Almost two months after Samuel Alito’s draft decision was leaked to the press, the Supreme Court finally released the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, automatically making abortion illegal or severely restricted in at least nine states. With many more states having passed or seeking to pass similar laws, abortion is likely to be criminalized in more than half of U.S. states. Just as when the draft was leaked, people across the country took to the streets to reject an undemocratic SCOTUS decision that takes all of us half a century into the past.

So far, the biggest protests have taken place in Democratic-controlled states where abortion will remain legal. One of the biggest was in New York City, where a crowd of 20,000 marched from Washington Square Park to Times Square and Bryant Park, bringing the busy traffic of the city to a complete halt as they passed.

Chicago also marched by the thousands, shutting down downtown and showing the will to fight back. People gathered at Federal Plaza and marched down Dearborn Street and through the busiest streets of the city. Just as in Manhattan, passersby joined the march and drivers honked in solidarity.

Portland too saw big marches descend on the city, starting from several points like Lownsdale Square Park, Tom McCall Waterfront Park, and Pioneer Courthouse Square. The protests later merged to march to the Justice Center. Other protests took place across Oregan, in cities like Eugene and Salem.

A few thousand people also flocked to the Capitol Building in Denver, Colorado, despite the rain. The crowd marched down 16th Street, chanting and holding banners. People shouted in solidarity from buildings and restaurant employees stood outside their workplaces to show support.

In various cities across California, thousands of people took to the streets to protest. There were rallies and marches in San Diego, West Hollywood, San Luis Obispo, San José, among others.

Los Angeles saw a particularly big and emboldened crowd that gathered at Pershing Square. A section of the protest made it to the 110 freeway and blocked traffic. The repression by police was particularly violent during the demonstrations. Helicopters buzzed overhead and police clubbed protesters and journalists as they documented the protests. By 9 p.m. LAPD declared the assembly unlawful and violently dispersed the remaining protesters.

Red states also saw their share of protests, showing once more that people all over the country support abortion and are ready to defend it. In Dallas, Texas; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Atlanta, folks marched and rallied to reject the overturn of Roe v. Wade and the horrific bans being passed in their states. 

Against all odds, a surprisingly big crowd flocked to Utah’s State Capitol, located in Salt Lake City. Utah is one of the several states that has implemented a so-called “trigger ban” that immediately banned abortion in nearly all circumstances after the SCOTUS decision dropped.

One of the worst moments of the day was seen in Phoenix, Arizona, where thousands of protesters gathered in front of the Capitol Building, and the police shot tear gas from the windows to disperse the crowd.

But it was not the only one. Police beat protesters in Greenville, South Carolina and in many more states. More and more images and videos of police brutality against protesters defending abortion are coming to the surface.

Just as the police beat protesters fighting for the basic right to abortion healthcare, they will be the ones to brutally enforce the new bans cropping up in states across the country — just as they did fifty years ago before Roe. Once again the police showed that their role is to enforce the oppressive laws of this capitalist system, violating the rights and bodily autonomy of people across the country.

Despite the repression and the weight of one of the most significant rollback of rights in decades, the protests showed that there is plenty of energy and anger to fight back and to demand free, safe, legal abortion, on demand and without apology. Contradictorily, many of the decision day marches and rallies were called or led by big NGOs tied to the Democratic Party who did little to nothing during the last two months to prevent Roe v. Wade from being overturned. They would rather co-opt and pacify the rage at the SCOTUS decision and funnel it into votes for the Democrats, who have shown that they will do nothing to protect abortion rights.

The march in NYC shows a different way. It was called by a coalition of socialist groups, activists, and unions — including several of the new Starbucks unions shaking up the labor movement across the country. It was convened without cops. Unlike the failed Women’s March May 3rd rally, not a single capitalist politician — who let this decision be overturned and want to pacify our rage — was allowed to speak. Learning from the endless empty promises by the Democrats for the last fifty years, thousands of people took their anger to the streets, an encouraging sign of the willingness to build the type of independent mass movement necessary to defend the right to an abortion. But much more is necessary. To be successful, such a movement —  built in the streets and in our workplaces and communities — must expand across the country, linking the states where abortion will remain legal to those where abortion has already been or will be banned. Such a movement could shut down the country’s largest economic centers like New York City, or keep abortion clinics open in places like Mississippi. Such a movement could finally win free, legal, and safe abortion on demand.

The post Tens of Thousands of Protesters Take the Streets in Defiance of Overturn of Roe v. Wade appeared first on Left Voice.

The day that nine unelected Supreme Court Justices — a gang of misogynists, religious fanatics, ultra right-wing racists, and the staunchest defenders of capital — decided to overturn the right to an abortion, tens of thousands in New York City flooded the streets to voice their rage.

Over 20,000 people gathered in Washington Square Park and marched to Times Square and Bryant Park, past Democratic Party officials’ offices, GOP offices, and St. Patrick’s Cathedral, chanting “not the Church, not the state, people must decide our fate.” Block after block of protesters brought traffic to a halt on both sides of the street on a busy Friday night in Manhattan. Truck drivers making their nightly deliveries honked horns in support and people leaned out of cars to raise a fist in solidarity as protesters marched through the lines of traffic. 

The march, which took the streets without the “permission” of NYPD and the city, was marshaled by activists forged in the Black Lives Matter movement and other struggles. “We keep us safe!” the crowd chanted, knowing that the police do not. The march was dotted with green, an echo of the marea verde that won the right to an abortion in Argentina and decriminalized it in Colombia and Mexico and across Latin America. At least a dozen protesters were arrested by the NYPD as the march ended in Bryant Park, after staging a sit-in at one of New York City’s busiest intersections. 

The protest was convened by Left Voice and other organizations as part of a coalition of socialist groups, activists, and unions — including several of the new Starbucks unions shaking up the labor movement across the country. The strong participation of workers’ organizations in this fight was a clear statement that we have a critical part to play in any movement for abortion rights; that the fight for reproductive justice and against all attacks by the state requires the organized response of labor — the workers who can grind the economy to a halt. In the wake of the leaked decision, this coalition decided that whatever day the decision dropped, we would take to the streets to defy the abortion ban now taking effect in many states the country and defend the universal right to an abortion.

The coalition organized around two principles: the need for safe, free, and legal abortion on demand, and the need to build an independent mass movement in the streets and in our workplaces to fight for that right — one that has no faith in the empty promises offered by the Democratic Party or any capitalist party to protect abortion rights. Unlike so many other abortion rights protests, no Democratic Party politicians spoke and no one pointed to elections as the solution. 

The march began with a rally in Washington Square Park, where socialist groups, activists, and rank-and-file union members gave speeches to a packed crowd.

The resounding theme was a rallying cry to all those looking for next steps, who are not content to just wait until November like the Democrats tell us. People who know that this fight and the futures of hundreds of millions of people across the United States are in our hands. How do we build the movement we need to finally win the right to free, safe, and legal abortion on demand? Jimena Vergara, a UPS worker and member of Left Voice spoke on the need to organize in our workplaces and communities and unite the struggles of a new generation of union activists and all those who fight against exploitation and oppression:

The Democrats are not our friends in this fight. Our friends are the workers at Starbucks, at Apple, at Amazon, at Chipotle, at Traders Joe’s, who are fighting Jeff Bezos and other billionaires to unionize. Our friends in this fight are the Black, Latino, Palestinian, and immigrant communities all over New York and this country who are organizing in their neighbhorhoods for affordable housing, against police brutality, and so much more. We want a mass movement, independent of the Democratic Party made up of unions, workers, community organizations, students, feminists, and everyone who feels a sense of rage at this attack on our bodily autonomy. Just Imagine if we could strike for reproductive rights? Wouldn’t it be beautiful? Shouldn’t we make the slogan that we always chant real: if we don’t get it, shut it down! 

As the march ended in Bryant Park, rank-and-file union members and activists returned to this theme, giving speeches about what comes next and how we can harness the power clearly demonstrated in this march to continue the struggle. Over a thousand people sitting in the park chanted: “Strike, Strike, for abortion rights.” This rallying call must be taken up across New York City and the United States by all workers organizations — from the largest unions to the combative new unions cropping up each day — and by all activist groups and community organizations to make it a reality. With that power, we can build a movement that can enshrine in law the right to free, legal, and safe abortion on demand. 

The fact that the SCOTUS decision overturning Roe v. Wade came out despite the overwhelming support for abortion access across the country showed us that we can’t wait for the Democrats or the big non-profits to save us from the attacks of the Right. The tens of thousands of people who marched in New York City on Friday show that we don’t need to. We can fight for abortion rights and reproductive justice and so much more. Now it’s time to build that fight.

Join Bread and Roses, a new socialist feminist organization fighting to put an end to the exploitation and oppression of this sexist, racist, imperialist capitalist system.

The post 20,000 Protesters Go All Out for Abortion Rights in New York City appeared first on Left Voice.

Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine began on February 24, no one could have imagined that four months later the country would be granted candidate status for its integration into the European Union. But on Thursday, June 23, the leaders of EU member states decided to do just that for Ukraine and Moldova. The news had been expected for several days, and is seen in Kyiv as a victory and a step forward for the pro-imperialist government of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy — even if not in a climate of euphoria.

There is a long way to go between the status of an official “candidate” and that of a full EU member. Still, as French president Emmanuel Macron and many others have recognized, this is above all about sending a message to Russia and accelerating the dynamic of European imperialism’s eastward expansion.

A Message to Putin

The war’s first phase has been, for Russia, largely a failure, with Putin having to abort his initial plans. It has also been a disaster for Russia’s strategic objectives. Not only has NATO managed to close ranks (even if contradictions persist within the alliance), but it has also managed to win some new members (Sweden and Finland). Zelenskyy’s government has been strengthened and the Russian army has had its weaknesses exposed before the eyes of the world. Now, Ukraine is accelerating its accord with the West by obtaining official status as an EU candidate.

“When Zelenskyy announced Ukraine’s EU membership bid, many countries in western Europe were skeptical,” reports the Guardian. “Senior officials counted 10 member states that opposed candidate status for Ukraine, but the mood has shifted, as leaders feared being on the wrong side of history.”

An invasion of all of Ukraine and possible change of government by force would have created all sorts of social and political problems for Russia. Such a government would lack legitimacy on the international stage and would very quickly be ostracized by all the world powers. Its economy would collapse and questions would be raised about the political and economic viability of such a state. Even with the prospect of such instability, though, the Kremlin saw its military offensive as a way to block, at least temporarily, the growing alignment between Ukraine and the Western powers. 

Russia’ military failure in the war’s first phase has had precisely the opposite consequences intended: it has sped up that rapprochement.

A Symbolic Decision, A Long and Uncertain Process

This is the context within which granting Ukraine official EU candidate status takes on its full meaning. Make no mistake: the process of integration will take a very long time if it ever really happens. That is what leaders of member countries in the Balkans stated at the end of Thursday’s meeting. For instance, Albanian president Edi Rama said, “Northern Macedonia is a candidate for 17 years, if I have not lost count, Albania since eight, so welcome to Ukraine … It’s a good thing to give Ukraine the status. But I hope that Ukrainian people will not make many illusions.”

There remains a lot of skepticism among European leaders regarding Ukraine’s integration, and even more with respect to creating a fast-track procedure. Two former Brussels-based technocrats, Hans Kribbe and Luuk van Middelaar, write in the Economist:

[BLOCKQUOTE]Ukraine deserves straight answers, not false promises. And the truth that EU leaders leave unspoken is that, although anchoring Ukraine in European structures is strategically important, there are equally strategic reasons why the EU should not be one of them. 

It does not make sense for Ukraine to join the union before it secures NATO membership, which even Mr. Zelenskyy agrees is unattainable today. Security comes first, and the EU cannot provide it against Russia. EU member governments have a treaty obligation to assist each other in the case of armed aggression “with all means in their power,” but this form of solidarity, designed with terrorism or cyber-warfare in mind, does not deter a nuclear power. … 

Europe needs to grow into a geopolitical force, capable of working with America to stabilize the European region. But the accession of Ukraine, as well as states such as Russia-friendly Serbia, would risk leaving the club even more divided and hamstrung than it is today.[/BLOCKQUOTE]

Thursday night’s decision is certainly a step toward strengthening Ukraine’s pro-Western tendencies and the eastward expansionism of European imperialism. But there is still a long way to go before Ukraine becomes an EU member. Indeed, beyond the speeches rejoicing about the “progress of democracy” in Ukraine, the reality is that the Ukrainian state — a kleptocracy largely dominated by oligarchs — remains riddled with corruption. On top of that, it is a country at war, with a large swath of its territory occupied by a hostile power that in recent days is advancing securely in the Donbas.

All of this will make Ukraine’s rapid integration into the EU very difficult. The war itself, and the international balance of power, will be decisive for further developments. Meanwhile, None of the scenarios for Ukraine today represent, in any way, a progressive alternative for the country.

First published in French on June 24 in Révolution Permanente.

Translation by Scott Cooper

The post Ukraine’s New EU Membership Candidacy Is Mainly a Message to Putin appeared first on Left Voice.

A Growing Layer of Union Activists …

The first thing on everyone’s mind at the conference was the sheer size of the thing. Four thousand people registered. It was a sold-out crowd, and the biggest ever at a Labor Notes conference. Almost every session I went to was overflowing: the chairs were all filled; the walls were lined with bodies; people crouched in all the aisles.

It’s a key point because Labor Notes is one of the ways the most committed, energized rank-and-file activists in the labor movement — representing a swathe of industries and unions across the country and the world — gather themselves and talk to each other.

The fact that this was the biggest Labor Notes conference means that that active, energized layer of activists — helping drive union struggle across the country — is growing.

Not only is it growing, it’s discussing how to fight in a militant, disruptive way.

Striking was a key topic. The Teamsters are preparing to negotiate a contract next year at UPS, and it seems like a UPS strike is on the horizon. Two members of the caucus Teamsters for a Democratic Union gave a seminar on Saturday afternoon on how to prepare a strike, based on their own experience in 1997. The panel also explored how to strike during a contract too — something labor bureaucrats have been terrified of for decades.

Another panel explored how to strike without a contract. There, a panelist said labor law is not the source of power — and he’s right. Our power comes from how well we can organize and squeeze the profits we make for the bosses, he said — not waiting for the government to save us. In the same vein, Joe Burns — author of the new Class Struggle Unionism and part of the leadership of the AFA-CWA union — called for a “class struggle unionism” unafraid to break laws when it strikes.

These are all ideas reaching a growing layer of union activists now. And many of the labor activists hearing these ideas were young, and often queer — part of “generation U,” as I’ll say again later, who don’t have the huge weight of an old bureaucracy teaching them to be “careful,” to avoid strikes, to play it safe.

… and a Radical Layer

But it’s not just that the conference was huge or that it was throwing around militant ideas. It’s also that, again and again, it seemed like the huge audiences were far more radical, far more to the left, than many of the panelists themselves. Again and again, they drove the conversation in more radical directions.

For example, not a single official panel title or description on the Labor Notes conference program mentions socialism. But at every panel I saw, the audience brought up socialism and said (in one way or another) that socialism is the goal of our fight.

Another example. One panel said it would tackle how unions should relate to the problem of the murderous, racist police. On that panel sat a member of a nonprofit in Minneapolis. He stood up to talk about how to reduce the tensions between communities and the police. He said, “Well, we know, not all cops are bad, some are really good people.” The audience jeered him: “Fuck 12! Fuck the police!”

During the Q&A, one of my own Left Voice comrades — a rank-and-file activist from SEIU in Los Angeles — stood up. She pointed out that cops aren’t just the descendants of slave catchers. They’re strikebreakers, enemies of every real union. Cops have no place in the labor movement, and we need to kick them out of all our unions and federations to strengthen the movement, she said — to wide applause.

It was just after this that a Minneapolis activist — identifying themselves as queer and Black — stood up. They pointed out the ways that nonprofits worked overtime in the wake of the huge 2020 uprising to co-opt the struggle for racial justice, to rob the movement of its radical energy, and to channel it in safer directions — then led us in Assata Shakur’s chant: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love and support one another. We have nothing to lose but our chains.” The crowd cheered them on.

All this seems like an important change from other kinds of LN meetings. In 2021 — just one year after the biggest social movement in history, which was a struggle against racist police — I went to Labor Notes’ “Troublemaker School” in Philly. It was nothing like this.

It was big. But by comparison, it was much tamer. The only session on racial justice and unions was like an HR session from my boss. It called for us (individually) to be anti-racist in our unions — surely a good message. But never did the speakers talk about our own unions’ role in fighting the murderous, racist cops. I raised the issue, but it fizzled. 

In fact, the content of our discussions at this year’s conference was a major move to the left from Labor Notes as an organization. The pages of LN never, or almost never, hazard a mention of socialism. They don’t dare criticize the Democrats like even some of this year’s panelists did (I’ll mention them in a minute).

At least part of the reason might be “Generation U” — the new layer of young, often queer, activists driving the new unions. The Starbucks and Amazon unions were a major presence — not only were many of their activists there, but they were the equivalent of labor “celebrities” — cheered at every chance. And we know that younger people are far more likely to be deeply critical of capitalism and open to socialism.

Powerful Contradictions …

But this conference was a showcase for powerful contradictions in this layer of the labor movement — especially around politics.

People were grappling with the problem of the Democratic Party. At multiple sessions, activists raised major, and crucial, critiques of the Democrats — a party that has betrayed, constantly, the labor movement. The highest pitch of that critique came from Joe Burns, at a panel on his new book.

There, for example, Burns pointed out just how toothless and cynical the Democrat promises of the PRO Act are. Those promises face the combined power of U.S. judges who side with the ruling class, not workers. Even if that law could be passed — it almost certainly can’t be — judges are standing by ready to interpret it in the narrowest, most useless way possible. And the Democratic Party came up again in a workshop about organizing and bargaining around abortion rights. Several attendees brought up being let down for decades by the Democratic Party, and the need for a mass movement, led by the labor movement, to win abortion rights in the United States.

