Left Voice

Europe is in Lockdown. What Should the Left Do?

Wed, 25 Nov 2020 14:27:53 GMT

Europe is in the middle of a deadly second wave of the pandemic. Yesterday, the UK, Italy, and Germany each had more than 10,000 new cases — higher numbers than were ever reached in the spring. There is now one Covid-19 death every 17 seconds in Europe. As a result, each European country is announcing new restrictions. Since the beginning of November, Germany has been in what people are calling a “lockdown light”: Museums, theaters, restaurants, and bars have to shut down entirely. But schools, shops, offices, and factories remain open.

Germany now prohibits more than ten people, coming from more than two households, to meet up — even outside. Yet an unlimited number of people can meet inside if they are at work or attending a religious service. So we are faced with a kind of neoliberal dystopia: in Berlin, the New Museum is closed, but IKEA is packed. People can go to work, to the mall, or to church — and nowhere else.

The numbers of new Covid-19 cases in Germany were exploding, topping 20,000 per day at the end of October. With the new measures that took effect on November 1, these numbers have leveled off. But they are not going down either. As the days get shorter and colder, resignation sets in. It feels like nothing can be done to stop the pandemic. People watch helplessly, knowing there will be tens of thousands of additional deaths before a vaccine is widely available sometime next year.

Lockdowns Work

The thing is: every state that has seriously attempted to eliminate Covid-19 has been successful. The list includes South Korea, China, Vietnam, New Zealand, Australia, and surprisingly many others. Most of these countries were confronted with serious outbreaks. Now, they are at or close to zero cases.

What is the secret? Westerners might claim that China was only successful because it has an authoritarian regime—but that is not the case in Australia. Could New Zealand only stamp out the pandemic because it is an isolated island? But that does not apply to Vietnam. Many of these countries had the experience of responding to SARS in 2003-04. Thus, they decided that the pandemic could be beaten.

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Covid-19 arrived in Europe in January, and soon there were catastrophic scenes in Bergamo in northern Italy. Europe shut down in March — but most restrictions were lifted in May, before the virus could be eliminated, or at least contained to a point where each new infection could be tracked. Instead, the virus was allowed to spread, slowly but consistently.

European governments argued that it was necessary to reopen their economies. There was always a spirit of defeatism: it is simply impossible to contain Covid-19! Or even better: we could have done this back in March, but now it is too late!

As the second wave arrived with the fall — and there was never any doubt that it would — it became clear that European governments had made no real preparations. In Germany, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, there is neither sufficient testing capacity nor enough personnel for contact tracing.

The “lockdown light” that began on November 2 is not intended to prevent people dying from Covid. Rather, the goal is to maintain as much economic activity as possible — and then, in that framework, to space out the death. As a result, hundreds of people can still gather in enclosed spaces. The only requirement is that they are generating profits for a capitalist. Shops are full and public transport is packed. Schools remain open so their parents can be exploited at work.

Governments never tried to stop the virus — just to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. This “strategy,” if it can even be called that, was intended to “save the economy” at the cost of a few hundred thousand lives. But even from the perspective of cynical bourgeois politicians, this policy has been an absolute disaster. In fact, the only reason that EU politicians are not being chased by angry mobs is that they can point to the U.S.: “Hey, it could be worse!”

The countries that stopped the pandemic — often with 2-3 months of a serious lockdown — are also the ones with the best economic outcomes. It turns out that even without restrictions in place, people do not like to go to the mall if it means risking death for themselves or their families.

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As a result, the half-lockdowns will likely continue indefinitely. And this is leading to a dangerous rise in irrationality. In Germany, tens of thousands of people have joined demonstrations against any kind of public health measures. They are getting support from far-right parties, soccer hooligans, and open Nazis. Politicians blame this on social media — but it is also a response to obviously contradictory policies. People wonder: If the virus is really so dangerous, why would the government allow workplaces to remain open? The answer is obvious: because capitalist politicians are more concerned about the profits of the capitalists than the lives of workers. They would literally let you die to save the balance sheet. But since there is no mass socialist party explaining what is going on, a sector of the population is drawing the opposite conclusion: then the virus must not be so bad. (Or alternatively: then the virus doesn’t exist at all.)

A Left Alternative

The example of Australia shows that even with a weak initial response to the virus, it is possible for a government to stop the pandemic. In Melbourne, in the state of Victoria, the number of cases was growing exponentially in July. The state government implemented a lockdown that shut down most non-essential activities. After almost 100 days of lockdown, Melbourne reached zero cases. Zero!

As Omar Hassan reported in Red Flag, “lockdowns work.”

The lockdown in Victoria was opposed by capitalists big and small: huge corporations financed campaigns, but got owners of cafés or cosmetic studios to speak for them. These petty capitalists would demand to open their businesses even though they knew this would lead to preventable deaths. This says a lot about how capitalism can turn people into monsters. For petty bourgeois like this, the system has made it so that keeping a tiny shop open really is a question of “life and death”

But what about the costs of lockdowns? A society needs to produce in order to survive. Lockdowns mean that many people lose their jobs and thus lose the ability to get their most basic needs met. and more so for a society. That is why the Left needs to campaign for a complete prohibition of layoffs during the pandemic, as well as quarantine wages for everyone. Essential workers need to get hazard pay — as well as a drastic reduction in hours by hiring more people to do essential work. Imperialist states are giving billions to corporations. This money needs to go straight to working people. Rather than propping up private companies, we need to be taking them under public control.

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What about the effects of lockdowns on mental health? But it is not the case that keeping businesses open during a pandemic is a good alternative. To quote Hassan, “How exactly would allowing the virus to kill thousands of our families, friends and workmates improve our collective mental health?” Instead, we need to create spaces where people can quarantine in peace and safety. This means turning hotels into shelters. This means providing every single person high-speed internet with free access to services like Netflix and Zoom. Therapy, education, and cultural experiences need to be made available to everyone.

The experiences of countries that are beating the pandemic shows: working people are willing to accept even severe lockdown measures — if, and this is crucial, they have a perspective of being effective. A lockdown of 2-3 months is enough to get the number of cases low enough that comprehensive tracing is possible. And then, economic life can resume.

Two Errors

The Left can make two mistakes in responding to the pandemic. One is to oppose all government measures in general, in the name of defending democratic rights. But collective actions, based on mass solidarity, are necessary to save lives — and living is the most important democratic right of all. Sections of the Left who join in protests against Covid restrictions (and thankfully, it appears that there are not many) are only useful idiots of big and small capitalists happy to massacre the ruling class.

A second, equally serious error would be to uncritically support lockdowns by capitalist governments, or police repression against right-wing counter-protestors. Reformists have often proclaimed a kind of “national unity” for the duration of the pandemic. Die LINKE, the Left Party in Germany, has virtually refused to criticize the government since Covid-19 arrived, despite its continuous failures. In a crisis, the political independence of the working class is more important than ever.

As Leon Trotsky said, “In ninety cases out of a hundred the workers actually place a minus sign where the bourgeoisie places a plus sign. In ten cases however they are forced to fix the same sign as the bourgeoisie but with their own seal, in which is expressed their mistrust of the bourgeoisie.” In other words, when a bourgeois government is imposing necessary public health measures, the working class needs to fight for control of the implementations — for a working-class program to stop the pandemic. This would include workers’ control of all lockdown measures. What sectors are truly “essential” and what kinds of restrictions are necessary? Workers’ representatives — and not the hated and corrupt agents of the ruling class called the “police” — need to enforce these restrictions. This would also mean putting the distribution of all public money under the control of elected representatives of the working class. Should billions go to shareholders or workers? This would be a step toward the working class taking control of society, getting rid of the capitalists and their governments who let hundreds of thousands die to maintain their profits.

MTA Plans Service Cuts and Fare Hikes, Keeps Its Cops

Tue, 24 Nov 2020 18:38:20 GMT

On Wednesday, officials at New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) announced the details of proposed cuts due to a $12 billion budget shortfall. Among the proposals are a 40 percent service reduction across subways, a 50 percent reduction to the Metro North and Long Island Railroad commuter lines, and the elimination of certain bus routes. Up to 9,400 MTA jobs would also be slashed, and fares would increase.

The coronavirus has slammed the MTA and public transit workers. By some estimates, nearly one in four MTA workers has been infected with the virus, and over 130 workers have died. Compared to pre-pandemic levels, subway and commuter line ridership has declined by 70 percent, and bus ridership by over 50 percent. These drops in public transit riders have led to a commensurate plunge in revenue: the MTA is losing an average of $20 million per day, straining an already distressed system. With schools closing again and many offices and businesses remaining shut for the foreseeable future, these massive budget holes will only deepen.

The coronavirus pandemic may have hastened the MTA’s deterioration, but it by no means started it. Although New York City is one of the wealthiest cities in the world, its public transit system has infamously been neglected and underfunded for decades under both Democratic and Republican leadership. Much of the subway switching and signalling infrastructure is over 100 years old, service is increasingly unreliable, and the vast majority of stations are in need of repairs. Trains and stations are notoriously cramped and poorly ventilated, and Governor Andrew Cuomo even declared a state of emergency in 2017 after a series of malfunctions and a derailment.

The reasons for this neglect are clear: the MTA primarily serves working-class New Yorkers, especially as they get pushed further out of the city due to gentrification. People of color make up two-thirds of subway riders — and an even higher proportion of bus riders — and 70 percent of the MTA workforce. By contrast, the wealthy can find ways around public transit, particularly because city planners have long prioritized drivers and the car industry. Politicians and the capitalists they serve are happy to cut services like public transit which harm the working class.

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The enormous impact of these cuts and fare increases cannot be overstated. The cost of a trip would jump from $2.75 to $3.75 — a staggering 36 percent increase. (Previously, the MTA only increased fares by around three to four percent every two years.) Officials are also considering scrapping the 7- and 30-day unlimited MetroCards, a huge blow to commuters. These fare hikes come even as New York faces an affordability crisis: The cost of living increased at twice the rate of incomes between 2005 and 2017, and a growing number of New Yorkers struggle to make ends meet.

Capitalists need workers to get to work, but they do not care about their quality of life or the financial pressures that commuting imposes. Cuts to public transit will mean more time spent on subways and buses, and more time spent calculating and switching to faster and cheaper routes. As long as workers can arrive on time at the workplace, capitalists do not care that it requires a 20-minute walk to the station, taking three different crowded modes of transit with significant delays, and spending a quarter of their hourly wages.

The coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated these stark inequalities, and will amplify the consequences of the proposals. Those who have lost their income as a result of business closures will face further financial hardship as a result of the steep fare hikes. Additionally, working-class Black and Brown people make up an overwhelming majority of jobs deemed “essential” during the pandemic such as MTA workers, home health aides, janitors, delivery workers, and grocery store workers. These workers, unable to work from home or socially distance like the wealthy, find themselves packed onto crowded trains, particularly as the MTA has reduced services on some lines. These conditions are a tinderbox for infection, and further cuts will only increase these dangerous levels of crowding.

New York politicians have deliberately and systematically underfunded the MTA. While public transit crumbles, they prioritize projects which benefit the wealthy, such as the Second Avenue Q subway line which serves one of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods. They were also happy to spend $25 billion on Hudson Yards, the “billionaire’s playground” office, shopping, and apartment complex on Manhattan’s West side.

When politicians like Governor Cuomo or Mayor Bill de Blasio do take interest in the subway, it is primarily to add police officers to criminalize the poor and people of color. Last year, the MTA added 200 police officers and 300 of its own officers to patrol subways and buses, and approved adding a further 500 cops. Over 2,500 NYPD officers now patrol the subways, brutalizing turnstile hoppers and the unhoused. This rise in patrolling comes amid constant increases to the police headcount — this summer, Mayor de Blasio approved hiring 900 new officers, bringing the total to over 34,000. There is endless money for the police, the armed wing of the capital, but no money for the working class and the public transit they rely on.

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Public transit should be free, accessible, safe, and reliable. New York is one of the wealthiest cities in the world with one of the highest concentrations of millionaires and billionaires — a safe, well-functioning transit system could be easily paid for, but politicians like Cuomo and de Blasio will do everything in their power to avoid taxing the rich. While overall ridership is down and the wealthy work from home or find alternatives, public transit is still essential to New York City. The proposed cuts would devastate the city, and the chaos caused by the 2005 MTA strike is testament to the power of these workers. The Transit Workers Union has the capacity to wield this enormous power on the behalf of not only transit workers, but the entire working class of New York City. Workers and unions need to take up the fight against these cuts, and make sure that working class New Yorkers don’t pay the price while politicians govern in the service of capital.

Capitalist Competition Is Sabotaging the Race for a Vaccine

Mon, 23 Nov 2020 18:06:35 GMT

As Covid-19 continues to spread across the globe, more than 200 vaccines are being developed worldwide against the virus. Twelve are in phase 3, where they are tested with humans, and six are already approved for early or limited use.

Millions of people are following the development of these vaccines with the hope they will put an end to the pandemic that has killed so many and halted everyone’s lives. Capitalist governments are desperate to develop a vaccine because the sooner a vaccine is ready, the sooner baseline exploitation under capitalism can return.

