Left Voice

If You Marched in Black Lives Matter, Support Unionizing Amazon

Tue, 02 Mar 2021 21:40:39 GMT

Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama are taking on the richest man in the world and the second biggest private employer in the U.S. in an effort to unionize a 5,800 employee distribution center. It is being organized almost entirely by Black workers in a Republican, right-to-work state, and in spite of a major effort by Amazon to crush the campaign.

The unionization drive in Bessemer is tightly linked with the broad, nation-wide Black Lives Matter movement that took the streets to fight anti-Black racism. In fact, the impetus to unionize came from Amazon workers involved in the protests over the summer and that rage, that fire, that boldness to defy the status quo spread to their workplace.

This unionization effort highlights the fact that Black workers remain among the most exploited sectors of the working class, with long hours, intense labor discipline, and few benefits..The struggle of Amazon workers at Bessemer makes crystal clear that exploitation and racial oppression are tightly linked in capitalism — the wealth of the United States was built on Black enslavement and continues to be built on the hyper-exploitation of Black workers. These Amazon employees highlight that Black struggle takes place in the streets, but it’s also in workplaces like Amazon’s distribution centers.

But the effort to unionize is difficult and the workers face many powerful enemies, including the richest man alive, Jeff Bezos. Those of us who chanted “Black Lives Matter” this summer must just as enthusiastically support the workers in Bessemer. Black liberation requires not only a fight against police killings but also a fight against the highly exploitative conditions faced by Black workers on the job.

The Unionization Effort

On February 8, nearly six thousand Amazon employees launched a vote on joining the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU), which currently represents 12,000 poultry workers in Alabama and 100,000 workers across the United States. The union vote ends on March 29. If the workers are successful, this would be the first Amazon union in the U.S. and could spark more unionization efforts at Amazon warehouses, as well as in other logistics and retail companies. As Amazon is a multinational corporation, with nearly million workers abroad, this drive could also have wide-reaching international implications.

Amazon is well known for its inhumane work conditions, back-breaking labor, and impossibly high productivity expectations. Every move of the company’s workers is monitored and tracked and those who fall below the “productivity threshold” are disciplined or fired.

In the past few months, Amazon workers have put their lives on the line by working in the midst of a deadly global pandemic. Nearly 20,000 of Amazon’s employees in the United States contracted Covid-19 and 10 have died since October. Of course these are only the officially reported numbers. People who spoke out, like Black activist and former Amazon worker Chris Smalls of New York, were fired. Amazon workers received a measly $2 hazard pay increase early in the pandemic, but that was ended in June 2020, months before the U.S. reached its COVID infection peak. Meanwhile, Bezos made $70 billion in profits in 2020 alone as Amazon’s revenue soared. He has made so much, in fact, that he could afford to pay a $105,000 bonus to all of Amazon’s 1.2 million employees and still be as rich as he was before the pandemic.

His enormous wealth, estimated at nearly $200 billion, is built on the hyper-exploitation of workers and facilitated by the fact that they have no union to defend them. Amazon has gone to great lengths to make sure that no warehouse unionizes. It has hired intelligence analysts to track “labor organizing threats,” and spied on employees’ interactions in closed Facebook groups. A previous unionization effort in Delaware was speedily crushed by Amazon.

In Bessemer, Amazon has pulled out all the stops to thwart unionization, including threats of job loss, anti-union propaganda in bathrooms, phone calls to workers, anti-union meetings, and a ridiculous anti-union website featuring a doggie DJ. While Amazon is using the workspace to flood workers with anti-union propaganda, union organizers are forced to meet with workers off the property. Even the ability for union organizers to reach out to workers has been attacked by Amazon — they petitioned the city to change the amount of time at red lights so that workers won’t have access to pro-union messages and organizers who distribute pamphlets at the lights. And recently Amazon offered to “buy out” employees for $2,000 and hire new workers who are less likely to unionize.

Black Lives Matter: Working Class or Corporate?

The unionization effort at Amazon is deeply connected to the recent eruptions of class struggle among essential workers, including produce market workers, health care workers and teachers. While the bosses hid away in their summer homes, workers kept the country running. It was disproportionately Black and Brown who stayed on the job, often getting sick or dying, while the bosses made big profits.

The Amazon unionization effort is also a product of the Black Lives Matter movement, possibly the largest social movement in U.S. history. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Some of [the Bessemer] workers participated in the Black Lives Matter movement over the past year and reached out to this union because they were tired of dealing with the grueling nature of their work. There is a heightened political climate.” Bloomberg reported that the union drive was the result of “the growing acceptance that systemic racism has hurt the economic prospects of people of color.”

This overwhelmingly Black workforce is set to make history. In fact, 85 percent of the workers at the Amazon warehouse are Black. It’s essential that we always draw this connection: the Amazon unionization effort is an effort to make Black Lives matter. It’s a Black labor struggle. And it highlights the ways in which racism and exploitation are inextricably tied to one another.

The capitalists aim to invisibilize the connection between exploitation and racism in order to make a profit. They would like nothing than to make Black Lives Matter a mere corporate marketing scheme. After all, in the summer uprising for Black Lives, Jeff Bezos donated $10 million to “combatting systemic racism” and tweeted support for Black Lives Matter. He and other capitalists would like nothing more than for all this to be a politics of empty symbolism, of tweets supporting Black workers while the system breaks the bodies of those same workers. Further, Amazon plays a central role in supplying surveillance systems to cops who murder Black people — another example of Amazon’s sheer cynicism when it comes to BLM.

The unionization struggle in Bessemer highlights that living in a world in which Black Lives Matter means fighting police violence, as well as fighting against the exploitation of the working class — which includes Black workers, who have played a central role in the history of class struggle. The fight to unionize Amazon is inscribed in a history of Black labor struggle, of the civil rights movement, and of Black radials agitating inside and outside factories. And it is part of the history of Alabama, where Black and white mine and steel workers played an important role in the labor movement and organized major strikes, as well as the civil rights movement. Fighting for Black lives means fighting for better labor conditions for Black workers.

Workers Need Active Solidarity

The struggle for a union at Amazon is one of the most important labor struggles of the past few years in the United States. Unionizing one Amazon warehouse has the potential to unleash a wave of unionization efforts at other Amazon warehouses, as well as at other hyper-exploitative corporations such as Walmart and Whole Foods that have fought tooth and nail against unions.

The union struggle at Amazon is a struggle of David versus Goliath. Amazon has all the resources to manipulate and threaten workers; it has a bottomless well of funds to put towards anti-union efforts. The workers need solidarity.

Despite Joe Biden’s “pro union” and “pro worker” rhetoric, he was silent on the Amazon union until weeks after the voting began. Finally, on Sunday night he said that workers should be allowed to choose whether they want a union and spoke out against worker intimidation.

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However, as president, he didn’t call for any legal consequences for the illegal worker intimidation tactics that Amazon employs. It’s an example of just how empty his rhetoric really is: it’s just aimed at scoring points with the progressive base of the Democratic Party. It stands in stark contrast to the harsh language Biden used to condemn and demand prosecution of BLM protesters, while the cops in cities with Democratic mayors jailed, beat, and gassed protesters. And of course, he hasn’t said anything since his inauguration about the PRO Act, which would end “right-to-work” laws, penalize bosses that retaliate against workers who organize, and more.

Union leaders continue to promise the working class that the Democrats are the solution and funding Democrat candidates. Yet, those same Democrats are upholding these terrible labor laws and oppressive labor conditions. They refuse to pass a $15 dollar/hour federal minimum wage and haven’t moved forward on the PRO Act. The union bureaucracies are joined at the hip to this anti-worker party and have done almost nothing to support the Amazon workers in Bessemer.

Even Stuart Applebaum, president of the RWDSU, has maintained his focus on lobbying capitalist politicians and donating union funds to Democrats — holding, from time to time, small one-day actions. The RWDSU has 100,000 members; Applebaum could put the entire union behind organizing support for Bessemer and demanding that other unions organize national mobilizations and even work stoppages against Amazon intimidation and for a union.

For Amazon workers, unionization is only a first step. They will need to fight for the union to be a fighting tool of the workers, not a top-down front for the Democratic Party. Workers who organize because of Black Lives Matter should go further and use their unions as a tool to fight for Black lives. Amazon workers can and should organize walkouts against police violence, call strikes to defund the police, and use the strategic position of labor not only to shut down the streets but also to shut down a key sector of capital. A union will strengthen Amazon workers to organize these kinds of actions, but only if the workers make sure they democratically control their union.

For Amazon workers to create a fighting union, they will need rank-and-file solidarity. They will need mass solidarity from every single person who chanted “Black Lives Matter” last summer, from every single community organization, socialist group, labor union, and social justice organization. This will require talking about solidarity with coworkers and organizing solidarity actions. For those of us already in unions, we must demand that our unions organize actions and put resources into Amazon solidarity.

There is precedent for that kind of solidarity, even in Alabama. Michael Goldfield explains that the success of the struggle in the 1930s to build the steelworkers union in Alabama was because they built broad bases of solidarity.

They used unemployed organizations, ethnic organizations, and civil rights organizations to build broad support for their campaign …This is one of the lessons that I would draw from the campaign in Bessemer: people have some leverage, but if they’re only one part of a huge company, outside support, publicity, bodies, and everything else is really important to help them win. The more support we can give them, the better.

The only way the Amazon union will win is if we surround it with so much solidarity, so much support, that we will drown out the anti-worker messaging from the Amazon bosses.

"A Lot of Changes Need to Happen”: Amazon Workers on Why they Need to Unionize

Tue, 02 Mar 2021 17:25:30 GMT

In the biggest unionizing struggle in Amazon’s history, nearly 6,000 workers at a warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama are voting on whether to join a union. The union drive has met fierce resistance from the company, desperate to stop it. Last month, the union talk radio show The Valley Labor report interviewed union organizing committee members Darryl Richardson, a picker at the fulfillment center, and Jennifer Bates, a Learning Ambassador, about working conditions at Amazon, the union drive, the response from bosses, and why they need a union.

The union drive at Bessemer deserves support and solidarity from workers everywhere. If the workers win the union, it would be an inspiration for workers around the world, in addition to the 1.2 million workers currently being exploited by Amazon and Jeff Bezos.

Indiana Court Gives Cop a Get Out of Jail Free Card for Domestic Violence

Tue, 02 Mar 2021 14:30:26 GMT

On February 25, Boyce Ballinger was sentenced to 18 months probation after pleading guilty to felony “strangulation” and misdemeanor “domestic battery.” The court even promised to allow him to expunge his criminal record if he complies with probation.

On October 17 of last year, Ballinger and his wife went to a neighbor’s party. Ballinger has been a Fort Wayne Police Department (FWPD) cop since 2003, rising to the rank of sergeant. When they came home, his wife asked him about his alcohol consumption. He responded by attacking her.

Ballinger’s wife testified that he choked her with both hands and pushed her into a wall. She ran to a bedroom. Ballinger followed and banged violently on the door. When other FWPD officers showed up, they arrested him.

Judge Steven Godfrey, however, immediately released him without bail. Thousands of usually Black and Brown people languish in jail before trial on major and minor charges.

Ballinger was ordered not to contact his wife, who filed for divorce shortly thereafter. He violated this order in December by stalking his ex-wife and pulling up next to her in a parking lot to harass her. She reported him, and he was sent to jail to await trial.

After all this, the prosecutor and judge offered Ballinger a plea bargain. Such deals are routinely used to pressure Black, Brown, and working-class defendants to plead guilty in order to avoid draconian prison terms. But plea bargains can be used to protect cops who commit violent crimes. For example, three prison guards who confessed to beating a prisoner in New York, breaking multiple bones, were given a plea deal with no jail in 2015.

Ballinger was given a “suspended sentence.” The judge said he would get only probation if he complied with court orders, namely not contacting his ex-wife, holding a job, avoiding alcohol and drugs, and accepting emotional counseling.

This sweetheart deal went through despite local media coverage of the case. There are hundreds of thousands of people who deserve leniency. This case demonstrates yet again that U.S. courts simply do not treat defendants equally.

Barack Obama recently urged Black Lives Matter activists to stop saying “Defund the police,” and instead say, “Let’s reform the police department so that everybody’s being treated fairly.” Authorities’ responses to police crimes shows the police cannot be reformed. The police need to be completely abolished, together with the courts and the prisons. And this can only be done with working-class methods — breaking from both capitalist parties who are responsible for the police actions. This is how “police accountability” is handled by judicial authorities in Fort Wayne even though this city has had a Democratic mayor for the past two decades.

The FWPD has waited until after Ballinger’s conviction to move toward firing him via the city policing board. It takes months to remove a cop for aggravated assault and oppressing women, but minutes for bosses to fire a low wage worker for being late to work or making a defiant comment.

If he is fired, Ballinger will lose a salary of at least $89,700. Cops are not part of the working class. We need to kick cops out of all unions as part of the fight for justice. The Fort Wayne case confirms what James Baldwin once wrote about racist police violence: “Arrogant autonomy … is guaranteed the police … by the most powerful forces in American life — otherwise they would not dare to claim it.”

"Do You Miss Me Yet?”: CPAC Shows that Trumpism Is Here to Stay

Tue, 02 Mar 2021 13:17:58 GMT

“Let me tell you right now, Donald J. Trump ain’t going anywhere.”

