Protesters have taken to the streets of Tunisia’s capital, Tunis, in a public rejection of President Kais Saied’s decision to increase his powers.

Thousands of people demonstrated in central Tunisia on Saturday, chanting “Shut down the coup,” “We want to return to legitimacy,” and “The people want the coup to fail.” Many were also carrying banners calling for the restoration of parliament and democracy.

Saied’s supporters held a counter-demonstration chanting, “the people want to dissolve parliament.”

The protest was met with a heavy police presence on Habib Bourguiba Avenue. It was the first major demonstration since Saied declared on July 25 that he was dismissing the prime minister, suspending parliament, and assuming executive authority: moves that his opponents have labeled a coup d’état.

The boulevard was an epicenter of the 2011 Arab Spring protests in response to the overthrow of ruler Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and has a strong symbolic presence in Tunisia’s political imagination.

The president, a former constitutional law professor, justified his decision by citing emergency measures in the constitution. However, his critics and many legal scholars said that they still did not support his intervention.

Last week, one of Saied’s advisers told the Reuters news agency that the president was planning to suspend the constitution and offer a reformed version through a referendum, sparking opposition from political parties and the powerful UGTT labor union.

While many Tunisians welcomed Saied’s decision to dissolve the deeply unpopular parliament, his inability since July 25 to appoint a prime minister or offer any long-term plan has led to growing frustration.

Kais Saied has justified his actions by calling them a “course correction” after large demonstrations erupted across the country in July challenging high unemployment, corruption, and what was seen as an ineffective political class.

You might be interested in: Coup in Tunisia: Not What the Arab Spring Revolutionaries Had in Mind

On Tuesday, Saied said he would not “deal and negotiate with agents and traitors and those who pay money to disrespect their country.”

“This is a state with two regimes, an apparent regime, that of the institutions, and a real regime, that of the mafia,” he said, apparently referring to Ennahda.

Political leaders have complained about the constitution since it was agreed upon in 2014, calling for it to be changed to either a more directly presidential or a more directly parliamentary system.

Worries are growing, both internally and from the international community, that Tunisia may lose the rights and (bourgeois) democratic system it gained as a result of the 2011 mobilizations that sparked the “Arab Spring” and overturned the regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

Several human rights groups have expressed concern over Saied’s actions, warning of growing authoritarianism.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the Tunisian Association for the Defense of Individual Freedoms have issued warnings of increased “arbitrary and politically motivated acts of repression” after July 25.

Eight weeks later, Saied has yet to appoint a prime minister. He has rejected accusations of a coup, and portrayed his moves as an opportunity to purge the government of a corrupt elite.

While triggering a constitutional crisis and sparking accusations of a coup, Saied’s moves were initially widely popular in a country suffering from economic stagnation and political paralysis. The political system that emerged after the Arab Spring failed to address the country’s structural needs.

Gross domestic product (GDP) fell by 9% last year, commodity prices have soared, and a third of young people are unemployed. It is therefore not surprising that most of the demonstrators who clashed with the repressive forces in recent days are mostly young people and teenagers. These youth saw that the fall of Ben Ali did not change their material or living conditions, and can only envision a bleak future ahead.

In this sense, Saied took advantage of the political weakening of parties such as Enahda (Renaissance) to roll back the limited democratic rights gained during the Arab Spring. This authoritarian turn, however, cannot address the grievances of the millions living in poverty, and will only lead to further repression.  

First published in Spanish on September 18 in La Izquireda Diário.

Translation by Kripa Mehta

The post Tunisia: Thousands Protest President Saied’s Power Grab appeared first on Left Voice.

Originally Published in Michael Roberts’ Blog: The Next Recession

**

Canada’s Liberal Party prime minister Justin Trudeau has managed to get re-elected for the third time in the snap general election he called.  The Liberals won or were leading in 158 seats out of a total of 338 seats, and the Conservatives trailed the Liberals, winning or leading in 122 seats, four more than their 2019 result.  But Trudeau will fall short of an outright majority in parliament and will need the support of the left-leaning New Democrats to get any legislation through (as before). 

Indeed, the result is more or less the same as in the last election two years ago.  Trudeau’s plan to get a majority based on the ‘success’ of the government’s handling of the COVID crisis backfired.  Many voters considered the election as a cynical move and a waste of time.  Indeed, it was the Conservatives who got the biggest vote (as in 2019) attracting 34 per cent support to the Liberals’ 32 per cent, but Liberal support is centred around urban and suburban areas where there are more seats.  And Canada has a first past the post system as in the UK.

Voter turnout has been slipping in the 21st century from a peak of 75%; in this election it was around 65% – much higher than the US, about the same as the UK but below other G7 economies Germany and Japan. A 65% turnout means that the ‘no vote’ party was the largest – and Trudeau’s Liberals attracted just one in five potential voters.

Canada: voter turnout (%)

As the smallest G7 nation in GDP and population, Canada has seen far fewer COVID cases and deaths than many other nations, and Trudeau recently reopened the border, but only to the vaccinated.  In the election Trudeau pointed out the dire situation in Alberta, run by a Conservative provincial government, which refused to adopt social distancing restrictions and now has a wave of cases and hospitalisations.  Interestingly, the anti-vacc extreme right-wing People’s Party failed to make a mark, polling only 5%.

Trudeau may be back in office, but like the other G7 economies, things are not rosy economically.  Canada’s 2021 economic outlook is similar to that of other developed countries. After the largest economic contraction since 1945 (a dip of 5.5% of GDP in 2020), Canada is still in recession, according to the latest figures, although forecasters (Oxford Economics) are still expecting a sharp recovery.

Even if the above forecast turns out to be correct (and that is uncertain), the long-term economic trends for the Canadian economy are not great.  A recent Macdonald-Laurier Institute report, wrote that Canadian “real GDP growth over the past decade has been as lethargic as the decade after the onset of the Great Depression in 1929” (Cross 2020). Thus, Canadian capitalism had already been experiencing problems for over a decade when the COVID-19 lockdown started. 

For an account of Canadian capitalism up to the 1990s, I recommend the work of Marxist economist, Murray Smith . For the recent period, Geoff McCormack of the Centre for Canadian Studies at Guangdong University for Foreign Studies has produced an excellent analysis of Canadian capitalism, which I draw upon here.  McCormack finds that in the 13-year period following the ‘Great Canadian Slump’ of 1990-92, the profit rate on Canadian capital rose from 13% to 28%. But after peaking in 2005, it began to fall, reaching 17% in 2019.

The downward trajectory of the profit rate during this 14-year period was accompanied by a stagnating mass of profit. Between the years 1993 and 2005, the mass of profit grew by 142%. After 2005 and until 2019, however, it stagnated, having grown by merely 1.5% over the entire period.

Canada did escape much of the impact from the global financial crisis of 2008-9 because of the long period of relatively strong profitability and capital accumulation preceding the crisis.  But by 2006, according to McCormack. profitability had begun to erode.  “Afterwards, “sneaking” stagnation became increasingly evident in rates of capital accumulation, capacity utilization, employment, as well as real wage and GDP growth.”

In the eight years following 2010, business investment in plant and machinery grew by an average of only 0.1%. Recovery after the Great Recession was driven a credit-fuelled boom in housing.  People got jobs but at low rates of pay, just as in other G7 economies.  In the years following the Great Recession, real wage growth slowed substantially, averaging just 0.4% per year.  As McCormack says, “given poor profitability, lacklustre capital accumulation, truncated capacity utilization, low employment and low real wage growth, it is unsurprising that real GDP growth, too, was weak.”

Canada increasingly relies on its production of oil and gas and other mineral resources. And so there is no drive to phase out fossil fuel production to save the planet. Trudeau put it in a speech to cheering Texas oilmen a couple of years ago: “No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and leave them there.” So Canada, which is 0.5% of the planet’s population, plans to use up nearly a third of the planet’s remaining carbon budget. There’s oil in the ground and it must come out.

And even the growth in incomes in the last decade was not shared equally.  As in other OECD economies, the share of income going to the top 1% of ‘earners’ rocketed while the share going to the bottom 50% fell. Indeed, the top 1% has nearly as much income as the bottom 50%!

Canada: top 1% share (blue); bottom 50% (red) – World Inequality Database.

And wealth inequality in Canada is on a par with other G7 economies.

Source: World Bank

So the decade since 2009 has been characterized by sneaking stagnation, rooted in profitability problems that began after 2005. This has manifested itself in the stagnant accumulation of machinery and equipment, low industrial capacity utilization rates, low employment levels, as well as low real wage and GDP growth.  It is an expression of what I have called the Long Depression that all the major capitalist economies have sunk into since 2009 in the ten years leading up to the COVID slump.

And just as in other major G7 economies, corporate and household debt has jumped to record highs.  Despite very low interest rates, Canada’s corporate sector is weighed down by debt service costs. In 2020, 55% of corporate income went to paying interest and principal payments on loans, whereas it amounted to 43% in the US. The debt service ratio increased from 38% in 2006 to 57% in 2019 as economic stagnation wore on business balance sheets.

The Bank of Canada economists have classified 25% of Canada’s publicly traded companies as zombie firms ie. they persistently do not earn enough revenue to cover interest payments on their outstanding debts.

So Canadian capitalism bears all the hallmarks of the contradictions facing the rest of the G7 economies as they come out of the COVID slump.  PM Trudeau achieved nothing with his snap election and faces the same problems in getting Canada’s capitalist economy going as before.

The post Snap Canadian Elections Change Nothing appeared first on Left Voice.

This weekend, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under President Joe Biden began brutalizing and deporting thousands of mostly Haitian immigrants who have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border and camped on the outskirts of Del Río, Texas.

At least 16,000 immigrants have crossed the Río Grande from Ciudad Acuña, Mexico in mid-September. Most are Haitians, joined by some Venezuelans, Cubans, and Nicaraguans. Many carried small children and even infants. Migrants waded through sometimes chest-deep water, carrying their possessions, including food, in plastic shopping bags.

Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere and has been the target of the worst racism for centuries, before and after the revolution of 1791 to 1804 threw out the slaveholders and achieved independence. In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton jailed and deported tens of thousands of Haitian refugees following a military coup in Haiti. The country’s minimum wage today amounts to an annual income of only $817 — for those Haitians who can get stable jobs. Many of the Haitian refugees arriving today in the U.S. have been migrant workers in South America in countries hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. Let’s be clear: closing the borders to Haitians and deporting both adults and children to Haiti is outrageous and deeply racist.

This border crisis comes in a period of crisis for Haiti — after the country’s president Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in July, a 7.2 magnitude earthquake killed nearly 2,000 people in August and left tens of thousands homeless.

Once on the U.S. side, migrants declared themselves to U.S. border guards and hoped to gain asylum. The border guards stopped them from moving further, penning them in and forcing them to camp under the Del Río International Bridge. Most people are sleeping on cardboard, blankets, or dirt. Many have to cross back and forth to buy food in Mexico to bring back to the U.S. side. One Venezuelan father with two children told Reuters, “There is urine, feces and we are sleeping next to garbage.”

On Saturday, the DHS declared it was taking action to arrest and expel the migrants from the camp. By Sunday, Border Patrol announced it had removed 3,300 people who were either deported or jailed, pending deportation. Border Patrol head Raul Ortiz vowed to remove everyone from the camp within a week.

Photographs and videos show that mounted Border Patrol agents brazenly used their horses to herd Black Haitians while twirling and swinging leather horse whips — it’s an image that could have come straight from the 1700’s. They even did this in an attempt to turn back migrants from the camp who bought food in Mexico and were bringing it back to their families who had next to nothing to eat. This is under Joe Biden, who said he opposed Donald Trump’s racism. Now, he is forcibly expelling thousands of Haitians — many of them children — en masse. 

Haitian Migrants Denounce U.S. Abuses

On Sunday, the United States deported over 320 people to Haiti on three flights. At least twelve deportees told the New York Times that U.S. agents lied and said the planes were going to Florida. When they realized that they were being deported to Haiti, some migrants protested and guards handcuffed them. Six deportation flights to Haiti are planned every day for the next three weeks in order to remove about 14,000 people. The Haitian government has asked the United States to suspend deportations, saying it cannot provide adequate food or security for that number of people.

Over the weekend, U.S. Border Patrol sent 400 extra officers to Del Río. They are assisted by Texas state police and National Guard troops in carrying out these mass arrests and deportations. Border Patrol is registering migrants in the camp with tracking numbers and separating childless adults from families.

Zareal German, a 45-year-old migrant whose wife is pregnant, told the LA Times, “They don’t care about us — look how we’re living like animals.” Alex Bravener, a 25-year-old with a 3-year-old daughter came all the way from Brazil and has no money left. “We know that we come here illegally, but we are human too, like the president [Biden].”

In 2018, Donald Trump called Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations “shithole countries” and defended the use of tear gas on migrants attempting to cross the border. Today, with a Democratic president, the U.S. state is continuing to expel 16,000 Haitian and other immigrants, and instead of tear gas, there are horse whips. 

In May, the Biden administration said it was extending Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitian immigrants within the United States. This legal bar against deporting people to Haiti was enacted after the country’s severe 2010 earthquake in an acknowledgment that the country is unsafe for deportees due to devastation, violence, and dire poverty. 

However, TPS is only granted to those who have completed a bureaucratic application process after immigrating to the United States. The U.S. government argues that “removal” of recently arrived immigrants is different from deportation of established immigrants farther from the border. 

U.S. imperialism is directly responsible for much of the political unrest and environmental destruction in Haiti today. Now, Biden is carrying out this mass expulsion in the aftermath of a presidential assassination, an earthquake that destroyed or damaged more than 100,000 homes.

Claire Bazille was deported to Haiti with her toddler son. Her mother and six siblings there are homeless. Given the mass unemployment in the country, she said, “I don’t know how I will survive.” Bazille came to the United States. after working for several years as a janitor in Chile. 

Biden’s False Promises

Biden’s statements and actions on immigration have been full of contradictions.  During a 2019 debate, he accepted the idea that crossing the border without permission should be a civil, rather than a criminal offense. But then he defended the Obama administration’s deportation of 3 million people. In 2020, Biden switched course and began pandering for votes by telling Univision and members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus that Obama’s mass deportation had been a “mistake.” On the campaign trail, Joe Biden attempted to distinguish himself from Trump by promising a more “humane” immigration system.

Despite his campaign promises, Biden has upheld and deepened the racist immigration system of his predecessor. The organization United We Dream reports that Biden deported more than 597,000 people in his first five months in office. This March, the U.S. Embassy in Haiti tweeted a picture of Biden with the quote, “Don’t come over.” 

The Biden administration continued to employ Rule 42 from Donald Trump’s administration, which uses Covid-19 as a cover to authorize immediate deportation of adult immigrants without children, denying them the right to apply for asylum. Biden has also continued Trump’s policy of relying on the Mexican government to repress and jail migrants trying to cross through Mexico using militarized border guards.

Empty Words from “Progressive” Democrats 

As DHS began expelling Haitians, a group of 56 House Democrats headed by Ayanna Pressley, Nydia Velázquez, and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) wrote a letter on September 16 to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas requesting that he halt deportations to Haiti, release detained Haitians, and selectively allow some Haitians waiting along the border in Mexico into the United States.

Yet even these modest requests ring hollow when looking at the actions of these “progressive” Democrats. On AOC’s and Rashida Tlaib’s first day in Congress in 2019 they both voted Yes on a bill funding the DHS. 

The supposedly radical Democrats are not going to organize disruptive mass protests outside of the halls of government against the leadership of their own party. They certainly aren’t going to leave the party or withdraw their support from Biden. Their strategy is a dead end, reliant on begging Democratic officials who operate the deportation machine for sympathy. 

While thousands marched into airports at the start of Trump’s presidency to oppose the detention and deportation of people arriving from Middle Eastern countries targeted by the Muslim Ban, the response to the current border crisis is much more muted. The Democratic Party has the effect of kryptonite for internationalism.

What Can We Do?

Just as people flooded airports to protest Trump’s Muslim Ban, activists, unionized and ununionized workers, and youth should march into the San Antonio, Texas airport today and begin a mass sit-in to oppose Biden’s deportation flights to Haiti. We should call on flight attendants, baggage handlers, airline mechanics, and pilots to fold their arms and collectively refuse to drag people back to Haiti against their will.