The “America First” approach was and still is trying to guarantee priority access for the United States, while other nations bid against each other for the vaccine and the equipment necessary to store it, rather than developing a global solution through cooperation. This is not only about the lack of coordination, but also U.S. sanctions against countries such as Iran that continued just when they were hit hard by the pandemic. This shows us that saving lives is not the driver behind all these efforts.

In Stage 3

Other nations rushed into this race. The Chinese pharmaceutical company CanSino Biologics has a vaccine candidate that is in phase 3, but already has limited use among the Chinese military and is in late-stage trials in Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Russia. The same is true of Sinovac Biotech’s vaccine, which is being used with high-risk workers in China and is undergoing phase 3 trials in Indonesia, Turkey, and Brazil, where they resumed after a controversial case. The state-owned Chinese company Sinopharm has been using two different inactivated virus vaccines on a limited basis in the United Arab Emirates, and is doing trials in other countries.

The Russian state-run Gamaleya Research Institute’s Sputnik V, which demonstrated 92% efficacy, is another vaccine already being used. The announcement came two days after the U.S. pharmaceutical company Pfizer and German drugmaker BioNTech released their late phase 3 results showing 90 percent effectiveness, updated to 95 percent on November 18.

Most recently, the U.S. pharmaceutical company Moderna showed preliminary data that its vaccine could be 94.5 percent effective. The company’s vaccine has a significant advantage over Pfizer’s, which requires storage at -70 degrees Celsius and hence has significant barriers to distribution. Moderna claims its vaccine can be stored at a more manageable -20 degrees Celsius and explained that once doses are defrosted they can last longer in a refrigerator than initially estimated: up to 30 days, which would facilitate distribution logistics. These two vaccines could be close to receiving emergency use authorization (EUA) from the Food and Drug Administration. Pfizer has already submitted its EUA application.

The vaccines mentioned so far are the ones that have reached later stages of development. Other big pharmaceutical companies in Phase 2 or Phase 3 are: Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca, Novavax, Canada’s Medicago, and India’s Bharat Biotech. AstraZeneca announced today that they are getting results around 90 percent effectiveness and said that their vaccine won’t need to be stored at subzero temperatures.

While individual companies across the world scramble to develop a vaccine, one would think these companies and governments would be able to come together to stem the spread of a virus that threatens us all. Instead, what we see is all of these social efforts, investments, and experiments done in an uncoordinated and uncollaborative manner. For these large companies, what matters first and foremost is the value of their shares. So it is important for them to show that they are “first” with a vaccine — even before having robust results. The premature release of “positive” data also means many governments will run to buy a vaccine without guarantees of its safety or efficacy.

The race among private pharmaceutical corporations for larger portions of the market also furthers the well-founded distrust among the general public and healthcare workers of vaccines that are being rushed because of competition. Healthcare workers are considered high risk and will be among the first to receive the novel vaccines under emergency approvals, but many doctors and nurses want more data before being exposed. The capitalists are reluctant to go into new lockdowns and even less likely to provide safety measures that will reduce the number of cases. Rather than forego profits, they prefer to expose hundreds of millions to vaccines that haven’t been fully tested.

From Public Funding to Private Millionaires

This race is not only about corporate profits but also the geopolitical benefits that come with being the first country to create a vaccine. It is no surprise that the same countries that dominate the world geopolitically — the United States, Germany, Russia, the U.K., and China — are the main countries in the current vaccine race. In these countries, as in most others, scientific research receives state funding, but the resulting profits end up in private hands. For example, the Bayh-Dole Act allows U.S. universities to sell patents on discoveries funded by tax dollars.

A closer look at the United States reveals the vast amount of resources governments are putting into this vaccine race. Operation Warp Speed (OWS), a Trump administration initiative, already reached an agreement with Moderna, and on August 11, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) “announced up to $1.5 billion in funds to support the large-scale manufacturing and delivery of Moderna’s investigational vaccine candidate” in exchange for 100 million doses. That came on top of earlier support to the tune of $483 million and $472 million.

Among the main investments of OWS, there was “approximately $1 billion in funds to support the large-scale manufacturing and delivery of Johnson & Johnson’s (Janssen)” — added on August 5 to a previous $456 million. On May 21, HHS announced “up to $1.2 billion in support for AstraZeneca’s candidate vaccine, developed in conjunction with the University of Oxford.” On July 7, HHS announced $1.6 billion in funds to support Novavax. And on July 31, $2 billion were announced for Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline’s (GSK) investigational adjuvanted vaccine. This $10 billion budget for OWS alone was approved by Congress.

Pfizer received no OWS funds. The government reached an agreement to buy 100 million doses of Pfizer’s vaccine if it wins approval, which would be enough to guarantee the two doses needed for 50 million people. The agreement also included an option to buy an additional 500 million doses. In President Trump’s November 13 update on OWS, he voiced frustration about the company’s statements that it had not been part of OWS. “Pfizer said it wasn’t part of Warp Speed, but that turned out to be an unfortunate misrepresentation. They are part. That’s why we gave them the $1.95 million — billion. And it was an unfortunate mistake that they made when they said that.” It is clear that President Trump, like other world leaders, is thirsty for recognition that his government was part of vaccine development.

Not a Global Vaccine

The Covid-19 pandemic, which has already caused at least 1.33 million deaths around the world, means massive profits for big pharma. These companies have raked in public funding and increased their share prices, and now will add to that through deals with countries that will have to pay millions of dollars for access to the vaccine.

As groups such as the London-based Global Justice Now have already pointed out, a majority of the vaccine doses that could be available in the near future have already been claimed by wealthy countries. For example, 780 million doses — or 78 percent of the doses Moderna claims it can produce by next year — have already been sold to the world’s wealthiest governments. The vaccine race has amplified the dynamics of imperialism that already exist on a global scale, leaving most of the world to scramble for whatever is left when the great powers are done.

The challenge won’t only be purchasing vaccines but also handling the expensive distribution requirements, including access to freezers and dry ice. Dr. Germán Malaga, who is working on Peru’s response to the pandemic, told CNN that there are about 30 ultra-cold freezers in Lima to handle the Pfizer vaccine, but that “for the other 20 million Peruvians, including in the Andes and the rainforest, there are none.” India and South Africa submitted a request to the WHO to “guarantee a waiver from certain provisions of the TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) agreement for the prevention, containment and treatment of Covid-19.” In other words, the manufacture of vaccines will be held back by patents.

Governments running to buy vaccines, or “calling dibs” on future doses, shows the capitalists’ desperation to get people back to work. Many countries have been unable to control viral spread because the dynamics of capitalism will not — indeed, cannot — allow for a proper slow down or shut down while also supporting the great mass of people. Instead, leaders are increasingly desperate for a vaccine to get people back to work. This means that they will begin buying vaccines and pushing them on populations before they even truly know whether they will work or are safe.

Countries such as South Korea that have controlled the spread of the virus more effectively have decided not to rush into the market for vaccines. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Health officials are worried that the fast-tracked vaccines might not be effective or could carry long-term side effects.”

Against Big Pharma

The capitalists are touting vaccine development as an example of the merits of innovation. In reality, though, the global vaccine race has exposed the falsehood of some of the most closely held beliefs of the capitalist elite. These include the idea that capitalism “raises all boats” and “stimulates innovation.” As we have seen, rather than coordinating and sharing the results of scientific research, each multinational company is working on its own, in complete secrecy. Companies are wasting resources on duplicate research and taking much longer to find a vaccine. Imagine if the world’s great scientific minds all collaborated to develop the best possible vaccine in the shortest possible time. It is not hyperbole to say we would likely already have a vaccine saving lives.

So much of the preliminary research for new biotechnologies is funded by tax dollars and then turned over to private companies. These companies then charge the public exorbitantly, limiting availability and access in order to ensure the largest profits. Medicines should be made for the public good, not patented by private companies. As the consumer watchdog group Public Citizen noted,

Moderna is taking taxpayers for a ride – and the Trump administration is doing nothing about it. Taxpayers are paying for 100% of Modern’s Covid-19 vaccine development. All of it. Yet taxpayers may wind up paying tens of billions more to Moderna to buy our vaccine back, if it proves safe and effective. The so-called Moderna vaccine belongs in significant part to the people of the U.S. We paid for it. Federal scientists led the way. It ought to be the people’s vaccine, not a new taxpayer burden.

All medicines, vaccines, and beneficial therapies should belong to the people. This is not an original or revolutionary idea. After developing the vaccine for polio in 1955, Jonas Salk was asked by CBS newsman Edward R. Morrow who owned the patent. Salk said “Well, the people, I would say … There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”

We must move beyond a culture in which medicine and science are used to extract profit from the public body and toward one in which they serve the public good. We should not forget how we got here: pharmaceutical corporations and the state invest more in remedies than in preventing diseases. As we know, it is always more profitable to sell the vaccine. Capitalism refuses to change the root causes of diseases like Covid-19.

As Left Voice states in the program published last month, we need a healthcare system that puts people over profits:

A healthcare system dominated by corporations produces the inevitable outcome: big profits for pharmaceuticals and other health-related industries, while healthcare workers face unsafe working conditions and millions of people remain uninsured. Other so-called essential workers have been forced to work without the necessary protective equipment. Unsafe school reopenings, imposed at the state and federal level to get parents back to work, have put teachers, staff, students, and communities at risk and are contributing to rising numbers of Covid-19 cases across the country.

Having a vaccine would be a huge step forward, but we cannot trust these companies or the current distribution plans. An mRNA vaccine needs to be refrigerated at around -70 degrees Celsius, which would require special freezers for transportation and storage. Capitalism has already shown itself unable to produce enough masks for healthcare workers, so how can we expect this system to be able to produce and distribute enough high-tech freezers to store the vaccine — assuming it even proves to be safe and effective? Wouldn’t mass production of these freezers suffer the same fate as ventilator production during the first wave of the pandemic? Covid-19 has exposed the racist and class faultlines upon which our economic system is based. How can we trust that those who are most vulnerable to Covid-19 will be able to access the vaccine?

We need to eliminate competition and unite research and development efforts across borders. It is imperative to produce a generic, safe, and effective vaccine available for every country immediately at no cost. We need to nationalize the healthcare system and all vaccine-related industries under workers’ control.

The Fine Print of "Representation Matters”

Sun, 22 Nov 2020 20:04:54 GMT

In 2019, while working as faculty at the University of Minnesota, I attended a symposium on how to retain American Indian and faculty of color. During a breakout session, a speaker, who was a Black woman, remarked that she did not think she could be militant when advocating against structural racism at work. She said that doing so would close the door for other Black women because they too would be perceived as militant and angry, which would hurt their chances of professional advancement.

On November 4, 2020, I was arrested as part of a mass arrest on the I-94 freeway in Minneapolis while volunteering as a street medic at a protest. The protest was organized by several community organizations and labor unions to protest Trump and to highlight the fact that a Biden win will not be a solution to how capitalism continues to profit off our lives. That night, over 600 people, including peaceful protestors, street medics, legal observers and community organizers, were kettled on the highway by Minneapolis police and state troopers. For five hours, we were detained on the highway without access to bathrooms, food, water, or medications. In the so-called progressive Twin Cities where police murdered George Floyd, Jamar Clark, Thurman Blevins, and Philando Castile, this planned and deliberate repression of peaceful community members and organizers should not have been surprising. But it was surprising for many of us who had never had a police encounter—other than receiving speeding tickets—to experience the Twin Cities as the police state that it is. Many of the arrestees got their first glimpse of the reality that so many BIPOC have existed in.

For many of us BIPOC, police reform is simply police brutality reimagined. According to a city council member aide, the order to kettle and arrest protestors was issued by the commissioner of public safety, John Harrington – a Black man. The chief of Minneapolis Police, Medaria Arradondo, is also a Black man. His predecessor, Janee Harteau, is a Native American woman. Minnesota’s lieutenant governor is also Native American.

On November 8, 2020, University of Minnesota students and labor organizers gathered on campus to call out Democratic leaders, in particular, Dr. Joan Gabel, the first woman president of the University of Minnesota, for her silence over the arrest of so many of her students (including students of color) during the November 4 protest, while touting “inclusivity” in her emails and brochures.

On a cursory glance, the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul give the illusion of being progressive cities under Democratic leadership. The reality is much different. These leaders, who pay lip service to progressive movements like Black Lives Matter and immigration justice, are actually themselves agents of repression because their interests are fundamentally tied to the interests of the ruling class. “Representation matters” is an insufferable phrase touted by liberals since Barack Obama was elected President. It has now been brought back to life after Kamala Harris became the first woman, the first Indian American, and the first Caribbean American to be elected to the office of the Vice President of the United States. A South Asian friend of mine announced that she was going to make samosas in celebration. Another friend was excited to have a “Kamala aunty” in the White House. The same enthusiasm continued as Biden announced that his transition team included Cecilia Muñoz, a Latina. Muñoz, a former immigration advisor to Obama, has defended Obama’s brutal immigration policies. Biden also named Shawn Skelly, a transgender veteran, to be part of his transition team.