Those words of Senator Ted Cruz from his speech to this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which concluded on Sunday, could just as well have been the tagline of the entire event. While the theme was officially “America Uncancelled” — undoubtedly spurred by social media companies throwing Trump off their platforms in January after the attack on the U.S. Capitol — it was perhaps the clearest demonstration yet of the extent to which Trump has remade the Republican Party in his own image. The weekend’s summit reaffirmed that Trumpism, far from having been defeated in November, is here to stay.

CPAC is the largest annual gathering of conservative leaders and grassroots activists — a right-wing “superbowl,” in the words of conservative activist Charlie Kirk — featuring speeches from many of the highest-profile Republicans. The event often offers a glimpse into the shifting center of gravity of the conservative movement, and an opportunity to scope out the new blood and the up-and-coming stars who may be the future Republican presidential candidates. Among those who received the strongest receptions and began to shore up their image as 2024 contenders were South Dakota governor Kristi Noem and Florida governor Ron De Santis, both of whom bragged about their states’ lax coronavirus restrictions and keeping their economies open.

The speakers and videos eschewed policy discussions to touch instead on the usual bogeymen: antifa, George Soros, China, the “Squad,” and, of course, socialism. As this year’s theme indicated, “cancel culture,” free speech, and political correctness run amok also featured heavily, with speech titles such as “Bill of Rights, Liberty, and Cancel Culture,” “The Left’s Assault on a Free People,” and, comically, “The Way Forward: Unlocking Our Churches, Our Voices, and Our Social Media Accounts.” Repudiating Trump’s deplatforming, speakers warned that conservatives were under attack by the government, the big tech monopolies, the media, and an out-of-control free speech culture, particularly on college campuses.

The notable absences at the conference said as much about this conservative center of gravity as the attendees. Long-time Trump critics Senators Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse were not present, nor was former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, who recently spoke out against Trump. Representative Liz Cheney, who voted to impeach him earlier this month and did not show, was singled out in numerous speeches throughout the weekend. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who voted to acquit Trump, was not invited in response to his critical remarks about the former president after the trial. Several popular “moderate” Republican governors, including Larry Hogan of Maryland, Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, and Phil Scott of Vermont, declined to attend. The message was clear: it’s Trump’s party now, and his critics need not apply.

That message permeated CPAC, where thousands sported Make America Great Again and Trump garb, and posed with a gaudy, 6-foot tall gold-painted sculpture of Donald Trump dressed in American flag shorts. In interviews, many attendees pledged fealty to Trump over the Republican Party, and vowed to leave the party if he does not run again in 2024. It came as no surprise that Trump won 55 percent of the votes in the traditional attendee straw poll, with De Santis a distant second. But Trumpism was not just an aesthetic, or a fringe “Trump-or-bust” attitude — it touched just about every facet of the summit.

Nearly every CPAC speech and forum centered around Trump’s pet issues, from law and order (“Same Badge, Different Beat: To Protect and Serve, or Socialist Social Workers?”), to China (“Quad Goals: Fighting Communist China From All Four Corners”), to immigration (“The Looming Humanitarian Crisis at the Border”). Consistent with the “uncancelled” theme, speakers also railed against “big tech” and made unsupported claims about conservatives being censored on social media. No fewer than nine speeches focused on voter fraud and the importance of restoring the “integrity” of U.S. elections. While not every speaker explicitly embraced the notion that last November’s presidential election had been outright “rigged” or stolen, that claim is clearly being used as state GOPs prioritize enacting highly restrictive voter laws on their agendas. CPAC may indeed have confirmed that conservativism’s tectonic plates have shifted — firmly in the direction of Trump.

Demonstrating his continued centrality in the conservative movement, Trump was CPAC’s closing act on Sunday. His rambling, 90-minute speech — highly reminiscent of his rallies — was practically a checklist of his favorite topics and grievances, punctuated by standing ovations and, at various points, vigorous chants of “We love you!” and “You won!” Claims about election rigging were, of course, a centerpiece, and he went into depth about all the fraudulent votes and illegal voting practices used to steal the election — “a disgrace.” He also spoke at length about strong borders, “illegal aliens,” and law and order, and excoriated President Joe Biden’s “radical immigration policies.” Less restrained now that he has left office, Trump repeated his infamous racist line about Latin American countries: “They’re not giving us their best and their finest. Remember I said that? … We turned out to be 100 percent correct.”

His foreign policy talking points were likewise Trump chauvinism redux. He mentioned China 23 times — twice using the racist term “China virus” he coined to refer to Covid-19 — and criticized the U.S. trade deficit with the country and its dominance of “the future of the world.” He emphasized that NAFTA, the Iran nuclear deal, and the Paris Climate Agreement were some of the “worst deals,” and that Biden had rejoined the World Health Organization in a “horrendous surrender.” Trump also repeated his claims about “endless wars” and, revisiting another of his classic lines, said, “if you’re gonna go in [to Iraq], keep the oil.” Other targets of his ire were U.S. energy policy, and the “wholly ridiculous Green New Deal.” He even weighed in on transgender women in sports, one of the conservative cultural grievances du jour, in line with the previous day’s panel: “My Pronouns are First Place and Winning: Protecting Women’s Sports.”

Those watching Trump’s speech were undoubtedly waiting to hear about his plans for another presidential run in 2024. While he stated explicitly that he was not going to start a new party, he did not rule out another presidential bid. Instead, he teased, “The incredible journey we began together four years ago is far from over,” and explained his plans for the coming years: “I’m announcing that I will be actively working to elect strong, tough, and smart Republican leaders.” Parts of his speech sounded like a hit list of Republicans who had been disloyal to him. Of politicians such as McConnell, Romney, Cheney, and others, he had strong words: “Get rid of them all.”

But Trump’s valiant return to the conservative spotlight is not due to inertia on the part of the GOP, nor was his rehashing of topics from his old speeches just a display of egotism. They are a result of the weaknesses and divisions within both the Republican and Democratic parties. Republican politicians at the highest echelons of power did not even attend CPAC, and Trump called for cleansing them from the party. Trump and his speech topics resonate precisely because the Biden presidency provides the very conditions for preserving it. Biden’s project to “return to normal,” restore the legitimacy of U.S. hegemony and institutions, and attempt to return to the neoliberal order that preceded Trump’s presidency is doomed to fail. Trumpism here to stay.

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In this sense, Trump was by no means “grasping for continued relevance,” as some mainstream media outlets said of his speech. The GOP, particularly its increasingly far-right base, is still enamored of him and the issues — immigration and others — that propelled him to the political stage in 2015. Even if he does not run again in 2024, he and his supporters have made clear that he is still the movement’s standard bearer, and he will likely play kingmaker in the coming years. U.S. Senator Rick Scott, former Florida governor, multi-millionaire businessman, and potential 2024 candidate, was explicit about this. He emphasized that the GOP and “establishment Republicans” cannot take the party “backwards,” because, “if we do, we will lose the working base that President Trump so animated. We’re going to lose elections across the county and, ultimately, we’re going to lose our nation. We’re not going to let that happen.”

Nearly four months after the presidential election and over a month into the Biden presidency, it is as clear as ever that Trumpism and the capitalist crisis that created it are here to stay. CPAC brought this fact into full view, demonstrating why both the grassroots Republican base and its politicians are committed to Trump for the long haul. For all Biden’s promises of returning to normal, the truth is that his administration does not offer a meaningful answer to Trumpism. And far from offering an alternative for the working class, Biden continues to implement the same racist, capitalist, and imperialist agenda. As socialists, our task is not just to fight Trumpism and its gilded manifestations. We must fight to counter both racist parties of capital with the force of the working class, which is under attack now under the Biden administration as it was under Trump.

A Cuban Covid Vaccine Could Help Save the World’s Most Vulnerable

Mon, 01 Mar 2021 18:33:42 GMT

The news from Havana that Cuban medical researchers have been working on a domestically produced Covid-19 vaccine and are close to the human testing phase is not only great news for the island’s residents. Based on Cuba’s long history of providing long-term and emergency medical care for large swaths of the world’s most vulnerable poor populations, it has the potential to alter the trajectory of vaccinations across the globe.

In early December, The People’s Vaccine Alliance reported that “rich nations” that represent only 14 percent of the world’s population “had bought up more than half (53%) of all the most promising vaccines” that had been produced thus far. That means that nearly 70 lower-income countries would be able to vaccinate only one in 10 people. According to the Launch and Scale Speedometer, a project of the Duke Global Health Innovation Center, “High-income countries are hedging their bets” by reserving and buying up the overwhelming bulk of vaccine doses produced, “while low-income countries are left out.” According to its data as of February 15, “High-income countries currently hold a confirmed 4.6 billion does, upper middle-income countries hold 1.2 billion doses, lower middle-income countries hold 599 doses and low-income countries hold 670 million.” It is a microcosm of the inequity, misery, and death bred by a global system of exploitation known as capitalism.

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The Economist reported on January 27, “More than 85 poor countries will not have widespread access to coronavirus vaccines before 2023.

Freed from the Profit Motive

Cuba’s Soberana 2 (Spanish for sovereign) is a conjugate vaccine that fuses an antigen to a carrier molecule, a method that bolsters a vaccine’s stability and effectiveness. If it works, it will be yet another feather in the cap for the Cuban biotech sector that over a 30-year period has become one of the most advanced in the world, especially in immunology. It is a highly sophisticated research and development ecosystem, entirely publicly funded and managed. It is a key part of one of the world’s most efficient public health care systems in the world, and its mission has always been to develop drugs that prevent disease and treat patients who are at the greatest need medically.

That is the opposite of U.S. “Big Pharma,” which functions to maximize revenues as it creates “blockbuster” drugs (those for which it projects sales in excess of $1 billion) that are often for maladies that are far less important than what the world’s masses confront as part of daily survival. A case in point is gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), which for more than 100 years was known as “heartburn” and was largely an unpleasant (but almost never life threatening or even particularly serious) but for which Nexium, Prilosec, and other drugs that are now available without prescriptions were created and filled the coffers of a handful of wealthy mega-corporations.

Despite a global pandemic, that profit-driven motive is impossible to overcome; capitalism is going to be capitalism. And so even the World Health Organization’s COVAX program to build manufacturing capabilities and buy supply “so that 2 billion doses can be fairly distributed by the end of 2021” depends largely on the world’s major imperialist countries to “share” some of their vaccine wealth.

The idea that global capitalism is going to come to the rescue of the world’s most vulnerable is, of course, a pipe dream. At best, there will be token support, like that proposed by French president Emmanuel Macron. He told the Financial Times that Europe and the United States should allocate up to 5 percent of their current vaccine supplies to developing countries — a proposal immediately rejected by the Biden administration.

That’s why a Cuban vaccine is likely very good news for the world’s most exploited countries. The Cuban objective is to produce about 100 million doses in 2021, and to immunize its entire population by the end of the year. But Cuba’s population is less than 11.4 million people. If history is any indication, the other doses are likely to end up in the arms of impoverished people around the world, especially Africa and Latin America.

Cuban Medical Internationalism

To be sure, Cuba’s production capacity is insufficient to meet the 100-million-doses goal. While the United States has expressed zero interest, the island nation is working hard to team with contacts in Europe and Canada to expand production once the virus is ready. Then, Cuba’s unique approach to the “intellectual property” it generates through its biotech activity will kick in. While Cuba does patent the therapies it creates, it has typically sought mostly to recover its actual costs when selling its medicines — when it’s not providing them gratis to the most needy — and generally only charges near-market rates for patent licenses when the licensee is a wealthy capitalist company.

That is how the “business” side of Cuba’s medical internationalism has long worked. The other component has been its overseas medical missions, so broad in their sweep that the thought of Cuban Covid-19 vaccines not ending up as part of them is almost unimaginable.

In late 2019, the United Nations estimated that about 30,000 Cuban doctors were active in 67 countries, sometimes responding to disease outbreaks but just as likely to be working in longstanding clinics focused on illness prevention — just as health care is practiced in Cuba itself. Sending health workers around the globe began soon after the Cuban Revolution, and one academic study estimated that between the early 1960s and the mid-2000s, nearly 70,000 Cuban health workers had provided services in nearly 100 countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. During the same period, some 3,350 Cuban health workers every year worked abroad in two-year stints as part of the country’s “structural cooperation programs” helping establish health systems in 94 countries.

Some other examples include Cuba’s long-term care for 18,000 victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine, which it has been providing since 1990, helping treat everything from cancer to hair loss and skin disorders caused by exposure to radioactivity. And when the end of apartheid in South Africa led to “white flight” of so many of that country’s physicians, Cuba began a cooperative agreement in 1995 that has sent hundreds of doctors to that country while inviting medical students from South Africa to study in Cuba.

Whatever one sees as the limitations of Cuba’s 1959 revolution, there can be no denying that the country has built a health care system that puts most of the developed world to shame. There are no private hospitals or clinics — the government operates the national system. No one gets a bill for medical services. Medicines are free. When there is a charge for therapeutic drugs for visitors, it is so low as to be nearly unfathomable for people in the United States — as documentarian Michael Moore famously showed in his film “Sicko,” when he took 9/11 first responders from New York City to the island.

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All of this is a testament to the power of a planned economy that puts human needs before profit. Even with the problems of the Cuban leadership, Cuba’s revolution that overthrew an oppressive capitalist regime that ruled in the service primarily of U.S. imperialism nearly eradicated illiteracy and infant mortality, established free, universal education, and began a long-term project to build one of the world’s most effective health care systems aimed at keeping people healthy, not bankrupting them if they are unfortunate enough to get sick.

That’s some of what we fight for when we fight for socialism.