The working class is international. The U.S. working class cannot build its strength by supporting a capitalist party that oppresses workers from the nations most beaten down by the imperialist division of labor and wealth. 

The mass deportations in Del Río show that the domestication of the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) uprising — defused and shunted into the Democratic Party via NGO control and electoral endorsements — has been disastrous. The result of  the liberal U.S. capitalist party is now visible for everyone to see. Mounted federal cops are chasing Black people seeking safety with whips. The millions who rose up against the murder of George Floyd could fight this outrage too, with organized rank and file workers. BLM today being too demobilized to take immediate solidarity action with Haitians against the U.S. government is a condemnation of the strategy of lining up with the Democratic Party.

We must demand open borders for all immigrants and refugees from Haiti, Afghanistan, and all other countries. This includes an equal right to work in the United States, with equal pay and conditions alongside U.S. born workers. By building solidarity, battering down restrictions, and dissolving the Border Patrol will we learn in action how to fight imperialism and our own capitalists at home. For Open Borders! Let Them All In!

The post Mounted Border Police Chase and Whip Haitian Refugees as Biden Deports Thousands appeared first on Left Voice.

The crisis of Evergrande, China’s second-largest real estate development company, has shaken the global financial markets. The company, whose liabilities are estimated at US$355 billion, informed creditors a few days ago that it would not be able to meet interest payments on its debt that were due on Monday, September 20. Market reactions were negative that day. In the United States, the Dow Jones, S&P 500, and Nasdaq fell 1.78 percent, 1.70 percent, and 2.19 percent, respectively. Brazil’s Ibovespa index dropped 2.33 percent. In Europe, the Euro Stoxx 50 index (Eurozone) fell 2.11 percent, and markets in London, Paris, and Frankfurt all dropped, by 0.86 percent, 1.74 percent, and 2.31 percent, respectively.

The sheer size of the company, it’ amount of debt it carries, and the Chinese government’s wait-and-see attitude have been enough to generate a lot of misguided discussion of this being a Chinese Lehman Brothers. That’s a reference to September 2008, when the fourth-largest U.S. investment bank collapsed due to the insolvency of its massive mortgage loans. With no Federal Reserve bailout, the collapse had a domino effect of losses in financial institutions worldwide.

The crisis is not only an “opportunity to regulate the sector,” as some — including the Chinese bureaucracy’s own propaganda — would have us believe. But it is too early to declare this a Chinese version of Lehman Brothers, since the Chinese government will not likely wait for things to reach that level.

The Evergrande crisis is the explosive echo of a real estate bubble in China that was not going to sustain itself for long. Much of China’s economic growth in recent years has come from public and private investment in real estate, as the decline in  social benefits from the Mao Zedong era — such as state-subsidized housing — had to give way to new ways of meeting the needs of the population. China’s urbanization rate has risen steadily since the 1990s, with successive waves of migrant workers from the countryside filling the industrial cities. Since the mid-2000s, though, an emerging middle class in the big cities has also imposed the need for urban planning.

Creating housing, factory dormitories, and other buildings created a boom for the real estate and construction sector, which now accounts for a substantial part of China’s GDP — some 29 percent today. Evergrande alone has 778 projects underway in 223 cities. That much business is symbolic of China’s economic growth pattern in the recent period, and an eventual default of the company — owned by founder Xu Jiayin and Jack Ma of the giant Alibaba (and target of government disciplining of big tech firms) — would cause the collapse of several other real estate-related companies in the country.

There are other potential ripple effects, too. The construction sector relies on commodities such as iron ore, and so the Chinese crisis directly affects countries such as Brazil, where companies such as Vale are exporters of that raw material to China.

Thus, the entire affair is no “minor detail.” The Chinese government is seeking to reduce the state’s burden of using public money to finance, and sometimes even rescue, companies at a time when it is also trying to contain the effects of China’s enormous inequality. Today, there are tens of millions without jobs while the country has more billionaires than the United States.

Moreover, a large percentage of labor strikes in China are concentrated in the construction sector, according to the China Labour Bulletin. Henan province has surpassed Guangdong province (where Evergrande is headquartered) in the number of strikes this year — all among workers in the civil construction industry, who have either not been paid, been given IOUs, or had their wages doled out in installments smaller than what they are supposed to receive. On top of this, there is a glut of contract fraud. The government’s allergy to labor strikes raises greater concerns about what might happen with a real estate bankruptcy.

Intellectuals such as Elias Jabbour, an economics professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, artificially diminish the economic concerns that Evergrande’s problems create within Xi Jinping’s bureaucracy. He confuses the real Evergrande situation with the government’s apparent interest in regulating some of China’s monopolies as a way to secure the business of Chinese capitalism more effectively and reduce the possibility of social explosions resulting from inequality. It would be difficult for the Chinese government to allow a generalized “breakup” of small- and medium-size enterprises that depend on the real estate sector just to teach Evergrande a “lesson.” When things worsen, the reactions we expect from Beijing tend to change. What is certain is that Xi cannot allow major jolts to the Chinese economy — especially at a moment of heated international disputes with Washington, which has just closed a deal to sell nuclear submarines to Australia. Accounting for almost one-third of China’s GDP, the real estate sector — and Evergrande itself, if need be — will get help. In China, too, there are capitalist enterprises that are “too big to fail.”

Beijing is walking a tightrope. The government, which controls the banking sector, needs to inflict enough pain on Evergrande to show that it is “serious” about the real estate industry’s need to reduce its debt levels and cease its dependence on state financing. Xi doesn’t want to spend money bailing out companies; he wants robust capitalists who guarantee their own profits, and discipline themselves to the Chinese Communist Party. But he cannot afford to go too far. The lesson cannot turn a strategic sector of China’s economy into a dying ghost.

The Chinese bureaucracy, however, cannot control everything, and crises arise that elude Xi’s plans. We will see how he deals with this latest one.

First published in Portuguese on September 20 in Esquerda Diário.

Translation by Scott Cooper

The post China’s Evergrande: A Serious Crisis, But Hardly an Asian Lehman Brothers appeared first on Left Voice.

The following article was written by Jessica Prozinski, a participant in the protest.

We know who James Craig is and who he’s always been. He is the former chief of the Detroit police who hospitalized our comrades over and over again last summer for protesting against racist police brutality. Craig’s vocation was making Detroit safe for rich white developers while treating the Black majority as though their lives meant nothing.

Craig’s lifework was being the hired gun of politicians — Democrat and Republican alike — who have been bought and paid for by business interests. This includes the Democratic Party Detroit city council and Democratic Party mayor Mike Duggan, who rubber-stamped Craig’s racist and brutal policies. It includes Democratic Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, who recently gave $7.5 million — that was supposed to be for fighting Covid — to the reckless Detroit Police Department.

Now Craig hopes to run as the Republican Party’s nominee for governor. On Tuesday, September 14, Craig showed the world how disastrous a campaign launch could be. The Detroit MetroTimes called it “a complete clusterfuck” on their front page:

Craig envisioned himself announcing his run for Michigan governor as a Trump Republican on beautiful Belle Isle with the cityscape in the background.

What actually happened was that protesters against racist police brutality — many of whom had been personally beaten, arrested, and hospitalized by Craig’s police the previous summer — made their own speeches from behind Craig’s podium.

Craig did eventually attend his own campaign event, during which he was inaudible but could be seen mouthing the words, “I am running for governor.” Thirty-eight seconds later he was gone. He was chased into a waiting SUV by protesters jeering, “Run, Jimmy, run!”

From there, he ended up at what activist group Detroit Will Breathe described in a tweet as “the balcony of a gentrification building.”

Craig’s epic smackdown was a masterclass on how to take over the press conference of a class enemy.

Detroit Will Breathe (DWB) and Michigan Liberation were not satisfied with simply ruining the event for Craig. They took it a step further, commandeering the press conference and speaking to the dozens of members of the media about the damage Craig has inflicted on Detroit and about their own demands.

Jumping onto a picnic table and speaking through a bullhorn, DWB leader Lloyd Simpson said,

This is a man who directed his department to brutalize protesters taking a stand against systemic racism and police brutality. A man who, at the TCF [center] last November, embraced racist Trump supporters who came to intimidate and disenfranchise voters in the Blackest city in the nation. A man who called the officer who executed Hakim Littleton with a shot to the back of the head an “American hero.”

After Simpson spoke, protesters sang chants written specifically for the event by Detroit musician and DWB leader Jae Bass: “James Craig is full of hate, we won’t let him win our state!” “No justice, no peace. James Craig is still the police!”

Then protesters occupied the space directly behind the podium as Bass announced, “So, this is our press conference now.”

While Bass was speaking, the handful of Craig supporters began to weakly chant, “Craig! Craig!” but the chant petered out after six “Craig”s.

Craig’s subsequent scheduled campaign stop in Flint was also canceled after the Detroit debacle.

Craig tried the “paid protesters” trope on a reporter from WDET with unfortunate results: the reporter asked him how he knew the protesters were paid.

“I don’t know, but I gotta believe,” Craig replied. When the reporter pressed him further, he replied, “I feel good about it. I feel like they were paid. I don’t have any hard evidence, but — ”

“Is that how you operate as an officer, then?” the reporter asked. “You don’t have any hard evidence, but …”

As Detroit Will Breathe pointed out in a statement to Deadline Detroit, “The only person there seeking to get paid for their politics was Craig.”

Ironically, some protesters who did not have a recreation passport had to pay $12 to attend the protest, since Belle Isle is now a state park.

It has to be especially damaging to former chief Craig’s reputation that his campaign failed so spectacularly on … security?

The protest was publicly organized by Detroit Will Breathe on Facebook.

Craig, who in July proclaimed that, “What I can’t respect is a victimhood mentality,” then went on Tucker Carlson’s show Tuesday night to play the victim. “[As] you saw in the video, it became very tense,” he told Carlson, adding,

So you know what, we need to hold Governor Whitmer accountable for this. She oversees the Michigan State Police and the Department of [Natural] Resources that covers the island. I know this is not accidental. This is not accidental.

So you know what, we need to hold Governor Whitmer accountable for this. She oversees the Michigan State Police and the Department of [Natural] Resources that covers the island. I know this is not accidental. This is not accidental.

The DNR and Whitmer administration wasted no time in responding:

Whitmer spokesman Bobby Leddy spoke to the Detroit News Tuesday, adding,

This is a baseless attack. Here are the facts: Craig’s team was proactively contacted by the Department of Natural Resources to ensure they had the proper permit for the event. They affirmed crowd control would be the campaign’s responsibility, and law enforcement was immediately dispatched when a problem arose.

The Michigan State Police told the Detroit News that a sergeant was sent to Belle Isle after a 911 call, but when he arrived, he found 20 peaceful protesters not breaking any laws, so he left.

After the event, Detroit Will Breathe issued an official statement, which reads in part,

The people of Detroit are demanding a new vision of public safety where we invest resources into the needs of residents rather than the criminalization of Black people and the expansion of violent policing.

In the days after the event, the scandal and derision has only grown.

Jim Kiertzner of Detroit Channel WXYZ observed, “This was not the launch James Craig wanted. I’ve been doing news in Michigan for 38 years and 48 years total. I’ve never seen anything like this in a race for statewide office.”

Our movement will continue to call out Craig’s racist and violent police practices that brought harm to Black people in Detroit. The movement must also make sure that we call out both political parties, Democrats and Republicans, who continue to defend and fund the police who harm and repress Black and Brown communities, and repress any struggle, including the struggle of the workers against their bosses, that seeks to win power to the oppressed.

The post Detroit Activists Shut Down Former Police Chief’s Press Conference appeared first on Left Voice.

The following is adapted from a talk given September 8th at a forum by the Rank-and-File Temple (RAFT) Caucus at Temple University on “Racial Capitalism.” RAFT is the rank-and-file caucus of TAUP (AFT local 4532), the union for faculty and other staff at Temple University in Philadelphia.

Today, one of the most important fights for unions is the one against the police — to kick them out of our unions, jail killer cops, and to abolish the police completely. 

Our union leaders, though, usually tell us the opposite. Not only my own union’s leaders at Temple University, but also the leaders of the national AFT, and those of the AFL-CIO federation, want us to keep out of the fight against cops and the wider racial struggle. And those same leaders defend the fact that the police are part of our unions, protected and supported by the AFT and the AFL-CIO — despite the fact that police brutalize workers and oppressed people everywhere. 

But that strategy — keeping union fights separate from the anti-racist movement — has only helped keep working and oppressed people weak. Real power means wider, deeper solidarity, and that means linking up our fights against bosses and against racism for a classwide struggle against the ruling class. In other words, today more than ever, we have to mobilize in our unions, from the bottom up, against the police and against the racist capitalist system they serve. 

The Police Are Our Enemy

The police are no friends to the working class — despite some of our own union leaders calling them “workers.”  

Capitalism has produced racism since its inception. White supremacy helped to justify the colonization of the Americas, the extermination of many of its native peoples, and the looting of the natural resources that helped jumpstart capitalism. And it was key to the enslaving of the workforce that picked cotton for the mills of the Industrial Revolution. Today, racism helps keep the working class and oppressed divided and terrorized — making some groups, like Black and Brown people, hyper-exploitable for the bosses’ profits.    

Cops are a lynchpin in this racist system. The terror they inflict on Black and Brown people — like the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Walter Wallace, Jr. here in Philadelphia — aims to keep down a potentially powerful force of revolt inside the working class and oppressed. And police are the front lines of the mass incarceration of Black people that helps fuel massive profits.

But throughout their history, the police have also been the bosses’ primary source of “muscle” against strikers. Police have long attacked and killed strikers, making sure scabs can get through picket lines — all so that the bosses can keep turning a profit. For public school teachers in my own union, the AFT, cops terrorize Black and Brown children in school hallways, keep the “school-to-prison pipeline” flowing, and terrorize Black and Brown families.

At Temple University, where I am an adjunct, the campus police force— the biggest one in the country — is the spearhead of gentrification to harass the majority-Black neighborhood. Meanwhile, the bosses of the university (and the businesses that depend on it) gobble up the surrounding neighborhood.

In other words: the police exist only to protect the ruling class’s property and power. But to do this, the massive police forces of cities like Philadelphia and New York swallow up huge chunks of a city’s budget. In New York this year, police spending exceeded $10 billion. And yet Democrats in local governments like New York and Philadelphia constantly attack union teachers because of a lack of funds. 

All of this means our fight for real power as workers has to take on the police and racism.  

The Failure of Our Union Leaders 

And yet many union leaders have been failing, again and again, to throw our unions’ weight behind the fight against the racist police. In fact, union heads keep insisting that our unions should be protecting the police.

During the uprising against the police last summer, the leaders of my own union local — TAUP at Temple — did little beyond releasing bland statements of support for protesting students. They refused to call for the defunding, let alone the abolishing, of either Temple’s massive police force or Philadelphia’s. And they sat on their hands instead of mobilizing the union’s members to join the protests happening right outside Temple’s door.

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In this, TAUP’s leaders were just following the lead of Randi Weingarten, the president of our parent union, the AFT, the eighth biggest union in the U.S. with about 800,000 members. The AFT, too, did little beyond putting out a tepid statement about equality. But that same statement made sure to defend the police as members of the working class that deserve protection inside our unions and union federations. In fact, the AFT itself is affiliated with at least one police union, the Keane Police Officers Association (AFT local 6246). 

Leaders of the AFL-CIO — the nation’s largest union federation — also rejected all calls to defund or abolish the police and to kick cops out of our unions. When protesters in the anti-police uprising last summer vandalized the AFL-CIO headquarters, this should have been a wake-up call that large sections of the working class and oppressed are alienated from the union movement’s leaders. Instead, it led the late president of the federation, Richard Trumka, to double down, denouncing the protesters and then championing the right of police to be protected by the AFL-CIO.

In this way, the leaders in the AFT and the AFL-CIO want to keep union struggles separate from the wider fight for racial justice. Intead, their strategy is to stick to economic issues — about pay, hours, and conditions — and steer clear of building a wider class struggle. 

