary staff members. This increases the burden and responsibilities on the rest of us to do tasks that are outside of our purview — sometimes even unsafe for ourselves and patients — which then builds up resentment, burnout, and loss of dignity. There are several reasons for this lack of staff — the first is that our hospital refuses to hire more. As far as I know, the hospital lost millions and millions of dollars from the first wave of Covid-19, and since then it has been trying to recuperate its revenue and profits. One of the main ways it did that was by refusing to hire more nurses and other staff — and this was even before the Omicron surge. Other reasons are staff leaving due to vaccine requirements and also a high burnout rate leading to a large number of resignations. Medical residents such as myself often help nursing staff with patient care tasks because we know that the nurses are overwhelmed, but the flip side of that is that we become overwhelmed too — often having to stay late or fall behind in our other tasks because we’re helping with drawing blood, transporting patients, or even taking vitals.

Our hospital has money and will continue to have money, but its priorities are not in supporting its workers. Its priority is to create the image that we’re a premier hospital in New York City, at any cost. But the reality is that we’re not — lots of patients suffer because of the worker shortages and burnout. I’ve witnessed so many unsafe patient practices in my hospital because we don’t have enough trained people to distribute tasks responsibly or evenly according to ability. People are filling gaps where they can even if they are trained or not.

Omicron also made many of us sick. Many residents experienced symptomatic Covid-19, even if we were boosted, and called out of work. Our nursing colleagues also experienced outbreaks and called out. I remember that in my clinic, we only had two nurses to staff the entire clinic. I was helping them by taking the vitals for my patients and weighing them — a standard practice that nurses usually are responsible for in my clinic. But because of the shortage and the sick callouts, the responsibilities were shared to cover the shortage.

We’re repeatedly being told by my hospital that we have enough money to hire nurses and other staff but that it’s more of a “supply” issue than a “money” issue. Meaning that there are no nurses available to hire because of various reasons — burnout, relocation, retirement, etc. I verified this with some nursing colleagues (who are also associated with Left Voice), and they did corroborate that many healthcare workers have left the field during this pandemic, which makes sense. The hospital, though, is never short of resources to hire more staff where it can.

What is the state of healthcare worker burnout at your workplace?

We’re very burnt out. It’s so common that sometimes it doesn’t even phase us anymore. We are churned for our labor, go home, and do it again the next day. It’s deeply sad how working in health care robbed so many of us of our joy, even simple ones. One evening I was talking to a coworker about her plans after she completed her residency, and she said she just wanted to start reading books again. I won’t forget her response because it reminded me of how we can’t even do simple things that others may take for granted because our highly exploited working conditions leave us with little room to engage with life’s pleasures.

I felt I was very afraid that the Omicron surge would retraumatize people, and so I worked with some of my coworkers to set up support networks of care among ourselves, much like a mutual aid system. It is so easy to feel isolated and burnt out and [to feel that no one notices]. To prevent that, several of us came together to find more concrete ways to take care of each other through this surge. It’s the least we can do in solidarity for each other — especially when our bosses and administrators only care if we are well enough to work.

What are you and other residents and physicians demanding to keep yourselves and patients safe?

Unfortunately, I can’t share many specifics in order to protect our efforts and my coworkers.

During the first wave, we built networks of solidarity among ourselves and drafted a long petition of demands to our hospital that were honored. This included hazard pay, childcare provisions, supplying adequate PPE, and decreasing barriers to PCR testing among hospital staff. We are still advocating for ourselves and our patients and will continue to do so.

Has your workplace instituted the CDC’s revised Covid-19 isolation measures, such as shortening the quarantine period or recommending that healthcare workers continue working even if they have Covid-19 but are asymptomatic?

Yes, my hospital has adopted this policy, much to the chagrin of residents like me. The fact of the matter is, you can still transmit Covid-19 even if you’re asymptomatic — and in a hospital setting, this puts a lot of fellow workers and patients at risk. Thirty percent of the Bronx is still not fully vaccinated — which means that there is a significant chance that asymptomatic hospital workers could transmit Covid-19 to a patient who, even if they’re vaccinated, can then potentially transmit the virus to someone they know who could not be vaccinated, or is immunocompromised, or elderly, or a child, or disabled, or a person with multiple chronic conditions.