But there’s a deep reluctance at the top of our unions to take this logic to its natural end — calling for cutting our unions’ ties to the Democrats and building an independent party for the working class. At a panel that Sara Nelson facilitated, the room was again overflowing. People stood and crouched for lack of chairs in a massive space that could hold hundreds. At one point Nelson blasted the Democrats. She pointed out just how badly Democrats and Republicans both had betrayed labor.

So a comrade of mine in Left Voice put out the obvious point: If the Democrats are so awful to labor, let’s cut ties, let’s create our own, independent party! It was an idea that was met with mad clapping and shouts of agreement.

Nelson grabbed the mic — and waffled. “Workers don’t need their own party. If they have more power over production, the parties will come to them!”

But this is astonishing. It flies in the face of history. Even when unions were much bigger — in the 1950s and 1960s — Democrats worked overtime to co-opt, limit, restrict, and betray the movement. For just one example: Democrats and Republicans stood arm in arm in 1947 to pass the Taft-Hartley Act, which radically undercut and hemmed in the ways unions could legally strike.

We see the same contradiction in the fact that, at this meeting for labor rank-and-filers, the LN staff spent so much time and energy preparing for speeches by a Democrat — Bernie Sanders.

Bernie is definitely a reason many young people to socialist ideas. He surely has their ear. But that situation is full of contradictions, too. Despite all this, he serves a party that has refused to lift a finger for labor, that helped usher in the neoliberal revolution against labor, that champions the bombing and murder of working-class people around the globe. In 2020 his run for president helped gather these radical forces on the U.S. Left — but only to endorse Biden, who opposes key working-class struggles: for police abolition, to put up a real fight for abortion rights in the streets — and on and on. Whether he wants to or not, Bernie is helping keep this dynamic going, helping pull radicals into the the Democratic Party, the graveyard of social movements.

And we see a contradiction in how Labor Notes relates to union bureaucracy too. Labor leaders have played a major role in tamping down real rank-and-file struggle — exactly the kind of struggle Labor Notes exists to stir up. And far from shrinking in recent years, that bureaucracy has been exploding in size and power over rank-and-filers. 

Surely that bureaucratic system has major contradictions of its own. Nelson isn’t the same kind of leader as the late Richard Trumka. In fact, it was Burns — in the leadership at AFA-CWA with Sara Nelson — who criticized most labor leaders during his panel (and in his book Class Struggle Unionism). But even though the idea of union democracy was much discussed — as it should be! — the critique of bureaucracy, what it is, how it exerts its power, how it tries to control the rank and file — was curiously muted in most of the sessions I went to, as it is on the pages of Labor Notes too.

But all this shows that something important is happening — symptoms of something much larger.

… and Powerful Possibilities

What’s most important in all this isn’t just the lack of imagination in even a stirring, brilliant speaker like Nelson, or the limits of Sanders. 

What’s important is that people like Nelson and Burns, and Bernie too, are bellwethers — or canaries in coal mines, or tuning forks — registering something bigger than them, that doesn’t quite have its voice yet — something new, and possibly powerful, at work in a dark way inside labor itself.

It’s true that unions’ bureaucratic leaders have spent many decades in a love affair with Democrats. But this is true even of a more leftward union leader like Nelson, who endorsed Biden in 2020. Still, the fact that Nelson did not champion the Democrats at the conference is a kind of ripple, on the surface, of a force from below requiring her to shift. Labor Notes became — in many cases despite the official programming — a place to critique the Democrats and, at least here and there, tentatively, to think about alternatives.

And the same goes for Labor Notes as a whole. The big, roiling mass audience was constantly surging past the more restricted, narrower limits of Labor Notes as an organization. Here we see a hidden power struggling inside the most energized layers of unions.

Something is stirring inside labor. The goal now is for us to fight to help give it shape and expand its power: for a radical, militant force in the labor movement, breaking free from all capitalist political parties, struggling for radical, bottom-up control of unions — to build a labor movement that could really fight for the overthrow of this rotten system and the building of socialism.

The post Something Big Is Stirring: Report from the 2022 Labor Notes Conference: appeared first on Left Voice.

Neoliberal, imperialist feminism has nothing to offer women, LGBTQ+ people, people of color, or any oppressed group. It is a dead-end strategy used to justify the continued exploitation and oppression of hundreds of millions of people in the United States and across the globe. To confront the injustices and attacks we face in a context of increasing capitalist crisis, we need a feminism that is not subjugated to an inherently patriarchal, violent, racist, and wholly oppressive system designed to put the profits of a few over the needs of the vast majority. We need a feminism that is international and anti-imperialist. We need a feminism that harnesses our power as workers, those who make society run and who can shut it down — from the factory floor to the classroom — to fight for the liberation of all peoples and for a society free from exploitation and oppression. It’s up to us to build the fight for a socialist feminism. It’s up to us to fight for a society in which every material need is met, but also that guarantees the right to free time, to art, to self-realization, and pleasure. To echo the rallying cry of the feminists who came before us, we want bread for all, but we demand roses, too. Left Voice invites you to join us in that struggle, as part of an international network of socialist feminist organizations at the forefront of the struggle against exploitation and oppression around the world.

Sign up here to fight for a renewed, combative, socialist feminism.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: contact@leftvoice.org

New York City, NY — A new coalition of over thirty left groups, rank-and-file workers organizations and unions, and activists have come together to organize a march and rally today in response to the Supreme Court decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case which overturned Roe v. Wade, to protest the attacks on abortion rights by the State and the Right. This coalition includes workers, teachers, abortion rights and community organizations, and socialist organizations like Left Voice, Socialist Alternative, NYC for Abortion Rights, Starbucks Workers United (Astoria Blvd. and Caesar’s Bay), MORE caucus — UFT, Center for Reproductive Rights Union, to name a few.

The rally to go “All Out For Abortion Rights” in New York City is scheduled for 7 PM EST today, Friday, June 24. Organizers will gather at 6:30 PM in Washington Square Park. 

The coalition is organizing this protest under the following banner: for a federal law for free, safe, legal abortion on demand and without apology. Inspired by the mass movements in other countries like Argentina, the coalition believes a national law will only be won through a movement organized in our workplaces, schools, and in the streets. Just as abortion rights were initially won in the streets by committed organizers, and then codified by Roe, we will wage this fight to gain abortion rights for all via a mass movement. 

“In Ireland, in Argentina, in Poland, and Chile, the abortion struggle has been fought on the streets, through direct action and unapologetic claiming of abortion as an inalienable right – not by electing politicians who will defend ‘the right to choose.’ It is this militant action that we will need in the United States if we want to win,” said New York City for Abortion Rights member, Emily Janakiram. New York City for Abortion Rights (NYCFAR), a member of the coalition, was formed five years ago to be part of an important left response to the right’s attacks on abortion rights.

“Roe v. Wade is being overturned, making abortion illegal in many states. The right wing is on the offensive and only a mass movement from below has the power to halt this all-out attack on women and LGBTQ people. We need to protest, walk out, occupy, and strike to send the message to the courts, the right wing, and both major parties that we won’t tolerate these attacks any longer,” said Socialist Alternative, another one of the groups sponsoring the action. 

“The attacks on our rights are a labor issue, especially as working class people, especially people of color, will be bearing the worst of these attacks. For decades, politicians have convinced us that we are helpless to stop these attacks. They tell us to take our anger and fear to the polls election after election to make sure that even the nominal right to an abortion isn’t overturned. The legislature or courts will not save us — our rights will be fought and won through our own organizing. We can’t wait until November — which is why we’ll be taking to the streets today in response to the Supreme Court decision,” said Left Voice, another co-sponsor. 

If your organization, union, or union caucus wants to join us in co-sponsoring this action, please get in touch at contact@leftvoice.org. 

You can find the most up-to-date information on the rally here: https://www.instagram.com/left_voice/ 

A media kit with a full list of sponsors and flyers can be found here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1KYBb8sQpYnFnb_3YkpC4Vqm5l-MU6HDN?usp=sharing 

Sponsors List: 

Left Voice

Socialist Alternative NYC

Tempest Collective

NYC for Abortion Rights

CUNY for Abortion Rights

Rank and file action CUNY

Starbucks Workers Utd. (Astoria blvd)

Starbucks Workers Utd. (Caesar’s Bay)

NYU GSOC-UAW Local 2110

Art Workers Inquiry 

Student Workers of Columbia

Blue School Union

Brooklyn Eviction Defense

OPEIU Local 1010

Repro Justice Collective Columbia 

Repro NYC (extinction rebellion) 

Washington Square Park Mutual Aid

MORE caucus – UFT

Socialist Revolution (Affiliate of the IMT)

The gym 

Crown Heights Care Collective 

Fordham Graduate Student Workers 

Young Communist League

Association of Legislative Employees – NYC Council Union

Center for Reproductive Rights Union 

Party For Socialism and Liberation – NYC

Thank God for Abortion

If When How CUNY Law 

CUNY SPH Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights and Justice Club (Repro Club- CUNY) 

Workers’ Voice/La voz de los trabajadores

Outlive Them NYC

###

The post Unions, Left, and Activist Groups in New York City Organize Coalition and March in Response to the Supreme Court’s Decision to Overturn Abortion Rights appeared first on Left Voice.

It’s official. 

The Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, the biggest accomplishment of the U.S. feminist movement in the 60s and 70s. Fifty years of federal abortion rights are spinning down the drain. 

Thirteen states have trigger laws. Abortion is likely to be banned or almost entirely restricted in half of the United States as a result of the Dobbs decision. Millions of people will not be able to access abortion services in their home states or even in neighboring states. 

Abortion is healthcare and healthcare is a right. It should be accessible and easy to get; it should be free and available at any hospital. The high cost and inaccessibility of abortion is a product of the inherent sexism in this patriarchal capitalist system that has always sought to control, regulate, criminalize, and pathologize the sexuality of women and LGBTQ+ people. 

But the overturning of Roe v. Wade will be especially terrible for the most marginalized sectors and communities across the United States — Poor people, working class people, people of color, and undocumented folks are going to be those most affected by this attack on reproductive rights, and they will face the most hardship in getting the abortion access they need. Overturning Roe means some people will undertake massive debt to get abortions, some will be forced to birth children, some will be seriously hurt, and others will die because of this denial of abortion rights. Black and brown people will be the first to face criminalization for getting abortions. The effect of this decision is clear: the criminalization of abortion doesn’t mean the end of abortion — it only means the end of safe abortions.

Nine unelected judges have the undemocratic power to decide on the bodily autonomy of hundreds of millions of people. From high up in their mansions and cushy Washington, D.C. offices, they are stealing the right to abortion from millions of people in America. Nobody voted for them — they were placed in their seats by the president and the Senate, which is the sector of Congress meant to ensure the overrepresentation of the whitest, most conservative states. Two men who have committed sexual harassment and sexual assault sit in these seats and get to make decisions about what people do with their own bodies. 

The problem isn’t just right-wing justices. It is that the Supreme Court, whatever its makeup, has the power to dictate the rights of every single person living in the United States, often going against the interests and will of the majority of the population. Nine people have the ability to force people to birth children, to take away the most basic right of bodily autonomy. 

Undoubtedly, the right wing is in a state of jubilation over the overturn of Roe v. Wade. They have been trying to overturn it ever since the decision came down in 1973. State by state, they have put forward legislation to curtail our right to abortion, and have mobilized religious fanatics to harass people at clinics. The most radicalized right wing sectors have bombed clinics and killed doctors who provide reproductive care. 

There is nothing pro-life about the Far Right, which supports the murderous cops who kill Black people, wants to eradicate trans people’s existence, and does not support any policy that would ensure that parents have the means to take care of children, such as free and public healthcare, education, and childcare. 

The right wing that is actively on the political offensive today is not the same anti-choice right wing that it was in the past. Given political expression by Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” brand of right-wing populist rhetoric, it is shifting to ever more reactionary and oppressive policies to consolidate its base. It is now also made up of the likes of Kyle Rittenhouse supporters, the violent bigots who ran over protesters from the Black Lives Matter movement, people who want to limit voting rights and overturn the 2020 election to keep Trump in office, and those who are now increasingly centering their politics around attacks on bodily autonomy and trans people, especially trans youth. They want to bar trans kids from playing sports and using whatever bathroom reflects their gender identity and makes them feel safest. They are trying to punish the few parents out there who do accept and support their trans kids and prevent them from providing their kids with the gender-affirming healthcare that they need. 

Democrats are going to make fiery speeches about abortion rights and act as though they support a person’s right to make decisions about their reproductive health, but those speeches will be nothing but lies and empty promises. The Democrats also bear responsibility for the situation we are in. A key way that Democrats restricted abortion access was the barring of public funds from being used for abortion services. The Hyde Amendment, passed by Jimmy Carter, stopped Medicaid usage for abortions. Carter said:

Well, as you know, there are many things in life that are not fair, that wealthy people can afford and poor people can’t. But I don’t believe that the Federal Government should take action to try to make these opportunities exactly equal, particularly when there is a moral factor involved.

For low income folks and many folks of color, reproductive rights are already denied in several ways. Abortions are extremely costly, people are subjected to forced sterilizations in ICE detention centers, and Black women have a disproportionately high maternal mortality rate due to racism in the medical field. Reproductive rights means more than simply having access to safe and free abortion. Reproductive rights means making a living wage that allows folks to be able to raise a family and having unions to fight for those wages. It means being able to keep families together instead of separating them with borders and prisons. Reproductive rights means bodily autonomy, including gender affirming care. 

It means a federal right to accessible abortion. 

The Democrats promise to support abortion rights, but the majority actually supports anti-abortion legislation like the Hyde Amendment. They even throw their weight behind anti-choice candidates. They have had majorities and supermajorities in Congress, but they have not passed any legislation guaranteeing the right to an abortion. They want to use the topic of abortion rights to garner votes every election cycle and to inspire campaign donations, but it’s clear that they aren’t interested in our bodily autonomy or our healthcare beyond how weaponizing them keeps them in power to do the bidding of the capitalists and ultra-wealthy. 

The situation is dire. We need to fight back. Make no mistake: the Right is going to come for more and more if we don’t organize and mobilize to stop them. They are going to go after abortion pills, and they are going to try to ban abortion on a national level. They are already declaring attacks on trans kids and trans adults, and they are going to broaden their attacks on LGBTQ+ rights.  We need to unite and fight back, not only to win the tepid protections that Roe v. Wade guaranteed us, but to win the right to free, legal, and safe abortion as a federal law and to expand reproductive rights so that all people have the right to decide what happens to their bodies and futures.

Voting for Democrats may seem to many like a stopgap measure to at least abate the advance of the Right, but their complicity year after year shows that we can’t put our faith in this losing strategy anymore. The Democrats just want to keep us on a hamster wheel of broken electoral promises. Clearly, voting for them has not worked. Roe v. Wade will be overturned with a Democrat as president and the Democrats in control of both houses of Congress. 

The Democrats and their allies have tried to convince us that there is nothing to do but brace ourselves for the overturn of the basic right to an abortion and just try to vote more Democrats into office. But there is an alternative. It is the more difficult option, but it is the best way that we can ultimately win and defend against the attacks of a patriarchal capitalist state. That option is to mobilize a mass movement in the streets. It is to organize groups to take the struggle to our workplaces. It is the path that millions of people took to win in Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico. 

And it’s what won us even the limited protections of Roe v. Wade in the first place. We have a radical and combative feminist legacy to look back on. On International Women’s Day in 1970, people demanded free and safe abortion on demand, 24-hour, community-controlled childcare, and worker control of profits. That same year, 50,000 people took to the streets of New York City to fight for abortion rights and more. 

But that movement was co-opted and quelled — it was funneled into nonprofits funded by billionaires whose primary strategy for decades has been to convince us to put our faith in the courts and the Democratic Party. That faith is misplaced and their strategy is a losing one. It is up to us, the people, to build a movement that does not fight for only one cause and doesn’t repeat the mistakes of white feminism, TERF feminism, or lean-in girl boss liberal feminism. We must build a movement that doesn’t put our fate in the hands of capitalist politicians who work directly against our interests and endanger the most marginalized sectors of society. 

That movement must include all those ready to fight to protect the right to an abortion and reproductive rights. But to ensure that abortion becomes free, safe, legal and accessible on demand, to ensure the right to bodily autonomy, we need to connect the dots: to show that the oppression of women, LGBTQ+ folks, Black and brown folks, and immigrants is part of an intricate system of oppression engendered by a racist, sexist, trans and homophobic capitalist system. Within a broader movement, we need a socialist feminist wing that knows that the struggle for the liberation of women, queer folks, and all oppressed peoples is tied to the overthrow of the capitalist system. 

Above all, we need to build a movement that knows that it can win. Most social movements of our generation have not seen many victories, but we are seeing them now in the labor movement. Recently, we have seen Starbucks and Amazon workers winning union elections. There is a broad range of folks in the United States who are fighting to unionize because their experience has shown that taking the fight into their own hands and harnessing their power as workers is the best way to fight for their rights and to improve their lives. We want those unions to be fighting unions that stand in support of abortion rights. We want to shut down the system not only through mobilizing in the streets, but by mobilizing in our workplaces as well. The working class runs and produces everything that we rely on as a society, and if we shut down then we can bring the whole system to its knees.

It is possible to win. So let’s take the streets tonight. We must express all of the rage of this moment and say: We are not going to accept this attack on our rights. We are going to fight, we are going to build a movement, and we are going to win.

If you are in New York City, join us in Washington Square Park at 6:30 p.m. for a rally and march. And if you would like to join us in the fight for socialist feminism, sign up here.

The post Supreme Court Overturns Roe v. Wade. Organize, Mobilize and Fight Back. appeared first on Left Voice.

In the aftermath of Emmanuel Macron’s reelection as France’s president, a process of reestablishing a genuine revolutionary perspective and practice has taken an important turn in the country. It has the potential for tremendous historical significance. And it offers some important lessons for activists about what to do and what not to do — including for activists in the United States.