One part of that strategy — and a key reason why leaders of the AFT and AFL-CIO refuse to join the anti-police and anti-racism movement — is their reliance on the Democratic Party. The idea seems to be this: by currying favor with Democratic politicians, unions can gain leverage to win on purely economic issues. And so union heads like Trumka and Weingarten help raise huge sums for the Democrats and help “get out the vote” for people like Biden. 

Relying on Democrats, though, means shying away from more militant tactics like the strike for fear of upsetting the “allies” in the Democratic Party. But it also means relying on politicians like Biden who helped build the racist mass incarceration system, and who now totally reject the major demands of the struggle last summer, like defunding and abolishing the police. More than this, their strategy means relying on exactly the party that spearheaded the brutal repression of the anti-cop uprising last summer, since it was Democrats in Portland, Philadelphia, and New York that attacked protesters. No wonder, then, that leaders like Trumka and Weingarten refused to offer any real, concrete solidarity with the movement last year — organizing strikes, picket lines, and so on.  

This union strategy — stick to “bread and butter” issues, avoid militant tactics, rely on Democrats — has been common sense among union leaders for decades. But it has been a miserable failure. It hasn’t stopped the steep decline of the union movement in recent years. The percentage of workers in unions has dwindled to just 10.8 percent, and unions have been losing power and influence under the attacks of the ruling class since the 1980s. For adjuncts like me, there hasn’t been a single instance, in the history of unionizing adjuncts, where a union has won a fundamental change to our working conditions, like a real and systematic pathway to tenure.

From Union Struggle to Class Struggle

But the last year has brought with it some hints of the power that comes from unions linking up with the wider anti-racist movement.  

One was the role unions played in the uprising last summer. During that struggle, unions did not come close to playing the kind of role they could have played. But in Minneapolis, some union bus drivers refused to transport arrested protesters to jail. They did something similar a few months later, after the murder of Daunte Rice just outside of Minneapolis, with the support of their union, the MTU. And on Juneteenth, in the midst of the anti-cop uprising that summer, the ILWU, the dockworkers’ union, held a solidarity strike for one day up and down the West Coast.  

These examples are isolated, but they point to the power of unions joined to racial struggle. That power does not come from asking Democrats for their blessing or help. It comes from working class and oppressed people taking matters into their own hands and acting for themselves, using their own weapons, like strikes alongside disruptive protests and marches.  

Union membership is low, but unionized workers are standing at key chokepoints of the capitalist economy, from transportation and healthcare to manufacturing and education. This is a key reason the capitalist parties do not want the economic struggle and wider class struggle to be united. Had the solidarity actions spread — if more transportation union workers refused to help the police in other big cities, and if union rank-and-filers across the country refused work not just for a day, but until our demands were met — the power of the anti-police uprising would have been far stronger. 

But more than this, reversing the losses of the union movement itself means moving past narrow union struggle to classwide struggle — not just with statements, but with real action.  

For example, joining our union power with the struggle to abolish the police would mean attacking a key force of capitalism that breaks strikes  and soaks up huge amounts of money that should be going to workers and the oppressed, for their own priorities. And it could be a means of building bridges between the struggle of union teachers and those of Black and Brown communities terrorized by the cops. In other words, linking unions to wider mass struggle could help the union struggle become more powerful, too.

That means building, inside our union, from the bottom up, a rank-and-file movement ready to join the struggle against racism concretely, in the streets, and to use our weapons as workers — like the strike — in solidarity with that struggle. That in turn means independence from, and a fight against, the Democratic Party that defends the police and crushes anti-police protest.  

One concrete part of that wider fight is to follow the lead of SEIU Drop the Cops and push to kick cops out of our unions — out of the AFT, as this campaign states, and out of the AFL-CIO completely. Dropping the cops would be a central way to strip the police of the protection our unions — and our dues money — gives them, to make it easier to attack police funding and jail killer cops. 

When our union leaders keep our unions separate from other struggles, like racial struggle, it only helps the bosses. Moving past their failed strategy means moving past narrow, economic union struggle for a wider, militant class struggle. 

But that in turn means workers and the oppressed acting for ourselves — not relying on the Democrats, but organizing from below, challenging the bureaucratic leadership of our unions and of the non-profits and the social movements themselves, too. All that will also require new organizing bodies,, like mass assemblies, to connect the wider class struggle to itself. Unions are crucial, but they alone are not enough for real class struggle.

We can’t abolish the cops without abolishing the capitalism they serve. That will mean organizing ourselves, from the bottom up, inside and beyond our unions and movement organizations, not just for economic gains but for class struggle against the rulers. The union leaders who are in bed with the Democrats can’t help us. But kicking cops out of our unions, and building towards a wider class struggle, are steps in the right direction.

The post Temple University’s Rank-and-File Talk “Cops out of Unions” appeared first on Left Voice.

The Met Gala, a fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute that is also a gathering of celebrities, politicians, and the wealthy and well connected took place on September 13. The bourgeois press coverage focused on the celebrity spectacle, nearly ignoring the horrific police attack on abolitionist activists protesting outside the event, many of whom were arrested. Left Voice spoke with Prince, a photo-journalist and activist who was on the ground.

Left Voice: What’s your background in activism?

Prince: I started in college. I have my own YouTube channel. And, you know, through that YouTube channel, I did videos on topics related to race and racism. One of the biggest videos I did was talking about victims of police brutality, just keeping people informed of the things that were happening. And then I got involved in the protests in May last year, in May and June, after the death of George Floyd. I did that for basically all of that summer. And that continued into the fall and the winter all the way up until now. Around the winter time is when I found my camera. And that’s when I started bringing my camera along and I started doing the whole photography thing.

Left Voice: Would you consider yourself press, an activist, press and an activist? How would you define what you’ve been doing?

Prince: Mostly what I do is basically what I was doing with the YouTube channel. I take photos and post along with them what the action was about, what we were there for, the message we were trying to send. I try to use my Instagram to keep people informed of that. I would say it’s kind of like photojournalism, in a way.

Left Voice: Do you think cops target you more when you bring your camera? How do you think the camera has affected your experience at actions?

Prince: In terms of the cops, I don’t think the camera has made much of a difference. You know, I still think they view me the same way with or without the camera. And I’m still trying to find the best way to put it. I still can be subjected to the same type of treatment with or without the camera. But it definitely has changed my role in protests. 

Left Voice: Were you taking photos of the action at the Met Gala? How did you hear about it and what were the demands that you guys were making?

Prince: I saw a flier for an action being organized at Foley Square and that’s where I originally went. We then traveled as a group to the Met Gala. On the way there, that’s when the group was informed of the plan for that day. So we had no idea of the original plan, or at least I didn’t. I can only speak for myself. I had no idea of the original plan.

Left Voice: What was the atmosphere when you got to the Met Gala? Were a lot of people out? Was it tense?

Prince: I’ve been thinking about it and talking about it ever since that day. There were tons and tons of people. They were all behind these barricades set up along the sidewalk. A lot of them were dressed up and you could tell they were all waiting for something to happen. The atmosphere was kind of like people just waiting to potentially see their favorite celebrity. I just wasn’t a fan of that, you know?

Left Voice: What do you think of the contrast of being at this protest and then all of these celebrities that a lot of people might look up to are attending basically this expensive party?

Prince: I feel like a lot of them had no idea that this was happening outside or maybe they didn’t see anything. But I feel like they probably got some wind of it through social media after. I guess they didn’t feel like they had any responsibility to comment on it. I wish that wasn’t the case. I wish they would use their platforms to speak about what was literally happening right outside the building of the party they were attending. I think there was one person who attended that commented on it. I’m forgetting the person’s name. But there were a lot of other recognizable people there. So I wish there was more engagement of that.

Left Voice: How long did it take before cops started harassing and arresting people? How did that play out?

Prince: That’s also an interesting thing, because when we first got there, we were waiting around for a good while — I would say about an hour. I was just standing. I didn’t know what the waiting was for. I didn’t ask. I was just waiting for something to happen. Once things did get started, it went from zero to one hundred. I heard someone chanting in the distance, and then we were told to chant along with them. So I just started chanting as well. And then I followed the voice. And next thing you know, we were in the street. We were taking the street and surrounded by all the people. We are on the other side of the barricades, now in the street. 

I don’t know if you heard about the person who was doing the speech. It surfaced all over the Internet and has been everywhere else. They’re only 18 years old. They did that powerful speech. And I was just there listening. I was taking photos. I was also listening to the powerful words they were sharing. After their speech, we were doing a lot more chanting and there were fliers being passed out letting people know why we were there and that they should be fighting there with us. There was a lot of that, and then that’s when the cops took the street. They were in front of us in front of our group, then they put on the speaker telling us that we had to get out of the street, that we were preventing traffic from moving. They started pushing us back. That’s when the brutality started happening — as they were pushing us back. There were people in the front preventing them from pushing us back. Then they tried to grab one of those people — and they did, and they grabbed other people as well. Then we got pushed to the sidewalk. We’re on the sidewalk and the police proceeded to grab comrades off of the sidewalk as well. They even grabbed them right off the sidewalk. That’s how it led up to the brutality from the police.

Left Voice: How would you say the repression compared to other actions you’ve been to?

Prince: I’ve witnessed other stuff that was similar. What was different about this action is that they didn’t even care about all the people that were watching. I would say that‘s what separated it from other actions I’ve been to where they’ve used this type of brutality — the number of people that were there, and they still didn’t care about their actions.

Left Voice: What’s your take on AOC’s participation in the event?

Prince: I was seeing a lot of the reaction from people on social media about the dress. I follow people who are involved in the movement here in the city. It was very consistent that all of them weren’t fans of it. And especially after what happened in front of the Met Gala particularly, I wasn’t a fan, either. I kind of thought it was hypocritical that she would wear this dress up as “Tax the rich.” But then she’s at this event that’s very expensive to attend and among the rich. I guess she was trying to make a statement, but it wasn’t really making any real change.

Left Voice: Do you think people like AOC and Jamaal Bowman are doing enough for the movement against police violence that caught on last summer?

Prince: I don’t think so. A lot of the demands we’ve had haven’t been met, and they were talking about this yesterday at the march. We were talking about how there’s still a lot of change that hasn’t been done.

Left Voice: Do you think that Biden getting elected has caused activism to die down? Or do you think maybe other things are also contributing to that?

Prince: I feel like there were people who felt as if all our problems were solved because everyone was elected. That may have gotten some people to remove themselves from the movement because they feel like we accomplished something big from that.

Left Voice: What do you think people should know about what went down at the Met Gala?

Prince: The main thing people should know — and this is what was being amplified at the Met Gala — is Black lives still matter. There are still lives being lost. You have Mike Rosado, who was killed in the Bronx a little over two weeks ago. There are a lot of lives still being taken by the police. The fight isn’t over. The fight is still very much happening and this is something that people should be a part of and getting themselves involved in. There’s lives being lost, people facing homelessness, and there are still very real problems that are happening.

If people join the fight , we have a better chance of having these issues get closer to being solved.

The post Met Gala Protest: Interview with an Activist appeared first on Left Voice.

This week marks 13 years since the collapse of U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers. The bankruptcy burst financial bubbles, and the ensuing crisis quickly moved to the real economy. After its first manifestation in the United States, its epicenter would move to the European Union and then spread to the rest of the world.

Since then, the policy of governments around the world has been to unload the crisis onto the working class through public debt to bail out bankers and businessmen, cuts to social spending, privatizations, layoffs, and other pro-employer measures. These measures were meant to cushion the blow and avoid more catastrophic scenarios, like that of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

By managing the crisis this way, capitalists precipitated the so-called Great Recession: a period marked by low growth rates and a weak recovery that never really managed to achieve pre-crisis levels of growth.

Without having completely overcome the crisis of the previous period, by the end of 2019 new economic storm clouds were on the horizon. The pandemic accelerated and deepened these trends, with similar responses by governments including new corporate bailout policies and harsh consequences for the working class and the poor.

New Political Phenomena

The economic and social consequences of Lehman Brothers’ fall have led to the emergence of new ways of thinking, processes of polarization, and new political phenomena around the world, both on the Left and on the Right.

On the Right we have seen, for example, Brexit in the UK and the rise of xenophobic nationalism in Europe. In the United States, the rise of Donald Trump with his “America First” politics which resulted, among other things, in the rupture of several multilateral agreements, a hardening of U.S. policy towards Latin America, and increasing tensions with China for technological supremacy in the form of a trade war.

In Latin America during this period, the first cycle of so-called progressivism came to an end with the institutional coup in Brazil that led to the arrival of Jair Bolsonaro to power, the return of the Right with Mauricio Macri in Argentina, and the coup d’état in Bolivia, to mention only some of the most important processes.

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On the Left, neo-reformist formations emerged, such as Syriza in Greece, whose government at the service of the Troika — the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission, and the European Central Bank — paved the way for the Right to take power. For its part, Podemos in Spain also showed its profound limits and ended up joining a coalition government with the imperialist and pro-monarchist PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party).

In Latin America, the continuity of the economic crisis and the political instability on which the right wing was based gave way to the return of the center-left in Argentina with Alberto Fernández, the electoral triumph of the MAS in Bolivia, and the rise of Andre Manuel López Obrador in Mexico and Pedro Castillo in Peru. These events configured a sort of repeat — with elements of continuity with the past — of Latin American “progressivism.”

In the United States, thanks in part to the assault on the Capitol during the last days of the Trump administration, Joe Biden assumed the presidency with a renewed level of popular support and legitimacy that promised to bring an end to the political polarization of the Trump presidency. He implemented measures to contain the crisis, such as billion-dollar aid packages for families and companies, and infrastructure investment. However, his “honeymoon” phase ended abruptly on August 15 when the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan after 20 years of imperialist occupation, calling into question the role of the United States as the world’s policeman, and increasing tensions with powers such as China and Russia.

New Cycles of Class Struggle

Class struggle, intimately linked to the political dynamics of the post-Lehman world, has also emerged across countries and continents.

The Arab Spring in North Africa and the Middle East marked the first cycle of class struggle. Its most developed expression occurred in Egypt, where a revolutionary process emerged, only to be contained, diverted, and finally crushed by the counter-revolution. In other places, like Syria, the process was transformed into a reactionary civil war, with the intervention of U.S. imperialism on the one hand and Russia, as a regional power, on the other.

The influence of these uprisings in the Arab world gave rise to phenomena such as the Indignados movement in Spain in 2011, which spread to other countries. Other important mass movements also developed during this period, such as the youth movement in Chile, the occupation of Taksim Square in Istanbul, Turkey, the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, the Passe Livre movement in Brazil, Occupy Wall Street in the United States, the Maple Spring in Canada, and the the #YoSoy132 Mexican student movement, and later the movement for Ayotzinapa in Mexico.

From 2019, the Yellow Vest movement in France marked the beginning of a new cycle of class struggle. These occurred in many cases despite the Covid-19 pandemic, with revolts and rebellions from Hong Kong to Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon in the Middle East, and resistance to the military coup in Myanmar. In this period, the world also witnessed big strikes in India, uprisings in Algeria, and the rejuvenation of the Catalan independence movement.

In Latin America, this second cycle of class struggle has been manifested in the rebellion in Chile against 30 years of neoliberalism, the struggle in Ecuador against fuel price increases, the resistance to the coup in Bolivia and the revolt of the Colombian youth. The United States saw the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement during this time, which had international repercussions.

Thirteen years after the fall of Lehman Brothers, one of the most important lessons for the working class and oppressed peoples is the need to build revolutionary parties as part of the struggle to build an international for socialist revolution to organize the vanguard of workers, women and youth. The independent self-organization of the masses must fight to move from resistance, rebellions, and revolts, to the opening of revolutionary processes. These processes would prepare the road to victory over the capitalists and their states, which have only more exploitation, misery, wars and the destruction of the planet to offer.

Originally published in Spanish on September 15 in La Izquierda Diario

Translation by Otto Fors

The post The Fall of Lehman Brothers and the Rise of Class Struggle appeared first on Left Voice.