What do you think of Biden’s messaging around the “pandemic of the unvaccinated”?

It’s nonsensical. It further asserts that the pandemic response is an “individual choice” issue rather than a collective response that the government could lead more effectively. We’ve drafted narratives that people are unvaccinated because they simply “choose” not to get vaccinated and that most of the anti-vaxxers are white, Republican Southerners. While some of this may be true, the reality is that the United States government, in its imperialist, neoliberal, and capitalist nature, failed so many people over so many decades that any systemic government response is not going to be trusted by many people. For example, there are still concerns about how vaccination rates differ in Black and Brown communities compared to white communities, a result of government pogroms that have targeted and exploited Black and Brown communities. White, working-class folks in the Midwest and South have been failed by the government, which decimated union rights and enabled mass poverty and dispossession in those communities. Why would anyone then trust the U.S. government about getting medical shots when the U.S. government can’t even provide basic life-supporting measures for its people — housing, food, water, wages, healthcare, education, etc? When it has repeatedly betrayed everyday people? This pandemic is not a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” — it’s a pandemic that has spiraled because of poor government policies and the history of capitalism, imperialism, and neoliberalism in the U.S. and its continued support of those principles today.

The Biden administration is trying to wash its hands clean by shifting the blame onto people rather than by examining its role in enabling the pandemic. It refuses to support global vaccine access, refuses to protect tenants against evictions, refuses to provide student loan debt relief, refuses to enact universal healthcare. All this contributes to exploding cases in the U.S. and mass death. It’s unsurprising that the U.S. exceeded 1 million positive Covid-19 cases in one day and that the pandemic continues to ravage communities.

The “pandemic of the unvaccinated” also implies that certain people are more valued than others, which is not true at all. Unvaccinated people deserve as much dignity and respect as vaccinated individuals, and rather than blaming them, it’s important to create a widespread culture of collectivity, solidarity, and care. The government is responsible for creating that culture and could lead that charge easily, but it doesn’t and it won’t.

What would a socialist response to the most recent Omicron surge look like?

It looks like many things. First, it looks like having a communist government, one that is run by the people with direct elections and the ability to recall representatives and set term limits. It looks like everyday people exhibiting ownership over their workplaces and making collective decisions over workplace conditions, revenue, and daily operations. It looks like providing free healthcare, housing, education, and basic income for everyday citizens. It looks like building a culture of solidarity and care. With regard to the public health realm, it means centering our response around our most vulnerable and not around profits, economic activity, or the most well. That would mean more enforced lockdowns, strict monitoring and enforcing of workplace safety measures, social distancing, and mask mandates. I say this because our most vulnerable — the elderly, disabled, immunocompromised, essential workers, those with multiple chronic conditions — have the most to lose if we are not serious or strict about our public health approach to the pandemic. A socialist response looks like global vaccine access, sharing vaccine technology and materials with other countries, lifting the blockade off Cuba, Iran, and North Korea. It looks like reckoning with the history of racism in the United States and offering reparations and material gains to Indigenous and Black and Brown communities. A socialist response looks like many things — it would center people over profits.

As a resident, do you have a message for other healthcare workers organizing for safe staffing, sufficient isolation lengths, and other protective measures to keep themselves, their coworkers, and their patients safe?

It is so, so important for my fellow coworkers to realize that we have more in common with each other than we have differences. Residency is viewed like a sprint — as in, worry about ourselves and get what we need to and leave. After all, it’s only three to five years of our lives. But it’s more than that — it’s actually a very traumatic time, especially during this pandemic. The hyperexploitation and trauma that comes from that never really leaves us. Even if our working conditions become better after we graduate and we may lose memory of it, the misery, isolation, and burnout that residency offers does have deep and subconscious effects on us.