The lesson of what not to do can be found in an article by Marlon Ettinger in Jacobin, a magazine close to a significant section of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) leadership. It sings the praises of the electoral alliance created for the legislative elections that took place this month in France — an alliance of what the French call la gauche institutionelle, the institutional Left, to build what Ettinger calls a “counterpower to” the “monarchical executive” branch led by Macron. The leader of the coalition, known as the NUPES (Nouvelle Union Populaire Écologique et Sociale), is Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the social-democratic populist party La France Insoumise (LFI, France Unbowed). The fool’s errand of NUPES was to force Macron to name Mélenchon as his government’s prime minister by winning the most seats in France’s National Assembly.

Mélenchon was LFI’s presidential candidate earlier this year, and came in third — thus failing to make it to the second round. The NUPES coalition includes LFI, the Greens, remnants from the Socialist and Communist Parties, and others that have long been committed to the institutions of France’s Fifth Republic — and in some cases have constituted governments that have done the capitalists’ bidding. The NUPES campaign, at one end of the French Left spectrum, has had Mélenchon and his partners engaged in a wholesale capitulation to upholding the institutions of the French bourgeoisie in a quest for some ephemeral “power” — which Mélenchon argues for in exchange for becoming the managers of capitalism on behalf of the ruling class, but ostensibly with more of an eye to representing the interests of workers.

The coalition secured a virtual tie with Macron’s candidates in the first round of the legislative elections on June 12. The following Sunday, in second-round voting, Macron’s party lost its majority in the legislature but still secured the most seats. The NUPES delegates will be the second-largest grouping. 

At the other end of the French Left spectrum lies the revolutionary perspective — the fight not to manage but to destroy the capitalist system of exploitation and oppression along with the bourgeois state organized to serve and preserve that system’s interests. Along that spectrum can also be found the traditional organizations of what the French call l’extrême-gauche, the Far Left, including those who can trace the origins of their organizations back to the very beginnings of the Left Opposition to Stalinism led by Leon Trotsky, a leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution, and to the founding of the Fourth International in 1938.

History shows that to be between these poles is to tend strongly toward — or in many cases to be explicitly supportive of — the capitulation end of the spectrum. In France, we can see this in a brief history of the country’s Trotkyist “Far Left” since the 1960s.

The LCR and NPA

As happened in the United States, organizations identifying as Trotskyist surged in membership beginning in the late 1960s and well into the 1970s. In France, what became the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (LCR, Revolutionary Communist League) emerged in this period; it was the French section of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USec), one of the main international organizations of the world Trotskyist movement. Officially founded with the LCR name in 1974, it was the product of an upsurge in the class struggle that brought France to the brink of a revolutionary situation in May–June 1968. Many of the LCR’s key leaders were products of that uprising and then became a major component of the country’s Far Left for several decades. In February 2009, however, after a process of the USec moving further and further away from the core principle of building independent, revolutionary Marxist parties rooted in the working class and based on the historical program of Trotskyism, the group voted overwhelmingly to dissolve itself into the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) — a “broad anticapitalist party” that the LCR was a leading force in creating. A major factor in the LCR’s thinking was the vote for Olivier Besancenot, a member of the LCR, in the first round of the French presidential elections of 2002 and 2007: 1.2 million votes (4.25%) and nearly 1.5 million votes (4.08%), respectively.

The NPA project involved creating what is essentially a federation of currents from other Left organizations besides the LCR, along with groupings around feminist, alter-globalism, environmentalism, and so on — that is, around movementism, a focus on popular social and economic movements as the main force for societal change rather than on the role of the working class as society’s main revolutionary force. The NPA began with 9,200 members — a significant number. That the LCR should end up helping create the NPA makes perfect sense given its long-term orientation to social movements and its focus on recruiting youth rather than workers — a remnant of its origins in the student component of the May–June 1968 events. It presented its own liquidation into the NPA as a new schema for building a revolutionary party based on movements; in fact, it was a total abandonment of the central task of Trotskyists to build a revolutionary party.

That said, it’s important to note that at the NPA’s inception, its future was not cast in stone: it was certainly possible then that it could evolve into a mechanism for aiding the construction of a revolutionary organization. That would, of course, depend on its program, its activities, its engagement with the class struggle, and the assurance of democratic internal debate.

The two other main Trotskyist currents in France — Lutte Ouvrière and the Lambertists — never embraced the NPA project.

The Lambertists

The Lambertists today are organized in two groups, the result of a 2015 split: the Parti ouvrier indépendant (POI, Independent Workers Party) and the Parti ouvrier indépendant démocratique (POID, Democratic Independent Workers Party). Prior to that, this current of the French Far Left could be found in a series of organizations that went through several names and then, beginning around the commencement of the First Gulf War in 1990, tried on both a national and international scale to do something somewhat like the LCR tried with the NPA: regroupment of Left forces within a “broad front.”

For the Lambertists — so known because of the central role played by Pierre Lambert (1920–2008), a French Trotskyist who led an organization that had refused to join a 1963 reunification of worldwide Trotskyist forces that had split 10 years earlier — this effort revolved around the founding of the Parti ouvrier (PO, Workers Party) in France and the International Liaison Committee for a Workers’ International (ILC). The PO was a “fusion” of sorts with some members of the trade union bureaucracy organized in Force Ouvrière (FO, Workers’ Force), one of the country’s five major union confederations; this “broad” party had tendencies that included former members of the Communist and Socialist parties as well as anarchists, but was dominated by the “orthodox Trotskyists” of the Lambert current. Among its founding principles was “recognition of the class struggle,” but it focused on secularism and the fight against the institutions of the Fifth Republic, not on putting forth an actual revolutionary struggle. In essence, Trotskyism largely disappeared. Meanwhile, the ILC sought to engage movements and left-leaning union bureaucrats from across the globe, particularly in less-developed countries. Its focus was on “national sovereignty” against imperialism.

Lutte Ouvrière

Then there’s Lutte Ouvrière (LO, Workers’ Struggle), the third leg of the old Trotskyist stool in France’s Far Left. It traces its origins to a small group with a different name founded in 1939. Over the decades, it has grown to play a very key role in Far Left politics, thanks in part to its presidential candidates typically getting a very wide hearing. In 2002, LO candidate Arlette Laguiller eclipsed LCR candidate Besancenot’s good showing, garnering more than 1.6 million votes (5.72%), In 2007, though, Laguiller’s vote total dropped precipitously to only a third of that total: 487,857 votes in the first round, or 1.33 percent.

LO is distinguished by its deep orientation to workplaces, its semi-clandestine functioning, and its nearly complete eschewal of involvement in any struggles of working-class people and oppressed communities that isn’t based on economic struggles in the unions and their bureaucracies — which LO refuses to criticize. LO is held in high regard by many workers in France, and yet the organization has never used this regard to initiate or help lead a struggle against racism, police violence, or anything. Put simply, it has failed to find a way — or, more accurately, refused to find a way — to engage with radicalizing young workers in France who have been waging profoundly important class struggles over the past five years and longer.

Where have these currents ended up today? The NPA (that is, the ex-LCR) has endorsed Mélenchon’s ridiculous scheme to become prime minister while refusing to sign an agreement to join the NUPES (which didn’t want the NPA to join, anyway). As the comrades of Left Voice’s sister organization in France put it, the NPA has shown it is willing to “sacrifice political and programmatic independence for an electoral union and a few possible deputy positions.” The POI has openly endorsed the NUPES. The POID mounted no presidential campaign, but ran some candidates in the first round of the legislative elections while at the same time claiming it is preparing “the conditions for the class struggle that will arise” and calling on French workers not to “divide” the vote and to hold their noses while they vote for the “parties that have historically come out of the workers’ movement.”

LO claims to have as many as 8,000 “adherents,” a combination of perhaps 1,500 to 2,000 formal members and a loyal periphery. They are mostly implanted in the trade unions. At times, the organization does play a leading role in workers’ struggles in workplaces, and demonstrates principle, militancy, and class independence when it does so. The group abstains, though, from political and social struggles, and in that respect largely watches the French class struggle pass it by.

The NPA’s membership today is an estimated 2,000 — a massive decrease from its size when it was founded, and a reflection of its failure to become the force it claimed it set out to create. The two Lambertist groups each have 1,000 or so members, with many in the unions. But such numbers — and in a country of 68 million people, the numbers are not insignificant — are meaningless if those militants are not playing a revolutionary role in moving the class struggle forward. The crisis of the French Far Left — Trotskyism being the continuity of revolutionary Marxism from the Bolshevik revolution — is a crisis of absenteeism and abstention in a context of centrism run amok.

French Centrism

Centrism is a wide-scale phenomenon among nominally revolutionary organizations in which they vacillate between revolutionary and reformist politics. It has long been a feature of the world Trotskyist movement, and none of its main currents — whether known as Mandelism (the USec variant), Lambertism, or Morenoism (another important current from which Left Voice traces its origins) — have been immune. The “broad front” approach, which waters down revolutionary politics and practice to focus on slogans rather than action, is part and parcel of this phenomenon. Today, it has become one of the key features.

In his 1932 work What’s Next?: Vital Questions for the German Proletariat, Trotsky offered a detailed characterization of centrism’s content and purpose. “In general,” he wrote, centrism “fulfills ordinarily the function of serving as a left cover for reformism” and “to smear over the contradictions between the various tendencies” on the Left. In short, whereas “centrism is content with trifles … the revolution demands a great deal. The revolution demands absolutely everything.” And it allows for no shortcuts like those that have been sought in France.

In France today, this centrism has led to a point where the “old” Trotskyist organizations of the Far Left just discussed — even with their (relative) strength in numbers — have largely defanged themselves. They are divorced from the real battles of the French class struggle that have taken place over the last five years in particular. The NPA has crossed the class line; the Lambertists are two organizations of declarations and conferences, but little else; LO continues with its clandestine approach as it fails to engage with the growing number of French workers and youth who are seeking a revolutionary path forward to confront the misery of capitalism and the increasing attacks against them by the French state.

An Alternative Rooted in Genuine Struggle

Some years back, members of the sister organization of Left Voice in France (which publishes Révolution Permanente) joined the NPA precisely because of the potential mentioned earlier. As a public current within the NPA, those comrades waged a fight to keep the party independent and advance it along a path toward steadfast revolutionary politics. Over time, though, the NPA shrank rather than grew, and the NPA leadership — the old LCR leaders — moved further and further away from such a perspective. It became a terminal crisis. Eventually, our comrades were undemocratically excluded from the NPA — a de facto expulsion. 

That moment in June 2021 was a realization that created an opportunity to reconstitute a genuine, fighting, revolutionary Far Left in France. The “terminal crisis” of the NPA and the ongoing crisis of French centrism would need to be confronted head on, both programmatically and organizationally.

Over the past year, our comrades began to create the conditions for taking on this challenge. They used their strong links with, and in some cases leadership positions in some of the most important struggles in France over the past five years — the Yellow Vests movement, the strikes against pension reform, the rail strike and the Grandpuits refinery strike, anti-racist mobilizations, demonstrations protesting violence against women and rights for LGBTQ+ people, the environmental movement, and so on — to encourage the activists they’d been working with to join in a process of creating a new revolutionary organization. Such an invitation made perfect sense; after all, what these comrades brought to every one of these struggles, beyond their involvement in the day-to-day activities, was the class-independent, revolutionary perspective that they shared with those they met and worked with. They explained, for instance, that the only way to end racism is to end capitalism. The only way to win the comfortable retirement pensions are supposed to provide is to destroy the system of exploitation that puts profits before human needs.

One of the most important elements of this yearlong process was the presidential campaign of Anasse Kazib, a 34-year-old railway worker from a family of Moroccan immigrants who had become politicized in 2016 as part of the movement to resist changes to the French labor law, and who joined Révolution Permanente as well as the NPA the next year. He became a well-known symbol in France of a new generation of revolution-minded activists who rejected the complacency of the centrist Trotskyists. As Révolution Permanente explains in a balance sheet:

The idea of running Anasse Kazib as a candidate for the French presidency began as a proposal during the debates within the NPA … He had close links with the anti-racist movement, the struggle against police violence, and so on. He had also made his presence known on television, as a commentator on Les Grandes Gueules podcast for two years, and through his many confrontations with bourgeois politicians around Macron’s various counterreforms. …

The NPA leaders, unfortunately, had the opposite view. In a party in which all debates are public, they treated the proposal for Kazib’s candidacy as an “attack on the party.” It served as a pretext for pushing the 300 militants and sympathizers of Révolution Permanente out the door two months later. …

Once we were kicked out of the NPA, we decided to formalize the candidacy of Kazib, convinced that it would be a profound step to take that would carry the seed of a necessary revitalization of the Far Left in France, which had almost universally missed the boat with the wave of struggles that began in 2016.

The campaign was an uphill battle, given the requirement in France of obtaining 500 “sponsorships” from mayors and other elected officials just to get on the ballot — a burden the Kazib campaign could not overcome. But the campaign — essentially blacked-out from the French media — persisted as long as possible, galvanizing activists and directly confronting the Far Right, which launched racist, violent threats against the candidate at every turn. Those attacks ended up winning part of the French anti-fascist movement to the campaign’s side.

The balance sheet continues:

Interest in the campaign was striking among workers, youth, and residents of working-class neighborhoods throughout the six months of campaigning. Attendance at rallies and meetings — even though they took place several months before the elections themselves — testify to this: 500 people in Paris, 350 in Toulouse, 400 at the Institute of Political Studies in Bordeaux, 400 at the University of Paris 8, and 250 in Marseille, to name only the largest turnouts. Driven by the candidate’s charisma and fiery speech, these figures speak to a very militant campaign that involved more than 500 people, across the country, who helped organize rallies and public meetings, distributed leaflets, put up posters, and went on the road to meet public officials to encourage them to become sponsors.

Through this process, we want to begin — with many of those who worked with us in the presidential campaign — to build an instrument that can be used by workers, youth, and working-class neighborhoods to wage a social revolution, one that will put an end to capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and the destruction of the planet. We envision an organization that can intervene in the next explosions of the class struggle …

As we have reported in the pages of Left Voice, the process of creating that organization has shifted into high gear. At a conference held earlier this month, 100 delegates gathered to discuss the next steps. They issued a call for “the construction of a new revolutionary organization, one that is equal to the urgent task of ending the capitalist system and laying the foundations of a communist society.” And they addressed the call both to those searching for a revolutionary home who have found the “old” Far Left unwelcoming, as well as to the militants of those Far Left organizations that have turned away from the revolutionary struggle:

We address this call to all those who share our perspective and who do not see themselves in today’s Far Left, particularly the workers who have taken part in the working-class struggles of the last few years, the anti-racist, anti-fascist, LGBTQ+, feminist, and environmental activists who are convinced of the need for revolution, and the youth who know that this society has nothing to offer them. It is also addressed to those revolutionaries who seek to learn from the failure of the Far Left, even including militants still in the NPA, and who reject the turn taken by the leadership of that party, or that of Lutte Ouvrière.

Some Lessons to Draw 

To be sure, resuscitating the French Far Left is a much larger task than simply launching a new organization. It will require a relentless effort to establish a revolutionary pole of attraction within every struggle the French working class will be mounting as it confronts the new attacks sure to come in a second Macron presidential term. It will require an uncompromising program built on revolutionary practice and the approach of the Transitional Program that has guided revolutionaries in the Trotskyist movement since it was accepted as the founding document of the Fourth International in 1938. It will mean never forgetting why that program exists, as expressed in its subtitle: “Prepare the Conquest of Power.”

In taking this step, Révolution Permanente is accepting the responsibility implied in the Transitional Program’s very first line: “The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat.” Resolving that crisis has always posed the need for building an organization of the working class that refuses to cross the class line, that is resolutely anti-capitalist, that is committed to the self-organization of the working class and the most marginalized in society, and that has as its ultimate objective to help lead the great majority of people to wrest genuine power from their oppressors and transform society from one based on exploitation to one based on meeting human needs and freeing people from wage slavery — a communist society.

The forces of Révolution Permanente today are small, but the ideas are big. This step our French comrades are taking matters because others calling themselves Trotskyists have essentially neutered, if not completely liquidated, a revolutionary pole. Opening a path to its reconstitution is what our comrades are all about. At the very moment that the centrists have abstained from the movements, the comrades of RP are presenting a perspective for the movements to come together as component parts not of some amorphous “broad front” but of a revolutionary organization with a broadened focus — one that recognizes that the only real solutions will come in overthrowing capitalism.

Why does this matter here, and what lessons might we draw in this country? Of course, France and the United States have many differences. But revolutionaries here face many of the same challenges. Notably, in the aftermath of the French legislative elections, the Macron government is confronting what Révolution Permanente is calling a crisis of “ungovernability” that will create openings for the mass movements. In this country, we have some of those same features, especially with an ineffective Congress and a president sinking in his favorability ratings at a moment when the Supreme Court is attacking long-held rights.

We also have an organization with significant impact on the Left that serves the explicit function of derailing the independence of working-class struggles and channeling them into one of the two parties of our class enemy, the Democratic Party. That organization is the DSA, and just like the NUPES in France, it is wedded to the institutions of the bourgeois state. Our French comrades, with the Anasse Kazib campaign, demonstrated that there is an alternative — as long as becoming the managers of capitalism isn’t your objective.

We saw an increase in strikes late last year, and today there are major union organizing drives across the United States. These struggles come up against the limitations of relying on bureaucrats tied to the Democratic Party. Our French comrades have demonstrated how the self-organization of rank-and-file union members can keep strikes going and force the retreat of the class enemy. This will be at the center of their new revolutionary organization.

As in France, we have anti-racist, feminist, environmental, LGBTQ+, and other movements that wax and wane, sometimes growing to historical levels (as the Black Lives Matter demonstrations did in the aftermath of the cop murder of George Floyd). What has been missing in these movements is a revolutionary pole aimed at transforming them from their “narrow” focus to a perspective aimed at uniting all the struggles against oppression into one aimed at taking power away from the oppressors and exploiters. Our French comrades are beginning the process of making that revolutionary pole a permanent feature of class struggle in their country.

None of this is hyperbole. No one is claiming that the process beginning in France — or a similar process in the United States — puts revolution on the agenda. No, what is posed right now is the question of surpassing the absenteeism, abstentionism, and liquidationism that are features of centrism — features of the absence of a genuine revolutionary pole committed to action — and taking whatever steps we can to offer an alternative.