This Friday marked the ten-year anniversary of the start of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS or “Occupy”) movement, when one thousand protesters gathered in Zuccotti Park in Manhattan’s financial district. The movement quickly spread across the nation and the globe.  Drawing its inspiration from the sweeping Arab Spring protests across the Arab world, the OWS movement denounced economic inequality and political corruption. It catalyzed a broad movement that stirred class hatred and delegitimized capitalism, exposing it as a system where a few people accumulate an exorbitant amount of capital at the expense of the vast majority living in precarity. Ten years later, however, the 1 percent, the subject of the movement’s outrage, have only gotten richer. Despite its dissipation, there is much to be learned from Occupy’s brief and potent moment on the international stage about what is required to build and sustain a mass movement.

What Was Occupy Wall Street?

The Occupy movement emerged in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2007 and in the midst of a dragging War on Terror. As billions of dollars were spent on sending American soldiers to die and killing Afghans and Iraqis, the U.S. working class was struggling to put food on the table and seeing its economic prospects evaporating.

OWS represented, for the first time in a long time, spontaneous disruption. Two years earlier, many young people channeled their discontent about the wars abroad and financial crisis at home into Barack Obama’s “HOPE”-filled campaign. Deeply disillusioned by gridlock and the political elite, the working class gained a growing sense that these officials did not represent their interests. As homelessness, poverty, and scarcity became entrenched in the reality of life for the majority in the United States, indignation began to set in. Jaded by the political elite’s double-faced promises to save the economy, while using taxpayer money to bail out the big banks at home and wage endless war abroad, the movement found its first sizable manifestation in the heart of capitalism: Manhattan’s financial district.

Answering a call put out by the Canadian magazine Adbusters, two thousand protestors descended on Lower Manhattan on September 17, 2011, identifying themselves as the 99 percent. Calling attention to the growing divide between the struggling majority and the wealthy few who control the political system, the encampment began at Zuccotti Park.

While the initial protests received little attention in the first week, police violence quickly escalated media coverage, and images of pepper-sprayed protestors and mass arrests began to circulate on the internet. In the streets, the movement amassed huge crowds. Signs read, “We are the 99 percent.” One could hear chants like, “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out,” and “Hey-hey, ho-ho. Goldman Sachs has got to go.” Protestors taped dollar bills over their mouths. Class rage was palpable. That fall, the movement quickly spread to over 600 American towns and cities, and eventually 1,500 cities globally. 

On October 5, the movement in New York City reached an unparalleled scale: an estimated 15,000 protesters and union members marched on the financial district and over 700 people were arrested. Over the course of the movement, over 2,000 protestors were arrested in New York City alone. Within its first six months, over 6,500 people were arrested nationwide. As it grew, occupiers were the subject of heavy surveillance by the Department of Homeland Security.

On October 15, the Occupy Collective held an international “Day of Rage,” holding demonstrations in more than 950 cities in 82 countries. While demonstrations were largely peaceful, several notable examples of police violence brought even more attention to the movement. Occupy Oakland made headlines when the police raided the encampment before dawn, injuring Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen and sending him to the hospital. 

A notable feature of Occupy was its system of self-organization. Through general assemblies, occupiers organized food and comfort stations, childcare, and other services. One of such services was the “People’s Library,” which, during the encampment’s lifespan, had a collection of nearly 10,000 books run by professional librarians and even used an interlibrary loan system.

The broad principles that drove the movement helped expand its reach, but limited its potency, and there were limits to Occupy’s politics. The notion of ”prefigurative politics” emerged: occupiers claimed that their movement “aimed at prefiguring a future egalitarian and democratic society through its practice of a direct democracy that does away with hierarchies and eliminates the vices of formal, representative democracy under capitalism.” In other words, by sculpting political processes in the vision of its participants, the movement would create the future society it envisioned. As John Ehrenberg writes, “Not many people knew what Occupy Wall Street wanted, but a lot of people knew how it worked.” This kind of prefigurative politics often had the shortcoming of assuming the movement could create an alternative to capitalism within the capitalist system. This of course ignored that these alternatives are always crushed by the capitalist state — by force or by marginalization within a global system. In that sense, Occupy’s vision ignored the need to overthrow the capitalist state and fight for a socialist future.  

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Democrats, communists, and anarchists alike gathered under the broad umbrella of Occupy. While all had a generally anti-capitalist orientation, each individual or group had different ideas of what change should look like. Some wanted to jail the bankers, others wanted to overthrow the government. The lack of a program and a clear platform impeded the movement’s development, and made it difficult to extend beyond the encampment and into workplaces and neighborhoods. While Occupy created a new conversation space to critique the ills of capitalism, it fell short of organizing the working class and the oppressed behind a concrete program to confront the capitalist crisis.

The other limit was the lack of an active orientation to mobilize sectors of the working class who, with their firepower and their methods —the strike and the picket line — could have been a powerful ally to truly challenge the capitalist state.

By mid-November, the NYPD began to clear Zuccotti Park. Though protestors would continue to occupy the park in the following months and years, the cold of winter set in, and the movement never regained its original momentum. Lacking clear demands and a mechanism to channel participants’ discontent, the movement fizzled out, and the people radicalized by the experience of Occupy founded community organizations, took positions at NGOs, or went back to “normal life.” Some went on to join socialist organizations, and are currently involved in leftist politics. 

The Capitalists Have Gotten Richer

Ten years after Occupy, there are even more reasons to fight. 

The number of billionaires has more than doubled in the last decade. According to an analysis by Americans For Tax Fairness and The Institute For Policy Studies, “While billionaires’ total wealth fell by 6% (-$98 billion) from 2000 to 2010 as a result of the Great Recession, it shot up by 160% ($2.57 trillion) from 2010 to March 2021.” As of April 2021, U.S. billionaires had nearly twice as much combined wealth than the bottom half of Americans: $4.56 trillion vs. $2.62 trillion.

Many banks are bigger now than they were before the financial crisis. JPMorgan Chase has $3.4 trillion in assets, compared with $1.5 trillion in 2007. Bank of America has about $2.8 trillion in assets, compared with $1.7 trillion in 2007. Wells Fargo’s assets are near $2 trillion, more than double what they were right before the crisis.

Corporate profits have nearly doubled since pre-recession levels. There has also been corporate consolidation across many industries, bringing ever higher profits to a smaller number of exorbitantly wealthy capitalists. The profits of the logistics sector, with the behemoth Amazon at its head, have boomed. As these corporations have devoured smaller businesses and expanded their markets, they have become major employers for the working class. Recently, they have also become the epicenters of high profile unionization efforts and class struggle, such as the union drive at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, the Hunts Point strike in the Bronx, and, most recently, the ongoing Nabisco workers strike. Companies have responded with the usual repression and illegal anti-union scare tactics.

The income gap in the United States is the highest in any of the G7 countries, and the Black-White income gap persists. Notably, the wealth gap among upper-income families and middle- and lower-income families is greater than the income gap and is growing faster, and only the wealthiest families have experienced gains in wealth in the years since the start of the Great Recession in 2007.

Political and social movements have reshuffled in the aftermath of the recession and Occupy’s demise, which has resulted in a broad turn toward electoralism at the expense of building a mass movement. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), for example, made the decision in late 2014 to make the election of Bernie Sanders its number one priority. After the election of Donald Trump in 2016, thousands of devastated Americans joined the DSA. Yet rather than critiquing the political corruption that the Occupy movement rightly denounced, the organization conformed to grow under the banner of “socialism” while becoming increasingly integrated into bourgeois politics. Though class inequity is even more stark than it was before Occupy, a great deal of class anger has been effectively funneled into electoralism, and the spirit of mass movement has dissipated.

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A Mass Movement Rooted in Principles and Strategy

The Occupy movement, with its successes and failures, undoubtedly played a massive role in shifting popular ideology toward the Left in an era of failing neoliberalism. It connected the dots between corporate and political power, bringing broad sectors of the working class into a limited but genuine dialogue about class and the undemocratic nature of bourgeois politics, stoking class anger towards the capitalists. It politicized huge numbers of previously apolitical individuals, brought societal ills caused by capitalism into the open, and created assemblies to discuss issues. It inspired movements all over the world. 

We owe a great deal to the Occupy movement. But we cannot let the disappointment of the last ten years allow us to draw tepid conclusions. While “taxing the rich” is indeed a comparatively progressive demand in a deeply entrenched plutocracy, the current proposal being put forward by the Democrats does nothing but set the tax code back to the 2017 Obama era — the exact issue Occupy was rallying against. But we should tax the rich to fund public schools, institute free public healthcare, build extensive public transport, and much more.

But even that is not enough. Research and material reality confirm what we already intrinsically know: capitalism is unable to solve — in fact, exacerbates — the most pressing problems of humanity. And as Occupy recognized, the political system that upholds capitalism is an unlikely place to flip those dynamics, however good the intentions of the officials in power. As Thomas Hussey writes in his interview with Thomas Picketty, author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, “…it is hard, almost impossible, to imagine that the cure … – tax and more tax – will ever be implemented in a world where, from Beijing to Moscow to Washington, money, and those who have more of it than anyone else, still calls the shots.” We don’t just want to tax the rich — we want to expropriate them. 

Now, we have to channel the energy into a new mass movement rooted in class independence, self-organization, and revolutionary demands. As Occupy showed us, a movement without clear principles and strategy is bound to fizzle out or be pulled into the capitalist fold. The capitalist parties offer us no solutions to the endemic problems which they’re invested in perpetuating. 

Yet Occupy also taught us that we are powerful in great numbers. As the wheels that keep the system running, we can’t forget that we have the power to screech it to a halt. As David Harvey wrote in his 2011 response to Occupy, “… we, the people, have no option but to struggle for the collective right to decide how that system shall be reconstructed and in what image.” 

The post Bring Back the Spirit of Occupy appeared first on Left Voice.

On September 6, six Palestinian political prisoners escaped from the Gilboa prison in northern Israel. The feat was carried out by digging small tunnels underneath a toilet with just a rusty spoon and other utensils.

Five of the six prisoners are members of the group Islamic Jihad: Mahmoud Ardah (46), Mohammed Ardah (39), Yaqoub Qadri (49), Ayham Nayef Kamamji (35), and Munadil Infaat (26). And Zakaria Zubeidi (46) was a former chief of the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades in Jenin.

The image of an astonished Israeli officer looking at their escape hole traveled around the world. It was a humiliation for Israel’s high-tech security and surveillance systems, which they are proud to sell to the rest of the world.

Yet for the oppressed Palestinian people, the prisoners’ escape was an important moral victory. It showed that even in the worst situations there is still room to fight for freedom. Palestinians celebrated by waving their flags and handing out sweets on the streets of Gaza to the West Bank. Around the world, people shared memes on social media and spread images of a spoon as a symbol of freedom.

But the Israeli response was swift. Hundreds of Israeli troops were sent to find the prisoners with a massive operation of roadblocks and surveillance. They also increased the control inside prisons and their surroundings. Israel aircrafts attacked the Gaza Strip three nights in a row. Israeli troops arrested and interrogated several of the fugitives’ family members.

Israeli officers have raided prisoners’ cells, abused them, denied them basic necessities, closed canteens and laundry rooms, moved them to solitary confinement, canceled all family visits and phone calls, and more. Four hundred prisoners were transferred from Gilboa to the Shatta prison to prevent more escapes. This is a form of brutal disciplining to prevent further acts of resistance.

The cities of Ramallah, Nablus, Bethlehem, and Hebron, as well as the surrounding towns and villages, rose up in support of not only the six escapees but also the Palestinians still in detention who were subjected to punitive measures, according to the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society. 

According to the Israeli Prison Service, fires were started in a Negev prison and in Ramon prison. In a statement, the Palestinian Prisoners Society confirmed that Palestinian detainees had set fire to their prison cells in protest of Israeli torture and threats against them. The statement added that the Palestinian detainees were prepared to face any punitive measures.

On September 10, Mahmoud al-Ardah and Yaqoub Qadri were seized by Israeli occupation forces, and on the following day two more were recaptured: Zakaria Zubeidi and Mohammed Arda.

Palestinians reacted with riots and hunger strikes in Israeli prisons, as well as protests and mobilization in the streets of Gaza and West Bank. Protests were also held in cities around the world, including New York.

The recaptured prisoners were not allowed to see their lawyers until Wednesday.

You might be interested in: We Are Facing Two Viruses: Palestine’s Fight Against the Pandemic and Israeli Occupation

The lawyer of Zakara Zubeidi, Avigdo Feldman told the Associated Press that Zakaria was “beaten very badly” and taken to the hospital with a fractured jaw and ribs.

Khaled Mahajneh, the lawyer for Mohammad al-Ardah, said in an interview that he “has undergone, and is still undergoing, a very difficult journey of torture,” including the lack of medical care and food. In this interview, Ruslan Mahajeh explained that Mahmoud al-Ardah had been interrogated several times since his arrest, in an exhausting, seven- to eight-hour-long procedure.

Yaqoub Qadri’s lawyer reported that he has been in a “two by one square metre room that does not have the basic necessities for life.” He added, “There were many interrogators during his interrogation, and dozens of masked men — it is more about creating mental pressure and showing off muscles with the aim of stressing the prisoners out and shocking them.” Regarding Yaqoub’s days out of prison, he said, “I’ve seen children in the street, and kissed one of them. That was one of the most precious things in my life.”

According to ADDAMEER, a Palestinian NGO that supports political prisoners, there are about 4,650 political prisoners held in Israeli facilities, of whom 520 are administrative prisoners (held without a trial), 200 children, and 40 women. Since 2000, more than 12,000 Palestinian children have been imprisoned, many of whom are held in the same prisons as adults.

More than a thousand prisoners just put on hold their call for a hunger strike on Friday to demand an end to the violation of their rights.

Hunger strikes have been increasing as the conditions worsen. There are six Palestinian prisoners now on hunger strike:

• Kayed Fasfous: 65 days
• Meqdad Qawasmeh: 59 days
• Alaa Al-Araj: 40 days
• Hisham Abu Hawwash: 32 days
• Rayeq Bsharat: 27 days
• Shadi Abu Aker: 24 days

While the rearrest of four of the six prisoners caused rage and frustration among Palestinians, the fact that they found their way to freedom, even if it was only for a few days, has sparked joy and improved morale among many Palestinians. Yet the rejection to the rearrests and Israeli offensive showed the widespread solidarity we have seen growing over the past few weeks across Palestine. Tellingly, Israeli guards at the court hold the prisoners’ hands even when they are sitting handcuffed and surrounded by guards. They don’t want the prisoners raising their fists.

The ongoing threat of a massive hunger strike among prisoners should be accompanied by international solidarity. The protests on the streets are being led by new generations that are breaking with the traditional leaders. There should be a new call for a general strike against the Israeli occupation and for the freedom of all Palestinian political prisoners.

The May 18 strike, organized and driven primarily by rank-and-file workers and activists, followed a long history of struggle by workers and activists in Palestine to defeat their occupiers and their supporters in the U.S. and Europe — such as the six-month-long strike against British attempts to oust Palestinians from their lands in 1936 and the weekly national days of action during the First Intifada in the 1980s. Meanwhile, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestine Authority president, follows his conciliatory agenda of making agreements with Israel and other regional leaders that support the two-state solution. In contrast, actions like the general strike on May 18 showed the potential of a united working class in Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem, and other cities inside Israel to resist Israel’s onslaught and to carry the fight forward for a free Palestine.

The post Freedom for All Palestinian Political Prisoners appeared first on Left Voice.

Workers, students, union and peasant organizations, feminist groups, human rights activists, and even judges took to the streets on Wednesday in El Salvador. It was the country’s largest mobilization in decades.

Among the issues being protested were the Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele’s decision to double the number of military troops under the pretext of fighting violence and crime. In reality, it’s about gaining support and surrounding himself with the armed forces. 

In addition, Bukele’s Bitcoin law has been widely rejected by people all over the country. The law makes Bitcoin legal tender across the country. While the President claims this measure will make it easier for people in El Salvador to send money abroad, many believe it will bring inflation and even greater instability. At the protests, people set fire to Bitcoin machines amidst the mass marches. 