There is a meme that captures the myth of representation. It shows what appears to be a Muslim couple with a drone dropping a bomb over them. The man says, “They say the next ones [drones] will be sent by a woman!” to which the woman replies, “Makes you feel like you’re part of history.”

While it is understandable for people to celebrate diversity in what were previously white spaces, an unexamined part of this celebration of diversity is how neoliberalism has become so adept at designating leaders from marginalized groups to maintain a racist-capitalist system of oppression. There is much focus in professional spaces to create a pipeline for marginalized candidates, but the fact that these people from marginalized backgrounds will now be used to maintain the racist-capitalist structures such as the police, for-profit healthcare systems, and financial institutions is often overlooked. I first read about the misleadership class in Devyn Springer’s article in The Independent, but it has also been discussed by others before him. Walter Rodney, for instance, in his book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa writes that colonial rulers gave positions of power to a select few members of the oppressed class to keep the masses in check. In his article Springer discusses how Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, Killer Mike and T. I came together to reprimand the people of Atlanta who were rising up to protest the systemically violent epidemic of recent police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Tony McDade. Springer (who is based in Atlanta), said that even though these “leaders” might genuinely care about working class Black people, their class interests were actually aligned with that of the capitalist ruling class. Another recent example of this was when Barack Obama helped shut down the NBA strike against police brutality.

Systemic racism has been an ugly byproduct of this global capitalist system. People of color have been historically oppressed for profit through exploitation of the global south, slavery, foreign wars, sanctions, and the prison industrial complex. Now in the current stage of global capitalism, as some people holding marginalized identities are finally able to acquire capital, their class interests also shift from the oppressed to that of the ruling class. These new bourgeoisie are designated as leaders and often called on to parade their marginalized identities to whip the working class into shape. They are used as examples of success and voices of reason to quell uprisings. So, representation really does matter. It especially matters to Democrats who since have become skilled in using marginalized identities of working class people to do their work of neoliberalism and global imperialism while they con us into celebrating the diverse backgrounds of our oppressors. Representation matters when Black and Brown girls can see that they, too, can be the second-in-command to a murderous empire that has kept foreign countries impoverished through wars and sanctions. Representation matters when the next cop killing unarmed Black people also happens to be Black. Representation matters when a healthcare system exploiting workers and patients for profits happens to be headed by a woman or a nonbinary person. Such is the fine print of representation. It looks like progress and it absolves racialized capitalism of all responsibility for the suffering of the masses.

Focusing solely on skin color, gender identity, and sexual orientation-based representation without examining the underlying racialized capitalism that has created these disparities only detracts from the work we need to do. Such individual tokenism is little more than a seductive cover for a lack of willingness to change the economic, social, and political conditions that keep groups marginalized. The capitalist-friendly myth of representation also gives the false impression that the only way to succeed is to go through and stay inside the confines of the “pipeline” laid down by our oppressors. We should stop falling for it.

In the status quo capitalist system, individual professional advancement often comes at the cost of keeping others oppressed and subservient in the US and globally. We cannot achieve liberation through the superficial and deceptive tactics of representation and individual competition. Our liberation will only come through the struggle for a society free from exploitation and all forms of oppression.

Massive Protests In Guatemala against President Giammattei and the Congress

Sun, 22 Nov 2020 13:01:37 GMT

At least 10,000 people rallied in the central square of the country’s capital, in front of the seat of government, to express their dissatisfaction after 10 months of President Alejandro Giammattei’s administration and the approval of the 2021 budget — the largest budget in the country’s history. These latest events are part of rising discontent in the country in response to the policies of Giammeattei’s government and the right-wing party he represents, Vamos, as well as the deteriorating economic situation in Guatemala, which has been devastated by the pandemic and back-to-back hurricanes this fall.

By all accounts, this budget is a massive insult to the working class and poor of Guatemala. Despite being the largest budget in the country’s history, it slashes funding for both education and healthcare, leaving hospitals ill-equipped to handle the pandemic. With thousands of people going hungry and homeless throughout the country as a result of years of austerity and the government’s more recent negligence in response to Hurricanes Eta and Iota this year, the budget proposed to cut funding to combat malnutrition. It also slashed the budgets of the judiciary, which oversees government corruption cases.

Yet this plan gave no shortage of funds to politicians and the capitalist interests they serve. While thousands of people starve across the country, politicians negotiated an extra $65,000 to fund their own meal budgets. Further, the budgets of the nation’s Departmental Development Councils (CDC), bodies which are run by governors and mayors without significant oversight, were nearly doubled. Of the almost $100 billion Quetzals of the total budget (some $13 billion), the budget for the CDC accounts for nearly $4 billion. Many analysts claim that this was negotiated by mayors and governors in exchange for a rushed approval of the budget.

Saturday’s demonstration was called by artists, activists, and political organizations to denounce the passing of the 2021 national budget last week. This followed weeks of outrage over secret budget negotiations which forced the government to amend certain parts of the plan. In spite of the widespread unpopularity of the budget, however, the Congress rushed to approve it early Wednesday morning — without all 160 representatives even having seen the full document.

As protesters demonstrated in the central plaza, a small group of people broke into the Congress building and set it on fire. Several Guatemalan news outlets report that the events occurred without interference by the National Civil Police (PNC) — which only intervened after the fact to fire tear gas and disperse the crowd — leading to reports that the incident was actually caused by police infiltrators.

Most of the slogans chanted by the demonstrators in the center of Guatemala City denounced Giammattei as well as the president of the Congress, Allan Rodriguez, who belongs to the same political party as the president. But the demonstrators are protesting much more than just this administration. As one protester told Al Jazeera, “We are tired of so much theft. I don’t want my kids and my grandkids to live in such an indebted country.”

Student groups are playing a central role in the demonstrations against the budget. They are protesting against these austerity measures and against what they see as a corrupt government taking action behind the backs of the people.

President Giammattei reacted to the demonstrations on social media, writing that “one has the right to demonstrate according to the law” but “we cannot allow vandalism of public or private property.” He said that “criminal acts” taken during the protests would be “be punished with the full force of the law.”

But the government is not united in its stance on the budget or in its response to the protests. Opposition to the budget and to Giammattei’s presidency has taken root in the highest offices of Guatemala’s government. The Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity, a center-left party with representation in Guatemala’s government, issued a statement on November 20 calling on its supporters and the Guatemalan people to protest the 2021 budget:

With the three powers of the State infested with corruption and bent on the interests of parallel groups of power, there is no possibility of justice nor of combating corruption and impunity, other than protest and social resistance, under the protection of Article 45 of the Constitution.

Further, on Friday night, after Giammattei announced his intention to pass the budget, his vice president, Guillermo Castillo, said in a press conference that the country is not “well” and urged Giammattei to resign jointly for “the well-being” of the Central American nation. The disagreements between the president and his vice president have deepened since they took office 10 months ago, mostly in relation to Giammattei’s use of the presidency to further his own business interests. Despite the calls in the streets, so far Giammattei is refusing to step down.

The thousands of people in the streets of Guatemala City and other cities across Guatemala this weekend show that they will not let the government slash social spending to line their own pockets. They will not allow the government to make them pay for the pandemic, natural disasters, or a deepening economic crisis. They will not go hungry as politicians bolster capitalist profits. As one protester stated: “I think this is just the beginning.”

First published in Spanish on November 21 in La Izquierda Diario.

Translated by Madeleine Freeman

Interview with Striking Nurse in Philadelphia Suburb

Sat, 21 Nov 2020 20:20:19 GMT

On Tuesday, November 17, nurses at St. Mary Medical Center (SMMC) in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, went on strike after management refused to establish safe staffing ratios to confront the growing numbers of Covid cases at the hospital. Left Voice spoke with Drew, who has been a nurse for three years and, for the last year, has worked in the inpatient Endoscopy unit at the hospital. He is a rank-and-file member of the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals (PASNAP), which represents nurses at St. Mary, and has been on the picket line during the strike.

Can you give some brief background to the strike? What are your demands?

SMMC nurses organized a union over a year ago, even before Covid-19 dominated our lives, and joined PASNAP in August 2019. The heart of the organizational efforts have centered around safe staffing levels of both nurses and support staff, as well as competitive pay for those professionals. Some 243 nurses have left SMMC in the past two years. Poor pay and limited staff give little incentive for the talented, skilled nurses at SMMC to stay, so they leave for better financial and professional opportunities elsewhere.

Trinity Health, which is based in Livonia, Michigan, acquired SMMC four years ago. According to Trinity’s own audited financial documents, St. Mary made an average of $58 million in annual profits over the last three years.

The demand that has seen the most resistance is “minimum safe staffing grids.” Trinity wants complete control over staffing. Symbolic concessions from Trinity include a committee with nurses on it to discuss staffing issues, but that has no mechanism to hold Trinity accountable.

Why do you think it was necessary to turn to a strike, a refusal to work, given these conditions? Is it important for workers to refuse to work in conditions like the ones you’re facing?

I recognize that even in labor circles, nurses going on strike during a pandemic is not without criticism. PASNAP has been negotiating for a contract for over a year to no avail. Showing up at the bargaining table constantly and in good faith without results has left us with no other option. Personally, being forced to offer substandard care day-in and day-out convinced me it was necessary to strike. The decision to turn to a strike was not made lightly, but I firmly believe this will enable me and my peers to provide care that we will be proud of.

Nurses are on the front lines in the midst of a brutal and historic health crisis that’s been bungled at every level. They’re being asked to risk their lives and well-being after economies have been wrenched open to ensure the flow of profits. What do you think are the major changes needed in the U.S. health system, and why?

This is a conversation that is happening on the picket line in Langhorne, and I’m sure with every nursing organizational effort across the country. Nurses are being forced to ask: Why are we being taken advantage of? Why have conditions gotten worse when we were sold to a prestigious, faith-based company that owns 93 hospitals in 22 states? The resentment over for-profit healthcare is crescendoing among the nursing staff. Preventable illnesses being ignored due to insufficient insurance means patients are only seen when they are incredibly ill. Many of my peers see socialized medicine as inevitable, since for-profit healthcare is not sustainable.

What kinds of dangers do nurses face because of the lack of staffing, especially during a pandemic? Why is it crucial for nurses to win safe staffing now?

As always, our first priority is quality patient care. There are countless studies that show that for every additional patient a nurse takes on, the rates for infections, patient falls, medication errors, and mortality increases. Nurses at our hospital have been very vocal about their frustration at not being able to ensure hourly turns for necessary patients and not being able to spend moments with patients to share some human comfort. Understaffing is associated with high nurse turnover as well, and is absolutely responsible for the 243 nurses that have left SMMC in the past two years. Nurses are burning out and fleeing the bedside in droves.

This moment — when the public eye is on healthcare — is the moment to advocate for our patients and ourselves.

The communication between SMMC, St. Chris, Einstein, and especially Mercy Fitzgerald have been so important for things like coordinating strike efforts, but what may not be obvious is the amount of emotional and psychological support provided by the nurses of those hospitals. I’m sure most people who have participated in organizing and union efforts have felt a sense of doubt. It is natural to question if striking is the right thing to do or if all the work involved is worth it. Although these hospitals may have not had formal coordination, the networking and human infrastructure being built between these regional hospitals is real and has only improved.

So far, only one of Trinity’s hospitals — St. Mary — has gone on strike. Is it important that the other hospitals, too, take militant action together to win demands?

Nursing staff and other healthcare professionals are in a stronger position to advocate for ourselves and our patients if we take action together. It may be obvious to many, but sitting at a table with representatives from a multimillion-dollar company and begging for the bare minimum staff needed to provide adequate healthcare is not productive. Strikes and other forms of resistance are the only way to have your demands heard. I can only imagine the power our strike could have if multiple hospitals in the region were picketing this week.

Black Man Murdered by Cops at Grocery Store in Brazil

Sat, 21 Nov 2020 16:37:20 GMT

On Thursday, João Alberto Silveira Freitas was shopping with his wife at Carrefour, the grocery store in Porto Alegre’s neighborhood of Passo D’areia, when there was an argument with the cashier — who called the security guard. An off-duty member of the military police who happened to be shopping at the same store helped the security guard, and the two racists dragged João out of the store. “They violently beat him to death.

Emergency medical technicians called to the scene tried to revive João, as several videos posted on YouTube show, but were unsuccessful — he was already dead when they got there. The killers, who had waited over the corpse while waiting for the ambulance to arrive, were arrested for murder.

There is no way an argument in a supermarket justifies beating someone to death. This case reveals that structural and institutionalized racism is a matter of common practice by supermarkets such as Carrefour. On the eve of Black Awareness Day — when Brazilians commemorate the death of Zumbi dos Palmares in 1695 at the hands of Portuguese colonizers — it is necessary to organize and shout Black Lives Matter!

João was admired throughout the neighborhood and called “Beto Nego” by his friends and acquaintances. Demonstrations broke out against his killing in several Brazilian cities. Two other Carrefour stores were set on fire in protest. Outside the grocery store where João was murdered, protesters gathered and were met by police with tear gas. In São Paulo, where local media called the protests “vandalism,” CNN showed right-wingers attacking the demonstrators.