A central task today for revolutionaries — whether there are 10 of us, 100 of us, or thousands — is to find a way to intervene with the perspective of building an independent working-class part with a revolutionary perspective. That also means recognizing the importance to building that party of struggles based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and other elements — because resolving the issues that confront people and force them into the streets to fight for their rights is impossible without revolution.

The post Trotskyists in France Are Reconstituting a Fighting Revolutionary Left. There Are Important Lessons for the United States appeared first on Left Voice.

The Fourth International was founded in 1938 to unite internationalist communists who opposed the Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution. These left oppositionists were ruthlessly persecuted by Stalinist spies — one such spy murdered Leon Trotsky in 1940. But no case of Stalinist infiltration was stranger than a press conference that took place in East Berlin on November 10, 1961. A man named Otto Freitag had fled from his home in Munich and crossed the border into East Germany. He gave a press conference explaining he had been forced to seek refuge from the West German secret services. Freitag was a Trotskyist — a member of the International Committee of the Fourth International, to be precise. What was Freitag doing in the German Democratic Republic, a country that threw people in jail for the “crime” of reading Trotsky’s works?

Freitag’s comrades in Zurich began to wonder: Could he have been kidnapped by the East German secret police, the Stasi, and forced to make such statements? Or had he in fact been an agent? In the latter case, he must have been under very deep cover. Freitag had joined West Germany’s Independent Workers Party (UAP) a decade earlier, in the early 1950s. The UAP was aligned with the leader of Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito, a Stalinist who had broken with Stalin. The small Trotskyist group in West Germany had joined the UAP — and when the party fell apart, Freitag joined the Trotskyist group.

The Fourth International split in 1953, between an International Secretariat (IS) and an International Committee (IC). While the Swiss section sided with the IC, the West German section remained loyal to the IS. Heinrich Buchbinder, the leader of the Swiss section, was looking for activists in West Germany to recruit to the IC. Freitag’s handlers from the East German Stasi and the Soviet KGB had an admittedly brilliant idea: if they led a split in the West German Trotskyist group, their otherwise untalented man could ascend to a leadership position of the international Trotskyist movement.

Freitag followed these orders and founded a German section of the IC in 1954. The Stalinist agent was soon a full member of the International Committee. Meetings of the IC, attended by Gerry Healy, Pierre Lambert, and Buchbinder were held in Freitag’s Munich apartment — which had been rented by the Stasi. All documents went straight to East Berlin. And Freitag was no mere observer. He participated in the assassination of the Czech Trotskyist Wolfgang Salus, who had once been Trotsky’s secretary, in Munich.

The astounding story of Freitag has been told before, at least in German.¹Hermann Bubke, Der Einsatz des Stasi-und KGB-Spions Otto Freitag im München der Nachkriegszeit (Hamburg: Verlag Dr. Kovač, 2004). Not much more has been known about the Swiss Trotskyist group that recruited him — until now. Lucas Federer, a young historian from Zurich and a leader of the Youth of the Movement for Socialism (BfS), has just published a very thorough history.²Lucas Federer: Zwischen Internationalismus und Sachpolitik: Die trotzkistische Bewegung in der Schweiz, 1945-1968 (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2022). The book is under a Creative Commons license and can be downloaded for free from the publisher’s website. The Trotskyist group led by Buchbinder was tiny, yet its history offers fascinating insights about Trotskyism in the postwar period.

Emerging from the Underground

If you’ve heard anything about Swiss Trotskyism, you’ve probably heard of the Revolutionary Marxist League (LMR in French / RML in German), which was formed after 1968, led by Charles-André Udry. At its height, that group organized more than 1,000 people, making it quite a force in a small country. Today, former Trotskyists occupy leading roles in Switzerland’s Green Party, the Social Democratic Party, and the union bureaucracies.

Federer’s new book, however, looks at an earlier and much more isolated generation of Trotskyists, with little connection to their successors. In the two decades following World War II, they never had more than a few dozen members. But their internationalist campaigns gave them an outsized influence.

When World War II began, Switzerland remained neutral. In 1940, Swiss police nonetheless arrested a dozen Trotskyists after an anti-militarist bulletin was distributed to soldiers. A number of Trotskyists spent years in prison, and the Marxist Action of Switzerland (MAS) had to go underground. The Austrian Trotskyist leader Josef Frey, in exile since 1938, played an important role as a theoretician, but his authoritarian manner increasingly alienated his younger comrades before his death in 1957.

Recounting the history requires a bit of alphabet soup: In the 1950s, the Trotskyists formed a somewhat broader, legal organization by taking over an independent leftist newspaper: Proletarian Action (PA). For a number of years, the MAS still functioned as a secret core inside PA. Over the course of the 1950s, the Trotskyists made several attempts to unite with dissident Social Democrats and Stalinists, but they were only able to recruit a few people. This took the form of a Socialist Workers Conference (SAK), which later founded a Socialist Workers League (SAB). Over the course of a decade, the MAS dissolved into PA and then PA dissolved into the SAB.

At this time, a triumvirate came together that led the Swiss Trotskyist group for two decades:

-Heinrich Buchbinder (1919–1999): a son of Jewish immigrants, studied medicine but didn’t finish his degree, and worked a publicist for the chiropractors’ association. He had been a leader of a social democratic youth organization in Zurich before splitting it away to join the Trotskyists. He became the public face and energetic leader of all the Trotskyist groups.

-Jost von Steiger (1917–2007): a chemist directing a laboratory at a big Siemens plant, took up roles in the leading bodies of the Fourth International. Because of his job and also because he had been convicted after the raid in 1940, he could not appear in public.

-Hans Stierlin (1916–98): an engineer, invented a new kind of refrigerator and founded the company Sibir to produce them. He was so successful that “Sibir” became a common term for a refrigerator in Switzerland. Stierlin tried to run his company, with hundreds of workers, based on egalitarian principles. He also donated large sums to the Swiss Trotskyist group and the Fourth International. This allowed the group to place ads in big newspapers, despite their very small size. Although Stierlin never appeared in public, he participated in the weekly meetings of the Political Bureau for decades. As one biographer put it, he “resolved the contradiction between Marx and Ford in his person.”³This is an interesting parallel to David North, the millionaire CEO of a capitalist company and who leads a bizarre cult that claims the legacy of Trotskyism.

Surveillance and Solidarity

Surveillance of the Trotskyists was not limited to the Stalinist spy Freitag. The Swiss secret services included Buchbinder on the “Dangerous and Suspected Persons List” in Category 1, and his mail and telephone were observed for decades. (This is, ironically, one of the main sources for this book.) The secret files scandal in 1989 revealed that Swiss police had been illegally compiling dossiers on citizens for decades.

France’s secret services were equally interested in this tiny group, because the Swiss Trotskyists supported the Algerian anti-colonial movement. Most European Trotskyists supported the National Liberation Front (FLN). The Swiss Trotskyists, however, followed the lead of Pierre Lambert and Gerry Healy of the IC and supported the Algerian National Movement (MNA).

While Michel Pablo and the IS gave uncritical support to the FLN, the “orthodox Trotskyist” IC were cheerleaders for the MNA. Lambert, for example, described the MNA as a “workers party” with “socialist demands for the expropriation and nationalization of large landowners and big businesses.” The claim that the MNA was somehow more left-wing or socialist than the FLN was false — as the independence war advanced and the FLN won the upper hand, the MNA increasingly collaborated with French colonialism.

Buchbinder organized a Switzerland-Algeria Committee that sought support from trade unions and publicized the anti-colonial struggle. The cause was popular among the slowly emerging New Left. The Trotskyists again had their homes raided by police in 1956, accused of providing military training to MNA militants or even planning attacks in Europe.

New Social Movements

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Swiss army wanted to acquire nuclear weapons. A large protest movement opposed this plan. This movement is often remembered as the work of left-wing Social Democrats and religious pacifists. But the small Swiss Trotskyist group had an outsized influence — they benefited from their connections to Healy’s organization, which was active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in the UK. The Swiss campaign copied many tactics from the British movement, including multiday protest marches.

These protests politicized a new generation of leftists, in a prelude to 1968. Buchbinder became a national leader of the movement against nuclear weapons in Switzerland, and was even a delegate to the Accra Conference in Ghana in 1958. This helped Buchbinder connect with a new generation of young people. But he began to clash with them, particularly because he supported nuclear energy. As this book shows, it was his success in this largely pacifist movement that led Buchbinder to slowly abandon his Trotskyist convictions. He ended up withdrawing from public life, after several decades at the head of a small group.

In the 1960s, the SAB slowly petered out. Von Steiger remained on the leadership bodies of the Fourth International, but as he admitted later in an autobiographical text, he was representing a section that no longer existed. While earlier generations of revolutionary militants had usually come from the workers’ movement, the New Left emerged from the universities. A new Trotskyist tradition was born in Lausanne, in (French-speaking) Romandy, where Charles-André Udry broke away a youth group from the Stalinist party, forming the LMR / RML.

As Trotskyism gained new momentum, both Buchbinder and Stierlin retired from revolutionary politics. The former even rejoined the Social Democratic Party, where he had started his political career decades earlier. Von Steiger, in contrast, joined the new RML, helping to set up the new group’s first branches in German-speaking Switzerland. He provided a lone link to the earlier experiences of Swiss Trotskyism. By 1974, the RML had 350 members. Including candidate members and sympathizers, the group organized 1,000 to 1,200 people, half of them under 25.

A Hidden History

The story of the spy Otto Freitag, which was first extensively documented almost 20 years ago in German, yet remains largely unknown in English, is fascinating in the context of one particularly strange episode of Trotskyist history. For decades, Gerry Healy, Alex Mitchell, and David North ran a campaign called “Security and the Fourth International.” They accused Joseph Hansen, a leader of the Socialist Workers Party in the U.S., of being an FBI and KGB agent. Hansen served as a guard for Trotsky during his exile in Mexico, and they accused him of complicity in the assassination.

The accusers never came up with anything more than the most laughably circumstantial evidence. Healy passed away in 1989, and the tabloid reporter Mitchell has since more or less admitted that the entire campaign was a cheap hack job.⁴Alex Mitchell, Come the Revolution (Sydney: New South, 2012). Yet David North, who today publishes the website WSWS, besides working as the CEO of a capitalist printing company, continues peddling this vile conspiracy theory.

If North were at all interested in spies in the Fourth International, Freitag would be an easy place to start. The Stasi archives are open, and the relevant documents are available in books. Yet North appears more interested in slanders than in serious historical research.

Rebuilding the Fourth International

The story of Swiss Trotskyism shows how our movement needed to hold out against persecution by Stalinists, colonial powers, and “democratic” governments. It shows how a small nucleus is sometimes needed to keep the flames of internationalism alive in adverse conditions — and this tradition can reach wide new layers when the class struggle is on the ascent again.

For international readers, the Swiss Trotskyist group is most interesting as a study in the development of the Fourth International in the years after the Second World War. Some Trotskyists believe that the IC represented an “orthodox” alternative to the “Pabloite revisionism” of the IS. In reality, however, both sides shared a common method of adaptation to social democracy, Stalinism, and bourgeois nationalism in the colonial and semicolonial world.

Fighting to rebuild the Fourth International today cannot be limited to clutching to this or that supposedly “orthodox” splinter. It requires a struggle to reestablish Trotskyism’s real legacy and connect it with the most advanced sectors of workers and youth.

The post The Strange Story of Trotskyism in the Alps appeared first on Left Voice.

Last week, Ecuador’s indigenous movement, mainly from CONAIE (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador), called for massive protests against a fuel price increase. Indigenous communities are facing the consequences of an extractivist policy that hands over their territories via mining contracts to corporations that raise fuel prices, in an oil-producing country.

For the past 10 days, all around Ecuador, streets have been barricaded, and massive protests have stopped the economy. The main roads into the capital, Quito, have been blocked off, and the country is now facing food and fuel shortages. 

The protesters are demanding that President Guillermo Lasso freeze the price of gasoline, declare a moratorium on small farmers’ bank debts, reinforce labor rights to cut job insecurity, stop privatizations of the public sector, and limit oil and mining expansion into indigenous lands.

At first Lasso’s government tried to portray itself as “democratic” and to show a “willingness to listen” to popular demands. However, Lasso has not backed down, and refuses to dialogue with the protesters.  

He has accused the indigenous movement of trying to destabilize the country and of committing “terrorist acts.” As a consequence, the leader Leonidas Iza was arrested and taken away in an unidentified car, and it took several hours before his transfer to another city was made public — all this in an attempt to tamp down the movement. Iza was released in the early hours of Wednesday morning, but prosecutors opened a case against him, which will go to trial on July 4.

Lasso called for a state of emergency in six provinces, including a nighttime curfew in Quito. On Sunday, police took over an indigenous cultural center in Quito to use as a base to repress the protest — a slap in the face to the indigenous protesters.

The Continuity of Lenin Moreno’s Policy and a Latent October

The unrest in Ecuador is not temporary — it confronts not only the government but also the whole political and economic power of the country. It comes after the massive uprising in October 2019, which put former president Lenin Moreno on the ropes and limited the IMF’s austerity plans. Lasso stated that he would not allow this strike to acquire the dimensions of a new social outburst, but the living conditions for the Ecuadorian people are dire and taking expression in the street.

After two years of pandemic, Moreno’s vaccination campaign was promoted as one of the “most successful” in Latin America, but deep social and economic problems lingered. The average worker in Ecuador earns a minimum wage of just $425 a month. Lasso had promised an increase of $100 to post-pandemic wages, but he failed to clarify that he would divide it in installments throughout his term, so the increase was only $25 this year.

During the pandemic, workers were subjected to a labor regime in which their rights were openly attacked. With the Humanitarian Support Law promoted by the Moreno government, employers could increase working hours, reduce salaries, stop paying pension contributions, and fire workers without any impediment. Lasso’s initiative in this matter was to make a sort of “copy-paste” of the law and adapt it to the post-pandemic world under the euphemistically named project “Creating Opportunities.” In this project, he basically proposes an alternative labor regime, where the parties in “common agreement” can modify the working conditions (as if the employer-worker relationship was one between equals).

This is how labor precariousness is disguised as “full employment,” in a country where working conditions, the attack on wages, and the loss of labor rights are central concerns of the day.

Lasso promised to transform poverty into micro-entrepreneurships, with credits, indebtedness, and the classic neoliberal appeal of individual effort, but not only does poverty remain, but Lasso’s image as the “self-made” banker was further discredited after the Pandora Papers scandal exposed his use of tax havens.

Layoffs of health workers, austerity in education, a privatization plan for energy resources, the repression of the women’s movement in the middle of 8M, the opposition to legalize abortion in cases of rape (!), the increase in the cost of living, and an enormous crisis in the prison system — where overcrowding, degrading conditions and violence have left more than 300 prisoners dead in one year — added to the emergence of groups linked to hired killings in the country’s main cities. These groups have helped the government undertake a policy of militarization, establish states of exception, and criminalize protest. They are among the reasons that Lasso’s approval rating has plummeted to only 31 percent, but this is not only a question of his government.

Questioning the IMF Country

The rebellion of 2019 fundamentally questioned the country’s economic model; the IMF austerity could not be applied without contradictions. Despite a slowdown during the pandemic, that deep malaise remains.

UNES (Union for Hope), a bloc constituted centrally by the Democratic Center Movement and the Citizen Revolution Movement of former president Rafael Correa, presents itself as the largest opposition force. In fact, however, it guarantees Lasso’s center-right party’s governability, making alliances in the Constituent Assembly, where the government has a small minority. UNES has done nothing to confront the IMF austerity, supported by a government that promotes itself as the representative of the banking system and as continuous with Morenismo. This shows that UNES is not an alternative.

To redouble the mobilization and bring together the indigenous movement, workers’ organizations, and students, we need to organize in assemblies where we can discuss a plan of struggle to stop Lasso’s adjustment and for the immediate release of political prisoners.

Workers and popular sectors should independently organize and establish a program that unifies their demands against the IMF adjustment, the tariff hikes, labor precariousness, and extractivism. Such a program, which centrally questions the ownership of strategic resources, could fundamentally address Ecuador’s structural problems and lead to the conquest of all the popular demands.

Originally published on June 16 in La Izquierda Diario

Translated by Paul Ginestà

The post Ecuador’s Indigenous People Are Fighting Neoliberal Austerity in the Streets appeared first on Left Voice.

On Wednesday, workers at an Augusta, Maine Chipotle store collected union cards from a majority of workers, which informally makes them the first store to form an independent union at a Chipotle in the United States. 

The workers are calling their new union Chipotle United, and say they are not yet seeking to affiliate with Service Employees International Union (SEIU 32BJ), which has been attempting to organize Chipotle workers in New York City. According to the Central Maine Morning Sentinel, workers submitted a letter of their intent to form a union to management at the Augusta store and to Chipotle’s corporate offices on Wednesday. Of course, it is very unlikely that the store management or the company will voluntarily recognize the union without a fight. Companies like Chipotle make billions off of the labor of their exploited employees and a unionized workforce makes that exploitation more difficult. It is likely then that these workers will have to petition the national Labor Relations Board if they want to force a vote for formal union recognition, a process that will likely expose them to retaliation and intimidation tactics by management. At both Amazon and Starbucks, for instance, several employees have been harassed, fired, or faced other forms of retaliation from management while organizing for union elections, and sometimes even after. 

These workers are just the latest in a series of high profile successful unionization efforts at food service stores, retail stores, and corporate warehouses around the country. Amazon warehouse workers, Starbucks workers, and Apple retail store workers have also all successfully organized their workplaces in the last six months. While these unionization efforts, particularly at Apple and Chipotle, may not seem like much compared to the 14 million current unionized workers in the United states, these victories are an important sign of things to come. Chipotle employs almost 100,000 workers in the United States, Starbucks almost 400,000, and Amazon, the largest of all three, employs more than one million workers. If these unionization efforts can spread to the rest of the workers in these companies, we could see one of the biggest upticks in union density in at least the last 60 years. Such increased numbers and new energy could be just the spark that unions need to jumpstart a more militant labor movement.. 