Because of that, it’s important that we recognize that our working conditions bring us together in powerful ways even if we all have different backgrounds, material conditions, and trajectories. No one deserves to be exploited or powerless at work, and if we can organize around that, we can achieve many great things for ourselves.

I will also say that it’s important for my colleagues to recognize that other healthcare workers are not our enemies. Our enemies are the hospital and its leadership. Don’t blame nurses or other health care workers for having unions or fighting for their working conditions. They’re not doing it at our expense — in fact, we can learn a lot from them and organize with them to better our working conditions.

And lastly, be kind to yourself and those you work with. It’s hell out here, and the last thing we need is to beat ourselves or each other up.

The post “It Feels Like Everything in the Hospital Is Breaking Down”: Interview with a Medical Resident in the Bronx appeared first on Left Voice.

Fabián Puelma, a leading member of the Revolutionary Workers Party (PTR) of Chile, spoke at a virtual event of the Organization of Internationalist Communists of Greece — Spartakos (OKDE-Spartakos). The event was titled The Second Death (?) of Pinochet, and the complete video (Greek / English) can be watched online. We have added headings but have otherwise refrained from editing the text as it was presented.

Comrades, first of all I would like to thank you for the invitation. I fully share the idea that the exchange of experiences between Chile and Greece can be very interesting for thinking about the revolutionary struggle in both countries. Indeed, the government of Gabriel Boric seeks inspiration in some of the reformist experiences of the last decade in Europe. Certainly, the rapid submission of the Syriza government to the Troika, and the enormous disappointment that this generated in sectors of the working class and the people, allow us to anticipate some of the contradictions that will inevitably mark the new reformist experience that we are living in Chile.

I would like to apologize in advance for my broken English. I will share with the organizers the written presentation in case there are parts that were not understood correctly.

The government of Gabriel Boric (supported by the Frente Amplio, [a coalition of] neoreformist groups inspired by Podemos, and by the Communist Party) represents an attempt to restore a new center-left project and to consolidate the institutional channeling of the popular rebellion of October 2019. Let us remember that neoliberal progressivism (represented by the Concertación, which was the alliance of parties that led the transition pact at the end of the Pinochet dictatorship) is in a deep crisis. This is why we speak of restoration. It is not by chance that Boric is today negotiating with those parties for the conformation of the government.

As I was saying, the government of Gabriel Boric seeks to consummate the institutional deviation of the popular rebellion. That is why, before going deeper into the current situation, I would like to explain briefly what were the characteristics of the popular rebellion.

[First, we should place the rebellion in an international context. It forms a part of a cycle of the international class struggle which was initiated by the Yellow Vests in France at the end of 2018. In this same cycle, we saw the protests in Hong Kong, Puerto Rico, Lebanon, and the resistance against the coup in Bolivia, among other processes. We can call it a “second cycle of the class struggle” since the capitalist crisis of 2008 erupted. The first cycle was marked by processes like the Arab Spring, the Indignados / 15M movement in the Spanish State, the Taksim Square movement in Turkey, or the massive protests of June 2013 in Brazil. I think the general strikes in Greece can be placed within this context.]

A Decade of Struggle

The October revolt in Chile followed several experiences of struggle in the country. The most important are the student mobilizations in the years 2006 and 2011. There were also important strike processes of precarious mining and port workers. Also the massive movement against the private pension system and the emergence of a powerful women’s movement.

The government of Michelle Bachelet, of neoliberal progressivism, tried to deactivate the mobilizations. However, it did not succeed in reversing the political crisis and the delegitimization of institutions. After this came the victory of Sebastián Piñera. He won with promises of increased employment and growth. But these expectations hit the wall. 2019 had been a year of bad news for the economy. And working families began to feel it in their pockets with lower incomes and more indebtedness.

The trigger of the rebellion was the brutal repression of the state against the mobilizations unleashed by the high school students. Piñera brought out the military to put an end to the mobilizations, but this caused anger to explode throughout the country. It started as a protest against the increase of the subway fare, but in a few days it questioned the whole legacy of the dictatorship. It shook the whole political system.