REPRESSÃO | Ato por Justiça após assassinato de João Alberto no Carrefour termina com repressão policial. Veja as imagens pic.twitter.com/kyE8vsyr0I

— Esquerda Diário (@EsquerdaDiario) November 21, 2020

There were also protests at Carrefour supermarkets in two other cities, Belo Horizonte and Campinas.

Esquerda Diario expresses its solidarity with his family and friends, just as we declare our complete repudiation of this killing. João’s murder is a deep expression of the racism at the core of the rotten capitalist system, which in Brazil is controlled by a regime born of the institutional coup that came to power to increase repression, mass imprisonment, and police genocide with Black corpses piled high. Reforms, privatizations, and the dismantling of public health have increased the exploitation of the Black population, making our lives even more precarious.

João Alberto Presente!

First published in Portuguese on November 20 and November 21 in Esquerda Diario.

Translated by Scott Cooper

Governor Cuomo’s "Pay Cut” Is a Cynical Publicity Stunt

Fri, 20 Nov 2020 21:52:31 GMT

In a move that smacks of rank hypocrisy and condescension, Governor Cuomo announced on Wednesday — in the midst of a televised coronavirus briefing — that he would be foregoing his scheduled $25,000 raise for next year. The decision comes after several conservative news outlets, including the New York Post and Fox News, condemned the Governor’s expected pay increase in the face of a growing state deficit.

Cuomo, who has a net worth of at least $5 million and who currently earns $225,000 a year — one of the highest governor salaries in the country — did not mention the criticism, but said that he and members of his cabinet would not be receiving their raises because of the “overall financial picture” created by the coronavirus pandemic. Of course, foregoing these raises will have practically zero impact on the state’s expected $14 billion budget shortfall. It will, however, help him to deflect attention away from his brutal attacks on the working class and his record of ruthless austerity. By taking a voluntary pay deferral he also, once again, gets to sell the self-serving and corrosive narrative that “we are all in this together.” He gets to pretend that he and those like him — the wealthy and politically powerful — are somehow sharing in the economic pain and suffering that his own administration helped to create.

Cuomo’s scheduled eleven percent raise, it should be noted, is about five times greater than the average percentage increase that most New York State public sector workers were scheduled to receive. At $25,000, it is exactly equal to what a full-time minimum wage worker in Albany would make in an entire year before taxes.

While the Governor is no doubt hoping that this publicity stunt will help convince New Yorkers of the severity of the state budget crisis, the fact is he has repeatedly rejected proposals that would balance the budget through progressive taxation on the rich and super rich. Since he was elected, Cuomo has argued that any increase in taxes on the wealthy will only lead to capital flight, concerns that have not only been shown to be largely unfounded, but ignore the widespread economic hardship facing the majority of people living in New York. Instead of taxing those who can most afford it, he has instead proposed further sweeping cuts to already hard hit public services that working people rely upon, including education, transportation, and health services. If enacted, these cuts would devastate the New York working class and likely only push the state further into an economic crisis that working people will again be forced to pay for.

Cuomo’s decision also comes among a wave of wage cuts and raise deferrals to public sector employees, including tens of thousands of New York City school teachers, who were told last month that their scheduled and contractually obligated back pay would be indefinitely postponed. Although an independent arbiter eventually ruled in their favor, these teachers will still not receive the full amount of their pay until July. Meanwhile, at the City University of New York the new Chancellor, Fellix Matos Rodriguez, following the Governor’s lead, unilaterally declared that faculty and staff raises won in the last contract — raises that were traded for other demands such as the elimination of step increases for part-time lecturers — would not be forthcoming. He has said no word about when, if ever, they will be honored.

Although Cuomo has tried to portray himself as a compassionate liberal, especially since the pandemic began, he came to power as an anti-union fiscal conservative and he has governed as one ever since. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, state and city labor unions have done little to challenge his authority or to resist the draconian cuts that have taken place under his watch, cuts that have only added to the misery of decades of previous austerity. Now that these unions are facing even more massive budget cuts and layoffs, they seem to be even less inclined to risk triggering the wrath of the Governor, but if they hope to survive, that is exactly what they must do. This darling of the neoliberal establishment and the party he represents have nothing to offer the working class but more attacks and hardship as capitalist profits are threatened by the recession.

As the country prepares for what looks like another two years of a deadlocked congress, it is unlikely that any federal bailout of New York will be forthcoming. Thus, it is looking more and more possible that New York, like many other states, will have to solve its budget crisis on its own, and such a scenario can only end in one of two ways: either working people are forced to pay for the crisis, or they fight back. Public sector unions in particular have an obligation to build the fight against the coming wave of austerity, but doing that will require more than the usual lobbying efforts and bargaining for scraps on offer from the labor bureaucracy. If labor wishes to survive, unions will have to begin to think and act as a collective political force, of and for the working class as a whole. Nothing in New York City or New York state runs without the consent of the state workers, and building the collective capacity for a city-wide or state-wide strike against austerity has to be the priority of every public sector worker and unionist in the state and across the country right now.

From Emiliano Zapata to the EZLN: Land and Autonomy

Fri, 20 Nov 2020 20:59:50 GMT

In 1910, Mexico was celebrating its 100th anniversary as an independent nation. Since 1877 the country had been under the dictatorial rule of General Porfirio Díaz Mori, a veteran of the Franco-Mexican war of 1867. Through both constitutional reforms[1] and rigged elections, the dictator was reelected, governing for over 30 years (a period known as the Porfiriato or the Pax Porfiriana). His administration was known for its ruthless suppression of any political and social opposition. For example, in 1892, residents of the town of Tomochic were massacred on Díaz’s orders after they declared autonomy. Of the town’s 279 residents noted in the previous year’s census, 165 died in the violence; the only survivors were women and children. Similar violence was waged against workers.

Background of the Mexican Revolution

In 1906 miners in the northern state of Sonora went on strike, as did textile workers the following year in the coastal state of Veracruz. This was the direct background of the Mexican Revolution: both strikes were repressed ruthlessly by the government, which killed hundreds of people with the help of U.S. Rangers from Arizona acting as scabs. In 1910, on the centennial of Mexico’s independence, Díaz had the perfect opportunity to show off his government as a modern administration. He ordered the building of grandiose public works, such as the Independence Monument, the Lecumberri prison, and the Palace of Fine Arts, and he accepted gifts from foreign governments, such as big ornamental clocks from China and the Ottoman Empire.

But Díaz was old, and he knew he needed a successor, so he held elections one last time. This time, however, his opponent was the young landowner Francisco Ignacio Madero, the son of a rich family. Madero promised democratic reforms and soon grew popular among the masses with the slogan “Sufragio efectivo, no reelección” (Effective suffrage, not reelection). He ran as candidate of the newly established National Anti-reelection Party.

Díaz, fearing this, ordered Madero’s arrest, but Madero fled to San Antonio, Texas, where he published a document called “The Plan of San Luis Potosí,” in which he refused to acknowledge Díaz’s election. Given that all legal options had proved ineffective, he proclaimed that, on November 20, the Mexican people should rise up and overthrow the dictatorship. Mexicans answered the call, but their effort was supported not by middle-class sectors, as Madero had initially thought, but by the popular masses of workers and peasants. In February 1911, Díaz’s troops were defeated, and he was forced into exile in Europe, where he died in 1915.

Madero’s Government and Zapata’s Radicalization

For the first time in decades, Mexicans had a democratically elected president. Madero had gathered the support of anti-reelection sympathizers, working-class anarcho-syndicalists like the Flores Magón brothers in the North, ranchers such as Francisco “Pancho” Villa in the northern state of Chihuahua, and peasants such as Emiliano Zapata in the southern state of Morelos. But Madero’s presidency left the Porfirian apparatus intact and delayed the much-awaited agrarian reform.

This particularly angered Zapata, who refused to recognize Madero for his demagoguery. Madero in turn branded Zapata a traitor and ordered the army to pursue him. At the end of 1911, Zapata and his supporters responded to Madero’s military aggression with the “Plan of Ayala,”[2] marking a break with Madero and proposing a radicalization that went far beyond the Plan of San Luis Potosí.

Articles 6 to 9 of the “Plan of Ayala” were based on two fundamental principles: First, the expropriation and nationalization of lands without compensation. This would be carried out against “the landowners, científicos[3] or leaders who directly or indirectly oppose this Plan,” targeting all landowning classes in the countryside. Second, the land would be seized by dispossessed peasants, based on the armed power of the insurgent people, and it was the landowners who would later have to prove their right to the lands before the courts, and not the other way around, as was called for in bourgeois legislation.

The “Plan of Ayala” was undoubtedly the most advanced programmatic formulation of the land question that arose during the Mexican Revolution. It gave Zapatismo a strong anti-capitalist bent. This was also expressed on the political terrain: if at the beginning of the revolution the Zapatistas allied themselves with Madero—whose program was limited to institutional reforms and who represented a sector of the ruling class—they finally broke with him and adopted an independent position, one whose basis was both the “Plan of Ayala” and the towns of Morelos, where they established their own military organization.

The Zapatistas tried to put the “Plan of Ayala” into practice during the following years, in the heat of the civil war. But it was not until 1915 when the Zapatistas’ radical agrarian policy could be broadened and deepened on a large scale. It was then that the Zapatistas and workers began constructing their own state, or what the historian Adolfo Gilly calls the Morelos Commune—echoing the Paris Commune of 1871. Like the communards of Paris, the peasants and agricultural workers of Morelos stormed the heavens.

Huerta’s Coup and the Aguascalientes Convention

Madero was a naive and superstitious man, always trusting any advice and refusing to listen to the people close to him, like his brother Gustavo. The U.S. embassy, fearing that the social discontent in Mexico would affect U.S. interests (as was the case in Cananea), plotted with Díaz’s nephew Félix and General Victoriano Huerta to oust him in a coup.

They gathered the support of conservative forces and staged battles in Mexico City for 10 days straight in what is known as the Decena Trágica (the Ten Tragic Days), killing thousands of civilians and troops loyal to Madero while he and his vice president, José María Pino Suárez, were under arrest. Huerta forced Madero to resign, and they finally transported him and Pino Suárez to the Lecumberri prison and executed them there; Madero’s brother, who had discovered Huerta’s conspiracy, also perished at the hands of Huerta’s men. Pedro Lascuráin was named interim president, and his only action during the 45 minutes of his tenure was to give power over to Huerta. This farce led those who had risen up against Díaz to take up arms once again.

This time, the revolutionary forces—joined by the forces of Álvaro Obregón, a Sonoran politician, and Venustiano Carranza, governor of the eastern state of Coahuila—aimed to oust Huerta, who fled to the United States. Zapata and Villa met in Mexico City and arrived with their forces in a five-hour military parade. They discussed their political positions and agreed that neither sought power, even going as far as to (in a Goofy Gophers-esque situation) ask the other to sit in the presidential chair, to which Villa finally agreed.

The Mexican Revolution held the Aguascalientes Convention to try to erase the differences between the two factions. Carranza and Obregón represented the interests of the Mexican bourgeoisie and urban sectors, which wanted to maintain the status quo as much as possible while abolishing the most abhorrent aspects that the Porfirian regime. Villa and Zapata, on the other hand, represented the interests of peasants, rural workers, and indigenous peoples, who sought land through an agrarian reform.

Since the factions represented interests of opposing classes and social forces, they could agree only on a new interim president. Carranza and Obregón argued that constitutional power needed to be respected, and thus named themselves Constitutionalists and their military branch the Constitutional Army. Villa and Zapata, on the other hand, decided to respect the agreements of the Aguascalientes Convention, and their faction was known as the Conventionalists.

The Morelos Commune

When the Zapatistas left Mexico City and returned to Morelos, Obregón went to war with Villa’s Northern Division. This was a wise strategy, since Villa was his most powerful military adversary, and defeating him would open the way to victory for the Constitutionalists. This decision, however, allowed Zapata and his supporters to build, throughout that year, one of Mexico’s most advanced social and political experiences, deepening what had been done since 1911 and in particular since the defeat of Huerta in Morelos.

The land distribution was carried out to return ancestral properties to their original owners through agrarian commissions, which raised the topographical plans and the boundaries of all the villages in the state, granting them fertile lands for cultivation and resources such as water wells, springs, fountains and forests.[4]

This culminated in a great social transformation: the expropriation without compensation of the haciendas and the elimination of the economically dominant class in Morelos. This also showed that point 8 of the “Plan of Ayala,” as noted above, undermined the entire landowning class. For example, “in just two months, between January and March 1915, 105 Morelos villages recovered their lands, as Zapata informed Roque González Garza, in charge of the Executive Power of the conventionalist government.”[5]

This was accompanied by the creation of a National Bank of Rural Credit, a Factory of Agricultural Tools, and Regional Schools of Agriculture. The purpose of these measures was to promote the sustainability of agricultural production by facilitating access to credit, education, and tools and by promoting the modernization of the countryside and collective planning. Although this was mostly concentrated in Morelos and the neighboring states where the Liberation Army of the South had military influence, Manuel Palafox—one of Zapata’s secretaries—used these initiatives to widen the scope of the “Plan of Ayala.” On this point, it is important to consider the Zapatista policy toward the sugar mills:

The most advanced production units in the state of Morelos, due to their technification and productivity, and their concentration of wage labor, were nationalized without payment: We are referring to the mills and distilleries…. The mills, in addition to the haciendas, were the main economic sustenance of the state…. There were 24 established mills, operating with state-of-the-art machinery and a very sophisticated irrigation system. The degree of development of the sugar industry can be measured if we consider that Morelos supplied one-third of the sugar consumed nationally, and was the third-largest sugar-producing region in the world.[6]

The development of this profound economic transformation was not devoid of contradictions. While Zapata and his associates preferred the proliferation of sugarcane production to feed the sugar mills and thus fund the “war economy,” the communities favored guaranteeing their livelihoods through production for self-consumption, a decision that was generally respected by the Zapatista high command.