Supporting, defending, and helping to organize this new generation of combative workers is one of the most important tasks before us in the coming years. And this is because such union efforts are not only about wages, benefits, or working conditions. They are about the future of the working class as a whole. While contract fights and struggles with the boss can be important and necessary schools of war for the working class, the real power of unions goes well beyond the workplace. Unions are organizations where working people can learn both the true value of our labor and how to use the power of our labor to take collective action as a class. From the recent wave of Right-wing attacks on trans people and abortion rights to racist police violence, unions have a role to play in fighting oppression as well as exploitation. Workers at both Starbucks and Amazon have highlighted that their labor battles are intimately connected to social justice struggles, like the fight for Black Lives and LGBTQ+ rights. And of course, unions can and must use their power to fight for better living conditions for all working people, including universal health care, free public higher education, quality public housing, safe carbon-neutral renewable energy, and other basic necessities of life that capitalism denies us.  

The post The Unionization Wave Continues: Workers In Maine Have Organized the First Chipotle Store in the Country appeared first on Left Voice.

This week, UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s battered government is facing a tough economic outlook. Official figures show that the economy came close to stalling in April as GDP shrank by 0.3 percent, consistent with predictions that the UK will become the slowest-growing OECD economy. The new data also confirms that the disparity between wages and the cost of living is growing to levels not seen in decades, all as households cope with a record increase in energy bills.

This is the worst economic situation the UK has seen in decades. Johnson is trying to refocus the political agenda after surviving a no-confidence vote with a slim majority in which 148 ministers from his own party voted against him. The prime minister, in addition to getting himself together politically, and must avoid a recession. As if that were not enough, is facing strikes that could extend into a summer of discontent.

In a context of high inflation (9.1% in May), wage freezes, falling living standards, and severe labor shortages in some sectors, discussions around wages have taken center stage. Over 50,000 railway workers are currently in the midst of a nationwide strike action — the largest work stoppage since 1989 — to demand better pay and employment guarantees. The workers, who are represented by the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers union (RMT), went on strike on Tuesday, and have other strikes planned for June 23 and 25.

Johnson’s first response to the strike announcements was that better wage settlements could threaten a 1970s-style “wage-price spiral,” which in turn would force the Bank of England to raise interest rates further. However, as we have written previously, higher wages and employment are not to blame for rising inflation. Amid the cost-of-living crisis, the prime minister also wants to cut more than 90,000 public sector jobs.

Meanwhile, in an interview with the Sunday Telegraph, transport minister Grant Shapps said the government is considering legal changes to allow agency workers to replace striking staff in order to reduce disruption to services. Shapps added that workers were being misled in some cases by “Marxists” who are “determined to turn this into some sort of fight, as they see it, with a Tory government.”

But beyond the railroads, there could be more strikes, and rising inequality could spill over into other sectors. National Health Service (NHS) workers in England are facing an annual pay offer below inflation, which for nurses would mean a 10 percent cut in real terms to their income. These public sector wage agreements are bound to provoke widespread unrest.

Public sector workers have no shortage of reasons to go on strike. Wage depreciation affects millions of workers who served on the front line of the pandemic. This sector faces much slower wage growth than the country as a whole — 1.6 percent, compared with 8.7 percent growth in private sector wages.

On Sunday, thousands in London marched to Parliament as part of a demonstration organized by the Trades Union Congress (TUC). Protesters demanded a real wage increase for everyone, as well as a ban on zero-hours contracts (contracts where workers must be available when required, and employers do not specify a minimum number of hours or time slots), a ban on redundancy, an increase in sick pay, an end to racism at work, and a tax on energy profits to pay the bills of working families.

Unison, the largest union in the country, also called on its members to join the march and said it was “strike ready.” This union, which represents 1.8 million public sector workers, brings together workers in health care, education, the judiciary, water supply companies, government and environmental agencies, energy companies, and contractor workers who are employed on an outsourced basis for hospital cleaning, caretaking, call centers, and other work.

The dynamics of this situation and the willingness of workers to fight for their rights reminds us of what was known as the “winter of discontent” — the wave of struggles that took place in the winter of 1978-1979 in the United Kingdom in response to the then Labour government’s attempt to impose a five percent wage ceiling at a time of high inflation. Workers should continue their struggle, and keep integrating more sectors into this fight.

Originally published in Spanish on June 15 in La Izquierda Diario.

Translation by Otto Fors

The post United Kingdom: Is a Summer of Discontent on the Horizon? appeared first on Left Voice.

In 2021, the U.S. Department of Defense issued its Climate Adaptation Plan, which has been lauded by corporate media as a supposedly serious mobilization against climate change. More recently, the U.S. Army has followed suit with its own Climate Strategy. More and more frequently, Democratic politicians are learning to frame the eternal imperative of an eternally expanding military budget in the language of “greening” the military. Similar language is used by Pentagon higher-ups, and even more frequently by those from the “industry” side of the military-industrial complex. 

Make no mistake: the military is one of the worst polluters in the world and a huge contributor to climate change. The U.S. military owns enormous swaths of land and has a massive physical plant: by its own estimates, it outputs more carbon than all but 55 countries, and generates many other forms of pollution aside. In all, the United States maintains around 500 domestic bases and nearly 800 foreign ones, each an environmental black hole, unaccountable to any safety standards, reporting requirements, or community review and oversight. Beyond the carbon emitted by the daily operation of its millions of buildings and vehicles, the military has a long-term environmental footprint in the forms of toxic chemicals (leaked or dumped, often intentionally), ecologically disruptive changes to land-use, and direct repression of Indigenous land defenders and environmental justice movements.

So, without a doubt, the climate emergency demands a swift end to the polluting practices of the military. But what sort of changes will achieve this? In whose interest will a “sustainable transition” be effected? Allowing the military itself to propose and guide this transition will not, and cannot, lead to anything but a greenwashed imperialism. This would not represent even an incremental step towards climate action, because imperialism as a system of economic organization is deeply complicit in climate change. The military, as a leading “policeman” of the imperialist world order, can never take serious action to tear down the system it exists to protect. 

The published plans for a supposed “green transition” of the military show precisely how a militaristic response, which treats climate change as a “national security” threat, lacks any concern for either the environment or humanity. The overriding concern is ensuring that the armed forces can continue to operate as usual. They focus on which foreign bases the military will have to relocate, what infrastructure needs to be made more resilient, what training is needed to deploy troops in new, harsher climates, and what conflicts it should prepare to repress as the Global South faces greater resource scarcity. 

If these objectives seem to lack any connection with traditional goals of the climate movement, it is worth asking what interests they actually serve. The military has no interest in promoting sustainable resource use, protecting or restoring ecosystems, or ending extraction. A more fuel-efficient fleet of tanks, subs, warships, drones, and fighter jets may sound like incremental progress, but in the hands of the U.S. war machine, is no victory for the climate movement, nor for the billions of people around the world who suffer both the effects of a changing climate and the ravages of imperialism. A “more sustainable” border-industrial complex will still perpetrate the same violence against immigrants, even as the capitalist-driven climate crisis produces more environmental and economic refugees. Solar-powered prisons and fuel-efficient electric police cruisers still house the social-disciplinary tools to violently discipline the surplus population that capitalism relies on for its survival. Police, prisons, and borders  deserve our condemnation on their own terms; but, apropos of environmental concerns, it’s important to stress that “green” fixes to these institutions represent deeply unserious distractions for the climate movement. To arrest the ravages of climate change, we must attack the underlying disease, of which militaries, police, prisons, and borders are symptoms. That disease is capitalism. 

The Military’s Climate Priorities

Today’s militaries exist to enforce the land, borders, and resources of nation-states. For this reason alone, no bourgeois government’s military will ever allow the subversion of its “mission” to a broader goal such as climate mitigation, which is inherently internationalist and anti-extractive. Instead, as we see from the DoD’s own plans, a few token measures to reduce emissions will be paired with massive expansions to prepare for the “security threat” posed by a changing climate. The institutional logic of the U.S. capitalist state ensures that the military will only demand more money and resources for a militarized response to escalating climate chaos, doubling down on border violence, and making ever more aggressive moves to secure natural resources and transport corridors.

The logic of militarizing everything has uncanny parallels to the expansionary drive of capital in general. English economist William Jevons observed that when technology leads to increases in efficiency, resource use in that sector actually goes up, because capitalists see an opportunity for making more profit with the same outlay of capital: producing more for less. Similarly, when the military increases its planes’ fuel efficiency, for example, they are not obligated to run the same number of flights and save fuel; instead, with military superiority as their driving goal, efficiency gains are equally likely to incentivize more flights, to project more air-power with the same amount of fuel. The recent war in Ukraine reminds us just how eager the U.S. merchants of death are to find or invent new markets for their deadly wares. Imperialism is inherently unsustainable; it needs to expand. It will invoke the specters of authoritarianism and oriental aggression to justify ever-expanding weapons sales and militarized borders.

This logic leads to some extremely counter-intuitive “climate policies.” Take, for example, the Navy’s response to the potentially catastrophic melting of arctic sea ice. Rather than worry about the countries that will be swallowed by rising sea levels or ancient diseases that could be released from melting permafrost, their focus is on competition with Russia, as the melting Arctic opens potential new trade routes. Their proposed “solution” is to build more naval ships to cut through arctic sea ice to seize control of new trade routes before Russia can claim them. The buildup of military vessels, of course, will directly exacerbate the environmental crisis in the Arctic, but the military’s sole concern is how to leverage the situation in the interests of U.S. hegemony, even at the cost of wrecking one of the most vulnerable parts of the globe.

A Poisonous Presence Around the World

These priorities are completely disconnected from the costs of the crisis for the vast majority of people — those who don’t make up the capitalist class. Everywhere, capitalism extracts, exploits, and depletes natural resources, and these processes are mirrored by the violence that the military enacts against the people living there. This can be seen particularly clearly in the aggression that the U.S. military and other militarist institutions direct against frontline Indigenous water protectors and land defenders.

Recently, native Hawaiians have led the larger Oʻahu community in a fierce struggle to shut down Red Hill, a Navy base with enormous fuel storage facilities. Leaks from these tanks have poisoned a major source of drinking water on Oʻahu. The military has resisted the demands of the movement every step of the way, and even defied court orders to decommission the facility. Despite leaks as recently as April 2022, the military resisted and delayed shutting the facility down. As usual, pollution is not their concern; the tanks, even as they poisoned the water table, were an integral part of the U.S. strategic naval presence in Hawaiʻi, which in turn is key to protecting U.S. military power in the Pacific. The same imperatives that led the U.S. to annex Hawaiʻi in 1898 continues to visit destruction on the islands’ Indigenous people. Even now, as the Oʻahu community is forced to conserve water as a result of the Navy’s overuse, military infrastructure — including seven different military golf courses on Oʻahu — enjoys privileged access to scarce clean water.

Red Hill is just one example. U.S. military occupations throughout the Pacific have rejected and actively suppressed the struggles of Indigenous communities for decades. Similar dynamics can be found in Okinawa, Guam, and just about any territory occupied by the U.S. military throughout the Pacific. Okinawans, in particular, have endured rampant sexual harassment and assault from U.S. troops, and, just as in Oʻahu, the military presence on Okinawa has come with its own cases of the U.S. military poisoning drinking water.

Of course the dumping of toxic chemicals and rejection of people’s sovereignty extends far beyond the Pacific, and the worst consequences of the U.S. military presence throughout the world can be found in countries that the United States has directly gone to war with. Such countries include Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, which the United States blanketed in 20 million gallons of various herbicides during the Southeast Asia War, as well as Iraq where military waste was regularly burned in open air bonfires and munitions explosions have filled the air with especially high levels of heavy metals such as mercury, lead, and titanium.

There’s no way to know how many people around the world have been disabled and killed as a result of military contamination, not just in war zones, but also by the more routine impacts of U.S. military presence. In every case, the Pentagon goes to great lengths to cover up the consequences of its pollution, even when the victims are the military’s own troops and their families. Low estimates suggest that 400,000 people have died as a direct result of Agent Orange, with an additional two million suffering from cancers and other illnesses. This alone suggests that U.S. military pollution has likely killed millions of people, whose deaths will never be listed in official casualty estimates, and to whom the U.S. feels even less responsibility than its “recognized” victims. Because this kind of destruction is a side-effect of “official” military activities, they are not even up for discussion, appearing nowhere in the DoD’s climate adaptation plans. To the military top brass, these illnesses and deaths are unavoidable collateral damage to their core mission; they are incapable of recognizing that the military itself is an environmental hazard.

Though working class and oppressed communities occupied by the U.S. military abroad face the worst burdens of pollution, even communities within the United States are poisoned by the U.S. military. A recent report by the Department of Defense found that at least a dozen towns in the United States have had their residents poisoned as a result of neighboring military bases routinely using toxic substances for training exercises. While the U.S. military justifies its existence with the claim that they “protect American lives,” the fact is that the U.S. military’s existence is rooted in defending capital at great cost to human life. The international violence of the U.S. military’s sheer existence is perhaps best highlighted by the prominence of chemical pollution that the institution spreads everywhere from occupied island communities to countries in Southeast Asia and Middle East to the very heart of the empire.

Global Cops for Capital

The direct footprint of the military is vast and toxic, but the military is not just a contributor to climate change; it’s also an obstacle to climate action. To limit an analysis of the military’s environmental ills to its direct emissions, as with any other polluter, overlooks its function in maintaining the imperialist order. Yes, we should trace, tabulate, and condemn the emissions from the military’s tanks, planes, and ships. We should document and resist the destruction wreaked by the supply chains that construct and supply the U.S. global presence. We must protest and prevent the toxic chemical pollution that inevitably accompanies U.S. occupations. But, it’s crucial to go further: to recognize that the military is the enforcement mechanism for the fossil capital regime which is driving the climate crisis. The various branches of the American military ensure the “security” of global extractive flows of raw materials which are the source of capitalist profits. They enforce the colonial debt obligations and border regimes that ensure cheap pools of labor in semi-colonial nations; they are the physical manifestation of the U.S. government’s political role as protector of the fossil-extractivist sector of global capital. When the U.S. speaks of “security,” this is nothing more than a euphemism for maintaining the deeply unjust social relations that favor the interests of capital. “Security” in this sense is deeply antithetical to security for the poor and working people of the world, who are threatened by the environmental harms of capitalism and climate change, often by the repressive boot of the U.S. military itself.

A movement for climate justice which hopes to tackle the problem of environmental inequality at scale must challenge the fallacy of green militarism. The Pentagon has already begun to use the language of environmental justice to co-opt the demands of the movement into energy for ballooning its budget, even as, this year, the 2023 allotment for climate-related expenses make up less than half of one percent. As the consequences of climate breakdown accumulate and compound, the military will cite the unfolding chaos as a “threat multiplier” from which they alone can protect Americans. However, they’ll also claim that this is a new kind of threat, one that demands all sorts of new equipment, infrastructure, and an ever-multiplying array of agencies, units, and subcontracts. The logic of military expansion is unfalsifiable. As long as “security,” as defined by the military, is the basic concern, climate change is understood as a tactical challenge to U.S. hegemony, not an existential threat to humanity as a whole. This is basically acknowledged by the military and its apologists: “Electrification for the military has to be something that’s operationally valuable, rather than being strictly for the purposes of climate change,” admits the Hudson Institute’s Bryan Clark. Environmentalists should take this seriously; the military won’t meaningfully “green” itself. It can’t be recycled; it must be scrapped.

The Many Faces of Climate Militarism

The consequences of militarism adapting to the climate crisis have implications well beyond the purview of the Department of Defense. Much like the military, police departments and border patrols maintain and enforce the interests of capital, at the expense of the global working class and oppressed communities. For this reason, an environmental definition of “militarism” must extend beyond the branches of the military to include militarized police forces and border patrols. In fact, the recent freelancing of the National Guard to keep out migrants from the Global South — including many climate refugees — and the role that the Pentagon’s 1033 program plays in supplying police departments with military-grade equipment, demonstrates how militarized forces merge and empower one another. As the climate crisis is increasingly redefined as a “national security threat,” we can expect a militarized response to increasingly call upon the armed forces that oppress workers abroad, to merge them with those that oppress workers in and around the borders of the United States.

The most brazen domestic examples of state violence against the climate movement can be found in the treatment of Indigenous people who organize to protect their lands, like the brutal police responses to Indigenous-led pipeline protests. The #NoDAPL movement and Stop Line 3 movement, in particular, faced intense police repression, in the form of physical violence and surveillance of activists. In a grotesque irony, police have actually begun using the climate crisis as an excuse to obtain the militarized equipment that they use to oppress communities fighting to save the planet. As more people realize that climate justice can only be obtained by challenging the structures of extractive capitalism, the movement will come more into conflict with the police, whose job is to maintain these structures. 

In urban communities, too, the police have long been known as an occupying, militarized presence, and an active impediment to justice, environmental and otherwise. America’s history of racial segregation has built racialized environmental injustice into the very physical geography of cities, from the lack of greenspace and waterfront access, to the disproportionate siteing of toxic industry, highways, and waste facilities near concentrations of poverty. The police play a key role in enforcing this inequality, meeting every self-organized attempt at bettering the urban environment — from quashing a long-running outdoor community gym in Harlem to evicting mothers in California who occupy foreclosed houses — with violence and repression. The project of abolishing the police is not just a struggle against the terror they impose on Black communities; it’s also integral to the climate movement, because racial justice cannot be separated from environmental justice. Moving power from police to the working people of a community is a necessary step in securing their ability to fight for a sustainable future.

Prisons are yet another important conjuncture of environmental and social struggle, particularly in the United States. For decades, abolitionists have pointed to the burgeoning system of private and public prisons as a tool for containing “surplus” populations, for dividing and suppressing communities or movements that present challenges or alternatives to neoliberal normality. They are tools of economic and social discipline, and not just for those behind their walls and the communities they are torn from. As physically sited structures, they also impose economic and environmental pressures on the towns in which they are located. As major local employers, prisons pit the economic interests of their workers against the rights of the incarcerated, even as they drive away other economic opportunities in the area just by being there. As heavily fortified human cages which require round-the-clock intensive resource use, prisons produce enormous environmental harms, justified to local populations as a necessary trade-off for jobs.