Big Challenges Remain

For Cuba to fulfill this promise of its vaccine helping the impoverished of the world, it will have to overcome its own current desperate situation. Its Covid-19 statistics have been getting worse of late, with confirmed cases growing to more than 1,000 a day — far fewer than in the United States, but enough to put a big strain on the system.

This has been accompanied by growing economic strains beyond those put on the island every day by U.S. imperialism’s criminal blockade, the full version of which has been going on since 1962 — some 59 years. Cuba depends on tourism for much of its income, and the global pandemic has grinded that largely to a halt. The country’s economy contracted by 11 percent in 2020. People have been forced to line up every day outside supermarkets and other food shops just to get basic goods. These strains have compelled the Cuban government to take some emergency steps for which imperialism has long been clamoring, including allowing for some new self-employment.

Beyond those steps, there are the reforms that the ruling bureaucracy has been undertaking for many years now to increase the private sector overall and open the island to further foreign investment. The more that the world’s capitalists are invited to Cuba, and the more the Cuban government itself undoes its planned economy and adapts to “market forces,” the greater the threats to the country’s remarkable health care system. That would be a loss not only for the Cuban people, but for people the world over. The answer to Cuba’s problems lies in democratic decision making by its workers to protect and expand the gains of the 1959 revolution, along with expanded international solidarity and a global campaign to end the U.S. blockade.

Meanwhile, the Soberana 2 vaccine — which tens of thousands of Cubans will soon be getting as part of initial human testing — has urgency both in terms of health and economics. Cuba’s dedicated scientists are doing their best, and they don’t have any corporate bosses poking their heads into their labs reminding them of a fiduciary responsibility to produce fictitious capital for shareholders.

That’s good news for the entire world.

A Sledgehammer: Review of Judas and the Black Messiah

Mon, 01 Mar 2021 17:41:40 GMT

If, as Berthold Brecht postulates, art is a hammer which shapes reality, then great art is a sledgehammer which clears away the dross and beats reality into a form that lays bare the interconnections of social being. Shaka King’s Judas and the Black Messiah, detailing the assassination of former Illinois Black Panther Party Chairperson Fred Hampton, is a work of great art.

While watching this movie again and again, I was bothered by a question: how could such a great political film, which lays bare the institutional racism reaching to the highest levels of the state organs, and reinforces the demand to disarm, defund and abolish the police raised by the Black Lives Matter Movement, be made? Why this movie, at this time, especially given the political context, which has also seen the evidence of the collusion between the police, the FBI, and the politicos in the assassination of Malcolm X?

After all, the making of a movie with such fine production values as Judas and the Black Messiah is not cheap, in this case an estimated $26,000,000, which isn’t chump change, but is well below the average cost of $65,000,000 for a typical Hollywood movie.

I was not satisfied by the easy explanation that it was the result of the Black Lives Matter uprising, which has radically changed political dynamics in the U.S. and has reactivated the Black movement for civil rights and liberation. After all, there have been the civil rights movements in the past, and a civil war fought by Black soldiers on the side of the Union resulted in a racist movie like D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. Even films like Mississippi Burning, while showing racism, tended to reduce it to particular individuals at a particular time, in reality obfuscating the essential racist nature of the capitalist state apparatus.

This time, something is different, and I think that the “something different” finally reflects the change in the composition of the U.S. working class. Black and Brown workers are becoming the majority, for example the state of more than 50 percent of California’s workforce is of Latinx descent. Also, more people of color have entered the ranks of the petit bourgeoisie and thus have the financial wherewithal to help bankroll artistic productions.

This “something different” is reflected in a change of consciousness emerging among the growing layer of activists associated with the Black liberation movement, where important breaks with the traditional graveyard of social movements, the Democratic Party, and its careerist Black sheep dogs are happening. This can be seen in the repudiation by Black Lives Matter-Inland Empire and the BLM10, representing large chapters of the Black Lives Matter movement, of the unaccountable and Democratic Party promoters and self-proclaimed leaders of the BLM Global Network, who in 2020 alone raked in $90,000,000 in donations.

The growth in the number of Black filmmakers like Boots Riley and Shaka King are also evidence of this. In a certain sense, the production of Judas and the Black Messiah represents that leap in consciousness catching up to the class realities of life in the U.S.

A Nearly Perfect Film

Spoiler alert. I am not going to describe the film’s scenes, other than in a very general sense, because you need to see this film without preconceived images in your head.

In nearly every way, Judas and the Black Messiah is a perfect film. Like all great art, its essential message is more, much more than the overt content. From the screenplay script, by Shaka King and Will Berson, who strip away any potential superfluous filler, to the marvelous acting of Daniel Kaluuya (Fred Hampton), LaKeith Stanfield (William O’Neal), Dominique Fishback (Deborah Johnson) and Jesse Plemons (Roy Mitchell) in lead roles, to the supporting cast of Dominique Thorne (Judy Harmon), Algee Smith (Jake Winters), Martin Sheen (J. Edgar Hoover), Terayle Hill (George Sams) and all the rest of those actors who populate the screen, do so with a presence and an understanding of the intention of the work.

The background music, mostly stark and which hits you like a blast, is formed for the most part from the two most important notes in the Blues scale, the third and the flat seventh, signaling the importance of the scene by its level of intensity. Even the closing song, “I’ll Fight for You” by H.E.R allows the film to create a denouement which is not an end, but just another beginning.

The movie is simply outstanding in its ability to capture the raw essence of the times. Credit for that must go to Fred Hampton Jr. and his mother, Deborah Johnson, now known as Akua Njeri, who acted as cultural advisors to director King, and to Njeri who acted as a personal advisor to Dominique Fishman.

Every scene is riveting and connected with the underlying thematic layers which form the basis of not only the plot and storyline, but with this tragedy of immense proportions. Judas and the Black Messiah is the Greek tragedy tradition writ modern. It’s a story of contrasts between William O’Neal, a car thief and minor criminal turned FBI informant, George Sams, another FBI operative, on the one hand, and Fred Hampton, Deborah Johnson, Mark Clarke (also killed in the police assassination of Hampton), Jake Winters, and all those members and allies of the Panthers, the Young Patriots, the Young Lords, and the gangs like The Crowns, who know which side of the class struggle they are on.

O’Neal, played by LaKeith Stanfield in an edgy, never comfortable, never authentic persona, is a person without moral redemption. He is given choices, multiple times, most unpalatable but choices nonetheless, to act in an honorable fashion, to refuse to bow to the pressures placed upon him by the FBI and the circumstances which surrounded him.

His actions and those of the other FBI informant Sams, are contrasted with the choices of sacrifice, selflessness, and death chosen by Hampton, Clark, Johnson and all the others in the community of resistance which the Panther Party represented. The greatness in the art of this film is in the uncompromising portrayal of the contrast between choices which all the main characters face, including those made by O’Neal’s FBI handler, Agent Roy Mitchell, when confronted with the stark and vile racism of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, and those who surrounded him.

Certainly, while the events of Hampton’s assassination took place more than 50 years ago, the context of the fight for Black liberation is as fresh as tomorrow’s next ‘cop kills innocent Black person’ headline. The Black Lives Matter uprising triggered by the cop murders is the intense backdrop which frames the context of the essential theme of Judas and the Black Messiah.

The message of the film is clear and plain: be like Fred Hampton, not like William O’Neal. What matters is the legacy of your commitment to building a better world.

So let me say a few words about how some people have criticized this film, seeing it as demoralizing or as promoting hopelessness, After watching the film three times, and noting carefully how it was structured, that is not a conclusion I drew. It is an exposition of the raw reality which faces revolutionaries in the imperialist centers, and doesn’t try to hide, romanticize, or prettify the ways in which the state will try and eliminate all those who present a threat to capitalist rule.

This is the naked lunch, real life on the fork of reality with which you are confronted by the life and death choices. I found Judas and the Black Messiah life affirming, symbolized by the birth of Fred Hampton Jr. 25 days after his father was murdered, and with the knowledge that his mother and he are both active in the movement, and that some of the work initiated by the BPP is still making a difference. You can kill revolutionaries, but you can’t kill the Revolution.

The song by H.E.R. is itself a song of solidarity to those willing to pick up the torch, knowing full well that the road ahead will be hard traveling.

A Personal Note

In November, 1969, I was a newly hired political organizer operating in Regina, Saskatchewan. The University of Saskatchewan, Regina Campus, Students Union had invited Fred Hampton to speak to the student body about the struggles of the Black Panther Party in the U.S.A and the fight for Black liberation in context of the rising level of police repression.

I got to meet him as part of a group of political activists which had helped organize his visit. Hampton and his two associates were on a speaking tour of Canadian universities to raise money for the Bobby Seale Defense Fund.

His speech was electric, shocking to the 700 almost all white student body attendees, with the exception of several First nations and Metis students, including Harry Daniels, who was to become national president for the Metis Association of Canada. Most had never heard the police being referred to as “pigs.”

The theme I most remember is Hampton’s stress on the unity amongst the oppressed peoples of the earth. His viewpoint was that of a revolutionary Marxist, internationalist to the core, who stressed the similarities of the oppression people of colour faced, and the need for revolutionaries of all countries to work together.

At the end of his speech, he spoke about the repression by the Chicago Police Department and the work of the FBI in assassinating the national leaders of his party. He prophesied that he would probably be dead within the year. He was assassinated two weeks later.

On December 12, 1969, the political activists in the city of Regina organized a candlelight march from the campus to the headquarters of the city police department to protest the police murder of Fred Hampton and a 19 year old Metis youth, shot and killed by the police the previous day. Regina has a history of radical actions. It is the spiritual home of the socialist movement in Canada and of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, whose Regina Manifesto declared in stirring tones that “We shall not rest until Capitalism is eradicated.”

Of all the political struggles during those days, and in the decades to come, helping to organize this statement of resistance on a cold winter’s night was one of the acts I remember most vividly and most proudly adding to the list of Regina’s radical tradition.

The choices Fred Hampton makes in Judas and the Black Messiah, are the choices that he made in real life. His choice to become a revolutionary is the choice all those who wish to change the world are or will be confronted with. This film, like a sledgehammer changing reality, will be an aid in helping people make that choice.

See this film.

The fortunate Marxist: Ernie Tate (1934-2021)

Sun, 28 Feb 2021 17:36:38 GMT

This article originally appeared in Canadian Dimension on February 15, 2021

Born poor on Belfast’s Shankill Road in the midst of the Great Depression was certainly no entré to a life that would cross paths with Bertrand Russell, Vanessa Redgrave, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir.

Ernest (Ernie) Tate would nevertheless work closely with luminaries such as these and many others who, like him, opposed the war in Vietnam in the 1960s. A lifelong revolutionary socialist, Tate was a leading organizer of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, worked for Russell’s Peace Foundation and its International War Crimes Tribunal, and partnered with the then leftist, David Horowitz (now a prominent conservative spokesman), in taking the anti-war side at an Oxford Union debate.

This was quite something for a lad who dropped out of high school before he was 14. As a teenager Tate apprenticed as a machinist’s attendant in the Belfast Mills. At that young age, Ernie could look forward to a life of dreary, non-union factory labour, his day commencing with the screech of workplace sirens. Keen to escape this fate, a 21-year-old Tate emigrated to Canada in 1955.

Young Ernie soon crossed paths with Ross Dowson, proprietor of the Toronto Labour Bookshop, a pioneering figure in the small Canadian movement of dissident communists who aligned with Leon Trotsky. Dowson, whose brothers Murray and Hugh, were also part of this oppositional politics, ran for mayor in Toronto under the banner, “Vote Dowson, Vote for a Labor Mayor, Vote for the TROTSKYIST Candidate.” His campaigns, at their highwater mark in the late 1940s, garnered 17 percent of the vote.

Tate, who landed his first job at Toronto’s premier department store because his Ulster lineage seemingly aligned him with the store’s patriarch, Timothy Eaton, quit in disgust when he found out that his two-week paycheque totalled $60. He found better paying work in a variety of factory employments at Maple Leaf Milling, Radio Valve, and Amalgamated Electric. But Tate longed for more out of life than a mundane job.

The young man soon joined Dowson’s Socialist Educational League. A stern taskmaster, Dowson schooled the new recruit in the rudimentary texts of revolutionary Marxism, tutored Tate in public speaking, and assigned him tasks of writing for and selling the League’s newspaper, Workers Vanguard.

Ernie Tate as a “socialist missionary” with his cross-country literature truck, late 1950s.

Not yet 25, Ernie’s competence and commitment attracted the attention of the international leadership of the Trotskyist movement. The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the United States called on him to help in recruiting youth in the late 1950s. When in New York on this assignment, Ernie met Hannah Lerner and she returned to Toronto with him, where they married in 1957. During these years, Tate also twice attended an SWP educational centre, the New Jersey Mountain Spring Camp, his last participation in the classes offered there being in 1960.

In Canada, Dowson sent Tate on cross-country tours. He lived out of a truck, and sold revolutionary literature to pay for his meals. It was “missionary work” for socialism. He saw the country, made contact with workers, and crossed paths with all manner of militants, including Communist Party members fleeing the Soviet Union’s sinking political ship. In the aftermath of Nikita Khruschev’s 1956 speech revealing Stalin’s atrocities many dissident and disillusioned communists were finally ready to talk to a Trotskyist revolutionary. It was all, in Tate’s words, a “terrific education.”