The expropriation and nationalization of the haciendas and the sugar mills verified the anti-capitalist dynamic that unfolded in Morelos, a dynamic that—within the limits imposed by the economic and social structure of the state and regions—called into question the property of the former ruling class over the region’s primary means of production. The economic transformation was accompanied by a change in social relations. As an author quoted above puts it,

The expropriation and nationalization of land in Morelos had its correlate in forms of specific power that preserved the conquests and the achievement of the programmatic mandates of the Ayala Plan. According to Adolfo Gilly and John Womack Jr., decision-making and collective organization of villages served to re-create a type of democratic power in the state, which was the sustenance of the anti-capitalist measures carried out by the Zapatistas.[7]

Another author defines it as “an experience of self-government, of freedom for communities and of progress in transforming social, economic and political relations at the local level … an autonomous regional power—a regional state, in the strict sense.”[8]

The Morelos Commune and the Zapatista government[9] radically opposed all the governments that emerged during the revolutionary process: they destroyed—albeit locally—the capitalist state and its economic basis, sustaining themselves through the expropriation and nationalization of the latifundia and the sugar mills. In addition, peasants and agricultural workers, nourished by their own forms of organization, built their own power. To note this, as well as the revolutionary character of Morelos insurrection, does not deny their limitations. In the end, the commune would succumb to the Constitutionalist military offensive.

In particular, although Zapata and Palafox proposed extending their legislation to the national level, their political strategy, in the essential moments of the revolution, showed the primacy of a regionalist perspective, the expression of a peasant-based movement. And that, in addition, the political and social immaturity of the young working class (as well as the harmful role of Constitutionalism, which co-opted working-class sectors) deprived the insurgent peasantry of the urban ally that could have powered a revolutionary struggle against the bourgeoisie for national political power. As we will see below, however, today’s EZLN does not uphold the most advanced and revolutionary principles of the original Zapatistas.

Neo-Zapatism of the 21st Century

There is no doubt that the Morelos Commune’s experience of self-government could not have been sustained for a single day without the expropriation of the landowners and the subsequent agrarian distribution. Moreover, the self-determination of the peoples and communities headed by the Liberation Army of the South could become real only through a profound economic transformation and through an attack—in this case, a regional one—on the old power of the ruling class. And precisely because it did not have a perspective to fight for power at the national level and transform the entire capitalist structure of the country, the Zapatista experiment in self-government could not find greater support or avoid defeat.

The actions of the Liberation Army of the South and the Morelos Commune, one of the most radical actors in the Mexican Revolution, should be contrasted with the experience and program of the EZLN. Undoubtedly, the latter’s Good Government Councils (created in 2003) and the actions of the Zapatista communities are part of a decades-long process of resistance against the bourgeois state and express the aspirations of indigenous peoples. Their defense against state repression—regardless of whether they govern neoliberally or “progressively”—is a matter of principle for revolutionaries.

Sixteen years since the experience of autonomy and self-management in the Zapatista communities began, however, it is necessary to draw conclusions. As announced on July 19, 2003, in a communiqué from the Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee-General Command of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation and by the Zapatista Rebel Autonomous Municipalities of Chiapas, “The EZLN decided to totally suspend any contact with the Mexican federal government and political parties, and the Zapatista communities ratified in making resistance their main form of struggle…. Zapatista and rebel indigenous peoples have prepared a series of changes that refer to their internal functioning and their relationship with national and international civil society.”

The EZLN thus broke with the Mexican regime and created its own institutions, searching for a path toward autonomy outside the capitalist system—a project aligned with Toni Negri’s idea of “communism here and now.” But this project left the prevailing relations of production untouched and did not confront the political actors that guarantee them—such as the union bureaucracy, NGOs, religious institutions, evangelical churches, etc. It likewise maintains the yoke of exploitation on the workers, leaving untouched the dynamic of looting and theft of indigenous land.

The case of coffee growers’ cooperatives is an example. Although production for self-consumption takes precedence, and the surplus is always small and barely enough to purchase some of the goods they do not produce—salt, soap, clothes, some food, medicines, lime—the coffee sector is dominated by multinationals like Starbucks and Nestlé, which impose market prices.[10] Zapatista cooperatives cannot escape this.

As Leandro Vergara-Camus points out,

It would be a mistake to argue that the Zapatista peasants are outside capitalist relations. As many studies have shown, the Zapatistas have been directly affected by the neoliberal restructuring of the countryside. In addition, the vast majority of them have had numerous experiences of wage labor in the ranches and cities of the region and even of temporary migration to other regions of Mexico. In the terms used by the new ruralists, the families that make up the EZLN have been multifunctional for several decades now.[11]

At the core of this discussion is that the EZLN command’s policy has dissociated the rightful claim to autonomy from the need for access to land and natural resources. This disassociation is found in the San Andrés Pact, which was adopted by the EZLN leadership as a true program.

The lesson of the experience of the Morelos Commune is that autonomy is real only as long as the communities have the right to land, a historical right taken away in a history of robbery and plunder—an accelerated accumulation of communal lands on which Mexican capitalism rests. The last great chapter of this history of plunder began with the reform to the 27th Article of the Mexican Constitution by former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. This, along with the Agrarian Law of 1992, which promised “juridical security,” transformed the ejidos (communal lands) into private property with the certificates of parcel rights granted by the Registry of Agrarian Juridical Acts (RAJA). Thus, parcels of ejido lands can now be leased and sold.[12] In Chiapas this is aggravated by the state’s lack of infrastructure and means of production (irrigation embankments, troughs, wells, milking parlors, sawmills, tractors, vehicles and machinery), which economically suffocates the ejidatarios, who are forced to sell their parcels.

We Must Finish Zapata’s Work

Indigenous self-determination is unthinkable without the restitution of land. This requires a radical agrarian reform at the expense of the landowners—who own 41 percent[13] of Mexico’s 196 million hectares of land—and the multinational corporations. The latter are aided by the government through contracts to build megaprojects, such as the Mayan Train that President López Obrador has announced.

Similarly, the struggle for real autonomy leads to a confrontation with the state, which will hardly tolerate the undermining of large landownership. The EZLN leadership, however, has repeatedly stated that its strategy is not to abolish the capitalists’ power or to fight for a government of the exploited and oppressed. At this point it also differs from the experience of the Morelos Commune itself. Although it was limited to one region, state power was concentrated in that area, and it was based on the armed people and the expropriation of the landowners. The perspective of the EZLN’s leadership, in contrast, implies its coexistence with the power of the state and the construction of spaces (or “islands”) of autonomy, a strategy that evades the struggle to expropriate the means of production and free the whole of humanity from the chains of wage slavery.

A truly anti-capitalist perspective—considering that the EZLN claims to have such a perspective—must put forward the struggle for a government of workers, peasants, and poor indigenous people. An alternative power that breaks with imperialist domination and forges an alliance with the millions of immigrant workers and peasants in the United States—many of them coming from native communities—and that expropriates the capitalists and landowners, multinationals and agribusinesses. Without that, there is no way to meet the demands of the great majorities. Only a government of the workers and the people could, for example, provide the cheap credit and technical resources that poor peasants need, by expropriating the banks and industry. It could stop the dispossession, the environmental devastation, the handing over of water to large national and foreign companies, and guarantee the right to autonomy and access to land that is denied by the current political regime.

This undoubtedly implies seeking a revolutionary alliance with the working class, an alliance that will put the exploited and oppressed of the countryside and the city on their feet, with the aim of struggling for a new state, based on bodies of self-determination of the masses. The strategic objective of this alliance would therefore be communism, understood as a society of free associated producers. If in Zapata’s time this objective was unattainable given the limitations of Mexican capitalism in its infancy, today’s Mexico offers a real opportunity to realize it. The oppression and despoilment of Mexico’s rural masses is deepening, and a powerful proletariat has emerged in the countryside. The task is now to reclaim Zapata’s struggle and take it to the end.

Notes

The 1857 Constitution originally disallowed reelection. Díaz pushed for reforms that slowly granted him the right to be elected as president uninterruptedly.
Much of the information in this article was presented in Pablo Oprinari, ed., México en llamas: Interpretaciones marxistas de la Revolución Mexicana [Mexico ablaze: Marxist interpretations of the Mexican Revolution] (Mexico City: Armas de la Crítica, 2010), in particular the essays “Morelos 1915: To the Storming of Heavens,” by Jimena Vergara, and “The Paths of the Revolution,” by Pablo Oprinari. We have also drawn on Adolfo Gilly’s The Interrupted Revolution, a classic work in the Marxist historiography of the Mexican Revolution.
Científicos in this case refers to a group of Mexican politicians close to Díaz who had great fortunes and landholdings. They sympathized with the positivism of Auguste Comte, arguing that they wanted to “advocate for the scientific direction of the government and the scientific development of the country” (hence the nickname of “scientists”). They became ministers of Díaz’s government eager to succeed him in the presidency, but their plans never came to fruition.
Oprinari, “Paths of the Revolution,” 164.
Felipe Ávila, Breve historia del zapatismo (Mexico City: Crítica, 2018), 194.
Oprinari, “Paths of the Revolution,” 167.
Ibid., 169.
Ávila, Breve historia, 198.
Oddly enough, the refraction of the Mexican Revolution in Chiapas was quite contradictory. It began in 1911, after the fall of Díaz and the appointment of two governors: one in Tuxtla and the other in San Cristóbal de las Casas, formerly the state capital. So it was that by 1912 Jacinto Pérez “Pajarito” (Birdie), a warlord from the town of Chamula, led a revolt against the Tuxtlecos (residents of Tuxtla). According to the Tzotzil oral tradition, although they do not have a word for revolution in their language, they define that process at the beginning of the 20th century as the period “when we ceased to be crushed” (“k’alal ich’ay mosoal”) (or “when we ceased to be waiters”). That was when they decided not to be baldíos (indebted peons) or waiters, as John Womack Jr. explains in Rebelión en Chiapas/Antología histórica (Rebellion in Chiapas/Historical anthology). By 1914, the so-called Chiapas finqueros (hacienda owners) of San Cristóbal and Tuxtla, liberals and conservatives respectively, united to expel Carranza’s troops. The Zinacantecos, Tzotziles, allied with the Ladino peasants, confronted them. Their motive was to put an end to debt bondage. The original Zapatismo, that of the Southern caudillo, had no influence in that state, although Rafael Cal y Mayor, the son of a large landowner, arrived there in 1916 and waged an unsuccessful campaign in which he had imprisoned some U.S. landowners and distributed the lands of a few haciendas.
Sánchez Juárez and Gladys Karina, “Los pequeños cafeticultores de Chiapas: Organización y resistencia frente al mercado” [The small coffee growers of Chiapas: Organization and resistance to the market] (CITY: Universidad de Ciencias y Artes, Centro de Estudios Superiores de México y Centroamérica 2015), 200.
Leandro Vergara-Camus, “Globalización, tierra, resistencia y autonomía: El EZLN y el MST” [Globalization, land, resistance and autonomy: The EZLN and the MST], Revista Mexicana de Sociología 73, no. 3 (July-September 2011), http://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0188-25032011000300001.
It is a process that takes place in a qualified general assembly in which, in the presence of a notary public and a representative of the Agrarian Attorney, 75 percent of the ejidatarios attend and agree with the change two-thirds of the participants. J. Carlos Morett-Sánchez and Cosío-Ruiz Celso, “Panorama de los ejidos y comunidades agrarias en México” [Overview of the ejidos and agrarian communities in Mexico], Revista Agricultura, Sociedad y Desarrollo 14, no. 1 (January-March 2017), http://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1870-54722017000100125.
Data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), in “Rural Mexico of the 21st Century.”

Translation: Óscar Fernández

The Fight Against Cop "Unions”: An International Debate

Fri, 20 Nov 2020 20:11:32 GMT

On October 29, 4,000 heavily armed police descended on the town of Guernica in Argentina, about an hour south of Buenos Aires. For three months, about 1,400 families had occupied a 250-acre plot of land and set up emergency housing. The police of the province of Buenos Aires — known as La Bonaerense — used rubber bullets, tear gas, and extreme violence to throw people out of their homes.

Six weeks earlier, officers of La Bonaerense had organized protests across the province and the country. The government quickly offered concessions: increased salaries and even two hospitals just for cops. With that, the police ceased their extortion and returned to their work of repressing working-class and poor people — now with better conditions and higher job satisfaction.