Similar to militaries, environmental costs are incidental to the “mission” of prisons, and can thus only be mitigated, never reversed, without a fundamental challenge to the logic of incarceration. However, even as capitalism has created this horrible carceral edifice, it has also created the conditions for a powerful site of struggle, with a deep organic connection between economic, social, and environmental justice. Environmentalists who struggle against toxic infrastructure must recognize the necessity of connecting their fights with abolitionist organizing. When prisons are sited in poor communities, the choice is presented as a devil’s bargain: accept the prison for the jobs it will create, at the expense of the health of the community and the environment, not to mention the impact on those to be incarcerated therein. Overcoming this unnecessary evil and building a movement for tearing down prison walls and practicing restorative justice, both social and environmental, is a fundamental task of the environmental movement, if it is to build the power of the organized working class.

Domestic racial oppression is mirrored by the increasingly militarized U.S. borders, and the growing anti-immigrant sentiment against racialized “others.” As the climate crisis worsens, so too will mass migration from the Global South. Already there is an increase of immigration from Central American countries, and many of the migrants are climate refugees. U.S. industry bears responsibility for devastating the environments of Central America and underdeveloping these countries’ ability to respond to climate disaster; yet, U.S. policy towards migrants is incredibly violent, subjecting them to advanced surveillance methods developed by apartheid Israel, and to draconian detention policies, often as a prelude to deportation. 

Though the bulk of border enforcement is enacted by the Department of Homeland Security, the Pentagon is playing a significant role in training border enforcement through Operation Vigilant Sentry. This initiative by the Pentagon increases cooperation with armed forces and police forces to more effectively intercept migrants from the Caribbean, another region degraded and undeveloped by U.S. industry. 

The militarized response to climate refugees legitimizes a nationalist response to the climate crisis — an easy path towards eco-fascism or climate apartheid. Hardened nationalism in response to the climate crisis conveniently and deliberately erases the role that U.S. imperialism has played in creating the conditions for forced displacement of populations from the Global South, and must be opposed on these grounds; we cannot ignore the “environmental debt” accrued from centuries of extractive and polluting practices. And, ultimately, a nationalist response will be practically inadequate, since the wealthy countries of the Global North simply cannot bubble themselves off from climate disaster. This points to the necessity of a climate movement that is consciously internationalist and anti-nationalist, organized among the working and oppressed people of the world to oppose capitalist climate criminals wherever they exist.

Towards an anti-imperialist climate movement

We should be perfectly clear: there are no “green” militaries, and no green forms of militarism. The goals of nationalist and imperialist militaries, and of domestic security forces like police departments, border regimes, and prisons, are fundamentally opposed to the internationalist project of fighting climate change. Their security is not our security. Wherever the climate movement uncritically allows the Pentagon or a police department to co-opt the language of sustainability, it subordinates itself to the nationalist and bourgeois goals of these institutions and weakens itself for the fights to come. The climate movement needs to reach across—and to dismantle—the very barriers and borders that militaries are meant to enforce. Therefore, the fight for climate justice is inseparable from the fight for racial justice in the United States, or for the rights of migrants at the borders. Climate justice is inseparable from the struggles for economic and political self-determination in semi-colonial countries, whose resources and labor fuel the engines of global capitalism. And, contrary to those who insist that the issue of climate change should be prioritized above all struggles, we recognize the very interconnectedness of these struggles as the key to uniting them in a movement capable of challenging the oppression, misery, and environmental degradation inherent to capitalism.

The U.S. Left has so far failed to pose a powerful, working-class challenge to capitalist-driven climate change, in large part because it has not fully connected climate struggles to a broader fight against imperialism and its agents. Ceding rhetorical and ideological ground to the forces of militarism obscures and absolves their role in driving the crisis. When the climate movement allows the military to posture as a progressive force in the fight against climate change, it shores up the very system that needs to be replaced.

A climate movement that aims to win a sustainable future must take up the task of uniting with movements of the oppressed. Environmentalists must coordinate their struggle in solidarity with abolition and immigrants’ rights activists. These movements together could build a fighting force which can elevate the demand to defund the Pentagon as an essential part of environmental sustainability. Demands to close military bases, to abolish the police, to open the borders, and to welcome climate refugees are not auxiliary or “wishlist” demands; they are strategically central to the goals of the climate movement. The work of co-opting green language for the purposes of imperialism has already begun, so the climate movement must urgently take up the task of building a class-independent, internationalist force, stubbornly opposed to militarization, nationalism and carcerality, for an environmental justice that benefits working and oppressed people around the world.

The post You Can’t ‘Green’ the Military (You Have to Fight It) appeared first on Left Voice.

Train stations across the United Kingdom and the London Underground remained closed or inoperative on Tuesday. Striking railway and transport workers are demanding better salaries in the context of a sharp increase in prices.

Inflation in the country currently stands at 9.2 percent, and could reach upwards of 11 percent in the fall when energy and oil prices are likely to rise again, according to government officials. Prices are expected to rise by 50 percent in October when the cold weather sets in, on the heels of a 50 percent increase in April.

This is the United Kingom’s biggest rail strike in more than 30 years. The National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport workers (RMT) called for actions across the industry today, and has called for two more day-long strikes on June 23 and June 25. Workers are demanding improvements to the public system, Network Rail, as well as to the privately-operated lines.

Hundreds of photos show picketing workers enforcing the closures, coming out in force to stand in front of train stations, workshops, and operating stations.

Trains are not running in England, Scotland, or Wales. About 40,000 cleaners, signalers, maintenance workers and station staff on the railways have also joined the action.

Tuesday’s historic rail strike coincides with a strike of around 10,000 London Underground workers, who are fighting against job losses and attacks on pensions.

In London y today, there is very limited subway service, with most lines not running. The closures have created long lines at city bus stops, while demand for cabs has been significant. The government has advised the populace to avoid traveling as much as possible.

Even as the strike brings the country to a standstill, British Transport Minister Grant Shapps has refused to meet with the railway unions to resolve the dispute over wages amid rising inflation. For its part, the Labour Party has rebuked the strike from the top: a leaked memo from Labour leader Keir Starmer enjoined the party’s senior members in parliament from publicly supporting the strike. 

Meanwhile, Boris Johnson’s government has hit back, trying to break the strike by allowing companies to bring in agency and outsourced staff, a move that unions have denounced as impractical, unsafe, and potentially in breach of international law. However, Johnson has so far been unsuccessful, and the strike remains firm.

In the days ahead of the strike, the government announced that it would seek ways to designate railway service as essential, forcing train operators to provide minimum services even during the work stoppages. So far this has not happened, but it shows the government’s desperation to weaken the strike and slow the struggle for wage increases. However, there is no end in sight for the decline in purchasing power which led to the strike, which will only increase the economic pressure on millions of workers.

The strike was precipitated by a meagre offer by Network Rail to raise public sector workers’ wages by 3 percent. Wages for these workers have been frozen since 2020, so this ostensible “raise” leaves workers’ salaries far below the cost of living.

In this context, thousands of workers grouped in the Trades Union Congress (TUC) federation took to the streets over the past weekend across England and Wales. The protest passed in front of 10 Downing Street, the Prime Minister’s official residence, before reaching Westminster Palace, the seat of Parliament.

For its part, the National Education Union (NEU) declared that if it does not receive a wage offer by Wednesday that matches inflation, the union will put forward a strike authorization vote among its 450,000 members. If the vote passes, teachers would go on strike in the fall, between September and October.

Meanwhile, workers in the NHS (National Health Service) are faced with a new contract that would put their wages well below inflation. For nursing staff, this would essentially mean a 10 percent cut in their income, a prospect which has already caused widespread discontent among workers.

Clearly, the U.K.’s public sector workers have plenty of reasons to strike. The depreciation of wages affects millions of workers who served on the front lines of the pandemic over the last two years. This sector faces much slower rates of wage growth than the country as a whole. Official figures show private sector wages rising by 8.7 percent per year, compared to just 1.6 percent in the public sector.

Unions estimate that British workers have lost around one third of their purchasing power compared to 2008, due to inflation and the lack of commensurate wage increases. They claim that this is the biggest fall in “real wages” since 1830.

As we pointed out in a previous article, “The dynamics of this situation and the predisposition of workers to fight for their rights reminds us of what was known as the ‘winter of discontent’ — a wave of struggles that took place in the winter of 1978-1979 in the United Kingdom in response to the then Labour government’s attempt to impose a 5 percent wage ceiling at a time of high inflation.” The advance of the struggle depends on extending the strike, and integrating more sectors and workers into the fight. 

This article was originally published in Spanish on June 21, 2022 in La Izquierda Diario.

The post U.K. Railway Workers Begin Largest Strike in 30 Years appeared first on Left Voice.

This article is a contribution to the ongoing discussion on the progressivism of the “Fourth Transformation,” the name given to the political process being led by Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). It presents a critical interpretation of AMLO’s administration, based on analyses published in La Izquierda Diario México and Ideas de Izquierda, and engages in debate the Mexican socialist organizations that have adapted to the government and its party. 

Since AMLO took office, the character of the government of the Fourth Transformation has been the subject of multiple debates that have divided the intelligentsia and the different political and ideological currents on the Left. The true scope and the obvious limits of his self-proclaimed progressivism must be continuously examined in light of the events. This is particularly important considering that different sectors of the self-proclaimed anti-capitalist and socialist Left have effectively renounced one of the cornerstones of Marxist politics: political independence from the governments and parties of the bourgeoisie, whether they be neoliberal or “progressive.”

“Late Progressivism” and Class Character

From the beginning, Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s administration has been a late example of what has been called “Latin American progressivism.”¹This is a reference to the conceptualization of “late progressivism” developed by Massimo Modonesi in July and August 2018 with regard to the AMLO government; see Massimo Modonesi, “México: el gobierno progresista tardío” [Mexico: Its “Latest” Progressive Government], Revista Nueva Sociedad, July–August 2018. The political period in Latin America during which he came to power was very different from the one that marked the first wave of these governments in the Southern Cone — like that of Nestor Kirchner in Argentina or Lula in Brazil — which benefited from the global commodities boom that provided them with sufficient resources to implement limited redistribution policies without affecting the essential interests of the bourgeoisie and imperialism.

AMLO came to power at a time of low economic growth, which later worsened with the start of the pandemic and the subsequent global economic crisis, so his government instead obtained resources for its social programs from the so-called fight against corruption and his “republican austerity” policies — the name AMLO gave to laying off a significant number of public employees, affecting many of those working in highly precarious conditions. ²It is important to note that the region’s governments that are part of the so-called “second wave of progressivism” (like those of Argentina or Bolivia) share with the Mexican government an even more conservative position than their predecessors.

In this context, AMLO’s administration has from the beginning continually walked the line between the expectations and illusions of broad sectors of the masses and a program that protects essential capitalist interests. Gaining and retaining mass support — both in the 2018 election and in the years since — depended on its ability to differentiate itself from the legacy of neoliberalism. Hence the importance of maintaining progressive rhetoric and implementing measures that generate support among the population, such as the minimum wage increase (although it only benefited minimum-wage workers) and social programs.

This has been an essential part of AMLO’s strategy. Its effectiveness in strengthening his social and electoral base had been proven during his years as head of the Mexico City government. As previously discussed here, these mechanisms are used to achieve a relative expansion of certain state functions to build and strengthen hegemony and control over the masses.

The nature of AMLO’s administration and the class interests it represents were not altered by these measures, contrary to the claims of those who label it a “left-wing” or “people’s” government and thus conceal its essential agenda. AMLO’s popularity has been used to maintain fundamental aspects of the policies of his neoliberal predecessors. Often, only the names of these policies are changed to simulate a break with the past that has not actually occurred. Some examples include the creation of the National Guard and the more important role assigned to the Army, euphemistically referred to by AMLO as the “armed people”; the massive projects developed against the will of local communities, such as the “Mayan Train”; and the ongoing job insecurity of workers in the public and private sectors, despite the much-touted regulation of government outsourcing. Some workers in social programs have even begun to struggle against it, such as the workers of Mexico City’s Community Culture Program. AMLO’s government has also failed to address other essential demands, such as the right to free, legal, and safe abortion, as femicides and violence against women increase.

AMLO’s party, Morena, has thus taken on the role of administrator of the capitalist state, despite the fact that some specific measures have created friction with sectors of the upper bourgeoisie that have a less cozy relationship with the government. In most of these instances, the government decided to revise its measures to meet the demands of the capitalist class, as in the case of the outsourcing processes mentioned above, in which the administration ultimately yielded to business interests, and the plan to bring inflation under control.

It is essential to establish a clear definition of class to understand the essence of AMLO’s government, taking into consideration the particular characteristics of its “progressivism” in its relationship with the mass movement and capital. Otherwise, one could lose one’s way in implementing socialist and revolutionary politics that genuinely express the historical interest of the oppressed and exploited.

Imperialism and Progressivism

In Latin America, the attitude of governments, regimes, and political parties toward imperialist domination is decisive in defining their character. While the so-called progressive governments of Latin America have had varying degrees of autonomy (and, in some cases, a tense relationship with the White House), it is important to note that they have always respected the fundamental commitments made by previous governments in the context of national subordination — such as the payment of the foreign debt — and maintained their economic structures as dependent capitalist countries. This has ultimately defined the political and social character of these governments.

AMLO’s government has been no different. His administration completed negotiations on the new U.S.-Mexico-Canada Treaty (USMCA), the successor of NAFTA. It is the broadest dependency and semi-colonization agreement ever signed between a Latin American country and the powerful neighbor to the north, done in the framework of Trump’s America First policy.

In foreign policy, the government has sought a regional leadership role, adopting a moderate progressivism and distancing itself from Washington and other imperialist governments in certain aspects. For example, it maintains a close relationship with Díaz Canel’s government in Cuba and has experienced some diplomatic tensions with the European Parliament. More recently, it has engaged in a dispute with the U.S. government over the Summit of the Americas. AMLO made his attendance conditional on the participation of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, thus jeopardizing the outcome of a meeting that the White House considered important to its diplomatic relationships with Latin America and the Caribbean.

On crucial issues such as migration, national security, and the fight against drug trafficking, the government has aligned itself with the United States, playing a key role for Washington in relation to the rest of Latin America. On immigration, Mexico acts as a true buffer state, using its National Guard to patrol the border south of the Rio Bravo (Rio Grande) — having accepted the implementation of the Stay in Mexico program to keep migrants on the Mexican side of the border. Even with some of its progressive proposals, AMLO’s government — rather than breaking with the U.S. administration — attempts to pressure the White House and “create awareness,” such as by encouraging U.S. participation in the Central American social program Sembrando Vida (Sowing Life).

So, AMLO’s government maintains Mexico’s subordination to U.S. imperialism in economic matters and other crucial aspects, such as immigration, while never breaking with the White House on foreign policy — even if it sometimes aims for some limits in the region and seeks more room for maneuvering. All this unfolds as it upholds the imperialist order of dependency and plunder of Mexico and the region.

Demobilization and Mass Movements

Large sectors of the Latin American Left (particularly populists and reformists) have maintained over the past 20 years that Latin American progressives share an identity and interests with the processes of mass mobilization that preceded them. Those who support the most extreme versions of this theory claim that the mass movements came to power through these governments.

Clearly, the political shift in the region cannot be understood without considering the processes of class struggle that — at different levels and to different degrees — created profound crises in the region’s political regimes and in the relationship between mass movements and the old ruling parties. Far from sharing an identity with them, however, the various progressive groups actually played an important role in demobilizing the masses, effectively neutralizing the region’s most advanced class struggles. AMLO was no exception.

As discussed in other articles, the emergence of the movement in response to the disappearance of 43 students in Ayotzinapa in 2014 marked the beginning of a profound organic crisis. This was expressed in the slogan that blamed the Mexican government — “It was the state!”— and the repudiation of what had for decades been Mexico’s hegemonic political parties:  the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party), the PAN (National Action Party), and the PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution), which had signed the “Pact for Mexico” under the auspices of former president Enrique Peña Nieto.³This movement was preceded both by #yosoy132 in 2012 and by youth mobilizations against war and militarization in previous years. Four years later, this profound delegitimization of the institutions of the so-called “democratic transition” and their political representatives led to the electoral defeat of the parties that the masses identified with the legacy of neoliberalism.

Morena was able to capitalize on this crisis. After a meteoric rise, it presented itself as opposed to the parties of the “Pact for Mexico,” winning the presidential elections and channeling mass social discontent into support for the changes its candidate promised. This aborted the potential for a continuation of the social mobilizations of 2014 and the movement of sectors of workers and teachers who had been the main agents of social protest throughout those years. Sectors of the Mexican bourgeoisie saw in AMLO a way out of the crisis of representation. To a certain extent, they viewed his election — given the political and social circumstances — as the most acceptable solution.

Since then, AMLO’s government has developed Bonapartist characteristics, expressed by its position with respect to both the mass movement as well as the bourgeoisie and imperialism. These characteristics have been discussed extensively on other occasions: 

AMLO benefits from a degree of popularity and institutional strength that is directly proportional to the crisis of the old parties. The new “strong man” of Mexico, his legitimacy and his party, which practically dominates both legislative chambers, are a guarantee of stability after decades of rule by the discredited PRI and PAN. While enjoying a broad consensus, López Obrador assigned a new role to the armed forces, in keeping with his Bonapartist politics.

This process of demobilization cannot be understood without the actions of the union and social leaders who first supported AMLO as the opposition candidate and then, with greater enthusiasm, as president. From the moment it came to power, Morena has sought to strengthen its position by subordinating and aligning workers’ and mass organizations, including unions run by the old pro-business bureaucracy (such as the SNTE, the National Union of Education Workers) and former opponents in the Mining Workers’ Union and the National Union of Workers. The aim was to recreate, under new conditions, a central characteristic of the old PRI regime — the subordination of mass organizations under government control — while also working toward establishing trade union federations that are linked organically to the ruling party. This explains the current truce between the unions and the government, despite the attacks against some sectors of workers.