The high point of the rebellion occurred when the main unions and social organizations called for a general strike for November 12, 2019. The important thing about this date is that the whole country was paralyzed. Important sectors of the economy stopped, such as the port sector, state workers, health, education, among others. At the same time, there were roadblocks all over the country, barricades, and harsh confrontations with the repressive forces. During these days the president [Piñera] was on the point of being overthrown.

The way the ruling class and the main political parties found to save Sebastián Piñera was through a political agreement to elaborate a new constitution. A few days after the general strike, the “Agreement for Peace and the New Constitution” was signed. This agreement established an electoral timetable for the election of a Constituent Assembly. But a series of rules and traps were established to limit popular participation. Along with this, it was agreed that Piñera would finish his presidential term.

However, the agreement was seen by many as a betrayal, as a pact made behind closed doors and behind the backs of the people, an agreement signed by the same parties of the right wing, neoliberal progressivism, and reformism. It is at this moment that Gabriel Boric became known as a traitor, since he even signed the agreement individually, without his party officially endorsing it. Even the Communist Party had to criticize the accord and did not sign it. It was not easy to defuse the rebellion. The trade union bureaucracy played a very important role at this time. Since the agreement was signed, it did not call for any national strike to express this rejection in the streets. The Communist Party and the union bureaucracies prevented the emergence of any alternative to the agreement. This was the way to deactivate the rebellion.

By the time the pandemic arrived, the institutional deviation to rebellion was already underway. After this, what prevailed during 2020 and 2021 were elections. The Constituent Assembly was installed with an important presence of independent candidates. This is a process that is still open. However, the assembly has remained subordinate to the regime’s institutions. The last of these elections was the presidential election where Gabriel Boric won.

Revolutionary Workers Party

Which have been the political positions that we have promoted during these years? Maybe most of you do not know our party. Our organization, the Revolutionary Workers Party (PTR), is part of the Trotskyist Fraction for the Fourth International (FT-CI). Our organization emerged during the student mobilizations of the years 2006 and 2011. After this, we successfully inserted ourselves in various workplaces, especially among teachers, industry, and health. We also had a first electoral experience in the year 2017. In Antofagasta (which is one of the main cities of the country, and which is a mining, industrial, and port capital in the north of Chile), we managed to obtain over 3 percent of the votes.

During the rebellion, we converged with thousands of demonstrators to fight for the slogans: to overthrow Piñera through the general strike, for a truly Free and Sovereign Constituent Assembly, and to put an end to all the legacy of the dictatorship, in the perspective of fighting for an anti-capitalist program and a government of the workers.

One of our main fights was to promote instances of self-organization. We learned that at the height of the class struggle it is possible to impose the united front on the bureaucracy. This requires a previous accumulation in the unions, in number of militants and political recognition. This is what we achieved in cities like Antofagasta. During the rebellion we promoted the Emergency and Protection Committee, which was the organization that coordinated the general strike of November 12 in the region together with unions [and] neighborhood and student organizations.

During 2021 we participated in the elections to the Constituent Assembly and governors in the main cities of the country. We obtained 52,000 votes, and our comrade Lester Calderón, mining workers’ leader and candidate for governor, obtained 21,000 votes, corresponding to almost 13 percent.

A New Government

What is our reading of the current scenario? The election was polarized. But in the background there were two restoration projects. José Antonio Kast, an ultraright and ultraconservative, represented the defense of Pinochet’s political constitution. Gabriel Boric represents the project of rebuilding an alliance between reformism and the neoliberal center-left.

Boric’s victory has generated wide expectations of change. He won by proposing an increase in the minimum wage and a reduction in the working day, among other measures. However, during the second round he had a quick turn to the center. He promised to respect the fiscal adjustment of 22.5 percent of the budget for this year. At the same time, he no longer speaks of refounding the police or the freedom of the prisoners of the rebellion. Now he talks about strengthening the police. He said that it would be difficult to end the private pension system. At the same time, he is in negotiations with the Concertación parties for a governance alliance.