The socialist Left in Argentina, naturally, opposed this police riot. Class-conscious workers, such as the union of healthcare workers in the Buenos Aires province, called for “money for healthcare, not for police.” No serious partisan of the working class can want our oppressors to have better weapons, more impunity, or higher salaries.

And yet, there are a few socialist voices who support cops. Socialist Alternative in the United States, for example, has always considered cops to be workers. In the face of the historic uprisings against the police this summer, the organization made a half-hearted turn, calling for the expulsion of cop “unions” from the labor movement — while placing hopes in progressive police officers who do not seem to exist anywhere outside of SAlt publications. This is also the longstanding position of International Socialist Alternative and the different political organizations that trace their legacy back to Ted Grant.

The LIT-CI

Something similar happened in Argentina. The International Workers League — Fourth International (LIT-CI in Spanish) and its Argentine section, the United Socialist Workers Party (PSTU¹), came out in support of the police riots. This small group pointed out that police officers “have trouble making ends meet and suffer hardship with their families.” The larger groups of the revolutionary socialist Left, led by the Party of Socialist Workers (PTS), defended the traditional socialist demand for the “dissolution of the police.”² But the PSTU called this a “pacifist policy, adapted to the regime.” They said the Left should support the police demands for higher wages — while rejecting their demands for greater impunity.

Specifically, the LIT-CI has for many years called for the formation of police unions in Argentina, even though they are prohibited. The LIT-CI has also supported police “strikes” and “unionization” in Brazil, Colombia, and other countries. Police all over the world are just as tied to racist violence as in the United States. Police in Brazil, for example, whom the LIT-CI wants to draw into the workers’ movement, were responsible for the murder of Marielle Franco.

Their logic is that such “strikes” and “unions” can lead to police officers breaking with their commanders and “uniting with the working-class and poor sectors.” Paradoxically, and in contrast to Socialist Alternative, the LIT-CI very correctly states the Marxist position that “police are not workers.” But then it becomes even harder to understand why they would want these non-worker cops to join the workers’ movement!

Their hypothesis is that such cop unions would lead to fractures in the police, splitting the capitalists’ repressive forces. The problem is that they seem to give no thought to the actual role of cop “unions” anywhere they actually exist: they protect the armed thugs of the bourgeoisie. Studies in the United States have shown that unionized police are more likely to receive complaints of excessive force, but also more likely to have those complaints dismissed.

The MST

The LIT-CI has noticed that, as the uprising has forced socialists with pro-cop positions to reconsider, they are increasingly isolated. In Argentina, the Socialist Workers Movement (MST) and the Socialist Left (IS), both part of the Workers Left Front — Unity (FIT-U), had historically also called for the unionization of police. But they appear to have gotten closer to the Marxist positions that the PTS has always defended.

Just a few years ago, the MST called for “unionization now!” for cops. Now, as Alejandro Bodart, the main leader of the MST, explained in an interview about the results of the Latin American U.S. Conference of the FIT-U, his organization has abandoned this slogan:

We believe that [police] unionization is a slogan that has to be [within the theoretical baggage], but, for example, today in reality, that slogan is not adequate anywhere. For example, we are against raising unionization in the US, where what we have to do is take advantage of the mobilization to see if we will sweep away that racist police, we are also against raising unionization here, in Argentina. But we are aware that we have to have politics towards the repressive forces, we are against ultra-leftism, and this is a debate from Lenin’s time to the present, with those who refuse to have politics towards the armed forces and the repressive forces.³

In a sense, this is a very progressive step. The MST has abandoned their longstanding policy of calling for cop unions — they once criticized the FIT for not raising that demand, but now they have adopted the FIT’s position. (Last year the MST joined with the FIT to form the FIT-U.) Now they no longer raise that demand in Argentina, the United States, or anywhere else, apparently. Yet it is to remain in the “theoretical baggage” — what does this mean? Bodart proposes to not use such a slogan now, but rather “when the revolutionary mobilization advances to such a degree that there is a revolution.” Now we can ask: Is there any reason to believe that police “unions,” which play such a thoroughly reactionary role today, will become progressive forces as a revolutionary crisis sharpens? All evidence from the uprisings in the United States shows that the opposite happens, and these “unions” become even more reactionary.

Police and Army

The LIT-CI and the MST agree in putting an equals sign between the police and the army. They argue that not calling for police unions is equivalent to having no policies at all toward the armed forces of the bourgeois state. But as the entire history of the working-class movement shows, there are fundamental differences between police and soldiers — especially conscripted soldiers. The MST and the LIT-CI make no reference at all to this distinction.

Trotsky, in his History of the Russian Revolution, makes this point clear:

Disarmament of the Pharaohs [police] becomes a universal slogan. The police are fierce, implacable, hated and hating foes. To win them over is out of the question. Beat them up and kill them. It is different with the soldiers: the crowd makes every effort to avoid hostile encounters with them; on the contrary, seeks ways to dispose them in its favour, convince, attract, fraternise, merge them in itself.

This fundamental distinction between police and soldiers has been confirmed by every revolutionary experience in the history of capitalism. In 2011 in Egypt, for example, young soldiers began to fraternize with protestors and became useless as a repressive force — the police, in contrast, fought to defend the dictatorship until they were forced to abandon their uniforms and go into hiding. We even saw initial signs of this in the United States in 2020: while police remained extremely loyal to the racist regime, soldiers from the National Guard were quickly seen as unreliable, unwilling to be agents of repression against friends and neighbors.

As a revolutionary situation develops, the non-professional parts of the armed forces — such as conscripts or volunteers — inevitably begin to split. The formation of soldiers’ councils and similar bodies of self-organization can draw rank-and-file soldiers to the side of the revolution. This was decisive in the victorious socialist revolution in 1917 in Russia. The reason that police never join revolutions, as Marxists have always analyzed, is an expression of their material position as a privileged and professional force for repression divided from the working population.

Is Argentina Different?

The sympathizing section of the LIT-CI in the United States, Workers Voice, certainly hates cops and their “unions” as much as all other socialists in the United States. We were not able to find anything on their website about cop “unions” specifically, except a statement by the Revolutionary Socialist Network (RSN) that correctly states: “police out of the labor movement!” and “We do NOT support police winning better wages or working conditions.” But how can socialists demand better working conditions for police in one country and not in another? Argentinian police are no less murderous than in the United States — the Argentinian police institutions played a central role in the last military dictatorship. The LIT-CI’s position seems incoherent: do they want police to form unions and join the workers’ movement so they can kick them out again?

One could argue that the police and their “unions” are of a fundamentally different character in the imperialist USA and dependent Argentina. Except: as far as we are aware, there is no example in the history of capitalism, in any country, in which police unions have played a progressive role⁴.

Since Marxism is, in the words of V.I. Lenin, the “summing up of experience, illuminated by a profound philosophical conception of the world and a rich knowledge of history,” the Marxist position on the police is based on the revolutionary experience of the working class. The LIT-CI is calling on workers to support their oppressors’ demands for better working conditions — this appears to be based on a completely ahistorical, idealistic theory that police unions might somehow spontaneously, transform into their opposite. We hope that comrades from the LIT-CI, as well as Socialist Alternative and other organizations still placing hopes in police “unions,” will reconsider this mistaken view and fight, alongside with the rest of the socialist Left, to expel cops from the workers’ movement, rather than trying to draw them in.

All over the world the police have proven themselves to be violent, bigoted agents of capital. They are strikebreakers. They evict workers from their homes. Police are not workers, and socialists who defend them are on the wrong side of the class line. We are internationalists and fight the police worldwide because the police are our class enemies worldwide.

Notes [ + ]

1.	↑	Or PSTU-A to differentiate it from the LIT-CI’s Brazilian section, which is also called the PSTU.
2.	↑	We have written a number of polemics with the LIT-CI over the years. Here we are focussing on this one specific question. A more general overview can be found in our Reading List on the Trotskyist Fraction.
3.	↑	We have slightly modified the translation based on the original Spanish.
4.	↑	Perhaps there were certain tendencies in 1918-19 in Britain for police to align with the workers’ movement, but these potential links were quickly broken by the government.

Trans* Liberation is Only Possible If We Overthrow Capitalism

Fri, 20 Nov 2020 14:18:27 GMT

More Trans* people have been murdered in the U.S. so far in 2020 than in the entirety of 2019. This is the reality for Trans* people under capitalism. The Trans* community is overwhelmingly disadvantaged by capitalism and tends to be poorer, more precarious, and more vulnerable.

In the U.S., around 30 percent of Trans* people live below the poverty line. Trans* people face severe housing discrimination and more than 10 percent have faced eviction. Unhoused Trans* people are also far more likely to be unsheltered than cisgendered unhoused people. Prior to the current economic crisis, the unemployment rate in the Trans* community was double the national average and 44 percent of Trans* people who were working were underemployed.

In 2018, 35 percent of Trans* youth reported having attempted suicide in the past year, compared to 7 percent of cisgender teens. In that same study, 31 percent of Trans* teens reported that they had experienced sexual violence within the past 12 months. Further, Health care is often inaccessible, unaffordable, or abusive for many Trans* people.

Trans* people are also disproportionately policed and imprisoned. 22 percent of Trans* people report being harassed by police officers while 7 percent of Black Trans* people were sexually assaulted by police officers. In prisons, Trans* people face horrific rates of abuse and assault.

These statistics paint a harrowing picture of life for Trans* people under capitalism.

Rainbow capitalists would have us believe that all of this is because of individual bigotry and slight structural flaws. The answer, these queer servants of capital tell us, is that we need to ensure greater Trans* visibility by putting more Trans* people on boards of directors and billboards. They would have us believe that simply seeing a Trans* person in a Starbucks commercial will somehow benefit the Trans* community. “Look at us,” they want to tell us, “we’re increasing visibility, we’re helping solve the problem.”

But visibility is not liberation.

That isn’t to say that visibility is not important. But normalizing our oppression by putting a Trans* face on capitalism does nothing to put an end to systemic oppression and poverty. The solution isn’t to have more Trans* CEOs but to end the system as a whole — because the oppression of Trans* people under capitalism isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.

By design capitalism is an inherently imbalanced system that is based around a minority ruling over the majority. In order to do this, they need to find ways to divide the working class against itself so that they don’t question why they continue to work within a system that exploits them. From this need to divide sprung the exploitation of distinctions on race, gender, and sexual orientation. The working class was turned against itself by the bourgeoisie and their allies in the church and media.

Capitalism reinforces social relations that help capitalism function. For example, the gender binary props up the concept of the nuclear family, which capitalism relies on for (largely uncompensated) reproductive labor. Identities beyond that binary are then marginalized in an attempt to protect a social structure that is better for capitalism. This is carried over into the workplace where discrimination against Trans* people helps to maintain a pool of precarious labor for capitalists to tap into.

Given this, it is impossible to imagine a capitalism that doesn’t oppress because capitalism is based upon exploitation. The ruling class needs to maintain a system that allows them to enrich themselves off of our labor. This requires one class that is exploited and another that exploits. Even if every single Fortune 500 Company had a Trans* CEO, this would still be the way that the system works. And, given that Trans* people are overwhelmingly working class and vulnerable, they will continue to be oppressed.

Trans* liberation is not possible within the bounds of capitalism. If we want to end the horrific rates of Trans* poverty or lower the rates of suicide among Trans* youth or end police violence against Trans* people of color, then we have to end the system of capitalism.

We must overthrow capitalism for Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and all the other Trans* heroes of the past who fought for liberation.

We must overthrow capitalism for Layleen Polanco, Tony McDade, and all the other Trans* victims of police violence.

We must overthrow capitalism for the Trans* people sleeping on the streets, struggling with unemployment, and for all of the countless Trans* youth who are wondering if their lives are worth living.

Today is Transgender Day of Rememberance. Let us remember the brave struggles of our predecessors and carry their struggle forward, into the streets and into our workplaces; into our organizations; and into the future because as long as capitalism continues to stand, we will only see more devastation for the Trans* community.

Dangerous Working Conditions: Teachers in the Midwest Speak Out

Thu, 19 Nov 2020 22:38:38 GMT

Educators in the Heartland are feeling the pressures of the pandemic. Without widespread testing, mask usage, or any restrictions on businesses, many school districts and workers are left to fend for themselves. As we move into winter, the number of cases and deaths are projected to rise.

Coronavirus cases are surging all over the US, but no region has been hit as hard as the Midwest. On November 14th, Johns Hopkins University reported that the state of South Dakota had a weekly average positivity rate of 59.5%. Despite the high risk of transmission, South Dakota and its neighboring state Nebraska have yet to implement a statewide mask mandate. As of Tuesday, the governor of neighboring Iowa has only now issued a mask mandate, after months of refusing to do so.

To try to understand what it is like for workers on the frontlines of the pandemic, I talked to some education workers in those states. According to these workers, the state response has created a dangerous situation for workers and students.

“My wish is that our state and local government would do more to protect our citizens. It has been proven that masks save lives! It is hard to make everyone wear masks at school, but it can be done. When they (the students) see others not wearing them in businesses around town, it defeats our goal of stopping the spread.”