This dynamic of political cooptation has led representatives of workers’ and social organizations to participate in the Morena government and run as candidates on its electoral lists. These include several leaders that had been part of the movements that emerged in the last eight years. We have previously defined this phenomenon as “transformism,” using the term coined by Antonio Gramsci. ⁴See, for example, Bárbara Funes and Pablo Oprinari, “Los socialistas ante la propuesta de reforma reforma eléctrica del Gobierno mexicano” [Socialists before the Mexican government’s proposed electrical reform], Ideas de Izquierda, December 27, 2021. The demobilizing role played by AMLO’s government and the subordination of union and political leaderships of the mass movement have been essential characteristics of Mexican politics in recent years.

The Left and the AMLO Government: A Scandalous Adaptation

In an earlier article, we debated with some Mexican groups that call themselves socialist, including the Coordinadora Socialista Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Socialist Coordinating Committee), Izquierda Socialista (Socialist Left), and Izquierda Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Left). These groups have, with different nuances, combined the slogan “Not one vote for the Right” with the call for a “critical” vote for candidates from workers’ and grassroots movements on the Morena lists — in effect, calling for a vote for AMLO’s party.

Months later, they actively involved themselves in AMLO’s consultations regarding the trial of former presidents, which AMLO used to strengthen his image as an “anti-neoliberal” promoter of “participatory democracy.” He proved this to be his actual political objective when he opposed the trial and punishment of those responsible for implementing neoliberal policies. Also later, several of these organizations, along with Grupo de Acción Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Action Group),⁵This organization has been linked to the Workers’ Party of Argentina for several years. enthusiastically supported AMLO’s proposed initiative to reform the electricity sector.

The reform, which was challenged by U.S. officials and attacked by the right-wing opposition (which ultimately prevented it from being approved in Congress), aimed to limit the share of private capital in the sector to 46 percent and strengthen state control, which had been weakened by a 2013 reform. It was nowhere near an attempt to nationalize the electricity sector or expropriate the imperialist multinationals and Mexican capitalists — a pretense the government itself maintained from the beginning.

Despite this, the organizations mentioned above have promoted a front to defend the electricity sector reform, together with Morena, which they justified by claiming that the government’s proposal was a step forward in the fight for sovereignty in the energy sector. They put forth no meaningful criticism of AMLO’s policy.

Their participation in this front is no minor matter. It is not a united front with workers’ and grassroots organizations to advance the struggle; Morena is not a left-wing political force and does not promote class struggle. It is the opposite: a political agreement with the party that rules the country and manages capitalist interests, with a bourgeois program and politics — regardless of its progressive rhetoric and its social base.⁶It is worth noting, in case there are any doubts among the members of these groups, that as Marxists we do not define the character of a political force only by its social base, just as we do not consider the PRI (or its predecessors PRM or PNR) to have been “workers” because of the support they enjoyed for decades among actual workers. 

It is unsurprising that these populist and reformist forces, which have historically adapted to the “progressive” sectors of the bourgeoisie (first the PRD and then AMLO), have conveniently ignored this. It is clear that the political proximity of these socialists groups to populism and the pressures of government progressivism have played an important role in their gradual abandonment of a revolutionary perspective. Their participation in a front to defend AMLO’s reform, led by Morena itself, constitutes a renunciation of class independence. It confirms the adaptation and subordination of these “socialist” organizations to the ruling party. Despite the (albeit limited) rhetoric in their publications, where they claim to favor renationalizing the sector, they cannot conceal what has effectively been the basis of their politics — their membership in the front and participation in forums and actions organized with Morena to defend the government’s reform.

In previous years, when they were opposition parties, some of these organizations had maintained a policy of adaptation and subordination first to the PRD and then to Morena. Since then, their political support for the ruling party has taken a qualitative leap. One predictable, but no less shameful, consequence of this is their participation in the administration of the Fourth Transformation (4T). One of the leaders of the Revolutionary Action Group, serving as general director of Clean Energies of the Federal Secretariat of Energy has become a staunch public defender of AMLO’s policy — an example of the “transformism” mentioned above. It is part of a process of political subordination to a bourgeois government and party that has culminated in their participation in it and their defense of its politics from the “inside.”⁷Similarly, in the first years of AMLO’s term, two leaders of the Revolutionary Workers’ Party served for eight months as officials of the government’s National Human Rights Commission, with the aim of transforming it “into a fully autonomous body.” 

This brings us to the discussion of “ministerialism” within Marxist groups, and inevitably brings to mind the writings of Rosa Luxemburg, where she criticized the self-described socialist “who sought to introduce the same social reforms as a member of the government, i.e. at the same time supporting the bourgeois State” — which “in fact reduces his socialism (at the very best) to a bourgeois democratism or to a bourgeois workers’ policy.” In the contemporary case addressed here, this involves defending government policy and becoming “4T socialists.” ⁸See Diego Lotito, “¿Ministros ‘comunistas’ en los gobiernos capitalistas? El marxismo contra el ‘ministerialismo’ (“Communist” Ministers in Capitalist Governments: Marxism versus “Ministerialism”], Izquierda Diario (Spanish State), November 19, 2019.

This adaptation is all the more condemnable considering that the government has been completely hostile in conflicts with workers and the masses, even resorting to repression — as in  recent attacks against students and teachers. These demonstrations of how the government’s “progressivism” responds to workers’ struggles have not, unfortunately, altered the politics of these 4T “socialists” in the least.

A Socialist and Revolutionary Strategy against the 4T

The differences between some of AMLO’s measures and those of previous PRI or PAN administrations — such as the energy reform — do not mean his administration’s class limitations can be ignored. It is necessary to set forth a clearly independent perspective for the workers’ and people’s movement like the one we propose here, and for socialists to maintain political independence.

In his writings on Mexico and Cardenismo, Trotsky maintained that “during the struggle for democratic tasks, we oppose the proletariat to the bourgeoisie. The independence of the proletariat, even in the beginning of this movement, is absolutely necessary.”⁹Leon Trotsky, “Latin American Problems: A Transcript,” November 4, 1938. He also stated that it was essential to maintain the independence of the organization and its program, precisely to promote that perspective within the working class. He was referring not only to independence in organizational terms, but to the political independence of revolutionary Marxists, which should be expressed in independent politics for the working class, through which “we oppose the proletariat to the bourgeoisie.”

The groups mentioned above have not adopted a position of political independence and fought for it in the labor movement. Far from it. They have joined a front alongside the ruling party, have become uncritical defenders of its policy and, in some cases, have even joined the “transformist” movement as government officials.

This adaptation and political capitulation seems to be the result of both the pressure of AMLO’s progressivism and a misguided search for shortcuts in the process of growing their organizations. It is impossible, though, to connect with sectors of the masses in a revolutionary manner when you are acting as the Left wing of the 4T government.

What is needed now is to join with sectors such as the teachers, state workers, and cultural workers who have gone through experiences with AMLO’s government and are fighting layoffs and government repression — as well as those who are adopting critical political positions with regard to the 4T as they begin to learn and disseminate the lessons they have drawn about the limits and the true character of AMLO’s progressivism. The purpose is to promote politics that are clearly independent, both from the government and from the Right.

There are no shortcuts that go through subordination to Morena and lead to revolutionary politics and organization. That path can lead only to a repeat — as a new farce — of the sad experiences of organizations that have previously ended up dissolving into the ranks of the PRD or into Zapatismo itself.¹⁰Such has been the case of the PRT since the late 80s. Unfortunately, the Revolutionary Socialist Coordinating Committee, from the same PRT, has announced it will merge with the populist organization ONPP — thus heading down the same path.

Building a great revolutionary socialist party requires a political orientation to the vanguard of workers and youth, sharing a common experience with them in the class struggle, and organizing it under the banner of Marxism. This means debating the politics of AMLO’s progressivism and his “national project,” which does not challenge imperialist oppression and capitalist exploitation, and counterposing a strategy for achieving a workers’ and socialist revolution in Mexico and a society without exploiters or exploited. That is the perspective we in the Movement of Socialist Workers promote in the class struggle, in the political and union groups we are building together with independent workers and students, and through the international network La Izquierda Diario.

First published in Spanish on May 22 in Ideas de Izquierda – Mexico.

Translation by Marisela Trevin

The post AMLO’s “Fourth Transformation” and the Socialist Left in Mexico appeared first on Left Voice.

After the Supreme Court leak, we all know: it’s a matter of days before abortion is made illegal in at least 13 states across the country. 

 The Right is on the offensive: in addition to taking away abortion rights they’re also attacking voting rights, trans rights, and especially trans youth. This right wing won’t stop at overturning Roe — it will also come for abortion pills and for abortion all over the country, and wants to take away the few rights that have been won by trans and LGBTQ+ people.

The situation is dire. 

Planned Parenthood and the Women’s March are essentially absent from the struggle. While they organized a big march when the decision first leaked, they are nowhere to be seen now.

Some unions have issued statements in support of abortion rights and a few brought small contingents of workers to the marches organized by Planned Parenthood. The vast majority of unions, however, have said and done essentially nothing as a large swath of their members lose the right to bodily autonomy. This includes the two biggest unionized forces in the US– teachers and nurses who are disproportionately made up of women.  It’s not surprising that unions have done so little — so many “business unions” see their members as at best clients to provide services to in order to stop any radical activity while using workers’ money and energy to tie those workers to the Democratic Party. These top down unions tied to capitalist politicians aren’t fighting forces for the working class.

If we want to defeat these attacks on our rights, the rank and file have to take things into our own hands in this struggle. We can’t wait for union leadership, and we certainly can’t wait for Planned Parenthood or the Women’s March. 

Rank-and-file workers must form rank-and-file committees to fight for abortion rights: Teamsters for Abortion Rights, Starbucks Workers for Abortion Rights, Teachers for Abortion Rights, and more. These kinds of committees can and should organize other workers to take to the streets in protests — getting out more people than the small handful that the union leaderships moved last month. These committees can organize workplace actions, from small ones like wearing green, to bigger ones like a 13 minute work stoppage for the 13 states with trigger bans, or even a walkout and full day work stoppage for abortion rights. On the day the decision comes out, these committees could organize an action, a work stoppage. They should mobilize their members to join the action on the day the decision comes out. 

These kinds of committees are meant for action, but also for discussion. They are a way to build community, build political agreement, and discussion amongst co-workers. 

These committees aren’t just another activist group. They are important for two primary reasons. On one hand, they have the ability to mobilize new sectors — the over 60 percent of people who agree that Roe v Wade should not be overturned, but may not have taken the streets or any action. Our task needs to be to move those people, and what better way than to discuss it every day with co-workers — the people we have to see five days a week for work either way. 

But the most important reason for this kind of organizing is because the working class is immensely powerful. All profits come from our labor. Everything runs because of our labor. And that means that we can really shut it down, not only in the streets, but in the place it hurts our oppressors and exploiters the most: in our workplaces.

On a small scale, Left Voice has begun organizing in this perspective at CUNY. CUNY for Abortion Rights was formed shortly after the leaked Supreme Court decision came out to organize students, faculty, and staff. Members include students and faculty from the DSA, NYC for Abortion Rights, Left Voice, as well as the union caucus Rank and File Action and other groups. Over 200 people from all CUNY campuses have signed up to participate and so far, the group has organized a walkout at Brooklyn College and support for a protest by Staten Island students. Political science students organized a panel on abortion rights including Jenny Brown, author of Without Apology, Hennessy Garcia from NYC for Abortion Rights, and Tatiana Cozzarelli from Left Voice. 

These kinds of rank-and-file committees aren’t a substitute for unions; we must demand that our unions take action and these committees can be a mechanism to force them to do so.

These kinds of committees also mean that we don’t have to wait for when the Supreme Court decision drops or when bans are implemented — we can organize with our co-workers now. If you have three or four co-workers who want to form a rank-and-file committee, do it! Put out a call, get folks to sign up, and organize an action in the workplace or a contingent at a march. If you need help or ideas, get in touch with us (contact@leftvoice.org) and we can help! 

Rank-and-file committees can also be put towards fighting for other issues within and outside of the workplace, and strengthen our ability to fight for a good contract — an organized workplace is a workplace that is dangerous to the bosses. They can fight for higher wages, longer break times, better healthcare and other workplace demands. They can fight for full reproductive rights and healthcare, like the Jezebel workers did when they demanded trans inclusive healthcare at their job. They can mobilize in the Black Lives Matter movement or in solidarity with other struggles. They can also morph into or support other groups like the “women’s commissions” organized by the socialists in the early 20th century, or those currently organized in unions around the world. (A Starbucks worker in Chile will be speaking in NYC at May Day space about organizing a women and non binary commission at her workplace.) 

As the Right advances, it is clear that no one is coming to save us but ourselves. It is up to us to put up this fight, so let’s get to it. And let’s do it in the place we are most powerful: our workplaces, the very heart of what makes capitalism run.

The post Roe Is About to be Overturned: Organize With Your Co-Workers to Fight for Abortion Rights appeared first on Left Voice.

Yesterday, Gustavo Petro won the presidential elections in Colombia with more than 11 million votes, garnering not only the votes of his supporters, but also those of electors who chose the lesser evil in a context of profound polarization and intense hatred for the right.

In addition to winning Bogota, Petro declared victory in the entire Caribbean Coast, the Pacific Coast, and part of the Amazon (Putumayo, Amazonas, Vaupés, and Guainía). The vote count in the capitals of Colombia’s main districts shows that Gustavo Petro won in Barranquilla (64.16%), Cartagena (67.46), Cali (63.76) and Bogotá (58.59). For his part, right-wing candidate Rodolfo Hernández came out on top in Medellín (62.55%) and Bucaramanga (73.58%).

Petro’s victory has created great expectations among broad sectors of the population who have pinned their hopes on his candidacy. The elections were deeply influenced by the uprisings of 2019 and 2021 against Iván Duque’s government and the political regime as a whole. This was a period of social upheaval without precedent in recent times, in a country where internal tensions had been building up in response to the profound decline in the standard of living of millions of people. It led to the emergence of a mass movement that shook Colombia to its core. Since the mass uprising, the Historic Pact —Petro’s electoral coalition— has been in the best position to capitalize on the disaffection expressed by the movement. The results of this were seen both in the first round and in the second round held last Sunday.

Petro’s victory has put an end to a phase in Colombian politics in which the traditional right has never lost the reins, historically maintaining its alignment with the United States and acting as one of its bulwarks in the region.

Since the first round, and especially during the second round, the presidential elections in Colombia have been closely followed throughout Latin America, a region marked by political polarization, instability and fragmentation. With this outcome, Colombia joins the weak second wave of center-left and “populist” governments that have emerged as a result of a deviation towards electoral channels of mass discontent expressed in uprisings and revolts, like Gabriel Boric’s government in Chile, or as a result of a political and social crisis itself, like that of Pedro Castillo in Peru.

Petro’s victory is also a product of the deviation of the mass protests that began on April 28, 2021 and lasted for several months, following the uprising of November 2019. Since then, there has been a major shift in the political climate, and consequently in the electoral scenario, to which the political establishment has sought to channel the population’s discontent, fearing that an abrupt collapse of Iván Duque’s government would spark an unprecedented crisis and embolden the mass movement to demand more than just his resignation. As academic and former candidate Alejandro Gaviria put it: “There is a great deal of discontent. It might be better to have a controlled explosion with Petro’s victory than to leave the volcano bottled up. The country is asking for a change.”

Thus, the president elect has continuously sought to contain the uprising, often with right-wing policies, even launching attacks against those he referred to as “rioters,” who refused to leave the demonstrations on the streets. More than once he called for the national strike to be lifted, or just the roadblocks, which effectively amounted to the same thing.

On his path towards the presidency, and in order to make himself more palatable to the political establishment, Gustavo Petro established political alliances with traditional sectors, moving increasingly towards the political center. To ensure support from the left-wing electorate, and because there is a significant sector of the left that has criticized his adaptation to the right, Petro chose to appoint Afro-Colombian activist Francia Márquez as his running mate. Márquez had even obtained a large number of votes during the primaries, with broad support from grassroots and social movements.

In the last legislative elections, despite winning more seats, Petro’s coalition was unable to gain a majority. This means that he will need to create broad coalitions in both chambers of Congress in order to govern, strengthening his ties with more traditional sectors. 

Even before the elections, Petro declared that he would call for the establishment of a great national agreement, saying “If I win the elections, I am going to call for a great national agreement based on binding regional dialogues. And all the leaders of the center —even Álvaro Uribe or whomever his forces may designate— will be called to the table by the president to discuss the reforms.” Petro’s call was thus an act of pure political symbolism. Francia Márquez, the new vice president, also asserted on the television network Caracol that, as soon as the electoral results were announced, they would call for a national pact that would include Álvaro Uribe’s sector.

As I discussed in an article during the first round of the elections, the political scenario in Colombia mirrors the one in Chile created by Gabriel Boric’s victory. The new Chilean president, in whom the working masses and youth who had taken to the streets had placed their hopes for the future, took less than two months to disappoint broad sectors of society with the agreements he made with the establishment, the political regime, and the Chilean military. He has not released the people detained in the uprisings, but has advanced in militarizing the region of Araucanía, repressed youth protests, and prevented the use of funds from Chile’s pension system (AFP) to meet the needs of the people. In short, his was a meteoric rise on the political scene that ended up changing nothing for the people of Chile, as a result of which his popularity quickly dropped by 20 points. Petro will undoubtedly follow in his footsteps.

That is why we believe that the struggle for the people’s demands that gave rise to the recent uprising continues, and it can be found on the streets. The majorities represented by the working class and poor, the youth, peasants and indigenous peoples can only rely on their own strength.

There will be no solution to the land question, the important demands of indigenous peoples and Afro-descendant communities, the structural problems of housing, health and education or the historic demands of the working class, without the organization and mobilization of the working people, with a policy of total political and class independence.

Originally published in Spanish on June 19 in La Izquierda Diario

Translated by Marisela Trevins

The post Historic Defeat of the Right in Colombia’s Presidential Elections: What Are the Implications of Gustavo Petro’s Win? appeared first on Left Voice.

Last week, the New York City Council and Mayor Eric Adams approved a record $101 billion budget deal, which cut $215 million from the school budget and increased funding for the NYPD. The council passed the spending plan by a vote of 44 to 6. 