The government has proposed more than 200 changes to the constitution, leading to this outcry against authoritarianism. One of the changes being protested is a constitutional reform that would concentrate more power in the hands of the president. Specifically, it allows the president to seek reelection despite a constitutional limit on running consecutively. Another “judicial reform” would promote judges aligned with the ruling party and dismiss all dissidents.

Further, Bukele fired a judge in charge of investigating the genocide of El Mozote in the 1980s. As ProPublica highlighted, “Judge Jorge Guzmán has spent the last six years painstakingly gathering evidence from the survivors of one of the worst massacres in the modern history of Latin America: the slaughter of a thousand old men, women and children by the Salvadoran army during the country’s civil war.” Just two weeks ago, the legislature, controlled by Bukele, fired every judge in the country older than 60. Guzmán is 61.

This one among many authoritarian measures taken by Bukele, who has consistently fired judges who don’t agree with him. 

The demonstrators’ banners carried messages like “No to presidential reelection, no to Bitcoin, no to militarization, no to dictatorship!” and “Without judicial independence there are no guarantees for the defense of human rights.”

Bukele counts on the military’s support, thus demonstrating the bonapartization of the political regime that he is increasingly designing in his own likeness. For this reason, most of the demonstrators maintained that, in the face of an authoritarian regime such as the Salvadoran one, the only option for the population is to go out and protest to defend their rights and their freedoms.

This new day of mobilization highlights the authoritarian character and anti-democratic measures that Bukele represents, but also the conditions that plague the vast majority of the population, such as low wages, the health system’s failure to cope with the pandemic, as well as the increase in femicides, disappearances of young people, and repressive measures in collusion with gangs.

September 15 showed that there is a mass movement willing to confront Bukele’s government. But the opposition parties, which also took to the streets, are not the solution. They have been part of corrupt political regimes aligned with capital that are far from the interests of the people. It is fundamental that the struggles undertaken by the workers, peasants, and the great masses against Bukele follow a course independent of the bosses’ parties as a whole.

Originally published in Spanish on September 15 in La Izquierda Diario

Translated by Tatiana Cozzarelli

The post El Salvador: Bitcoin Machines Burned and Thousands Take the Streets Against Authoritarian Government appeared first on Left Voice.

The Australian government announced yesterday that it had signed an agreement with the United States and the United Kingdom for the production of nuclear-powered submarines. The move annuls a previous $90 billion agreement that Australia made with France for the procurement of diesel and electric submarines. The latter contract, signed with French defense contractor Naval Group in 2016, had been hailed as the “contract of the century.” Paris reacted strongly, calling the move “deplorable,” with French foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian going as far as to draw comparisons between the Biden administration’s sudden decision and Donald Trump’s rash, unilateral decision-making style. Beijing, for its part, condemned the countries’ “cold war and zero-sum mentality.”

Maritime Siege against China

Beyond disagreement between France and Australia over production sites, the decision shows the Biden administration’s preference for providing Canberra with non-conventional submarines — which France could not guarantee — capable of making the Oceanic country a pillar of the United States’ Chinese containment policy. The submarines can remain submerged for a long time, avoiding detection, and have the potential to fire long-range cruise missiles such as the Tomahawk in addition to their maritime armament of torpedoes and marine missiles. Defense specialist Jean-Dominique Merchet notes that this is the first time that the U.S. has agreed to sell such game-changing naval technology, and that previously only the U.K., in 1958, had benefited from the transfer of this U.S. technology. 

The submarine production process will begin in 2040, despite the fact that Australia does not have the necessary facilities to produce the specific fuel the submarines require, and that it would to some extent violate the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Wednesday’s deal increases the already high pressure on China considerably in any conflict scenario along the main maritime choke points in South and Southeast Asia (for example, in the Strait of Malacca, the Taiwan Strait, or the South and East China Seas).

At the same time, the timing of this announcement — two weeks after the catastrophic military withdrawal from Afghanistan — allows Washington to confirm its geopolitical priority: maintaining rivalry with Beijing and reassuring its allies in this important region. As part of this, on September 24, Biden will receive the three co-leaders of the so-called Quad, the security alliance to contain Chinese influence: the prime ministers of Australia, India, and Japan in person at the White House for the first time.

Heavy Blow to France’s Image and Unbridled Imperialism 

The agreement is a heavy blow to French diplomacy, not so much because of the economic damage — which is not negligible — but because of the loss of credibility. For years, France has been positioning itself as a permanent power in the Indo-Pacific, linked to the colonial possessions of its overseas territories. The country has sought to present itself as a third option outside of the U.S. and China in the region’s seas, refusing to be confined by the United States’ anti-Chinese naval containment.

Irritated at the loss of a lucrative contract, the French government has brought out its anti-Americanism as a mask. For supporters of Emmanuel Macron, the submarine deal demonstrates the French president’s strategic acumen in invoking Europe’s (impossible) strategic autonomy. But the reality is that beyond its imperial pretensions (which are far larger than its real strength), France needs the Pentagon — whether at the level of intelligence, military presence, or weapons — in the wars it’s waging, whether in the Sahel or North Africa. This is not to even mention the other European powers whose militaries pale in comparison to Paris.

The reality is that despite the Biden administration’s kind words towards European allies, these truly are Trump-like unilateral decisions. The United States has confirmed, once again, that its priority is rivalry with China at all levels — economic, technological, and military. Washington has no problem privileging its most important allies in this confrontation over traditional European allies, who are more moderate vis-à-vis Beijing and seeking points of “mutual understanding.” The new U.S. administration recently showed its first signs of this treatment when Switzerland decided to purchase F-35s from the U.S. over France’s Rafale aircrafts just after Biden’s visit to the Swiss Confederation at the end of June.

Notably, neither the French government nor the EU foreign affairs official were informed of the new agreement prior to its announcement. And even more shamefully, the agreement came one day before the EU launched its own new Indo-Pacific strategy to comfort the United States, a sign that the EU still has a long way to go before it acquires true strategic autonomy.

Originally published in Spanish on September 16 in La Izquierda Diario

Translated by Otto Fors

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A huge humanitarian crisis has unfolded at the border crossing from Ciudad Acuña, Mexico, into Del Rio, Texas. As of early last evening, there were about 10,500 migrants in a makeshift camp under the Del Rio International Bridge — an increase of 3,300 just over the course of the day. They are trying to survive in the shade under dangerous, squalid conditions, with hardly any food or water.

The New York Times describes “dense crowds sleeping on dirt or milling about in triple-digit heat amid conditions of deteriorating sanitation.” The Del Rio mayor called it a shantytown. Reuters describes “hundreds of migrants wading through the Rio Grande river back into Mexico to stock up on essentials they say they are not receiving on the American side.”

These migrants are overwhelmingly from Haiti, but also include some Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, and others, all fleeing unbearable conditions in their home countries. The Haitians in particular have most recently had to endure natural disasters and the assassination of the country’s president, which has precipitated a new round of brutal violene in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

There is only one response: Let them all in! 

Restrictive immigration is a tool of capitalism. Each and every day, the murderous results of closed borders reveal that nothing is more important to a system based on exploitation than increasing the rate of that exploitation. That’s why capitalist states limit the free movement of the great majority of people — the working class — between countries. A demand to let all migrants in is a start to undoing divisions deliberately sown by our class enemy to serve the bosses.

Likewise, there is only one direction to point the finger of blame for the current conditions of these migrants: U.S. imperialism, today embodied in the Biden administration. Since Biden’s inauguration, the overcrowded concentration camps for migrants remain open and child detention continues. All of this — and the situation in Del Rio — could be resolved if Biden and the Democrats wanted it to be. The horror is on them.

As a candidate for president, Joe Biden promised to “secure our values as a nation of immigrants.” Reviewing a position paper released by the Biden–Harris campaign in the context of today’s crisis at the Del Rio port of entry reveals the emptiness of that promise. “It is a moral failing and a national shame when a father and his baby daughter drown seeking our shores,” the document begins. It proceeds to spell out a long list of things Biden would do in his first 100 days. But while the Biden administration has rolled back some of the most egregious programs of the Trump administration, the document was mostly lies. Biden and the Democratic majority in Congress has failed to take decisive steps to avoid these crises — just as the Democratic Party refused to do so when it last held both the executive and legislative branches of government during the Obama presidency.

U.S. imperialism’s responsibility goes back generations. Haitians have no recourse but to leave their own country because it has been beaten down into squalor over the centuries, under successive imperialisms, as punishment for a successful revolt by self-liberated enslaved people that began in 1791 and ended in 1804. That revolution established the first Black republic in the world. In the 20th century, U.S. imperialism became Haiti’s primary subjugator and repressor through direct intervention, propping up brutal dictatorships, and rapacious theft of the country’s natural resources.

The Del Rio situation promises only to worsen. “Both migrants and Mexican officials said many more people are expected in coming days,” writes Reuters, reporting that some told reporters “they had chosen to cross here because the river is shallow and they felt there was comparatively less cartel activity.”

On the Mexican side of the border, migrants are also terribly repressed by the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), Mexico’s president.

For those already in Del Rio, it is a daily existence spent largely jostling for shade under the bridge. Most have not been fed, despite the U.S. Border Patrol claiming in a statement that it has increased staffing to facilitate “safe, humane, and orderly” processing of the migrants and that it is providing “drinking water, towels, and portable toilets.” Social media reports show little evidence of these steps, which are far from enough.

Migrants at the U.S border are fleeing poverty and violence in their home countries, and we must show our active solidarity. It’s time for a new movement in defense of their rights, just like the one that erupted immediately after Trump’s “Muslim ban” went into effect — when people streamed to airports across the country to protest. Such a movement must be one we organize as a class, with no reliance on the Democratic Party politicians who consistently betray the very migrant rights for which they claim to stand.

A united front of working-class organizations, human rights organizations, unions, and the Left can be built around a straightforward demand: For Open Borders! Let Them All In!

The post 10,000 Migrants Are Stuck in Squalor at the Border. Let Them All In! appeared first on Left Voice.

Originally published in Exberliner.

In the last 18 months, the world has learned to appreciate healthcare workers – everyone, that is, except hospital administrators and politicians. Doctors, nurses and all the other workers who keep clinics running have gotten lots of applause. Some have even received one-time bonuses of a few hundred euros. But even before the emergence of Covid-19, working conditions were catastrophic, and they’ve only gotten worse. Applause doesn’t pay the rent.

The problem isn’t pay, even though pay is terrible. The main problem is the lack of staffing. Imagine doing an eight-hour night shift all by yourself – that means being responsible for 30 patients at a time. What if two of them have a crisis at the same time? This is normal for nurses at Berlin’s biggest hospital. Is it any wonder that in Germany, trained nurses are abandoning their profession in droves? 

Endless appeals to politicians have gone nowhere. That is why healthcare workers are striking. Since last Thursday, nurses and service workers at Berlin’s biggest employers – the Charité and Vivantes hospitals — have been on strike together. They have two main demands: 

The first is Entlastung, which could be translated as “relief,” while in the United States healthcare workers call for “safe staffing ratios.” What this means is that management agrees on a minimum number of workers for each station. If not enough workers are available, the station needs to be closed. This is about basic safety.

The second demand is TVöD für alle, which means “equal pay for equal work.” Nurses at Charité and Vivantes are paid according to a union contract – the Tarifverträg für den Öffentlichen Dienst – that covers two million public-sector workers. That contract applies to everyone in the hospitals.

Except: Berlin’s public hospitals were broken up as part of neoliberal reforms 15 years ago. Now, wholly-owned subsidiaries are responsible for cleaning, cafeterias, laboratories, maintenance, laundry, etc. Workers of these companies – which are owned by the hospitals and ultimately by the Berlin government – are outside the union contract. A maintenance worker at such a subsidiary might make €800 per month less than a maintenance worker employed directly by the hospital – even though they work side by side.

If you look at the election posters all over Berlin, you might wonder why there is a strike at all. The SPD, the Greens, and Die Linke are all calling for more money for healthcare workers. But who has been in government in Berlin for the last 20 years (with minor variations)? These three parties. It was SPD and Die Linke who were responsible for outsourcing and union busting in the 2000s. Five years ago, the “red-red-green” coalition promised they would finally reverse this decision. But nothing has happened.

This is not just a workers’ movement – it’s a women’s movement

In the election campaigns, these parties are again promising something they have consistently refused to deliver. They tell us it is “complicated.” Cutting wages at hospitals was easy – but they claim that raising them again will take decades.

Hence the strikes. There have been many strikes at Berlin’s hospitals over the last decade, but this is the first time that a strike has been unlimited (i.e. without a fixed end date) and the first time since 2011 that workers from the “mother corporation” and the “daughter companies” (as they are called in German) have been striking together. Strikes at a hospital are incredibly difficult – it is amazing they have been going on for eight days now.

This is not just a workers’ movement – it’s a women’s movement. The majority of healthcare workers are women, and, under patriarchy, “women’s work” is always underpaid. When the SPD, the Greens, or Die Linke claim to be feminists, they can be judged based on how they treat nurses.

2,500 workers and their supporters came to a demonstration on Tuesday afternoon. Among loud techno music and lots of confetti, one worker after another emphasised: “It can’t go on like this!” The conditions at hospitals make it impossible for them to do their jobs. That’s why they are getting support from both doctors and patients. Everyone suffers when hospitals are understaffed – everyone, that is, except for administrators who get bonuses for cutting costs. 

“Capitalism, get out of the clinic!” – that slogan was chanted again and again. Nurses don’t have time to treat patients because they are busy with “medical coding” and paperwork to keep the money flowing. Even public hospitals are run with neoliberal mechanisms.   

This is not just about healthcare, either. At the same time the hospitals were being semi-privatised in the 2000s, the German and Berlin governments were also handing housing companies and the railway system over to the market. Even now, the Green Party is attempting to privatise the S-Bahn.

Right now, we are seeing social struggles against the rule of investors. There are strikes by train drivers. There is the campaign to expropriate big landlords. People are demanding that healthcare, transport and housing return to public control. These are all basic human needs, and they shouldn’t be subject to demands to maximise profits. That is why all of these struggles deserve support: our lives are more important than their profits!

The post Berlin: Healthcare Workers Strike Over Unsafe Staffing Levels appeared first on Left Voice.

On Monday, September 13, celebrities, politicians, and the wealthy and well connected attended the Met Gala in New York City. Known as “the jewel in New York City’s social crown,” it is as much a show of extravagance and wealth as it is a show of fashion. Designers and sponsors pay $35,000 for a ticket and up to $300,000 for a table. New York City politicians get in for free.

By now, everyone knows about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s publicity stunt at the Gala. The Bronx congressperson and DSA member showed up wearing a $10,000 dress that read “Tax the Rich” and then proceeded to socialize with the ultra wealthy. 

While AOC was hobnobbing with some of New York’s most elite, outside the Met Gala, Black Lives Matter activists were protesting outside the heavily policed perimeter of the event, speaking out against police violence, evictions, and the absurd show of wealth that the Gala represents. Several of those protesters were brutally arrested and spent multiple nights in jail while the wealthy celebrities inside drank champagne. While Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was mingling with the ultra-wealthy, performing her “wokeness”, Black people, activists, and protesters were being brutalized by the police right outside.

AOC’s absurd performance has drawn much richly deserved criticism from the Left, but there’s been plenty of pushback to this as well, and many have accused leftists who point out her hypocrisy of applying unreasonable “purity tests.” Bizarrely, AOC tried to paint this back-and-forth in the language of women’s rights, saying that her critics want to control her body. But that’s not what this is. The Met Gala is a sign — a very blatant one — of which side AOC is on.

The Met Gala Is Not Your Friend

The Met Gala is technically a fundraiser for the Costume Institute wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But it’s not some lowly fundraiser for a struggling cultural institution. The Met currently sits atop a $3 billion endowment. The Gala is nothing but a display of wealth and extravagance for the ultra wealthy and influential elites who attend. It reminds me of a scene in the Hunger Games, where the foppishly overdressed residents of the Capitol bask in their wealth and privilege, flaunting and celebrating it, while the very poor fight and die for their entertainment. The New York Times explains that guests “typically include a quorum of Kardashians, Hollywood A-listers and supermodels. The star-studded event is often referred to as the Oscars of fashion.” Kim Kardashian is worth 1.2 billion. AOC sat at the table of Anna Wintour, Vogue’s editor in chief, immortalized in The Devil Wears Prada, who approves all the outfits before the event, and who has an estimated worth of 35 million dollars. 