At the height of the Cold War, in which Moscow and Washington seemed trapped in an irrational race to stockpile more and more nuclear weapons, Tate took umbrage at the building of an official fallout shelter at Queen’s Park. He brazenly defaced the ridiculously inconsequential plywood and cement structure, spray painting “Ban the Bomb” on one of its walls. Hauled into court, and fined $50 for public vandalism, Tate was unrepentant. He declared that he was prepared to take to graffiti again if it might impress upon people the necessity to halt the arms race.

Ernie Tate (middle) as a “socialist missionary” with his cross-country literature truck, late 1950s.

The Toronto Socialist Educational League grew, merged with like-minded radicals in Vancouver, and became the League for Socialist Action (LSA). Its members played a leading role in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in the early 1960s. They also harboured black radicals like the Monroe County, North Carolina advocate of armed self-defence against racist attack, Robert F. Williams, when he fled the United States. On the run from the FBI, Williams was designated “armed and dangerous.” The LSA harboured the African-American fugitive, distributed Williams’s magazine, The Crusader, and helped him abscond to Cuba.

Tate spent much of the early 1960s on the west coast. Hannah and he parted amicably, but the two did not divorce until the 1980s. Now partnered with another comrade, Ruth Robertson, Tate was charged with consolidating the Vancouver local of the LSA.

He faced an uphill battle to bring warring factions in the small Trotskyist milieu together. His difficulties were compounded by the New Democratic Party (NDP), which the LSA’s members joined to participate in political campaigns and causes. Too often, the Trotskyists found themselves ostracized for their left-wing views, even expelled.

As an unpaid organizer, Tate scrambled to make ends meet. He lived from hand-to-mouth, the material situation quite dire. Ruth experienced a difficult pregnancy, culminating in the birth of a son, Michael, in 1963.

Picket line skirmishes often left Tate responsible for the well-being of arrested comrades. Ernie himself received a suspended sentence of four months on one “obstruction” charge. If there was camaraderie aplenty—Tate enjoying the company of poets like Milton Acorn and Al Purdy who were sympathetic to the LSA cause—Vancouver was nonetheless a difficult assignment.

Ruth Bullock, Ernie Tate, and Ken Orchard at an anti-nuclear bomb demonstration, Vancouver 1963.

Tate loved the west coast city and the surrounding natural setting, one of great physical beauty. And the dreary rains reminded him of his Belfast home. But the internal political turmoil dividing comrades in the branch rarely let up. Things worsened when Ernie and Ruth separated, and she departed for Toronto with their son.

With the SWP looking for someone to relocate from North America to London, England to consolidate those sympathetic to its section of the movement, Tate volunteered for the assignment. Arriving in London in 1965, Ernie rented an office for Pioneer Books. It consisted of a few rooms above a butcher’s shop at 8 Toynbee Street, and offered a range of Marxist literature and SWP publications not generally available in London.

Ernie consolidated a relationship with Jess MacKenzie, a Scottish comrade who had also emigrated to Canada. She came to London in late 1966 on her way to a Brussels Youth Conference. Jess took over running the bookstore, freeing Ernie to spend more time on his organizing work. Mackenzie and Tate would be inseparable for the next 55 years.

Tate’s political work in London was to unify disparate forces aligned with the Socialist Workers Party, which was affiliated with what was known as the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. World Trotskyism had fragmented over the course of the 1950s with different groups claiming to represent the Fourth International that Trotsky had founded in the late 1930s.

In Britain there were three established Trotskyist groups—the International Socialists, Militant, and the Socialist Labor League (SLL)—which also claimed membership in another wing of the Fourth International. Tate’s task was to regroup those outside of these political organizations, long aligned with their own specific bodies and fractured by differences, many of which Ernie thought either arcane or animated by historic but all too personal antagonisms. This necessarily meant delicate negotiations among fissiparous comrades, as well as challenging established rivals on the Trotskyist left, which the SWP thought could never be assimilated.

It was tough sledding. Tate was physically beaten by members of the SLL outside one of their meetings. He had the temerity to sell a pamphlet criticizing the group’s leader, Gerry Healy.

The hooliganism became an international cause célebré. Tate, who publicized the attack as an assault on workers’ democracy, refused to back down when Healy threatened legal action. In the end, the distinguished Polish Marxist, biographer of Trotsky and Stalin, and future G.M. Trevelyan Lecturer at the University of Cambridge (1966-67), Isaac Deutscher, rallied to Tate’s defence. He used his considerable authority within the emerging New Left of the mid-to-late 1960s to summon Healy to his home and, with Ernie present, upbraided the thuggery of the SLL, foreign as it was to the practice of the socialist movement.

Tate, MacKenzie, and a veteran of British far-left politics, Pat Jordan, established the International Marxist Group (IMG) as the section of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International in Britain. Jordan was once described by a London newspaper in 1968 as “the most dangerous man in Britain.”

The IMG became the vehicle through which a small contingent of Trotskyists made common cause with a growing youth radicalization and rising opposition to the war in Vietnam. Tate’s organizational acumen and his personal discipline and commitment were in good part responsible for the successes of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. He contributed mightily to the work of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation’s anti-war agitation and its War Crimes Tribunal, conducted in two 1967 sessions in Sweden and Denmark. Sartre’s On Genocide (1968) presented some of the findings.

Protest demonstrations in 1967-68 saw Tate join Jordan and the increasingly prominent New Leftist and former President of the Oxford Union, Tariq Ali, on speakers’ podiums at massive anti-war rallies. Currently one of Britain’s leading public intellectuals, and long associated with the New Left Review, Tariq Ali soon became the visible face of the anti-war movement. Recruited to the IMG by Tate, Ali introduced Ernie to celebrities like Vanessa Redgrave, who lent their support to the growing campaign against the American invasion and bombing of Vietnam.

Tariq Ali (front) and Ernie Tate (behind, glasses/tie), 1968.

Tate often accompanied Ali, worried that his friend and comrade would be attacked by right-wing opponents. There were indeed skirmishes in which Ernie was physically assailed. One pitched battled, in London’s Grosvenor Square, was ostensibly the inspiration behind the Mick Jagger/Keith Richards anthem to the moment, “Street Fighting Man”: “Ev’ry where I hear the sound/Of marching charging feet, boy/’Cause summer’s here and the time is right/For fighting in the street, boy.”

At a massive rally in Hyde Park, October 27, 1968, Tate and others addressed a massive throng of 200,000 in what is remembered as one of the great anti-war protests of the 1960s. The Guardian found Ernie anything but a poster-boy for the flamboyant counter-culture of the time. This “able Ulsterman in his early thirties, with unmodishly short dark hair, the black-rimmed spectacles of an advertising executive, and a terse, direct, manner,” seemed an incomprehensible incongruity.

For all the advances made, and exhilarating struggles, Ernie felt he should return to Canada, where he could secure paid employment and contribute materially to the support of his son. He had originally signed on to devote two years to the work in Britain, and that had stretched into four. Financial support that Tate expected to be forthcoming from the LSA in Canada rarely materialized. So in 1969, Ernie and Jess returned to Toronto, needing some time to recharge their batteries and get themselves on a more secure economic footing.

They found the LSA much changed. It had grown significantly, its membership now in the hundreds. Ross Dowson seemed uninterested in Ernie taking up a paid position within the LSA.

Jess, whose experience in running a bookstore was considerable, was passed over when the organization was looking for someone to oversee their Cumberland Street shop. She found paid employment at Ma Bell and worked with a dedicated corps of women’s liberation activists. They played important roles in advocating for women’s reproductive rights, defending Dr. Henry Morgentaler from vigilante attack and legal assault, and putting out an early women’s liberation newspaper, Velvet Fist.

Ernie and Jess thus remained in the LSA, but distanced themselves somewhat from the leadership. Tate continued to be a member of the International’s Control Commission. The couple remained affiliated with the LSA and its successors for years, outlasting Ross Dowson. Younger LSAers clashed with Dowson over a number of issues, including how to relate to the NDP and Canadian nationalism. Dowson left the organization to form the Forward Group in the early 1970s.

Ernie remained a senior voice within the LSA, advising comrades on the best ways to weather the storm of Dowson’s departure, fuse with other Fourth International-affiliated groups to form the Revolutionary Workers League (RWL) in 1977, and move the new organization in more decisively working-class directions.

Eventually, however, Ernie and Jess found that the SWP-affiliated Canadian section of the Trotskyist movement was not what it had once been. The RWL’s “turn to industry,” which Tate had hopes would integrate the Trotskyist movement more effectively with trade unionism and its struggles, never really jelled. Instead it descended into a wooden insistence that all comrades find factory jobs, abandoning professions, higher education, and much of their sense of self. Even getting a trade was frowned upon, regarded as joining the privileged, aristocratic section of the working class.

More and more, the RWL took its cues from an SWP that Tate thought obsessed with otherworldly assessments of an impending revolutionary class struggle that was supposedly erupting from below. As comrade’s lives were squandered in factory employments where the scope for union work was limited, the American leadership removed itself more and more from the terrain of international politics, where the Trotskyist movement had always flourished.

As the 1990s opened with the Iraq War, the RWL, now renamed the Communist League (CL), had become little more than an appendage of the SWP. It no longer published its own press, but sold the SWP’s Militant. Tate, his politics forged on the anvil of anti-war movements, was disgusted when the CL absented itself from protests, which some described as “patriotic” and “anti-American.”

By this point, Ernie and Jess had left the RWL, departing in the late 1980s. They never, however, renounced their understandings of the importance of the organized revolutionary movement, or the ideals and principles animating their involvement in it. Ernie remained throughout his life a revolutionary socialist and committed Marxist. As he moved out of the RWL, he picked up his longstanding activism in the labour movement.

Upon returning to Canada in 1969, Ernie worked for a time as a stationary engineer in Toronto’s west end Canada Packer’s plant, and was a union steward with the Packinghouse Workers Union. Upgrading his work skills at Ryerson Polytechnic (where his essays won academic prizes), Ernie ended up employed as a shift, then chief, engineer at Domtar Papers from 1975-1977.

He was hired at Toronto Hydro in 1977, where he worked until he retired in 1995. Active in Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Local One (which eventually amalgamated with Local 1000), Ernie served as a chief steward and helped to galvanize the somewhat somnolent union, which had not taken job action for well over a decade. As vice president of the local, Tate was one of the leaders of a successful 1989 strike, working with President Rob Fairley and a team of union militants.

Ernie Tate (front left) and Toronto Hydro strikers, 1989. Photo by Jess MacKenzie.

Tate continued to be employed at Toronto Hydro into the 1990s, working in energy management and conservation. Eventually, he was assigned to City Hall, coordinating Hydro’s relations with the municipality. He played a key role in the late-1990s building of a united front that opposed the Mike Harris Conservative government’s plan to privatize the province’s hydro-electrical power industry.

Over the course of the last decades, Ernie and Jess were ever-present in Toronto’s broad, left-wing community. They attended rallies and demonstrations, public forums and left-wing gatherings, radical cultural events and anti-war protests. Active in Toronto’s Socialist Project, Ernie and Jess were enthusiastic supporters of the struggle to up the minimum wage. They connected with younger activists in the Fight for $15 and Fairness.

Elders of the left, the revolutionary couple travelled to socialist conferences, in New York, Chicago, London, and elsewhere. In 2019 Ernie was a featured speaker at an historic gathering addressing the life and work of Leon Trotsky, held in Havana, Cuba.

With Jess’s collaboration, Ernie published a two-volume memoir of his life on the far left in Canada and Great Britain. Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s and 1960s (2014) is a unique resource, a rewarding read for anyone interested in a gritty account of mid-twentieth century revolutionary movements.

It has recently been a valued source of information for the 2020-21 Undercover Policing Inquiry, taking place in England. Its hearings have revealed the illegal and immoral activities resorted to as police agents surreptitiously wormed their way into left wing organizations like the IMG. Its office keys were copied and passed on to MI5, which subsequently burgled the group’s premises to secure membership lists and financial records. These undercover officers—at least six of whom were, at various times in the late 1960s and early 1970s, tasked with spying on or reporting about Tate—went so far as to form intimate relationships with targeted female leftists.

One of Ernie’s last political acts was to provide compelling testimony to these hearings. He condemned the “gross violations of people’s civil liberties” that had taken place over many years, orchestrated by “the British security services.” Tate expressed the hope that the Inquiry would lead to “legislation and public oversight” limiting the ability of the police and other forces of the state to “harass those who happen to be critical of society or are fighting for social change.”

A working-class autodidact, Ernie Tate was a literate and cultured man, able to reflect engagingly on art and literature, film and music. He could build a cottage and renovate a house, organize a demonstration, engage a crowd, and convince others of the need to use their particular talents to fight for a better world. A love of food and sociability, valued friendships and good health, were paramount in his everyday life.

Tate was an example of what the working-class is capable of at its best. He found in revolutionary Marxism answers to big questions. This body of thought defined his approach to life within a capitalism whose accomplishments he recognized but whose acquisitive individualism, exploitative essence, and myriad oppressions he abhorred.

Ernie understood well the strengths of the Old Left in which he was educated, but he appreciated as well the promise and possibilities of the many New Lefts that he saw come and go, all of which he regarded with a critical but buoyant hope.

Ernie Tate and and Jess MacKenzie.

Revered and respected among Trotskyists throughout the world, Ernie was a man of deep convictions. He held to them, through thick and thin. Compromise over cherished principles was not something he could countenance. Yet he was also capable of great warmth and generosity, which he routinely bestowed on those with whom he disagreed. His smile enticing, he could laugh at himself as well as the absurdities of a social order he knew was sick to its core.