She also told us that the state has made a supply of rapid tests available for staff and students, but we found that these tests are reserved for symptomatic individuals. This fails to take into account CDC guidelines that say asymptomatic carriers can also pass on the coronavirus. In Iowa and Nebraska, testing has yet to be made widely available in schools.

Workers in all three states say they have made preparations should they need to shift to distance learning. But at least in Nebraska, teachers are still unclear when that shift might come, “Originally our school district had said we would all be shifting to distance learning once the dial had gone to red. That has already happened yet no change has been made.”

Similarly, in Iowa, one of the nation’s hardest-hit counties released guidelines in July stating that should the positivity rate rise above 15 percent schools could file a request with the Iowa Department of Education to move to distance learning in the elementary and middle schools. Workers report that even in the face of a 29 percent positivity rate, no request has been filed to make the switch to remote or hybrid learning.

Staff petitioned the school board to require mask use, in keeping with new CDC guidelines over a month ago, but their request went unheard. This left workers feeling helpless to stop the spread. “Once school started, I couldn’t help but feel resentful that even though I was trying to do the morally responsible thing and make personal sacrifices, my efforts were nullified because I walked into an unsafe environment for eight hours a day. It didn’t have to be that way. Finally, our school board has reversed its decision, and as of Friday our county has implemented a public mask mandate. I want to be optimistic that things will get better, but I guess we will have to ‘wait and see,’” said one educator in Iowa. As of Tuesday, the state of Iowa has implemented a mask mandate, after months of leaving its workers out to dry.

Workers in each state agree: the messaging from their local politicians has been that mandates are too invasive and shutdowns are too extreme, but the lack of safety measures has made it difficult to stop the spread of the virus.

At the same time, education workers also face anti-worker legislation that poses obstacles for the labor movement to respond to these life-threatening conditions. Most states in the U.S., including the three mentioned here, have laws prohibiting teachers from going on strike, which undermines the right for teachers to defend themselves against these dangerous working conditions. Similarly, because these states have refused to shut down businesses, or cancel rent and mortgage payments, working parents are without options should the schools be forced to close. The second wave is now upon us, and instead of looking out for workers and students, elected officials in the Heartland continue to put profits over lives, putting the region and the country at great risk, and prolonging the pandemic for us all.

Pfizer and Moderna Vaccines: A Chance for Corporations to Monopolize Public Health

Thu, 19 Nov 2020 19:54:03 GMT

Pfizer announced Wednesday that its Covid-19 vaccine was found to be 95 percent effective and had no major side effects. Out of 44,000 participants, 170 participants contracted coronavirus, 162 of whom were in the placebo group and eight in the vaccine group. According to Pfizer’s press release, the vaccine was found to prevent mild and severe forms of Covid-19 and was found to be 94 percent effective in older adults who do not respond as strongly to some vaccine types. Pfizer’s vaccine candidate is well above the 50 percent efficacy threshold set by the FDA for emergency-use authorization, and Pfizer may apply for emergency authorization as soon as next week. According to this timeline, the vaccine could be authorized for certain high-risk populations before the end of the year, but this would require everything running smoothly, which is unlikely. The Trump administration has already ordered 100 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine, worth $1.95 billion, with the option of buying 500 million more.

According to Moderna’s press release, their competing vaccine candidate has demonstrated 94.5 percent efficacy in preventing Covid-19 infections. If the vaccine is approved, Moderna could receive up to $2.45 billion in federal funds toward both further development and future distribution. The Department of Health and Human Services has already granted $955 million to support the clinical development of Moderna’s vaccine candidate: $483 million when Moderna began phase 1 trials in mid-March and $472 million to support phase 3 of the vaccine trial in July. In August, the government agreed to buy and fund the distribution of the initial 100 million doses of the Moderna vaccine contingent on approval, with the option to get more doses.

The goal of President Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” project is to develop a vaccine as quickly as possible, but this will always be inefficient in the private sector. There are currently 200 different vaccines in production, 53 of which are in human clinical trials, 155 of which are still in development, but none of which are coordinated. While Pfizer and Moderna are the front-runners, any of these other candidates could still rise to the forefront.

Pfizer’s initial press release demonstrated 90 percent effectiveness. Then Moderna’s announcement came out, and Pfizer revised its efficacy to 95 percent. Pharmaceutical companies will continue to one-up each other so that they can be contracted as the first vaccine suppliers. But all the data we currently have are from Pfizer and Moderna’s press releases. There has not yet been an independent peer review on the safety or efficacy of either of these vaccines. Pfizer reported that some participants experienced fever, fatigue, chills, redness, and swelling as side effects. One Moderna vaccine candidate recipient reported a mild fever after taking the first dose, and “full-on Covid-like symptoms” after the second; another participant experienced fatigue after the first dose and a fever after the second. AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, two other companies developing vaccines, both had to pause their phase 3 vaccine clinical trials over side effect concerns. At least two participants in AstraZeneca’s phase 3 trial experienced transverse myelitis, an inflammatory syndrome that affects the spinal cord, and one participant in the Johnson & Johnson trial experienced “unexplained illness” after receiving the shot. The jury is also still out on whether these vaccine candidates will have any long-term side effects.

Production and Distribution Concerns

Even if everything goes smoothly and either of the vaccines is approved for use, how will it be produced and distributed? The federal and state governments will dictate where and how much of the vaccine is shipped. Pfizer’s vaccine will have to be stored at -70 degrees Celsius (-94 degrees Fahrenheit) until shortly before it is injected. By comparison, Moderna’s vaccine can be shipped at a significantly higher temperature, -4 degrees Fahrenheit, so it would not have some of the same distribution challenges as the Pfizer candidate. But distributing it would still require hundreds of refrigerated trucks, and the vaccine can be kept in a standard refrigerator for only up to seven days.

Hospitals and pharmacies will have to figure out how to store vaccines. In the case of the Pfizer vaccine, it could be stored in ultracold freezers (which are pretty uncommon), in conventional freezers for up to five days, or in the cooler for up to 15 days as long as the dry ice is replenished and the cooler isn’t opened more than twice a day. Hospitals and states around the country are trying to buy ultracold freezers to prepare for mass deployment despite the CDC’s instructions to not purchase freezers, because it is developing its own storage solutions for the vaccine rollout. Underfunded, underresourced, and geographically isolated distribution facilities will be unable to distribute large amounts of vaccine. As long as medical companies and large electronics manufacturers exist under capitalism, they will do what is profitable instead of prioritizing public health. As a direct consequence of health care’s commodification, hospitals and states are panic-buying freezers and thereby hoarding them, keeping them out of reach from other states and hospitals.

To administer the vaccine, hospitals, pharmacies, and other distribution sites will need sufficient supplies, PPE, and training. McKesson, a major medical supplier, is the primary candidate to sell syringes, needles, and other supplies to hospitals and distribution sites so that they can administer the vaccine. Hospital workers will have to be trained in administering the vaccine and will also be asked to ensure that people who get the vaccine come back in three weeks to get the second dose.

Then comes one of the most contentious problems: figuring out who gets the vaccine and on what timeline. U.S. officials are claiming that eldercare facilities and health care workers will be first in line. As vaccines become more widely available, Maine and other states are planning to offer the vaccine to additional higher-risk groups, such as people with underlying health conditions, school staff, and people in jails and prisons. While it is critical to ensure that people with the highest exposure and degree of fatality from Covid-19 receive the vaccine first, there are still no plans in place to ensure that the most vulnerable are prioritized. The federal government is responsible only for acquiring the vaccine to give to states, but states must decide how to distribute the vaccine on their own. This results in a patchwork of problems: Washington State’s health department does not have a warehouse that can store the Pfizer vaccine at a cold enough temperature; Arizona is unsure how to distribute the vaccine to rural communities and tribal lands; and North Dakota and Oregon have no clear strategy to take care of migrant workers. More sparsely populated rural areas that lack ultracold storage will likely be some of the last areas to get access. Despite being hurt most by the lack of federal guidance and the prioritization of reopening, groups such as undocumented folks and indigenous people will be deprioritized again.

Effects on the Stock Market

The Dow shot up 4.8 percent in premarket trading after Pfizer announced that its coronavirus vaccine was found to be 90 percent effective in blocking infection on November 9. Pfizer stocks rose 7.7 percent, and its German vaccine partner, BioNTech, rose by 13.9 percent. After Moderna released its vaccine news, Pfizer shares dropped 4 percent, and its German partner BioNTech’s shares fell 12.8 percent. AstraZeneca, which is planning to release interim results on its vaccine in December, saw its shares drop by 0.9 percent.

The vaccine news caused a chain reaction in other areas of the stock market. Since vaccines would require industrial cooling solutions, stocks in freezer and cooling circulator maker Daihan Scientific and deep freezer supplier IlShinbiobase also increased by as much as 30 percent on November 10. European stocks and oil prices are also through the roof. In a client note, Goldman Sachs analysts are projecting that emergency-use authorization (EUA) and distribution of an effective vaccine will, over the next several months, lead to significant upward earnings revisions for virus-exposed firms and help give investors confidence to rotate into those low-valuation stocks, allowing for an improved year-end point target of 3,700 for the S&P 500 and a 16 percent gain in 2021.

The current arrangement places the financial burden of a vaccine’s failure squarely on the backs of the working class, given that taxpayers will shoulder much of the financial risk while corporations stand to generate huge profits should the vaccines succeed. The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) has doled out large sums of money to pharmaceutical companies such as Moderna and Johnson & Johnson. Many of the companies working on the vaccines have secured government contracts, positioning them to be the first distributors with at least a temporary monopoly. As a result, these companies can generate millions and billions of dollars in profit well before the vaccine is ever put into use.

History Repeats Itself

The coronavirus has laid bare the consequences of allowing capitalists to regulate public health. But we’ve all seen the signs before. In 2005, Gilead Sciences notified federal regulators that it was suspending development of a potentially safer, more potent HIV-fighting drug than the one on the market, and it did not restart its FDA application until 2010. A coalition called PrEP4All Collaboration filed a petition on December 4, alleging that Gilead postponed development of the safer drug so it could continue to gain monopoly profits from its older combination HIV drugs, including Viread and Truvada, before those drugs went off patent and faced generic competition. One of the most common forms of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) to prevent HIV contraction, Truvada, relies on a molecule called tenofovir disoproxil fumarate (TDF). Descovy, Gilead’s safer drug, contains tenofovir alafenamide fumarate (TAF). TAF is more efficiently absorbed by the body than TDF, so it can be dosed at less than one 10th the dose of TDF, while having equivalent anti-HIV efficacy, decreasing the negative side effects on the bones and kidneys. PrEP4All petitioned for the Patent and Trademark Office to reject Gilead’s request for three extra years of patent life on the newer TAF drug so that generic versions of the drug could begin to enter the market. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office accepted Gilead’s request, allowing Gilead to maintain monopoly pricing on its HIV prevention drugs until 2025.

The CDC sued Gilead Sciences in November 2019 for refusing to obtain a license to use its patented regimens while profiting from research funded by hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars. Truvada was sold by Gilead beginning in 2004 as an antiretroviral medication to suppress viral load in people living with HIV, while the CDC proved in its government labs in Atlanta that Truvada could be used as a prophylactic to prevent HIV infection in monkeys. The CDC filed patent applications, which resulted in patents being awarded to the government in 2015. Before the government patent approval, however, the FDA approved Truvada as a prevention regimen in 2012, allowing Gilead to make billions of dollars marketing Truvada as PrEP.

In the United States, PrEP costs $20,000 a year for a patient without insurance. In Australia, the cost is $340 a year, so many more of that country’s most at-risk population is taking PrEP. According to ACT UP, the medication costs only $6 a month to manufacture. Reducing Truvada’s U.S. retail price even to Australia’s cost level could decrease HIV transmissions by half each year, demonstrating the impact of capitalist profiteering on human life.

While there are not as many drug-safety concerns about the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines (from the press releases they have provided us, at least, although there are reasons to suspect this data), the parallels with Gilead are stark. Clinical trials were subsidized with public funds while corporations stand to generate monopoly profits on the resulting drugs. The companies would keep the patents on the drugs, and their monopolies are further protected by the absence of data-transparency requirements regarding the sharing of key studies, cell lines, and the know-how to make a product. The vaccine costs $15 per dose to manufacture, and Pfizer would sell it to the government at $39, allowing Pfizer to generate profits of $14 billion worldwide in 2021.

Capitalism has revealed its insufficiency in addressing a public health crisis as large as the pandemic. To ameliorate this crisis, we need a truly socialist economy and social system. Government regulation of vaccines will be insufficient so long as their availability is dictated by corporate interests and individual states’ purchasing power. Nationalizing vaccine production and distribution would increase data transparency, allow vaccines to be produced faster and in larger quantities, and facilitate the coordination of shipping networks and freezer storage, which would allow them to be more quickly transported to the general population. Waiting around for states to figure out how to get the vaccine to certain communities will mean hundreds of thousands more deaths across the country. Putting vaccine production in the hands of workers who prioritize public health would prevent some of the most vulnerable among us, such as undocumented folks and the incarcerated, from being denied or delayed access to a critical resource.