Like museums all over the world, the 150 year old Met is built upon many centuries’ pillage of art and culture from semi-colonial countries. During the BLM uprisings, leaders of the Met came out publicly against taking down racist monuments, only to have to backtrack later under immense public pressure. They happily collaborated with the murderous pharmaceutical Sackler family for years, leaving the family’s name on a wing well after their complicity in the opioid epidemic was public knowledge until, again, an intense public pressure campaign forced them to cut ties. The Met is run on the low-wage labor of workers — many of whom were laid off during the pandemic —  while the director of the Met has a yearly salary of $737,318. 

The Met hides these unsavory facts behind a cynical veneer of civic-mindedness. The Met claims to be “the people’s museum,” and although It is famously free to city residents, this winds up excluding hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who cannot prove their residency. Similarly, the Gala’s pretensions to progressivism as a fundraiser does the same ideological work as any charity, which is to paper over the history of inequality and violence that’s at the historical core of institutions like the Met. The city’s working class has the right to museums and art, but we want museums that are run by and for working class and oppressed communities, with respect and acknowledgement and a struggle against colonialist legacies and imperialist realities.

The Met ain’t it. 

Bring All the Classes Into the Conversation? 

As AOC walked into this year’s Met Gala, she said she wanted to bring all classes together to support increasing taxes on the wealthy. “When we talk about having a fair tax code, it’s a conversation happening between working and middle class people, and I think it’s time we bring all classes into the conversation of having a fairer country.”

The hypocrisy, of course, is staggering. How are you bringing all the classes into the conversation by attending an event for the mega wealthy, ignoring the protests going on right outside? The classes are being brought together at the Met Gala the same way they always are: with underpaid workers serving the ultra wealthy, while those who raise their voice in protest are carried away in cuffs. 

As socialists, our goal isn’t to “bring all the classes into the conversation.” We know that capitalists are nothing but vampires, living off the labor of the working class. As Marx explains, “[this] vampire will not lose its hold on him [the worker] so long as there is a muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited.” There is no way to “bring all classes into the conversation” in a way that is egalitarian, or where working class people have equal say. “Bringing everyone to the table” is just a nice way of papering over the real class antagonisms that exist in our society and undermining class struggle. It’s the most liberal notion of representation, willfully blind to the actually existing relations of power. 

We need to be clear and AOC needs to hear it: We don’t want capitalists “in the conversation” or “at the table” with us. We want to take back the wealth they have stolen from us and use it in the interests of the working class and oppressed majorities. 

Taxing the Rich

Do I want to tax the rich? Hell yes. After all, the rich often pay less taxes than most of the working class. The problem is that the version of “tax the rich” being proposed by AOC is actually a tepid plan endorsed by Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden. Don’t take my word for it. Look at these tweets: 

Turns out that AOC’s “tax the rich” is nothing more than returning to Barack Obama’s tax levels — hardly radical, much less socialist, or even democratic-socialist. In fact, the proposal that House Democrats put forward is to the right of Joe Biden’s proposal. It refuses to close a loophole allowing the rich to pass large estates down to their heirs with nearly no taxation.

In fact, even the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post states clearly: “Let’s stop pretending Biden’s proposed tax increases on the rich are radical.” As the article explains, “In 1980, the top marginal income tax rate was 70 percent, about twice what it is now,” and the Democrats, with AOC now leading the charge, are just proposing to go back to 2017 levels.

So yes, let’s tax the rich, but we must demand and fight for more than Joe Biden’s minimal plan. 

Some might claim that AOC’s dress was a success because it got the whole country talking about taxing the rich. But in policy, it’s nothing more than a campaign stunt for the Biden administration and for Joe Biden’s policies. The fact that most public face of so-called “socialism” in the U.S. is doing publicity for this extremely tepid policy and dominating the news cycle, sucks all the oxygen from any discussion of tax reforms which would be meaningful for working people. This is now the limits of our political horizon, because the “radical” AOC wore it on a dress. 

And further, the question of what we spend those taxes on matters. I don’t want taxes on the wealthy  to fund the US imperialist military machine. And I don’t want it to be syphoned off to“green capital,” as a faux climate policy. We need to tax the rich for free healthcare, for free universities, for a free and expanded public transit system. We need to tax the rich for all the interests of the working class. 

AOC’s $10,000 dress and schmoozing with the rich and famous certainly won’t win us substantive taxation of the wealthy, and it does nothing to ensure that not a penny is used for the military. Rather than scaring folks like Jeff Bezos, seeing AOC at this kind of party must be a relief– she’s becoming more and more integrated into the club.

It’s true that AOC’s dress brought publicity to the idea of taxing the rich. But the reason that the rich are taxed at absurdly low rates isn’t lack of awareness. It’s because Republicans and AOC’s own party, the Democrats, protect and defend the interests of the wealthy.

You know what else would get people talking about taxing the rich? Organizing protests in cities across the country for more than Joe Biden’s tepid plan. That’s an approach which would have built class power, in addition to bringing attention to the demand to tax the rich. 

Whose Side Are You On? 

While AOC posed for the cameras, people were protesting outside. A small crowd spoke out against the murder of Mike Rosado, argued for the right to free housing, and highlighted that the Met Gala does nothing for the poor, working class and oppressed of New York City. Ella, a young activist said, “35,000 for a fucking ticket to show off your fucking robes while our people are still dying, our people are still being murdered.” 

These protesters, Ella included, were dragged away in handcuffs.  AOC hasn’t said anything about it since. She didn’t say anything about it for the multiple nights that protesters were held in jail.

This symbolizes everything AOC is about: transgressive rhetoric inside a literal and figurative party for the rich. It’s a party of empty gestures, adopting the language of radicalism to put down protests and assure capitalists that, as Joe Biden said “nothing fundamentally changes.” It’s the party of kente cloth-wearing Nancy Pelosi, who quickly increased police budgets and oversaw the repression of the very movement she sought to cash in on politically. It’s the party of children’s “overflow facilities” with “Bienvenidos” written in colorful paint, which we are assured are much better than Donald Trump’s “kids in cages.” But it’s all the same. That’s AOC’s party. 

And in the end, AOC is inside making headlines, while activists are being arrested outside. She’s ultimately doing nothing more than repping the party and program of Joe Biden. And while she talks the talk, she isn’t a real force for radical action in the streets. She isn’t forcing Medicare for All to be discussed in Congress, much less organizing mass protests for it. After all, Our Revolution, the progressive PAC that backed AOC, is now rebranding as “pragmatic progressives” — the folks who are just too “pragmatic” to get their hands dirty with protests, or with pesky demands like Medicare for All or cancelling student debt. 

The Met Gala is just one more example of exactly whose side AOC is on. And it’s not the first time she’s shown us. From supporting and then posing in Rolling Stone with Nancy Pelosi to her votes for the ICE budget and increased military budgets, she has made it clear.

And, unfortunately, the small protest outside the Met Gala was a sign of the times; with Biden in the White House, people are placated and demobilized. AOC is playing a role, not in getting people mobilized and riled up, but in keeping people on the sidelines. And the DSA seems to be following her lead. Instead of building a movement that fights with the slogan of making the rich pay for the crises they create, they fall meekly in line behind the Democratic party regime, again, cheerleading and arguing that “good Democrats” can be a way to bring about change.

But with the looming climate catastrophe, imperialist wars, and even the possible repeal of Roe v. Wade, we need to know which side we are on, and who will be on the other side opposing us. We will need to mobilize our side to fight in the streets, trusting the strength of mass mobilizations, like Black Lives Matter, and of the working class, like the ILWU port workers who shut down shipping across the West Coast. Time and again, AOC has shown that she is inside the party of the wealthy and powerful, not an outsider who will oppose it from within, and as such, she has made it clear that she is not on our side. 

The post Which Side Are You On? AOC and the Met Gala appeared first on Left Voice.

Since 2017, the province of Cabo Delgado, in the extreme north of Mozambique, has seen an Islamist insurgency by a group claiming to be ISIS. The security situation has degraded to such a degree that TotalEnergies SE (Total), the French multinational oil and gas company, had to “suspend” its work in the region last March, following  the attack on Palma, a city several kilometers from the Total’s base. It’s important to note that, since August 2020, the Islamists of Al-Shabab (not to be confused with the organization of the same name in Somalia) have taken control of the port city of Mocímboa da Praia, which was retaken by Mozambican and Rwandan forces.

The situation in Cabo Delgado has begun to attract quite a bit of regional and international attention. The province has been the center of multiple major investment projects worth tens of billions of euros since large gas deposits were discovered off the coast of the Cabo Delgado in 2009. Total invested around 20 billion euros, which became the biggest private investment in Africa’s history. ExxonMobil, the U.S. multinational company, has yet to decide whether it will commit to a 30 million-dollar investment. ENI, the Italian multinational, is moving forward with a $7 million offshore liquefaction project. The ENI project is the only one that seems to have evaded the threat posed by the Islamist group. Other multinational companies from India, Japan, South Korea, China, Thailand, and Portugal are also involved in this exploitation of Mozambique’s natural resources. Some analysts estimate the total investments in the Mozambican oil fields add up to between $50 and $100 million. In addition to its gas deposits, Cabo Delgado has also captured the attention of multinational mining companies because of its mineral wealth — in particular, the ruby mines.

To better understand the importance of these figures for Mozambique, keep in mind that the country’s GDP this year is estimated at only $14 billion, according to the IMF; the annual revenue per capita of this nation of 32.8 million is only $425. Mozambique is, in effect, the eighth-poorest country on the planet, and Cabo Delgado is the poorest province in the country. According to the MASC Foundation, the poverty rate in September 2020 was 44.8 percent in this majority-Muslim province; the official unemployment rate was 16.2 percent; illiteracy was 53 percent, the highest in the country; and the average lifespan was only 48 years. As for public services, the system of drinking water reaches only 44.5 percent of the province, and only 16 percent has access to electricity, in addition to very poor or nonexistent infrastructure.

In other words, these rich mineral and gas resources are found in the middle of an ocean of misery and underdevelopment. It’s in this context that the Islamist revolt arose in 2017. And it’s not shocking that a large part of these Islamist combatants are composed of unemployed youth and people who have been expelled from their homelands or forced to abandon their farming, subsistence mining, or fishing so that multinationals such as Total or MRM (Montepuez Ruby Mining) can move in. In this context, the “risky bet” of multinationals has been to exploit the natural wealth of a region plunged into poverty, all while trying to spare themselves from the conflicts that such a situation inevitably create. That bet seems to have failed, for the moment.

On top of Total’s suspended activities, the conflict has killed at least 3,000 and displaced 800,000 (information is highly controlled by the government, so these figures could be even higher). The locals are thus cornered between the violence and crimes of Islamists, on one hand, and the brutality and crimes of the Mozambican army and mercenaries the government has hired to fight the Islamist insurgency (unsuccessfully), on the other hand.

Militarizing Cabo Delgado

For many months, Total CEO Patrick Pouyanné had tried to convince Mozambican president Felipe Nysui and European Union (EU) leaders to adopt a more aggressive posture against the Islamic insurgency in Cabo Delgado. Before that, the Mozambican government had been reluctant to call for foreign military intervention and preferred hiring mercenaries. But the attack on Palma last March accelerated things. Following the attack, Total decided to suspend its activities in the country. Mozambique, afraid of losing its investors, began to intensify its efforts to recruit the armies of its allies ready to intervene in Cabo Delgado. 

This does not mean, though, that the Mozambican government has dropped all of its resistance to foreign military interventions in the country. For historical and political reasons, President Nyusi and his party FRELIMO (Front for the Liberation of Mozambique) are wary of the presence of South African troops — under the guise of national sovereignty. South Africa is the number-one power in the region and within the Southern African Development Community (SADC). This is why Mozambique, until just recently, had rejected proposals from the regional organization to deploy a standby force to help fight terrorism.

While agreeing to the deployment of troops from various SADC countries, President Nyusi increased the number of meetings to reach bilateral agreements, both with leaders of SADC countries and countries that are not part of the bloc, notably Rwanda. As the Portuguese newspaper Publico wrote at the end of July:

The president of Mozambique was in Harare in June, according to the president of Zimbabwe Independent, with the goal of ensuring that Zimbabwe, in addition to participating in the contingent of 2,900 soldiers that SADC is sending to Mozambique, is also sending a force under a bilateral agreement. On Friday, Angola will send 20 military advisers, Botswana has already sent 296 soldiers, and the South African parliament approved sending 1,495 South African soldiers (who began to arrive on Wednesday.

(Botswana Defense Force picture)

However, one week before SADC forces were  deployed, a thousand Rwandan soldiers and police officers entered Cabo Delgado and immediately sprung into action, affirming the Mozambican government’s distrust of its neighboring countries. This rapid deployment shocked not only SADC member countries but also civil society and politicians in Mozambique, who denounced the fact that parliament was not informed of their arrival.

To some analysts, the use of Rwandan forces is an attempt by Nyusi to maintain control of the military actions by foreign troops in the country. The Rwandan intervention would allow Nyusi to act as a counterweight to SADC and South Africa. But others point as well to the risk of conflict between different intervening forces, and possible misunderstandings due to a lack of common command. Mozambican analyst Manuel de Araújo explains, 

Rwanda will want to show results to SADC. There will be competition on the ground, and it might not go as expected. What’s expected is a force that has a common, joint command, a disciplined force that works in harmony, able to exchange tactical and strategic operational information so that, if necessary, they can count on support in terms of information, resources, and troops. In the opposite scenario, I see a powder keg where we will have a divided Cabo Delgado, a “Berlin Conference” scenario, where each district will be under the command of a different force or country.

To make the situation even more complicated, the imperialist EU and the United States already have forces in the country for various missions. Portugal, Mozambique’s former colonial power, sent 60 troops last April to train Mozambican forces. In May, another agreement was signed with Maputo to send an additional 60 military personnel. The United States also sent Green Berets to Mozambique to train its armed forces for a renewed mission last August. The EU decided in mid-July to send a training force of between 200 and 300 soldiers. In this European mission, as well, Portugal will take the lead. France says that it’s ready to use its navy to secure the Canal of Mozambique (it already has its navy there as part of long standing military agreements with Mozambique). 

At the moment, the exact number of foreign soldiers in Mozambique and in Cabo Delgado is not known, but it is estimated to be between 3,000 and 4,000, on top of Mozambican troops. Even if, theoretically, these missions are short term, it’s difficult to say exactly how long these forces will stay in the country. But this sudden militarization of Mozambique did not fall from the sky. It’s the result of pressure from investors such as Total and  countries such as France and the United States, whose major banks are involved in financing these investments in Cabo Delgado.

As the Cabo Delgado conflict observatory Cabo Ligado writes in its May report,

On 17 May, [President Nyusi] met with President Macron and Total’s chief Jean Pouyanne with a view to convincing both that he can re-establish security in Cabo Delgado. After the Palma debacle, a convincing security plan that persuades Total and the French has become an urgent priority for Maputo, which is understandably keen to get the company’s liquified natural gas project back on track. Total has undertaken to return when  the situation is calm. Reaching agreement on what that will look like and how security will be strengthened is now central. The predictions of a so-called “Iraqification” model (i.e., privileging security of key strategic interests over wider security needs of the population) appear to be unfolding.

Questions About Rwanda’s Intervention 

Among the armies intervening in Cabo Delgado, the Rwandan Defense Force (RDF) has attracted particular attention. Rwanda has experience in interventions in the region, notably in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Central African Republic. However, its participation in the fight against the Islamic insurgency in Mozambique is surprising given that the two countries didn’t seem to have particularly close ties.