At a book launch for his Revolutionary Activism I spoke of Ernie’s sacrifices for the revolutionary left. Not one to hold his tongue, Ernie upbraided me. His life had not been one of sacrifice at all, he insisted. Rather, it was a unique adventure, one in which the rewards received and work conducted in the struggle to build socialism far outweighed anything else that might be taken into consideration. He was a happy man, comfortable in the sincere belief that he was fortunate to have had the opportunity to do what he had done.

Ernie Tate died at his Toronto home on February 5, 2021, aged 86, succumbing to pancreatic cancer that he battled for months. He was cared for by his loving partner and political collaborator, Jess MacKenzie, and will be sorely missed by many. He leaves a legacy of his example, one that will guide those fighting for the day when, “The Internationale/Will be the human race.”

Nationwide Mobilizations Support Organizing Drive by Amazon Workers in Alabama

Sun, 28 Feb 2021 17:34:12 GMT

This article was originally published on February 21 on Socialist Resurgence.

About 50 solidarity actions in 25 states mobilized hundreds in solidarity with the Amazon workers in the middle of an intense union drive in Bessemer, Ala. Initiated by the Southern Workers Assembly, actions spread from the South to the North as labor activists realized the historic moment and potential to win a union vote at Amazon.

Socialist Resurgence members joined an action organized by the Connecticut Workers Crisis Response (CWCR) outside an Amazon warehouse in North Haven, Conn.. A spirited group of 30 union members, students, and activists stood out in the frigid temperatures. Their message was heard by Amazon truck drivers who blasted their horns in support as they turned into the warehouse facility. Lupe, a 21-year veteran banquet server, shop steward, and executive board member of UNITE HERE Local 217, said she attended the rally because she knew first hand what anti-union campaigns looked like. Lupe played a leading role in organizing her own Hilton hotel in 2017 and the Sheraton hotel in Stamford, Conn., in 2018 against union busters Cruz and Associates.

In Philadelphia, Socialist Resurgence members reported that close to 100 people were picketing outside the union-busting law firm of Morgan and Lewis, which was hired by Amazon to run their anti-union campaign. Morgan Lewis, with more than 2200 attorneys globally, is considered one of the leading union-busting law firms in the U.S. From helping President Reagan bust the Air Traffic Controllers strike in 1981 to representing Major League Baseball during the baseball players’ strikes in the 1990s, it has a long history of fighting workers.

In Rhode Island, Greenleaf Compassion Care Center cannabis workers who recently went public with their intention to join UFCW Local 328 gathered to send a message of solidarity to the workers in Bessemer.

In Oakland, Trent Willis, president of ILWU local 10, led union chants of a crowd of over 100 activists. John Hopkins, a former Amazon worker at the San Leandro facility, shared his experiences with union busting and said, “There was a purge of people that the (Amazon) see as potential leaders, pro-union people.”

Steve Leigh, a member of the Revolutionary Socialist Network, reports from Seattle that 150 people rallied in Renton, Wash., in a solidarity action organized by DSA, 350.org, Transit Riders Union, King County Labor Council, and other groups. “The focus of the rally was two-fold,” he writes, “Support Amazon worker organizing and win rights for tenants. The rally started at the Multi-Family Housing Association headquarters and marched to an Amazon Flex Warehouse. The housing association was picked as the target because it is a front for large landlords and actively opposes tenants’ rights in the legislature. The organizers stressed the connection of the two issues. Amazon has actively opposed a tax on big business to provide affordable public housing. ‘Amazon has turned Greater Seattle … unaffordable to ordinary people. While Amazon’s workers struggle to make rent, Bezos has earned enough money through the pandemic to give each of his workers $150,000 bonuses and still be as rich as he was before Covid,’ said the Facebook page before the rally.

“At the rally, speakers explained the horrible situation for renters and workers. One woman was laid off because of Covid and she had to drop health insurance to pay her rent. An Amazon worker explained that Amazon moved her co-workers to the night shift with no explanation, effectively firing single mothers. Besides support for Amazon workers in Bessemer, the rally called for rent control, an increase in affordable housing, and just cause eviction. After the rally, the demonstrators marched several blocks to the Amazon warehouse, chanting along the way, and rallied again. As they left they warned Amazon, ‘We’ll be back!’”

Perhaps some of the most important actions happened across the South, where “Right to Work” laws dominate the discussion and union organizing is becoming a priority as car manufacturing, logistics, and other industries are beginning to pop up in more locations. Actions in North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and New Orleans, while modestly sized and relatively left-wing in character, are important reminders of the radical tradition that once challenged the conservative and racist legacy of slavery and the Jim Crow era.

The long tradition of union organizing in Bessemer and the surrounding area could experience a revival thanks to the leadership of the mostly Black workforce at Amazon. These workers are confronting a true monster, with far reaching tentacles and very deep pockets. The median income is $31,610, while Amazon earned $125,560,000,000 in just the last quarter.

The company, instead of using that money to address the needs of workers, is spending millions on an anti-union campaign. The campaign includes text messages, banners with anti-union messages strewn around the warehouse, and consultants who pull workers into captive audience meetings daily to harass and emotionally distress them.

More Perfect Union, a media outlet that empowers working people, broke the story about Amazon’s manipulating traffic lights to make organizing difficult. By changing traffic patterns Amazon hoped to prevent union organizers from talking to workers stopped at red lights near their facility.

Amazon, while running an brutal anti-union campaign, is also playing the long game and hedging their bets that if the union vote does win they’ll face a weakened bargaining unit. The company is placing their strategy on Alabama’s “Right to Work” laws by weaving a contradictory narrative about the union forcing workers to pay dues through a “dues check-off” even though the laws allow workers to abstain from any financial contributions. Amazon hopes that if the union vote is successful they will find a divided workforce from which they can drive a wedge into the bargaining unit and eventually smash the union.

Solidarity on a massive scale is needed to overcome the many obstacles Amazon will put in the way. The absence of the AFL-CIO in mobilizing workers around the country to publicly support the union drive is noticeable. In a Washington Post article, Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, compared unions’ attempts to organize Amazon to the elusive white whale in Herman Melville’s novel, “Moby Dick.” Problems with this literary allusion aside, it’s unclear what the AFL-CIO’s strategy is in this fight. “This is just the beginning,” Trumka said. “I can promise you this is not the last effort.”

We know there are big legislative initiatives by organized labor centered on the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act). The PRO Act is a bill that organized labor is hoping will undo “Right to Work ” legislation. While there’s no question that passing the PRO Act would be an advance for workers, relying on the legislative approach and the Democratic Party to make change ultimately weakens the working class’s ability to fight the bosses. A major question in the case of the union fight in Bessemer concerns how labor leaders might be negotiating with politicians behind the scenes. Does the lack of mobilizations involve horse trading with Democratic Party leaders to win legislation for the PRO Act?

Today all organized labor should be making giant public declarations of solidarity to show Amazon workers that they are joining a vibrant and dynamic movement. They need a movement that not only organizes in Bessemer but takes on all of the Amazon warehouses and hubs, which employ 400,000 workers in the country.

Virtual Panel: Black Socialists on BLM, Class Struggle and Revolution

Sat, 27 Feb 2021 17:46:41 GMT

Join Left Voice for a panel with Black socialists who were part of the uprisings in 2020 to reflect on the movement last summer, the next steps for the struggle, and what it will take to win true liberation.

To register to receive the zoom link click here: https://forms.gle/341AKvjeh77ktyo6A

Panelists:

Tristan Taylor is a leader in the Black-led group Detroit Will Breathe and a member of Left Voice. Tristan led the actions and protests demanding justice for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. He and dozens of other activists face felony charges for their organizing.

Darrin Johnson is a leader in the group Black Power Collective. Formerly called Black Lives Matter-Inland Empire, the group recently broke with the BLM Global Network. Darrin is a leader in the fight against police brutality in the Inland Empire.

Julia Wallace is a frontline worker and leader in SEIU Drop the Cops, a group aiming to kick the police out of unions. She is also a member and international correspondent of Left Voice.

The purpose of the panel is to engage with fighters in Black, youth, and working-class struggles, reflect on the movement, and, most importantly, how to move forward. International socialist fighters will also be contributing their experiences throughout the discussion.

The event will be on Feb 27th – 3PM PT/6PM ET.

To register to receive the zoom link click here: https://forms.gle/341AKvjeh77ktyo6A

The event will also be streamed live on Facebook.

Biden Ratchets Up Military Tensions with China

Sat, 27 Feb 2021 15:41:03 GMT

On Wednesday, the United States sent its second warship this month, the USS Curtis Wilbur, through the Taiwan Strait. This contentious waterway separates mainland China from Taiwan — which China characterizes as a breakaway province, even though Taiwan has de facto independence from the mainland.

Biden ran a “tough on China” campaign, so his administration’s recent military exercises aimed at China (including exercises in the South China Sea) come as no surprise. The ruling class — both its Democratic and Republican wings — are united in their project to deter China’s economic and geopolitical rise in the context of U.S. imperialism’s diminished hegemony.

As the pandemic deepens the economic and political trends that have developed since the 2008 global economic crisis, interstate tensions — such as the competition between the United States and China — are likely to intensify. That means the growing rivalry between the two countries is a strategic question for the United States regardless of who is president. Trump’s aggressive rhetoric poured fuel on the U.S.-China relations fire, and his trade war signaled a marked escalation in tensions, but it was the Obama administration — of which Biden was a part — that architected increased U.S. military presence in the Pacific through the so-called “Pivot to Asia.”

Despite Biden’s campaign promises, there is no “going back to normal” in the world order, especially when it comes to China. Biden has proven his intent to maintain a harsh line against China by selecting Anthony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, two prominent China hawks, to run his foreign policy team. At the same time, the president and his allies in both imperialist parties have promised not only to maintain but expand military spending, already at an all-time high despite the economic crisis. Growing regional crises, such as the one in Myanmar, also threaten to deepen U.S.-China tensions across new terrain.

Taiwan’s Central Role in the Growing Conflict

In the game of chess between the United States and China, Taiwan occupies a particularly important place. For Beijing, the issue of reunification with Taiwan is a top priority because of the island’s geographic position and its advanced economy and technology sector, especially the country’s production of cutting-edge semiconductors that could give China strategic leverage in its competition with the United States.

The roots of Taiwan’s awkward place between China and the United States can be traced back to the triumph of the Chinese Revolution in 1949, which culminated in a civil war between China’s communists and the nationalist bourgeoisie represented by the Kuomintang (KMT). The U.S.-backed KMT retreated to Taiwan and set up a rival government in Taipei, 110 miles away from mainland China. In 1972, the Nixon Administration began a process of rapprochement with China, which culminated in Deng Xiaoping’s 1979 reforms aimed at capitalist restoration.

As part of those U.S.-Chinese negotiations, Washington broke official diplomatic ties with Taiwan in favor of reestablishing ties with China. Today, only a handful of countries in the world recognize the sovereignty of Taiwan, because doing so would complicate commercial relationships with China.

Despite that Nixon-era U.S. shift, Taiwan and the United States still maintain semi-official, albeit deliberately ambiguous, relations. These have established a delicate balance between the interests of Taiwan, the United States, and China. In recent years however, the limits of this strategic equilibrium have become clear as tensions between the United States and China have boiled to the surface. The Trump administration flirted with establishing official diplomatic ties with Taiwan; the Biden administration seems to be doubling down on Trump’s Taiwan policy both diplomatically and militarily through the promise of military aid.

With reunification a top priority for the Chinese Communist Party bureaucracy, the Biden administration’s provocations are widening the rift between Taiwan and the mainland. For Beijing, these moves also complicate China’s imperialist ambitions, posing a political threat to the aim of a unified Chinese state. Sooner or later the Taiwan issue is poised to bring the United States and China into greater conflict. For now, despite the relative decline of U.S. influence on a global stage, China remains the weaker party due to Washington’s military, economic, and technological advantages as well as its existing international relationships.

What Biden’s Imperialism Means for the Working Class

As tensions between the U.S. and China grow, even with Biden’s attempts at multilateralism and a rhetoric of “democracy,” Biden, as a representative of the capitalist class, won’t hesitate to use all of the mechanisms at U.S. imperialism’s disposal to ensure U.S. interests abroad. In just over a month since his inauguration, Biden has already launched a series of airstrikes in Syria and continues to impose brutal sanctions which affect workers in countries like Iran and Venezuela.

The U.S. Left has a special responsibility to show we have no appetite for imperialism of any kind. At the same time, organized opposition against the imperialist aims of the U.S. bipartisan regime does not mean we support the Chinese Communist Party bureaucracy, whose brutal restoration of capitalism in China has come at the expense of the millions of exploited masses in China. We stand in solidarity with the oppressed in China, Taiwan, and beyond, and against the ruling class around the world, especially here in the United States. And as the crisis intensifies, we need international solidarity among working people to address the international problems posed by capitalism.

Chilean Socialists Say: Not One Cent for the Cops!

Sat, 27 Feb 2021 00:42:05 GMT

Francisco Martinez, a street performer and juggler in the city of Panguipulli, was shot and killed by the military police, the Carabineros, on February 5. This is just one of numerous murders committed by Chilean police. They enjoy almost total impunity — even when they push a teenager off a bridge.

When millions of people took to the streets starting in October 2019, the police arrested thousands of people, and mutilated many more: over 200 people have lost one or both eyes. Yet while hundreds of young activists remain in prison, without evidence, not a single police officer has been charged with misconduct.