That is to say, most of the demands of the rebellion were put into question by the president himself. In addition, the right wing was strengthened in Congress, and all analysts say that the economic situation for this year will not be good. A period is opening in which the working class and the people will make an experience with a new reformist government. Expectations and illusions still prevail, but they will not be easy to satisfy.

From the Revolutionary Workers Party, we are not only fighting for political independence from the new government. We also believe that it is important to prepare the organization and the struggle for those demands of the October rebellion. None of those demands have been delivered, and the living conditions of the working class after the pandemic have declined. That is why we believe that we must promote the fight for this program, for the end of the private pension system, for the end of market education and health, for the nationalization of mining, for the return of the lands to the Mapuche people, among other measures.

Our organization is part of the movement for the freedom of the political prisoners of the rebellion. Together with dozens of relatives of prisoners, we are promoting the signature campaign for the Constitutional Convention to include amnesty in the constitution. At the same time, we are demanding that the government grant a general pardon, as the families are doing. And denouncing the attempts of the government coalition to include police officers in the pardon. This is why we believe that it is necessary to build a left-wing opposition to the government. And we believe that it is a mistake that some Trotskyist groups have politically supported Boric.

Like any reformist social democratic government, Boric’s government will rely on alliances and negotiations with bourgeois parties. It will not rely on the active mobilization of the working class, the only one that is capable of defeating the adjustment plan of the big capitalists. This is at the basis of the betrayal of the reformists, as I imagine you know very well from the experience of Syriza.

It is with this perspective that we fight to build a party of the working class, socialist and revolutionary. Starting by calling to group together all those who want to fight to win the demands of October in a totally independent way from the reformist parties and defeat the adjustment plan.

The post From Chile to Greece: Neoreformist Government and Revolutionary Opposition appeared first on Left Voice.

At the time of his assassination on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was supporting striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. The strike began after two workers were crushed to death by a faulty garbage compactor that the company knew was a danger to workers. On February 12, 1968, 1,300 sanitation workers walked off the job to demand better wages, paid overtime, safety protocols, a grievance procedure to combat the blatant racism of white managers, and union recognition.

For months, the primarily Black workforce protested horrendous working conditions and racism. Workers received a meger $0.65 per hour; many were forced to rely on second jobs, welfare, and food stamps to survive. Additionally, the mayor of Memphis actively suppressed their right to unionize–though workers had been organized in the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees since 1964, the city refused to recognize the union or workers’ protections. When the workers walked off the job in February, the city declared the strike illegal and sent the riot police to repress them as they led marches of thousands of people through the city.

As the strike entered its second month, the city hired strikebreakers to harass workers, and trash piled up on Memphis’s streets. MLK and other civil rights leaders visited the striking sanitation workers. They brought with them international support and drew tens of thousands of people into the streets to be in solidarity with the striking workers. As MLK said in support of the workers, “The person who picks up our garbage, in the final analysis, is as significant as the physician, for if he doesn’t do his job, diseases are rampant. All labor has dignity.” 

On April 3, MLK returned to Memphis to rally the striking workers. There he gave his famous “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech to a crowd of tens of thousands of people. The next day King was murdered by the state; his death only intensified the resolve of the strikers and brough more people into the streets in solidarity. By mid-April, the strike was over. The workers won wage increases and union recognition from the city. 

Contrary to his two-dimensional portrayal in bourgeois history books, MLK saw the deep connections between racism and class exploitation in capitalist society. Particularly in the last decade of his life, he argued that the labor movement and the civil rights movement needed to unite and fight together because their interests were one and the same. As he said in a speech at the AFL-CIO Convention in 1961: 

“Our needs are identical with labor’s needs — decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children and respect in the community. That is why Negroes support labor’s demands and fight laws which curb labor. That is why the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth.”

The post “I Am A Man”: MLK and the Memphis Sanitation Strike appeared first on Left Voice.