There is speculation about France’s role and recent contact the countries have had. As mentioned above, the Mozambican government has an interest in pushing Rwandan forces against the weight of SADC and South Africa. However, Rwanda has its own political and strategic interests in an intervention in Cabo Delgado. In addition to the potential economic opportunities in Cabo Delgado, Rwanda — by partnering with foreign investors — could try to use its intervention in Mozambique to strengthen its economic and political position in the region. We interviewed Jasmin Opperman, an analyst for 14°North who has covered the conflict since the beginning. She believes that

Rwanda derives multiple advantages, and we must examine the position of President Kagamé on national soil. He’s in a relatively isolated position and is constantly searching for alliances to strengthen his position … Look at the medical coverage in Rwanda and media statements. Their victories are directed towards the Rwandans, showing formidable strength and a strong president in the region. They hijacked the ‘war narrative’ and thus positioned themselves as the dominant force. We are also seeing this in its recent deployments in the Central African Republic.

The Economist takes the same position, and adds another element: “Rwanda is also short of friends, a result of hunting down enemies in other countries and backing rebels in its neighbourhood. Helping Mozambique gains Rwanda a new ally. And it pleases America, Britain and France. The presence of Rwandan dissidents in Mozambique may have played a small role in the decision, too.”

This last element, the hunt for opponents of Paul Kagame’s regime in the countries of the region, indeed raises questions. Even if it plays a minor role compared to the other factors, as the Economist says, it should be mentioned that in recent months, the Rwandan government has tried to reach agreements with southern African countries to track down opponents who have taken refuge abroad. Another important element in this regard is the disappearance of the Rwandan journalist and dissident Cassien Ntamuhanga, who was taken by Kigali agents last May in Mozambique, where he was living.

Even if tracking Rwandan opponents was not part of the main reasons for the intervention in Mozambique, fears that Rwandan forces are taking advantage of their access to Mozambican soil to gain intelligence about and repress its opponents do seem justified. This becomes more apparent given that Rwandan general Innocent Kabandana is heading the mission. He is known for tracking Rwandan opponents abroad. As DW Africa writes, Kanandana 

Is responsible for the assassination of Catholic bishops in Gakurazo in 1994, and for hunting Rwandan dissidents in the United States and Canada when he was a military attaché for the ambassador of Rwanda in Washington … And Kabandana, as the commander of the Rwandan special forces, would have directed operations in South Kivu, in the DRC, with the mission of eliminating Hutu refugees and repatriation of women and children, creating and fighting in the name of RED Tabara — a resistance movement against the Burundian government — and dismantling resistance groups suspected of being allies of armed Rwandan groups.

But General Kabandana’s involvement is not the only concern that this intervention raises. Indeed, while some praise the quality and professionalism of the Rwandan army, the reality is that it is marred by accusations and suspicions of crimes committed in countries of the region. The Cabo Ligado report affirms, “The 2010 ‘Mapping Report’ of abuses by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights presented evidence of alleged war crimes by Rwandan forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in the First and Second Congo Wars of 1996 and 1998.” 

Groupe Mars, which has close ties to French defense circles, wrote in La Tribune on Rwanda’s intervention in the DRC: 

A simple internet search leads to a series of studies, in French but not by French people, tending to show that the current regimes in Kigali and Kampala gain the greatest economic benefit from the humanitarian catastrophe that the Congo has become. Thus, Rwanda would have become the world’s leading exporter of coltan, an essential mineral in particular for the telecom industry because of its conductive properties. However, it is in the Kivus, in the DRC, that the purest ore is located. It’s extracted in artisanal mines controlled by militias that defy the authority of Kinshasa and export the ore to Rwanda, where it is refined to extract tantalum, which would help bring back one of Rwanda’s main sources of foreign exchange.

Rwanda is projecting itself as a state that provides security to the region, working closely with the UN and regional and international powers. This could, eventually, open the door to investments. It’s through this lens that we should also understand its intervention in Mozambique. However, all the previously mentioned factors evidently raise questions regarding risks, not only for Rwandan political refugees in Mozambique, but also for the security of local populations, which have already been victims of abuse by Mozambican forces and their allies. As the first reports of violence against civilians begin to emerge, the risk of abuse grows as the foreign forces remain in the country. From an economic standpoint, this also raises questions as to what the Mozambican government could promise Rwanda in terms of accessing the country’s natural resources. Remember, Cabo Delgado is also  a mineral-rich region.

 Are France and Total Financing Rwanda’s intervention?

“Who’s paying the bill?” It’s a question that many are asking, yet politicians from the intervening countries have only vague answers. This raises many more questions when we know that the majority of the countries involved are themselves in economically delicate situations. Given the importance of these regional investments, notably those by Total, all eyes are now on France. Speculation on the possibility of French financing is beginning to grow. And the claims are not without merit.

Against the backdrop of a partial recognition of French responsibility in the Rwandan genocide of Tutsis in 1994, the two states initiated a reconciliation and normalization process. It’s important to add that last May, French president Emmanuel Macron visited Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, before his visit to South Africa (another country that has been very involved in the Mozambican intervention). Also, Rwandan president Paul Kagamé and Nyusi were received in Paris by Macron for the Summit on Financing African Economies. Nyusi also visited Rwanda last April 28 for talks with Kagamé. 

(Macron pictures)

All these factors lead one to believe that France has something to do with the Rwandan (and South African) deployment in Mozambique. As J. Opperman explains,

The renewed friendship is part of an alliance. The fact that Rwanda is responsible for Mocímba da Praia [an important port city recently captured by Islamists] and the security corridor says a lot. Having a well-trained and well-armed military force would clearly help jump-start the development of LNG. Rwanda presents the best opportunity for Mozambique and France, and with it Total … I have no doubt that France will provide financial support.

António Rodrigues, in the Público article quoted earlier, goes the furthest in this direction. Referring to the change in French strategy toward the Sahel, where Macron intends to reduce the number of French soldiers by having them replaced with African troops, he writes,

This same strategy seems to have been already adopted by  Mozambique to protect the interests of the French multinational Total and its natural gas project in Cabo Delgado. The Rwandan contingent, which is already fighting jihadists in the northern province of Mozambique, will be financed by France, which already told Zimbabwe it was prepared to pay for its troops as well if it decides to send forces to Cabo Delgado.

Rodrigues, who does not reveal his sources, says Total will also join France in financing these operations. With respect to the possible involvement of French-backed Zimbabwe, he affirms,

The suggestion came from the French president, who Nyusi visited in Paris in mid-May, and who was ready to finance the operation (in fact, the money will come from Total, which can claim it as start-up costs and get a tax deduction). Macron reportedly proposed to establish the same type of technical and financial assistance agreement with Zimbabwe that he signed with Rwanda.

There are other indications of Total’s participation in supporting the Rwandan forces, such as the fact that the Rwandans have made Total’s plants in Afungi their base.

The fact is that after the difficulties encountered by the French intervention in the Sahel, which seems to be heading straight to a failure comparable to that of the United States in Afghanistan (if not worse), France is attempting to avoid direct involvement in the new African conflict at all costs. This is even more important given the political situation in France, with the population increasingly hostile to Operation Barkhane and the 2022 presidential campaign period already underway. It’s not absurd to think that the French, facing the need to help Total, are moving in the direction of involving regional partners, even if it means discreetly financing their interventions.

However,  it would be a mistake to think only France (and Total) have an interest in financing such an intervention. Remember that the multinational ExxonMobile is considering investing $30 billion for gas extraction in Cabo Delgado. U.S. investment banks are already committed to Total. Portugal is playing a major role in coordinating EU involvement in the region, and Germany has provided 4.2 million euros to protect the border between Mozambique and Tanzania, where Islamist fighters may seek refuge. China and Russia already have interests in the gas of Cabo Delgado, but India is without a doubt one of the countries in the Indo-Pacific zone with the most commercial links with Mozambique: from 1996 to 2021, Mozambique was the leading recipient of Indian investments in the world. Japan and South Korea could also be added to this list.

In short, even if the main stakeholders here are Total and France, multiple regional and global powers have an interest in “pacifying” Cabo Delgado. When it comes to Cabo Delgado, there are many candidates for an intervention or for financing interventions.

South Africa — France’s Other Ally

While France does not have the historical ties to southern Africa it has to Central and particularly West Africa, a consequence of its colonialist past, its recent interest in the region shows that it is searching for new, reliable allies and strengthening existing partnerships. This is how France “naturally” turned to South Africa. France and Total are fully aware that South Africa is a key player in the region and that its participation is essential to countering the Islamist insurgency in Cabo Delgado.

This is how the NGO Centro Para Democracia e Desenvovimento (Center for Democracy and Development) described this situation last July:

France was exploiting the economic and political influence of South Africa in the region to play a strategic role in the SADC military intervention in Mozambique. Pretoria has always advocated a regional solution for Cabo Delgado rather than intervention by international powers. Recognizing this, Paris has joined forces with South Africa to influence the structure of regional support for the fight against terrorism. Before the meeting in Pretoria, Macron and Ramaphosa had met in mid-May in Paris and terrorism in Mozambique was one of the topics discussed.

This rapprochement between France and South Africa is combined with a significant increase in France exporting arms to South Africa. In fact, in the French arms exports report to Parliament published in June 2021, we can see that the value of French military equipment delivered to South Africa in 2020 more than tripled from 2019, from 4.2 million euros to 14.1 million euros. These figures are certainly still far from the 20.2 million euros of sales to Morocco and even further from the 51.3 million euros to Algeria, but in 2020 South Africa was France’s biggest customer in sub-Saharan Africa, far ahead of Uganda (7.6 million), the second largest in the region.

The document has no record of arms sales by France to Mozambique in 2020. South Africa, though, approved half a million rands in arms exports to Mozambique in 2020. Given the level of corruption and opacity of the Mozambican government and business in the region, it is very difficult to know the details of these sales and even to obtain more information about them. The South African military and defense website DefenceWeb quotes Dewa Mavhinga, Human Rights Watch director:

His organization is aware that officially, South African authorities announced last year that they are providing weapons to Mozambique to help end the insurgency in Cabo Delgado province. However, they did not provide further details. Having documented allegations of serious human rights abuses in Cabo Delgado by both the insurgents and Mozambique security forces, including killings, kidnappings, ill treatment of detainees, and arbitrary detentions which are happening with impunity, we urge the SA authorities to ensure that their support will not result in further abuses.

It is very difficult to know at this point whether French arms were delivered to Mozambique through South Africa or other covert channels. However, there seems to be no doubt that the arms Pretoria obtained from France will be largely used for the intervention of the South African military in Cabo Delgado. This is another way for France to push for the militarization of Mozambique and the entire southern African region — always aiming to protect multinational interests.

Military Option Powerless to Address the Cabo Delgado Crisis

The military option in Cabo Delgado has become “common sense” among local and regional decision-makers, investors, and politicians in the imperialist states. There have been some initial military successes, such as the recapture of Mocímboa da Praia by Rwandan forces (which could accelerate the return of Total). The question that continues to be asked, though, is whether the Islamist insurgency can be stopped solely through military means. As we witness the terrible failure of 20 years of imperialist occupation in Afghanistan that has led to the shattering return of the Taliban to power, or France’s disastrous Operation Barkhane operation in the Sahel, we have contemporary examples of the harmful nature of these military interventions, particularly for local populations.

Jasmin Opperman says that a military intervention was necessary in Cabo Delgado, but points to the limits of this option despite short-term successes:

The recapture of Mocímboa da Paria comes at a time when the insurgents have already made the most of their opportunities. Reports indicate that the insurgents began to withdraw even before Rwanda arrived. Development is nothing but a cliché if we do not define it in the context of a forgotten Cabo Delgado, where human dignity must take precedence but where fear is used in a structured way to conquer hearts and minds beyond the economic expectations of employment and infrastructure development. The latter are only facilitators in the fight against the root causes of the insurgency. Neglect them and the insurgent lifeline remains intact. The Mozambican government is faced with Matthew’s principle and a global economy that favors the elite: “To those who have everything, more will be given. From those who have nothing, everything will be taken.” The people of Cabo Delgado have experienced this for far too long.

The poverty and misery that submerges Cabo Delgado, some of the figures of which have been exposed above, are indeed the key to the entire situation. The armies of SADC and Rwanda, and perhaps even those of other states, could overcome the current insurgency, but as long as the structural social, economic, and political causes that provoked it remain, other insurgencies will emerge. The military intervention itself could fuel a revolt among the local population. As noted above, the abuses of the military act as a driving force, pushing some into the arms of the Islamist insurgents. But there are also other factors related to the war that can fuel popular discontent.

To take one example, one of the major points of contention between locals and foreign investors’ projects has been the issue of land. Many fishermen, subsistence miners, and farmers were more or less forcibly removed from their land and fishing waters to make way for the multinationals. In the case of the miners, they were criminalized and forced to stop their work. Some of them, especially youth, even joined the insurgents after these expulsions. But now that the fighting has intensified and the number of displaced people has increased, the question of the refugees’ return and the fate of their land is becoming an increasingly central issue that could result in class struggle in the province. As the Cabo Ligado report states,

As the government continues to avoid making systematic efforts to ensure that displaced persons will be able to return to their homes in the future, there is growing concern that what appears to be temporary resettlement is in fact permanent. Among those displaced, this fuels theories that the conflict exists only to deprive them of the land on which they have long lived, farmed, and fished. For the host communities, it portends a future in which competition for land will be much fiercer, prompting them to act now against the displaced to secure an advantage in that competition.

It is no coincidence that the same report expresses fears that Islamists are taking advantage of this situation and are secretly recruiting among the displaced and in the refugee camps. This has led the Mozambican authorities to cultivate a great mistrust of refugees.

Another issue likely to fuel popular discontent and revolt in the province is a perception by the population that all the efforts are dedicated not to protecting them from the abuses and atrocities of the Islamist insurgents, but rather to protecting the interests of the multinationals. The Portuguese labor sociologist Mariana Carneiro, in an article entitled “Total’s gas is a ‘curse’ for Cabo Delgado,” describes how the population of Palma was completely abandoned in the face of the worsening fighting, while aid and resources went primarily to the employees of the multinationals on site:

All the food went by sea. And even by sea, there were sometimes incidents, attacks on the boats. When this happened, the government struck an agreement with Total and the other companies operating in Palma to guarantee their safety. All the workers from the companies and the banks moved to the hotels. In other words, the food did not reach the people of Palma, but it did reach the hotels. The few ships that managed to dock in Palma would first go to supply the hotels and the camps of the big companies. This population remained hungry.

Even if recently there have been images of Rwandan soldiers trying to help the locals, it’s clear to everyone that the priority is to secure the perimeters and the communication channels of the bases where Total and other foreign companies are investing so that they can come back as soon as possible and resume their activity. “The presence of a Rwandan contingent and the deployment of an SADC force seems to be aimed at protecting the interests of the multinationals involved in the natural gas projects in the Rovuma basin, which could result in an ‘oil enclave’,” says researcher João Feijó.

What all this shows is that a military intervention and the militarization of Cabo Delgado are completely powerless to resolve the fundamental problems that set the stage for the emergence of the Islamic insurgency. But that’s not the real objective. The primary goal of the military interventions, which Total and imperialist powers have begged for, is to ensure the security of investments, not people. In fact, the multinationals have done nothing but create structural socioeconomic problems for the people of Cabo Delgado. It is in this sense that we can compare the risk of this situation to that of Afghanistan. As Opperman said, 

SADC is confronted with budgetary constants and its presence will depend on foreign donors. Rwanda, with the support of France, could be there even longer. However, counting on such a presence would simply mean an Afghanistan II — security that rests on a mentality of a war on terror is not sustainable, and in my humble opinion, the insurgents are well aware of this reality. Getting involved is the easy part. Leaving is more difficult, as a departure means simply that the insurgents will come back to the conflict.

Today, Cabo Delgado is completely militarized — something for which France and Total are directly responsible. The militarization of Cabo Delgado and Mozambique will not solve the problems of illiteracy, unemployment, or the region’s land and natural resources issues. On the contrary, the youth, peasants, fishermen, and workers of Cabo Delgado will face even more violence and abuse, whether from the Islamists or the military. None of the promised development will come to pass for the working class of Cabo Delgado. Imperialist capital and the national bourgeoisie are unable, and have no interest, in solving the structural problems of the living conditions of the local people. To do so runs counter to their own economic interests. Instead, they will only fuel further popular discontent and provide a possible recruiting ground for the Islamists.