The social democratic opposition and the reformist Left have voted in favor of laws that allow police to stop people on the street without cause.

In response to this violence, the Revolutionary Workers Party (PTR) is running candidates for the Chilean Constituent Assembly and their new one-minute video has a clear message:

Not one cent for the cops!

To be precise, they are saying not one “peso” for the “pacos.” A Chilean peso is worth only about a tenth of a U.S. cent, so really more like: not even one tenth of a cent for the cops!

Instead, the PTR’s campaign, is calling for the elimination of all repressive laws, and the abolition of the police.

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A post shared by La Izquierda Diario Chile (@laizquierdadiariocl)

This campaign shows why we need an independent socialist party. Reformist socialists in the Democratic Party end up supporting the repressive apparatus. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez votes to fund ICE and the border wall, while Bernie Sanders calls for giving more money to police.

The revolutionary socialists of the PTR show it’s possible to run a campaign that takes up the demand of millions of oppressed people to defund and abolish the police!

Democrats Never Cared about Minimum Wage

Fri, 26 Feb 2021 23:13:50 GMT

Last night, hopes of a $15 minimum wage hit a major stumbling block. Elizabeth MacDonough, the Senate Parliamentarian, ruled that a provision of the third Covid-19 stimulus package that would raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour was ineligible for budget reconciliation. If Senate Democrats want to continue using this process to pass the bill with a simple majority — instead of the usual 60 votes needed to avoid a filibuster — they will need to either challenge MacDonough’s ruling or remove this provision. However, it’s unlikely that they have the votes for a simple majority, either.

Kamala Harris, who serves as President of the Senate through her position as vice president, has the authority to overrule MacDonough. However, she has refused to do so, despite the administration insisting that they are “absolutely committed” to a $15 minimum wage. Senate Democrats could also vote to overrule MacDonough (as they did in 2013 and Republicans did in 2017), or Chuck Schumer, as Senate Majority Leader, could simply fire her, as Republicans did to Robert Dove in 2001. The Democrats are not pursuing these options either, which raises the question: what exactly are they doing?

This situation illustrates a number of problems with the U.S. government as a system. The 60 votes required to prevent a filibuster is undemocratic, since it means that a majority alone is insufficient to pass legislation. It makes it especially difficult to pass legislation that deviates from politically moderate norms — that is, those on the right wing of the bourgeois political spectrum. Additionally, the Senate Parliamentarian is not an elected official — the U.S. population has no way of choosing them or holding them accountable. Furthermore, the decision for Harris to refuse to overturn the ruling was made internally within the White House, regardless of the wishes or needs of the population they are supposed to represent, two-thirds of whom support a $15 minimum wage.

Beyond the undemocratic nature of the Senate and its policies, the Democrats are clearly demonstrating that they are a fundamentally bourgeois party — their alliances do not lie with working people. If they truly wanted to raise the minimum wage as part of the stimulus package, they have several options they could pursue. Instead, they have chosen to prioritize governmental norms and procedures. This should come as no surprise. They are trying to balance two elements of their image as a party that are in conflict with each other: on the one hand, they want to portray themselves as the party that cares more about people’s suffering (unlike Trump); on the other hand, they want to portray themselves as the party that respects the institutions of government (also unlike Trump). The result is that they symbolically challenge the interests of capital only to the extent that it is politically beneficial, and not one step further. They’re willing to promote a higher minimum wage, but they aren’t willing to fight for it.

This is not a problem of individual politicians but of the deeply undemocratic structural nature and class character of the government and the Democratic Party overall. Voting in more progressive politicians may affect the details of how the story plays out — for example, Bernie Sanders is trying to pass an amendment that will pressure large companies into paying a $15 minimum wage in order to retain certain tax privileges and Ilhan Omar supports firing the parliamentarian — but it will not change the ultimate outcome. The purpose of the state is to manage class conflict in favor of the capitalists, and the system is designed in such a way that anyone who challenges this will be ultimately ineffectual, no matter the small reforms or local successes they may achieve. And even if the minimum wage was raised to $25, or $35, which would be a huge improvement for people’s living conditions, wage labor would still be fundamentally exploitative, prices would rise to compensate for increased wages, and the bosses and politicians would take the first opportunity available to attack these gains.

The basis of capitalism is the exploitation of the workers by the bosses, and no amount of reform will change that inherent fact of the system. That does not mean, of course, that we should throw our hands up and accept that nothing is to be done. Rather, we must fight for reforms such as a minimum wage hike through our own methods as workers, not by putting misplaced faith in capitalist parties who talk of reforms during election season and forget them as soon as they get elected. If we want to win a living wage for all workers, then we need to organize as workers to withhold our labor and demand the bosses to give us the concessions that we deserve. Through these means, we will both win the reforms and build working class power to eventually bring the entire exploitative system down.

So Much for the "Lesser Evil”: Biden Bombs Syria

Fri, 26 Feb 2021 18:08:06 GMT

Joe Biden’s first known military action since being inaugurated as president came February 25 in the form of vicious airstrikes on Syria. This serves as a reminder that for victims of U.S. imperialism abroad, there is no lesser evil.

Pentagon spokesman Jack Kirby claimed that the airstrikes were directed at a point along the Syria/Iraq border and destroyed facilities controlled by Iran-backed forces. The strikes reportedly killed 22 militiamen of the Iraqi-Hezbollah and Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces. Whether it is true or not that the targets of the attack are backed by Iran, the airstrikes risk creating a greater conflict in the region which would inevitably fall on the backs of the working classes of the Middle East, as has been the result of all U.S. intervention in the region in the past.

This strike comes as hopes of a return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), popularly known as the Iran Nuclear Deal, are fading, largely due to the Biden administration’s refusal to remove deadly sanctions on Iran. The “max pressure” sanctions were a staple of Trump’s attempt to establish greater U.S. economic influence in the Middle East. These sanctions have escalated conflict between the U.S. and Iran and deprived the Iranian working class of vital medicine. While Biden campaigned on a commitment to return to the JCPOA, his attempt to play hardball with Iran and the airstrike against Syria signal a foreign policy intent on continuing U.S. imperialism in the Middle East.

Syria has long been a battleground in the United States’ proxy war against Russia and its attempt to re-establish itself as the undisputed imperialist power. Biden and his team have promised to take a more hardline approach to Russia, Iran, and China. The U.S. uses the threat of terrorism and human rights violations to explain its escalations against these countries; however, the real threat to the Biden administration is that Russia, Iran, and China seek to grow the influence of their own capitalist classes, challenging the United States. If Biden’s escalations result in greater conflict in the Middle East, it will be the working classes of all nations that suffer.

The airstrikes also signal the Biden administration’s support for the Israeli regime. The Trump administration enabled Israel’s escalations against Iran. This included Israel’s own airstrikes along the Syria/Iraq border. Biden’s foreign policy team is packed with staunch Israel-enablers, such as Secretary of State Antony Blinken and foreign policy advisor Jake Sullivan, who have been candid about their desire to aid Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his increasing hostility toward Iran.

The Pentagon tried to justify the airstrikes as a retaliation against a rocket attack on a U.S. base in Iraq on February 22. The attack killed a private contractor and injured eight other private contractors, in addition to a U.S. service member. The Pentagon would have Americans believe that such an attack justifies a reaction from the U.S. military, but this is nothing but a further cover for U.S. imperialism. The fact that all but one of the victims of the February 22 attack were private contractors should also raise doubts about any moral posturing from the Pentagon. Privatized forces in the United States’ imperialist wars have a long history of atrocities against the people of Iraq.

Biden, of course, is no stranger to the use of airstrikes. As Vice President, he was complicit in the Obama administration’s attempts to institute regime change in Syria. The Obama/Biden administration also pioneered the use of drone strikes and airstrikes in the Middle East, infamously bombing seven different countries at one time. Biden’s Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, was one of the strongest supporters of regime change pursued by the Obama administration. He now has even more influence over U.S. foreign policy than he did under Obama, meaning that airstrikes on Syria will continue if all those opposed to U.S. imperialism do not organize a militant anti-war movement.

These airstrikes come as Biden is quickly back-tracking on any campaign promises that might have compelled the U.S. working class to vote for him, such as an increase of the minimum wage or student debt forgiveness. The United States’ currently has a military budget of $934 billion, yet the working class is told that programs which could improve our lives, such as universal healthcare, free college, free housing and green infrastructure programs are too expensive. This is because the Democratic Party and all its members exist to serve the interests of the capitalist class. Socialists in the United States must organize to put anti-imperialism at the center of their politics and denounce U.S. imperialism at every turn. For the well-being of Syrian workers and the workers in the U.S. whose interests are being ignored in favor of imperialism: No U.S. attacks in Syria! No war with Iran! U.S. out of the Middle East!

Amazon Is Desperate to Stop the Union Drive in Alabama

Thu, 25 Feb 2021 23:14:17 GMT

Workers at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama are currently voting about joining a union. If successful, it would be the first Amazon warehouse in the world to unionize. This is not just about a single Fulfillment Center — it would challenge the company’s whole business model, which is based on treating workers like robots. How do we know? Because managers are going to extreme lengths to stop the unionization drive.

The Washington Post had already reported workers getting five text messages per day and seeing anti-union fliers hung inside bathroom stalls. Workers are being forced to attend anti-union meetings, in violation of social distancing policies.

Now, Payday Report has added that last Saturday, Amazon was offering workers a bonus for quitting. If they had been there for two peak seasons, they could get $2,000, and $3,000 if they had been there for three.

Why would the company, which is almost constantly hiring, want employees to quit? Because workers who quit will not be eligible to vote for the union. And their replacements, being new on the job, might be easier to misinform or intimidate.

These bonuses might actually end up costing the company more than a union contract would. But Amazon’s fight against unions was never just about keeping wages low. Rather, Jeff Bezos’s business model demands that workers remain atomized and powerless. This is how he makes hundreds of billions in profit.

Join Left Voice for a Black History Month round table on Saturday, February 27. Sign up or view the event on Facebook.

Employees have described the Fulfillment Centers as “cult-like sweatshops.” Workers are tracked by computers at every second, and admonished if they speak to colleagues or take too long in the bathroom. Walking 15 miles per day is normal, which is why workers call out: “We are not robots!”

In Germany, where Amazon has been facing regular strikes since 2013, the company hires thousands of additional workers during peak seasons to serve as a kind of permanent scab force. Management is willing to spend almost unlimited amounts of money to prevent even a small wage increase.

And that is not all. As More Perfect Union reported, on December 15, Jefferson County changed the traffic light in front of the Amazon warehouse. Company managers had lobbied for the change, supposedly because of traffic jams during shift changes. But what this really means is that pro-union activists have less time to hand out materials to workers outside their workplace.

Up to 85 percent of workers in the warehouse are Black, while it’s no coincidence that the richest men in the world are white. The unionization drive is also a struggle against racism.

The workers in Bessemer are resisting all these desperate maneuvers and illegal tactics. If they win the union, this would be an inspiration for the 1.2 million workers around the world currently being exploited by Bezos. That’s why they deserve support from workers everywhere.

Why We Split with BLM Global Network: Interview with an Organizer

Thu, 25 Feb 2021 21:48:44 GMT

In early December, ten local Black Lives Matter (BLM) chapters (#BLM10) published a statement calling for greater accountability, transparency, and more democratic decision-making processes within the national structure and leadership of the Black Lives Matter Global Network (BLMGN) and its co-founder and executive director, Patrisee Cullors. In January, another BLM chapter — BLM Inland Empire — issued another statement breaking with the national BLM network. While the statement focused on the disastrous internal structure of BLM, it also made deeper criticisms of BLM’s involvement with the Democratic Party and in supporting “black capitalism.”

The statement clearly says, “The use of the BLM name, which we believed was intended to unify our struggle, has been commodified and debased. It is now being used to sell products, acquire book deals, T.V. deals, and speaking engagements. We have no interest in these pursuits, and we are opposed to the movement to substitute Black capitalism for white capitalism…”

It goes on to say, “The issue of greatest concern for us is the relationship between the Global Network and the Democratic Party. This is hypocritical at best, as the Democratic Party has historically rejected and ignored BLM’s demands and has made it clear that they are pro-police, pro-prison, and committed to capitalism….This is a party that is a threat both here and internationally. To ally with them is to ally against ourselves.”

After breaking with the BLM network, the chapter re-named itself the Black Power Collective. Here we present an interview with Left Voice member Julia Wallace and one of the writers of the BLM Inland Empire statement, who is now a main organizer of the Black Power Collective.

Join Left Voice for a Black History Month round table on Saturday, February 27. Sign up or view the event on Facebook.

What made you all break from the Global Network?

This was actually a long time coming, and something that our chapter had been deliberating about for years. There were a number of factors that played into our making our decision when we did: First, there was the BLM 10’s statement, which outlined how the Network exploited and didn’t communicate with the grassroots organizations that are putting in the real work across the United States The Global Network has made decisions about the infrastructure of the Network as well as major financial decisions without addressing any of the many chapters that make (or made) up the Network. Second, the Network’s support of Democratic candidates who are directly responsible for systemically racist laws, like the 1994 Crime Bill written by Biden, and Kamala Harris’ jailing the parents of children who have trouble going to school was shameful and literally against what the organization was originally about. Lastly, there is the Network’s increasingly embarrassing caricatures of being revolutionary, like partnering with One United Bank, prominent members such as Melina Abdullah partnering with Levi’s Jeans company, and the cringeworthy “Twerk on Washington” video that was released on Dr. King’s birthday. These all created the perfect storm. We had to finally make the decision to break away. The BLM Global Network is not revolutionary, it is exploitative.