The local chapter of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) at MS 839 in Brooklyn recently wrote an open letter about how the budget cuts will impact their school. I interviewed Frank Marino, an eighth-grade teacher and his chapter’s union delegate, about these budget cuts and how his school community has organized in response.

Go ahead and introduce yourself. Where do you work, what do you teach, and what are your roles at your school?

My name is Frank Marino. I teach at MS 839. I am an eighth-grade humanities teacher. I teach a reading class, and I advise our school’s GSA [Gay-Straight Alliance], which we call Safe Space. I’m also a teacher leader, so I have played a couple of different roles on school leadership teams and instructional leadership teams, and I have been a grade team leader. I’m a member of the UFT and I’m a delegate for our chapter. I’m also a member of MORE, the Movement of Rank and File Educators.

Can you tell me about what’s been going on in your school, but also across the city with the recently-approved city budget?

Our new mayor Eric Adams, in his first budget, has cut funding to schools by around $215 million. That means that individual schools now have had their funding adjusted based on the “Fair Student Funding formula.” Many schools have had shifts in their enrollment due to the pandemic, rising costs in housing in New York City, and inflation — all of which play a role in why people choose to either move out of the city, change schools, or take their students out of public school and put them into charter or private schools. 

Schools are funded based on the number and type of students enrolled, but during the first two years of the pandemic, the city did not penalize schools for enrollment changes. This year, the mayor has taken that away and is now doing  what he’s calling “right-sizing” school budgets. But it’s a cut.

So our school is facing a 7 percent cut, totaling around $500,000. That means our principals are forced to excess [reduce staff at their site due to lack of available positions, requiring excessed teachers to find new positions] at least four, but up to six teachers. We will not have any money for after school sports or arts programs, including our school musicals. We won’t have any money for per-session work on our curriculum. We won’t have any money for teacher leadership positions such as instructional coaches or peer collaborative coaches. We’re a new school; we started in 2015, and we’ve made a great, beautiful school where kids love to come every day. And this cut is really setting us back.

With the Covid funding over the past few years, we were finally getting close to being able to provide kids with the support and opportunities they deserve. We didn’t have to choose between having a musical and having reading intervention; we didn’t have to choose between having teacher coaching or a music teacher. We actually got a glimpse this year of what it looks like to have a school funded well. Because we had this money, we hired enough staff that we could get our class sizes down to 22 or 23 kids. It made a tremendous difference, especially coming off of a year of hybrid learning where we had reduced class sizes. We all got a taste of what it would be like to actually have small classes.

And now the state just passed a law capping New York City class sizes over the next two years. But with this budget cut, how do they expect that to work?

It won’t unless it comes with money. And it needs to come tomorrow. Principals are making decisions about programs and scheduling now. Even if somebody walked into our school on September 5 with a bag of cash in their hand, it won’t bring back those four teachers that we were forced to excess.

 Exactly. It really struck me reading your letter. I’m a first year teacher and I kept thinking about how, if this happened at my school, I would be one of the first on the chopping block after a whole year of developing relationships and putting so much in. It’s infuriating to know that this is happening all around the city.

It’s devastating. It’s absolutely devastating. Our school hired incredible first-year teachers this year who are all people of color, some queer women of color, who built tremendously deep relationships with students and who are now being told that they can’t work here next year because the school doesn’t have the money for them. It’s so demoralizing and dehumanizing to think that you could just pluck somebody up; to think that teachers are just expendable or interchangeable and that you can just shuffle them to a different school. It’s absurd.

Our students planned a walkout when they heard that their teachers were going to be excessed. They were livid.

 Can you tell me more about your students’ walkout and the picket you held as a staff?

We are a very tight-knit, close, community-focused school. So when we found out about the budget cuts last week, we immediately had a chapter meeting that Wednesday, and we just started working on our strategy of how to resist this and wrote that letter. This isn’t the first time that we have had to organize and take action as a chapter against something that was being done to us. And our union never asked us to do any of this. Right? We did it on our own.

That Wednesday, the staff wrote the letter and a press release. First we told the parents and families in our school. On Friday, we told the students, and they were rightfully upset. For a ten-, eleven-, or twelve-year-old to hear that next year they won’t have a musical theatre program, that their volleyball team is going away, that their crew leader (advisor) won’t be there next year — it’s devastating. 

So they planned their own walkout that they did during their second period. The eighth graders are all getting ready for their Regents exams, but the sixth graders took it into their own hands and organized this whole walkout, and they went out and marched around the block a couple of times. It was really great. And the teachers had planned our rally and our picket to happen after school. 

It’s incredible that your students independently planned the walkout. There’s so much power, not only for us as education workers and teachers, but also among our students.

Absolutely. That is the spirit of our school. We teach them lessons about organizing, and activism, and power, and equity, and justice, and making sure that they know how to use their voice. And this was a great presentation of their learning.

There are a lot of connections that I see between your struggles and those of the Minneapolis educators who went on strike earlier this year. They were demanding higher wages for their paraprofessionals and education support staff who are largely immigrants and people of color. I’m hearing that with your school where these new LGBTQ+ teachers of color are the first on the chopping block, too. We saw a lot of student-led organizing happening there, as well.

It is everywhere. Public education is under attack everywhere. And it is horrifying because public education is really the last guaranteed social program. And the capitalist class will do anything they can to chip away at it.  It’s infuriating because the leadership of our union, the UFT, asked us to vote for Eric Adams. They endorsed him. And this is what we are getting. We are getting an austerity budget and they are not stopping here. 

I’m terrified because I know that the cuts this year are going to mean more cuts next year. It is really disappointing that the “most progressive city council that New York City has ever seen” did not put up more of a fight. I know that once you get into government, you have to make calculations and you need to figure out where power lies. But it just shows such a clear lack of organization between the people who claim to be progressive and socialists that are in government — the fact that they allowed themselves to be blindsided by this budget and let the speaker [Adrienne Adams], the chancellor [David Banks], and the mayor set the agenda. They say all these great things, but they don’t put money where we need it. We need the money now. I’m just full of volcanic rage right now.

And look where they did put the money — they just gave $11 billion to the police.

All those councilmembers who made the campaign pledge saying, “I will vote no on any budget that doesn’t include a $1.5 billion transfer reallocation of the NYPD budget” yet still voted for the budget — they went back on their promise. They deserve this outrage. I really appreciate and can see the value in electing progressive people to government, but if you’re not going to show up for the community, you just literally voted with the Republicans.

You articulated it really clearly when you mentioned how the UFT [leadership] went and mobilized the vote for Eric Adams. And it’s these ostensibly progressive politicians and NGOs — those who funneled us all into going to vote for Joe Biden — who have ended up funding the police even more. It just goes to show what happens when you align yourself with a capitalist party.

Exactly. I know that the UFT is not a progressive organization, that it is not a democratic organization. During my time within the UFT, I’ve really seen and experienced so much disempowerment. But the fact that they let this budget pass without organizing, without sending all their paid staffers or organizing the members in schools who are faced with these cuts — They should have been having every single part of their apparatus sending messages to the City Council. I talked to City Council members who said, “I didn’t receive a single letter or call from a parent or a teacher about school cuts before the budget bill.” That is unacceptable. We pay dues every month to the union to watch these things for us. [Our union leadership] is supposed to have our working conditions and our jobs in mind all the time. The budget is a tremendous failure on their part.

It’s very disappointing because I love unions and I love our union. It does so much good for us, but they fucked up so tremendously by failing to organize us to resist this budget ahead of time. The City Council members that voted yes explained their vote and said, “We’re deeply concerned about these budget cuts,” but everything that they’ve said indicates that they do not understand how schools operate — even people who previously were teachers. It just shows me that the UFT did not do their job of defending and representing teachers’ interests because all those City Council people should have known what those cuts mean for our schools.

You mentioned the failure of the UFT to put up a real fight and the lack of democracy within the union. As you know, we’ve been seeing a resurgence of the labor movement recently: 150 Starbucks recently unionized, as well as the first Amazon union. It’s incredible. And it’s also important to recognize that just having a union doesn’t guarantee workers’ democracy.  In your school’s chapter, what does worker democracy look like?

It looks like [our staff] being organized. It looks like having clear, frequent communication that’s transparent and having regular staff meetings, chapter meetings, and community meetings.  I know some chapters where all the communications have to go through the chapter leader, which is just obviously gatekeeping the ability for workers within the union chapter to talk to each other. So we keep it open. I do a lot of work in terms of political education. I’m always posting and sharing and telling people about the budget and what’s going on with other labor unions. We have a really strong collective spirit. The value of collectivism is something that we cultivate, not just within our chapter but in the way that we operate our school. We truly have so much power to make a difference if we were organized and active and mobilized.

I just had one more thing I wanted to ask you about, especially since you said you were one of the advisors of your school’s GSA. Is there anything that you want to say about these recent attacks on trans rights around the country, such as the Don’t Say Gay bill, as well as newer bills coming out that are trying to take away parental rights from the few parents who are actually supporting their trans children?

It’s disgusting. It makes me sick to my stomach knowing that there are children watching this and internalizing this message that their existence is somehow less valuable. I see the impact that it has on my trans students. My trans students that are out have come into their identity and have been tremendously courageous. The impact of just knowing about all of this bullshit that is happening elsewhere, even though it’s not happening here in Brooklyn — their mental health is in the toilet. It is devastating.

At the same time, as a queer person who did not come out until college, who had experienced so much bullying and isolation in middle school, to see so many of my students coming out is such a powerful experience. We recently marched in the Brooklyn Pride Parade and it was so beautiful watching some of these sixth graders in the club who got up their courage to come out to their parents so they could march with us, and then getting all these waves and high fives and then seeing their parents see them — the tears and the pride and everything.

The fact that this can exist simultaneously with the most vile, repressive policies and practices elsewhere is just so disorienting. 

Right. Pride is about resistance. Stonewall was a riot against police brutality. That wasn’t a happy incident, but that is the origin of Pride and that’s the spirit of the movement we need to build.

Totally. Tomorrow we’re taking some of our students from the club to visit Stonewall. It’s all connected — my co-advisor for Safe Space is one of our new teachers being excessed. And it’s just so horrifying and sad because she’s done such an amazing job with them and with that club. And to know that she won’t be here next year — it’s depressing and so cruel.

They make policies, rules, decisions, with all this rhetoric, but it all just obscures the fact that these are people’s lives and communities. It’s infuriating because you can work so hard and you can do such good for your people, and it doesn’t matter because they will just chip it away, swipe the pen and take it away.

What do you want to say to other teachers and folks in the city who are infuriated about these attacks on education?

I think the best way to support us is to replicate these kinds of actions at your school. We need every chapter to be taking school-based actions, whether it’s letter writing, color days, pickets, or anything at all. We can’t rely on the UFT to organize us to do such things — we have to take initiative. We at MS 839 are only facing cuts of 7 percent, and there are some schools in far worse positions than we are. We only took action because we are so well organized, and after these last few years were so challenging, having even one of our beloved staff members excessed is unacceptable. 

The City Council approved this budget with the cuts, so we need to let them know our disappointment and let them know the specific human impacts of such budget cuts. Most of all, we need every New Yorker to let Mayor Adams know that we see through the charade, that we know he is cutting school budgets beyond what is accounted for by enrollment changes. We’ll be rallying at City Hall on Friday, June 24 at 3 p.m. 

Every person who cares about NYC’s children and their futures should let these budget cuts outrage them into action, beyond just this fight. We need to end mayoral control of our schools for good and put management of schools back into the public’s hands.

The post ‘It’s Devastating’: NYC Schools Face Enormous Budget Cuts appeared first on Left Voice.

Last month, the spokesperson for the Governor of Texas, Renae Eze, announced the shipment of barbed wire and training for its deployment in the border city of Piedras Negras, Coahuila, governed by Miguel Angel Riquelme Solis of the PRI ( the neoliberal party of the Mexican regime). Barbed wire, which has already been used in Texas against native people, will be used in an attempt to stop migrants from seeking to cross into the United States from Piedras Negras.

According to Eze, this shipment and training is at the request of Coahuila’s government. Mexicans arrived in U.S. territory to be trained by the Texas National Guard. At the end of the week, they were given the barbed wire (without specifying the length of the wire) and will return to install it. As a result, increased military activity is expected in the area, in addition to the persecution, detention and expulsion of migrants from Central and South America, as well as from the Caribbean and even the Middle East and Europe.

This binational anti-immigration policy agreed upon by the governments of Texas and Coahuila adds to the various clearly xenophobic and racist “unprecedented measures” against migrants fleeing violence and poverty in their countries of origin in the hope of finding work and improving their living conditions and those of their families. The use of barbed wire can seriously injure those who get stuck in it, putting their lives at risk.

The Culmination of Anti-Immigration Policies from Texas

As recently as November 2021, the Texas government reinforced the border fence by sending dozens of Border Patrol vehicles to International Bridge I and II, where it had already ordered barbed wire to be placed in order to stop crossings between the Mexican city of Piedras Negras and Eagle Pass in Texas.

The subordination of the Coahuila government to the Texan authorities occurs within the framework of the subservience of Mexican President López Obrador’s government to Washington. From Donald Trump’s administration to Joe Biden’s, the policies against migrants under Title 42 (which allows express deportations in the midst of the pandemic) have accelerated and increased, along with the Stay in Mexico policy. These include sending dozens of repressive military and state forces to the border, as well as the construction of sophisticated border walls, with patrols, high military technology, and materials whose costs are in the millions in government funding.

This, despite the already-existing physical barrier some 560 miles long along the border near Tijuana. The fence includes three containment barriers, very high intensity lighting, motion detectors, electronic sensors and night vision equipment connected to U.S. border police, as well as permanent surveillance with off-road trucks and helicopter gunships.

Despite all attempts by U.S. authorities to curb migration, the reality is that migrants continue to walk to reach the United States. While migrants have been stripped of everything, construction companies, with the complicity of the U.S. state under both Republicans and Democrats and  compliance from governments such as Mexico’s, continue to enrich themselves by building border walls, whether of concrete or with armed military or, as in this case, with barbed wire. 

The Answer Must Be the Unity of the Working Class.

The bourgeois politicians ally with the business class against migrants. But the immigration problem does have a way out: the international unity of the working class on both sides of the border is necessary, with the workers of “Generation U” who seek to unionize to defend and win rights, together with the thousands and thousands of people fighting for reproductive rights in defense of the right to abortion, with the young people who went out to fight against racism, as well as with democratic organizations, unions and human rights defenders, who are committed to fight in defense of the political, social, cultural and economic rights of those who migrate. This must also include unity against the xenophobic and racist policies of the Ultra-Rght, of both the Republican and Democratic parties, and the immigration policy of the federal and state governments in Mexico, which may claim to be very progressive but in reality are subordinated to U.S. imperialism at the expense of the lives of migrants.

Free movement and open borders for all!

Originally published in Spanish on May 18 in La Izquierda Diario

Translated by Paul Ginestà

The post Texas Governor Gregg Abbott Sent Miles of Razor Wire to Help Mexico Stop Immigrants from Reaching the U.S. appeared first on Left Voice.

The second round of France’s legislative elections on June 19 were destined to be a shock that would weaken President Emmanuel Macron, but the final results exceed the worst expectations — they are cataclysmic. The government has lost its absolute majority by a wide margin, winning only an estimated 238 of the 577 total seats. This will force Macron to govern as a minority, leaving him no choice but to rely on the Right. It opens a period of deep political instability.

The NUPES coalition (the Nouvelle Union Populaire Écologique et Sociale, which includes La France Insoumise, the Greens, and remnants from the Socialist and Communist Parties) won enough seats to become the leading opposition force. But that result is a far cry from the demagogic electoral objectives of its leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who just last Friday promised again, nonsensically, that he would be prime minister. (The strategy was to win a majority in the National Assembly with the belief that doing so would somehow force Macron to select the social-democratic populist leader as his prime minister).

As in the first round, the level of abstention — which reached 54 percent despite the campaign to mobilize voters that the NUPES has been waging since the presidential election in April — show just how difficult it was for Mélenchon’s coalition with bourgeois parties like the Socialists and the Greens to win over workers and youth. Nearly three-quarters of young people did not vote in the legislative elections.

In response to the NUPES, the Far Right is making breakthroughs and working to constitute itself as the second-largest opposition to the government. The National Rally (RN) party of Marine Le Pen may end up with another 10 deputies, following its historic result in the first round of the legislative elections. Le Pen’s party is capitalizing on the deep hatred of Macronism, but also on the inability of the NUPES to convince important sectors of the working classes that are seduced by the RN’s message.

These results point to an extremely unstable five-year period during which Macron’s capacity to govern will be severely tested. In the midst of a reactionary war in Ukraine and with the French presence in Africa in crisis, this situation will further weaken the position of French imperialism — a pillar of the European Union — on the international scene.

In a crisis speech, current prime minister Elisabeth Borne called for building a “majority of action,” betting on the possibility of agreements with the Right. These could be more difficult to forge than she thinks and, in what might be the best case, force Macron to govern more to the right than he wants.

The pandemic has temporarily put on hold what had been ongoing momentum toward uninterrupted class struggle between 2016 and 2020. This political instability, though, especially in an international context marked by sharpening geopolitical tensions, a deepening economic crisis, and recessionary tendencies, could quickly lead to major social explosions. In such a situation, the self-described “parliamentary guerrillas” advocated by the NUPES will be powerless. Further, the very sustainability of this coalition could be quickly put to the test — with Fabien Roussel of the French Communist Party already beginning to distance himself from it in remarks on Sunday evening.

The focus on winning reforms through elections remains at the heart of everything the institutional Left proposes. The urgent alternative is to prepare to fight on the terrain of the class struggle, seeking to seize the opportunities that will open up in the current political crisis. To do so, we need a revolutionary Left that goes on the offensive, and that can intervene in the coming struggles and build a front of resistance against Macron and the Far Right.

First published in French on June 19 in Révolution Permanente.

Translation and adaptation by Scott Cooper

The post French Election Results Point to a Political Crisis and Tremendous Instability appeared first on Left Voice.