When it comes to popular discontent, this is not only about it being channeled through the Islamist insurgents. Even if military missions crush the Islamists, it will not eliminate the sources of revolt. The struggle for land, for dignity, for survival, and against the contempt and cynicism of both the multinationals and the national ruling classes in Cabo Delgado could also take a progressive form, rejecting both the interests of the capitalists and the barbarity of the Islamists. If that transpired, the same forces that today are being sent against the Islamists would be used to suppress a legitimate popular revolt involving the most oppressed and exploited of the province. This is another result of the reactionary character of the pro-imperialist militarization of Cabo Delgado.

For the moment, imperialist powers such as France would rather not get directly involved in the fighting, but instead prefer to train Mozambican forces. However, there is no doubt they are pushing regional armies to act in their place, and likely are financing their operations. As with the current catastrophe being suffered by the Afghan people, the workers’ movement and the working class in the imperialist countries cannot stand idly by. There is no simplistic military response to a complex situation such as the one in Cabo Delgado, as the imperialist militarists claim. The workers’ movement in France should oppose any military intervention in Mozambique undertaken in the name of Total and the interests of the French state. A pro-working class and internationalist orientation would be to support any potential progressive movement in the province and the region, against the multinationals and also against the Islamists, who offer no solutions to the misery of Cabo Delgado. 

Unlike the militaristic imperialists, we are counting on the emergence of a movement of the oppressed and exploited that will sweep away the Islamists of Cabo Delgado and challenge the power of the multinationals — a movement that fights for the masses and the workers to be the ones who decide what to do with the natural resources. That is the only possible way out. Anything else will lead to disaster.

First published in French on August 30 in Révolution Permanente.

Translation by Emma Lee

The post How France and Total are Militarizing Mozambique appeared first on Left Voice.

School is back in session, with fewer remote options and fewer safety precautions than last fall, despite the fact that the delta variant is more contagious and more likely to infect children. In Mississippi, nearly 19,000 children have already caught Covid-19, and a recent CDC simulation found that 91 percent of all children under 12 could become infected with Covid-19 within three months in areas without universal masking and testing. 

In New York City, school has been back in session for only three days — too early to know the rate of in-school spread — but with overcrowded, poorly ventilated classrooms, unmasked lunches in packed cafeterias, and an inadequate testing program, positive cases are expected to jump quickly.

All around the United States, students and education workers are the sacrificial lambs of reopening. One teacher has described it as “the science experiment we are waging on children.” CNN just reported that 1 in every 500 U.S. residents has died of Covid-19, and the country is averaging around 150,000 new cases per day, with the biggest hotspots concentrated in the South. The CDC has issued special guidelines for schools in order to keep them open, claiming that students are not “close contacts” if they are able to maintain at least three feet of distance, even though the guidelines for all other settings is six feet. 

Teachers aren’t buying it, and experts have even criticized the six-feet guideline for not taking into account the airborne nature of the virus. A study from MIT suggests that while indoors, distance from others has very little impact, especially when people are in the same room for long periods of time — such as in schools.

Given these circumstances, we are seeking contributions from students and from education workers of all kinds: teachers of any age group, school administrators, and staff members of any role. What plan does your school have in place, and how is it affecting your work? What do people need to know about the conditions that students and employees are facing? 

We welcome articles, personal testimony, images, video-diaries, and other forms of contributions. Please email us at contact@leftvoice.org or reach out on social media. For examples of past worker testimonies, please visit this page.

The post Call For Submissions: Teaching Under the Delta Variant appeared first on Left Voice.

In Argentina’s primary elections on Sunday, the Workers’ Left Front – Unity (FIT-U), an electoral coalition of four Trotskyist parties, had its best elections yet. The coalition — composed of the Party of Socialist Workers (PTS), Left Voice’s sister organization; the Workers’ Party (PO); Socialist Lift (IS), and the Workers’ Socialist Movement (MST) — is now the third-largest electoral force in the country. PTS member Alejandro Vilca earned 24 percent of the votes in the province of Jujuy, a northern province that’s home to tens of thousands of indigenous people and farm workers. If Vilca’s performance in the November elections is comparable to Sunday’s results, he could win a seat in the National Congress. 

Kolla, Harvesting Worker, and Revolutionary Militant

Workers in the province of Jujuy were represented not only by the ideas that Vilca put forward during the campaign, but by his own life story, which resembles that of many in Jujuy. Like many residents of Jujuy, he is a member of the Kolla indigenous community and was born into a poor, working-class family. Along with his four siblings, he was raised by a single mother who worked as a maid in a private sanatorium in the province’s capital, San Salvador de Jujuy. 

Alejandro Vilca went to high school during the tumultuous early 90s, when state workers were at the forefront of class struggle in Jujuy. After high school, he worked hard to be able to study architecture in the western province of San Juan. There, he participated in the struggle against the educational reforms of the government of Carlos Menem and joined “En Clave Roja,” the PTS’s student group. Vilca was already a militant in the PTS during the mid-1990s when workers who had lost their jobs as a result of privatization and neoliberalism protested the governments with widespread roadblocks. 

A decade later, as a precarious municipal worker, he was part of the Provincial Coordinating Committee of Workers in Black and helped organize thousands of other precarious workers in health care, education, and other state departments. Because of his participation in this struggle, the municipality transferred him and a group of activists to the most difficult and precarious sector of work: garbage collection in the popular Alto Comedero neighborhood, far from the largest concentrations of workers in the department.

Vilca has spent the last few years fighting for the rights of the most exploited workers in the area, such as in the tobacco, sugar, and farming industries. He has also fought for the rights of indigenous peoples and women, and against environmental destruction.

A Campaign from the Bottom Up

Vilca’s personal history and political proposals gave rise to intense militancy on the part of rural tobacco workers and citrus harvesters on farms and in neighborhoods. One of these proposals is a law to ensure that the families of rural workers do not lose their rights once the harvests end. The campaign also received enormous support from bus drivers, street vendors, state workers, teachers, healthcare workers, social movements, and the unemployed. Sectors of students and working-class youth also held meetings in support of the FIT-U. 

Challenges

After Sunday’s elections, Alejandro Vilca reflected on the coalition’s goals and prospects for the future:

Our objective is to use the results of [these primary elections] to face the general elections and to reach more and more workers, women, youth, and indigenous peoples so that they organize themselves together with the left. The historic results leave us with good prospects for November to win a seat for the struggles of the working people. This great election is the result of the support, effort, and commitment of hundreds of workers from the most humble sectors of the whole province.

Vilca first ran for office in 2011 when the FIT-U was formed. He ran for governor and won 1.93 percent of the vote. In 2015, he ran for provincial deputy, earning 7.06 percent of the votes and nearly gaining a seat in the chamber. In 2017, he won 17.74 percent of the votes, helping the coalition win four seats in the provincial legislature and five councilors in the province’s main cities.

Since then, as a deputy in the Jujuy provincial legislature, Vilca has represented workers by proposing laws in their favor and denouncing the abuses of the right-wing provincial government of Gerardo Morales and his agreements with the Peronist block. He continues to take the same salary as a garbage collector and donates the rest of his position’s wages to social struggles. In this year’s primary campaign, he was the candidate who declared the fewest assets.

This is why in Sunday’s elections, the Left came in second in San Salvador de Jujuy, Palpalá, and Caimancito, winning its highest vote tallies in the capital’s working-class and popular neighborhoods. In total, the coalition got over 81,000 votes — 24 percent of all votes — and came in third place.

On the other hand, the right-wing Frente Cambia Jujuy party, helmed by Governor Gerardo Morales, won with 46.4 percent of the vote. That being said, it lost 20,000 votes compared to the provincial elections in June.

Peronism, united around President Fernández and Vice President Fernández de Kirchner’s Frente de Todos party, came in second place with 28.3 percent of the vote. The party did not achieve a definite advantage over the FIT-U, which was only 5 percent behind them and is now fighting for second place in the November general election.

As Alejandro pointed out during Sunday’s press conference, “This result is a message to the big businessmen who think they own the lives of the workers. It shows that the Left has been consolidating to raise a program of independence for workers and aiming at a real solution for our class.”

First published in Spanish on September 15 in La Izquierda Diario.

Translation by Otto Fors

The post Alejandro Vilca, the Socialist Sanitation Worker in Argentina Fighting to Enter Congress appeared first on Left Voice.

A record-setting number of environmentalists and land defenders were killed worldwide in 2020, according to the environmental rights organization Global Witness. Colombia has the highest number of these murders for the second consecutive year.

Colombia had 65 murders of environmentalists, followed by Mexico with 30, the Philippines with 29, Brazil with 20, Honduras with 17, the Democratic Republic of Congo with 15, Guatemala with 13, Nicaragua with 12, Peru with six, and India with four.

All these countries, many in Latin America and all in the Global South, experience the struggles of large multinationals that own the land and hire local thugs to harass activists. Sometimes it’s local large landowners, often descendants of local slave owners that do the harassment and murder. 

Environmental defenders are fighting so much: forest fires, droughts, floods, big business, hydropower, resource exploitation, mining, large-scale agribusiness, and more. For these and other local reasons, activists were murdered to defend the interests of large companies and agribusiness. According to the Global Witness report, “At least 30 percent of recorded attacks were reportedly linked to resource exploitation — across logging, hydroelectric dams and other infrastructure, mining, and large-scale agribusiness. Logging was the industry linked to the most murders with 23 cases — with attacks in Brazil, Nicaragua, Peru and the Philippines.”

And these are just the numbers on record — there have likely been many more attacks that have gone unrecorded, in part due to the attacks on journalists and independent press who try to expose the attacks.

According to Mongabay Latam, which published a journalistic investigation, Latin America is one of the world’s regions with the highest number of murders.

They highlight a high degree of collusion between business and the capitalist state in criminalizing activists who oppose certain extractive projects, especially in mining and agribusiness. Many of these activists and communities experience attempts to silence them through death threats, surveillance, sexual violence, or arrest.

According to Global Witness, at least four environmental defenders have been killed every week since the signing by major powers in 2015 of the Paris Agreement on climate change. It is clear that the agreement didn’t make a difference in the policies of big business, but it did make for flowery government declarations.

In fact, several countries used the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 to increase repressive measures using the health situation as an opportunity to clamp down on activists while corporations moved forward with climate destruction.

Large companies involved in extractive industries have prioritized profits over human rights and nature, making clear the motive behind the killings.

Under the government of Iván Duque, Colombia, in particular, has reached maximum levels of violence, positioning the country as the most dangerous for the defense of nature and territory. In 2020 alone, 65 murders of social leaders occurred, along with the wave of criminalization against indigenous communities that oppose the advance of extractive industries, such as fracking and agribusiness.

The fight against climate change and against climate catastrophe is also a fight against the massive corporations that murder anyone who stands in their way. This means uniting with workers and activists all over the world so that we can fight, together, against climate change, massive corporations, and the capitalist states that protect them.

Originally Published in Spanish on September 13 in La Izquierda Diario

Translated by Tatiana Cozarelli

The post Environmental Activists Are Being Murdered in Record Numbers appeared first on Left Voice.

Originally Published in Red Flag

2021 was a year of disaster for most of humanity, but for pharmaceutical companies it’s been a year of wonders. Profits are up. Pfizer expects to make up to US$26 billion this year from its COVID-19 vaccine, and Moderna US$18.4 billion. Moreover, the development of these vaccines has also provided these companies with a much-needed reputational boost. But Pfizer and the other pharma giants aren’t vaccine heroes. By demanding monopoly profits on their publicly funded vaccines, they are preventing urgent rollout of the life-saving medicine in many of the most needy countries, killing the poor while using the pandemic to extort the world.

Usually, when big pharma enters into public discussion, it’s because of the industry’s record of profit-driven atrocities. Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO Martin Shkreli became a poster boy for the industry when he gleefully hiked the price of a life-saving anti-parasitic drug by 5,000 percent, putting it out of reach for many. Purdue, producer of OxyContin, created a severe social crisis in the United States by aggressively promoting the use of addictive and deadly opioids, marketing them as a “wonder drug” for pain relief. In the past two decades, deaths from opioid overdose have increased almost sixfold, driving down average life expectancy in the US well before the COVID pandemic began. 

But now, everything has changed. Pharmaceutical companies that quickly developed COVID-19 vaccines have become the pandemic’s unlikely heroes. Public opinion has shifted. A Harris poll conducted between January 2020 and March 2021 found approval of the industry had almost doubled, from 32 percent to 62 percent. The pharmaceutical industry has gone from one of the most reviled industries to one of the most respected.

What’s more, “Pfizer”, “AstraZeneca”, “Moderna” have all become household names. People share which vaccine they received and engage in tongue-in-cheek banter over which is the best, as one might argue about football teams or who is the best member of BTS. Literally thousands of TikTok videos are dedicated to the notion that Pfizer is the “hot person vaccine”. The Moderna vaccine has found its most ardent defenders among Dolly Parton’s fan base, who are loyal to the brand because the country superstar helped fund their vaccine’s development.

Generally, though, it is widely accepted that Pfizer is the status vaccine, the Louis Vuitton of COVID-19 inoculation. Tom Cox, a former Kansas state politician, coined the term “double-dosed Pfizer elites” to express this sense of being part of a special club. A writer for the Atlantic admits that the name of their college friends’ iMessage chat is “Pfizer gang”.

There’s something truly disturbing about the branding and marketisation of life-saving medicine. A life-or-death struggle to vaccinate the globe and save millions of lives ends up looking like the cola wars of the 1980s. But competition between vaccine manufacturers isn’t some cutesy rivalry to win hearts and minds. It’s a brutal economic war to carve up markets and maximise profits, in which millions of unnecessary deaths are regarded as inevitable collateral damage. Pharmaceutical companies aren’t the “unlikely heroes” of the pandemic; they are its greatest villains. Through the twisted logic of the capitalist market, companies like Pfizer have become the main obstacle to mass vaccine production.

These corporations have benefited from the collective ingenuity of thousands of scientists and health experts, along with billions of dollars in public development funding—and then privatised the end product. Intellectual property laws allow corporations to block countries from using the research to produce cheap vaccines and increase the rate of vaccine rollout.

This monopoly over production, protected by patents, exists to allow pharmaceutical companies to price-gouge. A group of campaigners from the People’s Vaccine Alliance have calculated that the cost of vaccinating the world against COVID-19 could be at least five times cheaper if pharmaceutical companies weren’t profiteering from their monopolies. 

The human toll is unspeakable and, predictably, concentrated in the underdeveloped world. With the virus still raging through India and Latin America, Pfizer and Moderna have sold more than 90 percent of their vaccines to rich countries, where they can charge up to 24 times the cost of production. As of the beginning of August, the vice-president of the World Bank reported that only 1.1 per cent of people living in poor countries have received even a single dose of any COVID-19 vaccine. 

In 1974, a report titled “The Baby Killer” made the name of Nestlé, the multinational food and drink manufacturer, mud for decades. Nestlé was condemned for encouraging mothers in the Third World to rely on its baby formula products, which are less nutritious and more expensive than breastmilk. The company did this by pioneering many of the techniques that pharmaceutical companies today use to push their products. Nestlé’s sales representatives dressed as nurses and were sent out to some of the poorest communities on the planet. They offered free samples, and gave bribes to clinics and medical professionals who promoted their product. Nestlé knowingly ignored the fact that many parents had to mix its formula with contaminated water, leading to the spread of fatal diseases. The mass proliferation of baby formula through the developing world caused the mass death of children, and a boycott that lasted for decades was launched against Nestlé in 1977. 

For obstructing vaccine production in the time of a global pandemic, Pfizer deserves to be made into the Nestlé of the 21st century, one of the most loathed corporations on the planet. Pfizer should be up there with oil companies like Shell that spit toxic sludge over poor communities and into ocean systems. They should be hated as much as Lockheed Martin, whose bombs destroy school buses in Yemen. 

The “Pfizer Pfam” farce shouldn’t blind us to these realities. It’s time to start naming Pfizer for what it truly is: a bloodthirsty vaccine criminal. 

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