This is the latest example of how the Democratic party will take the fangs out of a movement. This just isn’t the same group that got people to really question the need for police and their role in upholding white supremacy and capitalism. The network has now become part of the very system that the movement was originally intended to fight against.

What would financial accountability look like to you?

It would be holding public sessions to vote on how money is used. It would mean absolute transparency in how money is used, in logs that are made public. It would mean determining how money can best be used to help those of us that are suffering during this pandemic, and how money can best be used to aid mutually. It does NOT mean creating organizations without input from the various chapters, creating a PAC to support the Democratic party

What has been the response to your statement?

The response has been much more positive than negative. There have been so many people who have reached out to us to let us know that we were saying out loud what they have been trying to say. There are so many people that have been done dirty by the Global Network and BLM-LA, and many of those people did not have the platform to make their stories known. The BLM10 have also said that they love our statement, and we will be working with them directly. We knew there would be reactions to our statement, and of course there have been some negative reactions as well, but those have mostly come from folks who are still convinced that the Democrats are our saviors. We’ve also seen that there are right-wing folks that have got wind of this and are making their comments. I want to make it clear: we do not care what they think. We do this so that we can have a STRONGER movement, which is not what right-wingers want to see. The moves being made by the BLM10 and ourselves will result in a stronger, truly grassroots, truly revolutionary movement. If anything, anyone who considers themselves on the left politically but does not want to see a stronger movement should question if they are not more right-leaning politically than they realize.

Why did you change your name, and what is the reason you changed it to the Black Power Collective?

This was something else that our chapter deliberated on for a long time, but we finally decided that we no longer wanted to be associated with the Network. One thing I’d like to make clear is that different chapters that are breaking away from the Global Network are deciding whether to keep the BLM name or not. As long as they’re breaking away from the Network, we support them, whether they change their name or not. For us, having the name was bringing us a lot of flak that was due to the actions of the Global Network and the LA chapter of BLM. Quite frankly, we didn’t want folks to think of us when they saw those Levis ads.

The name “The Black Power Collective” embodies what we’re about. TRUE Black power. Not “vote blue no matter who” ridiculousness, but revolutionary socialist power to the people! Seeing the kind of empowerment that the revolutionaries that came before us brought to our people. The power that loving and protecting one another brings. We aim to inspire our people to realize the power that we have, and to remember and honor the powerful people that we come from.

As I’ve learned from these past few years of organizing, plans and focuses can change at any moment. For now, our goal is to build with the BLM10. What we will end up building is slowly but surely coming into focus, but it will take time. We also are continuing to coalition build within our community and focus on mutual aid. We are restructuring, so some of what we’re doing will take time, but the work continues!

What are the politics of the group, and what are your personal politics? Tell us more about the Inland Empire? Demographics and politics. What do people think people should know about the IE that they may not know?

We are a socialist revolutionary group for Black empowerment. This means all Black people: LGBTQIA, disabled, homeless, all genders, and from anywhere on Earth. Speaking for myself, I’ve seen some of the worst of what capitalism does to our communities, having grown up in San Bernardino, California. San Bernardino is a part of the Inland Empire, which is a densely populated area of predominantly working class folks that is located approximately 70 miles east of Los Angeles. The air quality is some of the worst in the nation due to all of the diesel trucks that go through the area. These diesel trucks go to warehouses, which are abundant in the area. People are exploited for their labor, including undocumented immigrants who work for damn near nothing. The police enforce this system of capitalism and white supremacy just as bad as (and in some cases worse than) other areas, but since we’re not a big city like Los Angeles, there is not as much attention paid to what is happening here. This is an area that needs socialism. It needs strong unions. It needs guaranteed medical care for all that live there. It needs guaranteed housing. Capitalism is literally killing the people living here.

How can we fight against police brutality during the Biden era?

A lot of what began during the Obama years and continued during the Trump years MUST continue now! There was a surge during the last year of the Trump administration because people thought that getting rid of Trump would somehow be the end of white supremacy. Patrice Cullors, a co-founder of the BLM organization, even said so herself, after Trump lost the election. But what a lot of people that were involved failed to realize was that Trump was a mere symptom, and certainly not the root cause of police violence against Black folks and the prison industrial complex. This false idea of the Democrats being saviors to Black people and all marginalized groups is dangerous, because it allows them to continue to stab us in the backs while smiling in our faces. As I mentioned earlier, Biden is literally the author of the 1994 Crime Bill, a piece of legislation that has put more Black and Brown folks behind bars than any legislation passed post-War on Drugs. Kamala Harris jailed parents for their children being truant to school, sided with police unions, argued that prisons needed to retain prisoners because they would otherwise “lose an important labor pool,” and defended California’s decision to deny a trans woman’s request for gender-affirming surgery. Black lives do not matter to these people, and they need to be fought against with every bit the ferocity that we fight against Republicans.

We fight by taking to the streets. We fight by not letting any of these politicians be comfortable. We fight by organizing in our workplaces. We fight by contributing to and supporting grassroots activists instead of national organizations. We fight by providing mutual aid, and helping each other in ways that the government never will. We fight by educating folks as to how we’re being exploited by this system and how it is not sustainable.

How is the fight for socialism related to the fight for Black liberation?

You cannot have one without the other. Capitalism is directly responsible for the conditions that Black folks are living under worldwide. The colonialism and imperialism that both undermined the continent of Africa and brought many of our ancestors to the Americas is exactly what upholds capitalism. Black liberation to me looks like de-centering whiteness, loving ourselves, and finally having healthcare, housing, education, food, and water for all of us. It means embracing our art, it means not having white supremacy dictate and ruin our lives. These are the same goals held by anyone that is looking to replace capitalism with socialism. The goals of socialism: workers controlling and reaping the benefits of the means of production, guaranteed healthcare, housing, education, food and water for all, an end to the prison industrial complex…these are the goals that have been espoused by Black revolutionaries for as long as the struggle has existed! In order to be free, we need socialism!

"Protesting in their Heels and Waving Rainbow Flags”: LGBT Activists in Myanmar Join ...

Thu, 25 Feb 2021 17:25:43 GMT

Hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets in Myanmar since the military seized power in a coup on February 1. Workers and protesters have not been deterred, even as six people have died at the hands of repressive forces. Among those demonstrating are members of the Burmese LGBTQ community who hope that protests and mobilizations will increase acceptance in a country where discrimination remains common.

Saw Zin Maung Soe, LGBTQ activist and founder of the civil rights organization CAN Myanmar, said, “We are worried that we might be targeted by the police forces and those who are against the protests.” He was part of an LGBTQ demonstration on February 8 in the city of Mandalay that was repressed by police with fire hoses and rubber bullets. “We are all coming to the protests to support the greater cause,” he added.

Min Khant, a 21-year-old drag queen from Yangon, and his friends participated in the protests in full drag, receiving a lot of attention and support from fellow demonstrators. “People at the marches tell us we should have our rights,” he said. He hopes that LGBTQ presence in the mobilizations will help “people around the world to know about the LGBT community’s contributions for the fight for democracy.”

You might be interested in: In Myanmar, Workers Are On the Front Lines of the Fight Against the Military Coup

While persecution has escalated with the coup, anti-LGBTQ legislation was in force under the previous government of Aung San Suu Kyi. According to the International Lesbian and Gay Association’s 2020 State-Sponsored Homophobia report, Article 377 of Myanmar’s 1861 penal code prohibits sodomy — “carnal intercourse against nature” — and imposes fines and up to 10 years imprisonment.

The LGBTQ community, especially transgender people, are also targeted under Section 35c of the Police Act, also known was the “Shadow Law,” which allows authorities to arrest anyone acting suspiciously after sunset. Transwomen in particular routinely face abuse and harassment from police officers who are seldom brought to justice.

But LGBTQ protesters’ participation in the mobilizations against the coup does not mean that they are uncritically supportive of Aung San Suu Kyi and her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD). “The issue of LGBT rights was never a priority, even for the civilian government,” explained Maung Soe.

The military junta’s repression and persecution, which has included temporary cuts to cell phone and Internet connections, has not deterred the protesters. Monday saw the biggest day of protests to date, including a general strike. “LGBT are protesting in their heels and waving rainbow flags across Myanmar,” Min Khant said.

Join Left Voice for a Black History Month round table on Saturday, February 27. Sign up or view the event on Facebook.

Also at the forefront of protests are the youth and women workers, many of them from the most precarious sectors such as textile factories. The minimum wage in Myanmar is only about $3 a day, and the country offers advantageous conditions for companies looking to exploit precarious employees.

This is the framework in which solidarity has been forged between the different sectors against the military. LGBTQ activists released a letter calling to support workers who carry out the protests: “Since we, LGBTI people, have a history of active participation in past political activism, we want to announce that in this military coup, we will stand with the people and the government employees who are starting the civil disobedience campaigns.”

First published in Spanish on February 24 in La Izquierda Diario.

Translated by Otto Fors

Berlin Residents Have Built a Campaign to Expropriate the City’s Biggest Landlord

Thu, 25 Feb 2021 16:10:29 GMT

This article originally appeared in Ex Berliner on February 24, 2021

What happens with the rent you pay every month? Hopefully, some of it goes to maintenance. And the rest? If your apartment belongs to a public housing company like Gewobag, then about 27% of your rent goes to the construction of new apartments. In other words, your rent helps increase the number of apartments and thus lower rents.

If your apartment belongs to a private realty company like Deutsche Wohnen, then just 1% of your rent goes to the construction of new apartments. A much larger chunk goes to buying existing buildings, which means higher realty prices and higher rents.

In 2019, Deutsche Wohnen paid out €350 million in dividends to its shareholders. As the Berlin Tenants’ Association has calculated, that is over €2,100 per apartment. Or put another way: each renter pays €177 per month straight into the pockets of shareholders.

The shareholders include the investment corporation Blackrock. And Blackrock, in turn, supports Donald Trump and lobbies for tax cuts for corporations. Your rent money at work!

Almost everyone would prefer the public model, of course. Studies consistently show that renters from communal or cooperative housing companies are most satisfied — and renters at private companies are least satisfied. But what can you do? Deutsche Wohnen owns something like 100,000 apartments in the city. The largest four realty companies together own a quarter of a million.

Deutsche Wohnen: Expropriate!

Germany’s constitution, the Basic Law, offers a solution. Its Artikel 15 says: “Land, natural resources and means of production may, for the purpose of nationalisation, be transferred to public ownership or other forms of public enterprise by a law that determines the nature and extent of compensation.” (I explained the history of this article in my last column on the subject.)

To be precise, the article actually says Vergesellschaftung, which better translates into “socialisation” or “putting into the ownership of all society.”

But the point is: we can nationalise, also known as expropriate, them. In German, the word for that is “enteignen,” hence the name of the campaign Deutsche Wohnen enteignen!

The German state expropriates things all the time, like when it needs to build an Autobahn. When a pit mine for lignite coal is built, whole villages get nationalised. So why not do the same thing to provide affordable housing for all?

Deutsche Wohnen Enteignen! Biggest Poster Campaign Ever

Have you seen the yellow and purple posters that appeared all over the city? I have never seen so many posters go up at once. On Saturday from 10am to 3am, over 1,000 activists put up 40,000 posters calling for “a city with affordable rents for all.” The posters are in German, Turkish, Arabic and — in a sign of how quickly the city is changing — English.

The campaign to gather signatures is beginning this Saturday (February 26). The activists will have four months to gather 175,000 signatures. That is 1,500 signatures a day — no small feat in a pandemic. If they clear that hurdle, the referendum will be on the ballot in September at the same time as the elections to the Abgeordnetenhaus, the Berlin parliament. Then, if at least 50% of votes are in favour, representing at least 25% of all eligible voters, nationalisation becomes law.

Rents have increased more than 100% in the last decade. We are all paying twice as much as 10 years ago — and for what? My apartment building has not gotten twice as nice. In fact, for many people, housing quality has been going down as fast as prices have been going up. During the cold wave, heating failed at two buildings at Kottbusser Tor, and Deutsche Wohnen didn’t repair it for weeks, leaving renters sitting in freezing apartments — again.

Situations like this happen all over the city. It’s no wonder thousands of people are joining the fight against Deutsche Wohnen.

Two of the parties in Berlin’s governing coalition, the SPD and Greens, reject nationalisation. The campaign does have the support of The Left, which is a welcome shift. It was the PDS (forerunner of The Left) that privatised 200,000 publicly owned apartments when it was in government with the SPD in the early 2000s. And earlier this month, The Left and SPD evicted a homeless encampment to make way for realty speculators.

Expropriation Lasts a Lifetime

Last year, Berlin got a Mietendeckel, a rent cap, and as a result people across the city have seen their rents lowered. But that cap could be cancelled by German courts. It is set to expire after five years, and the SPD has come out against extending it past 2025. Nationalising the private companies would keep rents down permanently.

The SPD is claiming that compensation for nationalisation would cost €36 billion. But that is just if they pay the fantastical “market prices” claimed by the speculators. They want to get double or triple what they paid for the privatised apartments 15 years ago. A Berlin public housing company did such a ridiculously overpriced “buy back” in September.

But that is the point of nationalisation and socialisation: nowhere does the constitution say anything about “market value.” One could just as easily argue that Deutsche Wohnen deserves just €1 in compensation. Or at most a few billion euros. As the campaign points out, all costs of nationalisation would be covered by rents — which would no longer be flowing into offshore accounts, but toward creating more public housing.

It seems like an obvious choice. The Tagesspiegel reported two years ago that 54.8% of Berliners support the demand. I will be out collecting signatures starting this Saturday, armed with an FFP2 mask and hand sanitiser. I encourage readers to get active as well. Only German citizens who are registered in Berlin can sign the petition or participate in the referendum — but anyone can help out with the campaign.

This isn’t just about the Berlin housing market, either. Even if some court manages to block the proposed law — maybe they can claim Artikel 15 of the constitution is “unconstitutional” — the great thing about this campaign is that everyone is talking about nationalisation. Why should we allow a handful of billionaires to own everything? And why do we let them do the exploit us every month, with rising rents and low salaries? We can start with Deutsche Wohnen, but I can think of a few other companies that should come under public ownership. Amazon and Facebook, I am looking at you!

Detention Centers for Migrant Children Aren’t Summer Camp, They Are Concentration Camps

Wed, 24 Feb 2021 19:44:57 GMT

On Monday Joe Biden opened a new children’s concentration camp for unaccompanied migrants. It will hold up to 700 kids, from ages 13 to 17. This was a camp that was closed under the Trump administration, who was widely criticized for keeping migrant kids in cages— for keeping migrant kids essentially in concentration camps instead of reuniting them with family members in the US. This camp is being re-opened by the Biden administration.

This is absolutely horrific. The children who enter this camp are not allowed to leave. In other words, these are children kept in prison, kept apart from family members waiting for them in the United States. It is exactly what we protested against during the Trump administration.

If you were to read the Washington Post, it sounds like a nice summer camp for kids. Based on interviews with Mark Weber, spokesperson for Health and Human Services (HHS), Washington Post describes the camps:

At the 66-acre site, groups of beige trailers encircle a giant white dining tent, a soccer field and a basketball court. There is a bright blue hospital tent with white bunk beds inside. A legal services trailer has the Spanish word “Bienvenidos,” or welcome, on a banner on its roof. There are trailers for classrooms, a barber shop, a hair salon. The facility has its own ambulances and firetrucks, as well as its own water supply.

…Staff members wear matching black-and-white T-shirts displaying their roles: disaster case manager, incident support, emergency management. The most colorful trailer is at the entryway, where flowers, butterflies and handmade posters still hang on its walls from Carrizo’s first opening in 2019.

Don’t believe Weber or the capitalist media. These detention centers are not a nice summer camp for kids. This is a child concentration camp with a welcome banner.

Nothing could more clearly demonstrate exactly what the Democratic Party is: kids in cages with a culturally-relevant welcome banner.

Joe Biden came to the Presidency by feigning concern for kids in cages and speaking out against Trump’s many abuses of migrants— which drips with hypocrisy given that Obama was known as the Deporter-In-Chief and greatly expanded the state’s repressive mechanisms at the border. Biden promised that he would reverse Trump’s horrific immigration policies that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deportations and family separations; he promised that immigration would be one of his focuses in his first 100 days and that he would place a moratorium on deportations. But now that he is in office, we can see this for the lie it is; the U.S. will never put a stop to the border enforcement policies that make millions of dollars for weapons and private prison companies and keep the pillars of U.S. imperialism intact. Biden is employing the same policies as Trump and Obama before him: border patrol continues to turn away asylum seekers, deportations continue unabated, and immigrants are inhumanely detained in concentration camps. Over 250 people have been thrown out of the United States in the first month of Biden’s presidency. And yet Biden wants us to accept colorful concentration camps for children and call it an improvement.

We shouldn’t buy it. All the rage and horror we felt against Trump should be directed against Biden. Close the camps and free them all. Abolish ICE and open the borders. Nothing less.

The "Lesser Evil” Is Here, and Kids Are Still in Cages

Wed, 24 Feb 2021 18:08:50 GMT

After spending months on the campaign shedding crocodile tears for the children kept in cages by the Trump administration, President Biden has just opened his very own immigration detention camp for children. On Monday, dozens of children aged 13 to 17 boarded buses bound for a repurposed oil field workers’ camp in Carrizo Springs, Texas. The facility housed unaccompanied minors for a month in 2019 before being shuttered by the Trump administration, but is now being reopened by Biden. According to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the reopening is necessary to deal with overcrowding at other facilities that house underage migrants.

HHS has said its “goal” is to keep unaccompanied migrant minors in this camp, or others like it, for about 30 days, on top of the two-week quarantine they undergo at the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). But in 2020 the actual length of interment for migrant children averaged 102 days. That amounts to over three months of separation, on average, from family and contacts in the United States.

The concentration camp is run by a private religious nonprofit that contracts with HHS. “Contractors who run these shelters on behalf of ORR make a per head, per diem fee off the child. … So the incentive to release children quickly is very low,” explained Hope Freye, the director of Project Lifeline, a nonprofit that advocates for migrant children. These detention centers are run with little oversight or transparency, which makes it harder for families and advocates to locate and communicate with the children. Detention centers are infamously unsafe for migrants — trans women have died from the unsafe conditions, and migrant women in Georgia were given forced hysterectomies.

Join Left Voice for a Black History Month round table on Saturday, February 27. Sign up or view the event on Facebook.

Repulsively, the HHS is trying to present this children’s prison in a positive light; a spokesman stressed how much better facilities at Carrizo are than the infamous “chain link partitions” of the McAllen Processing Center, pointing to the daily $775 cost of housing a child there. This is a distinction that papers over the fundamental cruelty at the heart of the situation; to quibble over whether kids are prisoners in “camps,” “cages,” or “the Cadillac of migrant child centers” is ultimately a distraction meant to preserve the friendly public profile the Biden administration wishes to project. While some of the Trump administration’s more obvious abuses and openly vitriolic rhetoric may have been scaled back, the daily human rights abuses of our immigration system continue apace, barely hidden beneath layers of red tape and fleets of unmarked vans. The Biden administration sees no contradiction between condemning the excesses of the Trump immigration regime while also opening new prisonlike detention centers for children. Biden was instrumental in maintaining and expanding President Obama’s enforcement/deportation apparatus, whose appalling conditions now seem to have been forgotten, so it comes as little surprise that he would do so again. Despite his hand-wringing about kids in cages when it was convenient to distinguish him from Trump, he has never broken even slightly with the abhorrent logic of criminalizing and deporting migrants.

The Carrizo Springs camp is a perfect expression of what the Biden administration offers — a friendlier face for the same repugnant policy agenda. Much of the media attention to this new facility has uncritically swallowed the administration’s line on how “humane” the Carrizo Springs camp is, fixating on small cosmetic contrasts between Carrizo and the garish camps that garnered outrage under Trump. They note, apparently without irony, the absurd “Bienvenidos” banner hung over a tent where legal services are being offered to detained children. Little attention is given to the fact that the fundamental injustice of the policy persists, or the fact that many of Trump’s immigration policies were pioneered by his predecessor, Obama. Internment camps that keep minors separated from their families for months on end are a moral monstrosity, no matter how polished and inviting the Biden administration makes them.

While immigration advocates have called for such detentions to be immediately halted because of Covid, the Carrizo reopening demonstrates how a crisis can always be used to expand the reach of the security state. Nearly all unaccompanied underage migrants are on their way to meet family in the U.S., yet the Biden administration will never take the obvious step of simply allowing them to do so, or facilitating this process without a cruel and unnecessary stay in a detention center. The government so prioritizes punishing and deterring “illegal” immigration that it would sooner throw thousands of children in tent cities and trailers than simply send them to the families who are waiting for them. The pretext of Covid precautions as a justification for reopening the camp is entirely cynical: the best way to keep children safe from Covid would be to not keep them in overcrowded internment camps, and the simplest way to reduce crowding is, of course, to empty and close the camps. Incredibly, HHS is attempting to cast the reopening of the very facilities that were considered an unconscionable abuse of human rights under Trump as a humane precaution. This is what the Democrats stand for: a friendly, palatable expansion of child prisons, with inviting “Bienvenidos” banners waving above the entrances. Those moralizing philistines who loudly condemned Trump’s prison camps, but now seek to normalize those run by Biden, would distract us from the fact of oppression by scrutinizing its form.

We should not be taken in by the Biden administration’s self-congratulatory language, or by the media’s eagerness to wash away the supposedly aberrant nature of the Trump years. For the multiracial working class and oppressed, this is no lesser evil — this is only more evil with “kinder” words. Migrants’ rights are still being casually disregarded en masse, and we should not temper our criticism because such abuses are being carried out “more humanely,” or by an oppressor-in-chief who is less outspokenly bigoted. Nothing short of an end to the violence of borders and migration restrictions constitutes true justice for immigrants. This is just another example of the way Biden will govern, like Democrats and other representatives of the ruling class before him — long on rhetoric but short on justice.

The Democrats Attempt to Buy Harriet Tubman’s Legacy with 20-Dollar Bills

Wed, 24 Feb 2021 16:08:51 GMT

President Biden’s administration said it wants to put Harriet Tubman on the 20-dollar bill.

The idea was first floated in 2016, the last year of Obama’s presidency, by then Treasury secretary Jacob Lew. The plan was shelved under Trump, but it’s being championed again by Biden’s Treasury secretary.

But to avoid being too radical, the Treasury won’t boot the slave-holding, genocidal white-supremacist Andrew Jackson. It will just move Jackson to the back of the bill. In the words of Press Secretary Jen Psaki, “It’s important that our money reflect the history and diversity of our country.”

The Democrats’ plan for Tubman is barely a symbolic concession to the fight against racism and misogyny — since it continues to honor the racist murderer Jackson. But more than this, it’s a cynical ploy to use Tubman’s revolutionary legacy to support the racist system that she spent her life fighting.

The Radical Tubman

Tubman’s life was nothing short of revolutionary. Born around 1820, her first decades were marked by the casual horror of the slave system, which was key to budding American capitalism. On the Maryland plantation where she was born, for example, Tubman blocked a doorway to stop a plantation overseer from punishing a field hand. The overseer bludgeoned her over the head with a two-pound weight. She was left with a head injury that affected her for the rest of her life.

A little over a decade later, she fled the plantation. She traveled by night, following the North Star until she reached Philadelphia and freedom. But a year later she returned to free family members. All told, she traveled back to the South 19 times to lead others to freedom. The danger was extreme. Slave catchers put a $40,000 bounty on her head. Gruesome punishments awaited her if she had been caught. On her trips she kept a pistol nearby — in part to convince fleeing slaves not to lose their heads. Her words of encouragement: “You’ll be free or die.” As she told Fredrick Douglass, “I never lost a single passenger.”

But Tubman’s story hardly ends there. In 1858 she helped the radical abolitionist John Brown plan his historic attack on Harper’s Ferry, where Brown aimed to steal arms for a slave uprising and deal a blow to slave-owners. The raid failed, but Tubman called Brown a hero. A few years later, during the Civil War, Tubman led Union gunboats along the Combahee River to free 750 slaves from the depths of Confederate territory. And in the early 20th century she was championed the struggle for women’s right to vote.

The Democrats: Heirs of Tubman’s Enemies

By putting Tubman on the 20-dollar bill, Biden and the Democrats are trying to use her legacy for their own ends. And those ends are totally opposed to the ones Tubman devoted her life to.

We can’t forget that “Jim Crow Joe” was an enemy of racially integrating schools; that he was one of the architects of racist mass incarceration; and that he served under the president — Obama — responsible for the most deportations in U.S. history.

More than this, Biden rejects the idea of police abolition or defunding the cops — those proud ancestors of the slave-catching patrols that hunted Tubman. Instead, Biden calls for a “gentler” police that only shoots Black people in the leg, not the heart. Meanwhile, cops keep on murdering Black people with impunity across the country — like in Democrat-controlled Philadelphia, where Tubman first escaped. And in fact, Biden is using the January 6 riot at the Capitol to call for ramping up the United States’ white-supremacist forces of repression. Meanwhile, Biden’s presidential campaign raked in millions from border security firms hoping to make huge profits off the new administration’s racist border policies. And Biden continues to support racist deportations by ICE.

Join Left Voice for a Black History Month round table on Saturday, February 27. Sign up or view the event on Facebook.

By putting her picture on cash, the Democrats are using a militant who helped slaves escape from the plantations that were key in launching American capitalism for capitalist property. More than this: money is nothing but the embodiment of the value that capitalism has to constantly create to survive, and that value comes from the vicious and deadly exploitation of labor around the globe. That is, Biden wants to honor Tubman with a tool of capitalism “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”

Biden and the Democrats are trying to whitewash Tubman’s legacy because they have absolutely nothing to offer in the fight against the white supremacy that is so crucial to capitalism. They themselves are the agents of that capitalism. In other words, Biden and the Democrats are the heirs of the enemies that Tubman fought in her lifetime. As Lenin wrote,

During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them. … After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter.

Today, it’s crucial that we celebrate Tubman’s revolutionary legacy as socialists who understand that racism is a pillar of the capitalist system.

But we can only be true to that legacy by militantly fighting the heirs of her enemies: the police, the Democrats, and Biden, all supporters of the white-supremacist capitalist system. Their cynical, obscene canonizing of Tubman as a harmless legend deserves nothing but our scorn.

Tubman’s life is even more proof of C. L. R. James’s words: “The only place where Negroes did not revolt is in the pages of capitalist historians.” And it’s proof that Black people have been and continue to be at the forefront of some of the most important events of global class struggle.

Learning from Tubman means helping build the fight for a world where both racism and money rot in the dustbin of history.