The "Social Dilemma” of Capitalism in Decline

Thu, 19 Nov 2020 14:30:26 GMT

The Social Dilemma, which appeared last month on Netflix, does not contain a lot of surprises. It features critics of social media companies — like Tristan Harris, once an ethics officer at Google and unironically called the “conscience of Silicon Valley” — who have already been interviewed in countless liberal publications.

The documentary’s innovation is that it features fictional interludes. The algorithms that run your feed on Facebook or Instagram are portrayed as three uniformed agents standing at control panels like ensigns on a Star Trek bridge. Seeing tech personified like this gives us a feeling of just how nefarious the feed is. The actors give the algorithm a face: one that is clearly evil.

We know that every time we pull out our phone, we are served an endless supply of cat pictures and hot takes. Yet this content is not random. A supercomputer is learning, with billions of experiments per day, what to show us in order to maximize the time we spend with that particular app, and thus maximize the number of ads.

This machine learning system, with no understanding of human society, might have helped create flat earth theory or QAnon. Not that a computer was needed to come up with dumb ideas — but the algorithm determined, via endless trial and error, that these particular dumb ideas would glue a certain number of people to their screens if “recommended” to a mass audience.

Addiction

Everyone is familiar with the addictive nature of social media — who can get through a screening of the film without at least a quick glance at their notifications? So it is fascinating to see the former head of Pinterest talking about his unsuccessful attempts to leave his phone out of the bedroom. The inventor of the “Like” button recognizes that, trying to spread joy in the world, he unleashed a monster.

Truly, the sorcerer’s apprentice has lost control of all those broomsticks!

Elsewhere in the film, experts explain what social media has done. A dramatic spike in depression, anxiety, and suicide among teenagers, for example, correlates fairly closely with the spread of social media to our phones around 2010.

But these same experts doggedly ignore any phenomena besides social media. Was 2010 not also during the period where a historic crisis of capitalism robbed young people of any sense of security about the future?

The film blames social media for “polarization” and “radicalization,” and this is illustrated with mini-snippets of protests. We see masked demonstrators waving signs or throwing molotov cocktails. The images are from the U.S., France, Hong Kong, and anywhere else. The demonstrators might be protesting against vaccines or for autonomy from the Chinese government or against social cuts — the filmmakers are telling us that all political conflict in today’s world is the result of social media.

Left vs. Right

One of the fictional interludes — featuring a protagonist who attends high school despite clearly being in his mid-20s — shows a young man getting drawn in by “extreme” content. We all know the possibilities: incels, the alt-right, or countless other right-wing movements recruit like this.

But the filmmakers want us to know that “extremism” exists independently of political content. The not-so-young man is thus attracted to a movement called the “Extreme Center”! The film shows images that supposedly could be from the Right or the Left. But looking carefully, we see the posts contain a socialist fist, a Black youtuber, and thoroughly left-wing aesthetics.

When the protagonist eventually joins an “extreme” demonstration, the multiethnic composition of the mob lets us know this can’t possibly be a right-wing rally. In other words, these “experts” on the dangers of social media are showing us the horror that a white “teenager” could get angry about racism and join a protest against police violence. Oh no!

This “apolitical” stance is shored up by politicians calling for civility. Which politicians have been chosen? Marco Rubio and Jeff Flake! Two champions of racism, imperialism, and neoliberalism in the most aristocratic body of the U.S. regime.

As absurd as it might sound, the film is arguing that any form of social conflict is caused by social media. They are just a step away from arguing that the U.S. Civil War could have been avoided had Abraham Lincoln not gotten embroiled in an epic Twitter battle with Jefferson Davis. Have they ever considered how the Civil Rights movement emerged? And more importantly: Do they think this kind of “unrest” was a bad thing?

Perspectives

Against its intentions, the film shows some of the wonders of technology. Social media undoubtedly played a role in a whole generation in the United States increasingly coming to understand that capitalism offered them no future, and that socialism would be a vastly superior social system. This is the kind of “extremism” that the film’s “ethical” capitalists are ultimately worried about.

They acknowledge that social media companies have no reason to put the brakes on this addictive technology, as the market demands that they increase profits every year. The solutions they propose — “regulation” in order to “realign fiscal incentives” — are comically inadequate for the scale of the problem they are describing.

There is in fact quite a simple “regulation” that could give humanity all the benefits of this amazing technology without the devious mechanisms designed to make people addicted. That is: public ownership under worker’s control. The users of social media — which is basically the same as all of humanity — need to decide democratically what happens on these platforms.

For years, Mark Zuckerberg decreed that Holocaust denial would be allowed on the virtual version of the public square. And then from one day to the next, he reversed this call. Why should a young gazillionaire be deciding on what kind of opinions are acceptable in public? In order to shuck his responsibilities, Zuck has said that Facebook shouldn’t be in the business of arbitrating truth. And in a sense, we agree with him here: Facebook needs to be in the public domain.

In other words, we need to nationalize the social media companies, and put them under the control of not only their workers, but the entire working population.

Will this stop “polarization” and “radicalization”? Well, the organic crisis that is engulfing bourgeois society is not some “technical” issue that can be solved by altering a few lines of code. Yes, social media companies are doubtlessly accelerating the spread of morbid symptoms of capitalism’s decline. But the crisis is ultimately a result of the ruling class’s inability to address the most urgent problems facing humanity. This is why they escape to ever-more-distant fantasies — as far as Mars! — as the planet burns and their “democracy” becomes increasingly clownish.

The demand to nationalize Facebook and the rest of Big Tech is not just a reform program. Rather, it is a step toward putting all of society’s wealth under the control of working people. This would not only give humanity control over the means of production — it would, as a pleasant side effect, also remove the social basis for the terrible ideas that spread across social media.

NYC Closes Schools Again. They Should Have Never Reopened in the First Place.

Thu, 19 Nov 2020 00:08:26 GMT

The New York City public school system is shutting down all in-person classes this Thursday, November 19. It’s been less than two months since schools reopened earlier this fall despite widespread criticism from staff and parents that there weren’t sufficient safety measures in place. Today’s decision came from Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office: numbers showed that New York City reached a 3% Covid-19 rolling positivity rate, the threshold pre-determined by city officials to trigger a shut down. The decision contradicts the much higher limit posed by the state; despite quickly rising infection rates in the city, Governor Andrew Cuomo insisted that a higher threshold — closer to his state limit of 9% — would be preferable for future shutdowns. After all, then schools might be able to stay open longer and keep parents at work rather than at home.

This move from the City of New York comes after weeks of warnings and grievances from teachers and staff who claim that city schools are not safe for them or their students. Since schools reopened this fall, many teachers have kept their windows open while teaching — even in freezing temperatures — due to lack of ventilation.

After only a couple of months of in person teaching, the order to shutter school doors shows that New York City schools should have never been reopened in the first place. Even with masks, in-person instruction has posed a danger to the lives of students, teachers, families, and communities alike by contributing to this latest resurgence of Covid-19 cases in NYC. But given the City’s experience from the first wave of the pandemic in the spring, this should have come as no surprise.

Rather than rushing to change school reopening plans and throwing the lives of teachers and students into disarray, Mayor de Blasio and the City should have spent time figuring out how to provide quality online instruction to the largest and most diverse school system in the country — based on the guidance and input of teachers, staff, and students. Instead, they followed the lead of corporate and political interests who wanted to keep schools open to ensure the safe recovery of the economy while putting the lives of millions of people at risk. They said that moving to remote learning was too expensive.

Of course, many students don’t have Internet access and teachers too lack training from the city on how to better deliver lessons online. But rather than using this as an excuse to keep schools open, the City should provide Internet and mobile data to all students. Furthermore, beyond basic Internet access, many students need suitable devices to use for class and schoolwork. However, the Department of Education claims that it cannot accommodate such measures because it doesn’t have enough funding. Never mind the fact that it spent an unnecessary $269 million in a deal with Apple to provide iPads to city students who cannot even use them for schoolwork. Added to this is the fact that school budgets have been severely slashed for years to make more room in the city budget for the police and other departments that better serve capitalist interests.

While schools must close to stop cases of Covid-19 from exploding once again throughout the city, these closures could spell disaster for millions of parents who are not guaranteed leave to care for their children during the day. With NYC students at home in the coming weeks, it’s imperative that parents are given paid time for as long as the shutdown is in place. Further, the decision to lift the shutdown must be in the hands, not of politicians and city officials, but of teachers, staff, and families in order to ensure that the next re-openings are actually safe. The premature re-openings of schools in order to salvage the economy has done nothing but fuel this second wave of the pandemic. Teachers and staff should not be forced to go back to work once again in unsafe conditions to protect capitalist profits.

As cases rise across the city, shuttering public schools is a good first step, but it’s not enough. The City must ensure that restaurants, gyms, and other businesses that facilitate the spread of the virus can be shut down without cutting off the income of their employees during this next phase of the pandemic. New York City lost over 24,000 people to COVID-19 this year. We risk losing many more if politicians are allowed once again to prioritize businesses’ profits over people’s lives.

Fifteen Asia-Pacific Countries Sign World’s Largest Free Trade Agreement

Wed, 18 Nov 2020 18:25:53 GMT

At a virtual summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) on November 15, its 10 members — along with China, South Korea, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand — ratified the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), creating the world’s largest free trade agreement. China immediately hailed it as “a victory for multilateralism and free trade,” clearly referring to the failure of the Trans-Pacific Partnership — from which China had been excluded — after the United States withdrew from it in 2017. For China specifically, this victory is both political and symbolic.

The sheer size of the agreement’s member countries, which together account for a third of the world’s population, should not mask its relatively narrow scope — at least for now. The RCEP is an initial attempt to standardize and harmonize the region’s quite heterogeneous economic areas and the multitude of treaties already in force. As noted in the Economist, when the TPP was being negotiated, “American officials would snootily dismiss RCEP as an inferior, 20th-century-style pact, focused on tariffs and rudimentary trade-facilitation measures, in contrast to the TPP, with its coverage of areas such as environmental and labour standards, and rules for state-owned enterprises.”

A Potential Long-Term Platform in the Fight for Domestic Markets

While the current agreement is more political than economic, it could serve as a platform to further integrate the Asia-Pacific region, at the expense of the United States, and serve Chinese interests in the struggle for emerging domestic markets in Southeast Asia. The ASEAN member countries have distinguished themselves by effectively managing the Covid-19 pandemic. As the Geopolitical Monitor reminds us, countries such as Vietnam are well positioned in the current economic situation. And the RCEP also brings the region’s three giants — China, Japan, and South Korea — together for the first time.

This agreement constitutes a de facto bloc that excludes the United States and India, whose relations with China’s have deteriorated, while strengthening China’s strategic and logistical partnerships with them. Moreover, according to a Peterson Institute for International Economics report (mentioned in the Economist article), the RCEP could have a greater financial impact than the TPP, generating an additional annual value of about $186 billion (compared to $147 billion for the TPP). The report also states that the benefits will be particularly significant for China, Japan, and South Korea. More importantly, the RCEP could also aid negotiations on a potential trilateral free trade agreement between the three Asian giants, one that would help them escape their current political binds.

A Significant Victory for China

In rapidly shrinking markets, the Covid-19 pandemic has made international competition even fiercer than it already was. The various capitalist powers are already beginning to battle over negotiating the economic recovery to their advantage, thus stirring up rivalries across the globe — to the detriment of the workers who are paying the full price of the crisis. The Asia-Pacific region finds itself in relatively good shape, buoyed by its more efficient management of the pandemic than North America’s and Europe’s. After four years of U.S. retreat during the Trump era, this development — even if confined for now to politics and symbolism — is a partial victory for the Chinese leadership. It is the second major agreement in the region that excludes the United States, as the Washington Post points out.

In situations of crisis, economics and politics tend to merge more sharply. The signing of the agreement and the Chinese media hype it has spurred may bode well for a deepening of China’s influence in the region, as evidenced by India’s keeping its distance from a treaty it mistrusts. In the looming global crisis, the struggle for Asian domestic markets will undoubtedly be a major component of the fundamental opposition between China and the United States, an opposition that will not disappear with Trump’s departure.

First published in French on November 16 in Révolution Permanente.

Translation by Scott Cooper

Not Enough Nurses: Philadelphia Healthcare Workers Strike for Safe Staffing

Wed, 18 Nov 2020 15:50:18 GMT

Today is the second day of a planned two-day strike at St. Mary Medical Center in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. The nearly 800 nurses who walked out Tuesday morning are members of the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals (PASNAP), having won union recognition last fall. They are striking for their first contract and, importantly, for safe staffing ratios that would establish a maximum number of patients for which each nurse is responsible. This demand, vital for healthcare workers across the country pre-Covid, has become an even more critical necessity during the pandemic.

The bosses, Trinity Health System, used the opportunity of the economic downturn at the start of the pandemic to lay off administrative and housekeeping staff. Cutting labor costs and squeezing the remaining workers is a tried-and-true method to increase profitability. Some 350 workers — or 12 percent of the workforce — were furloughed in April, which dumped more clerical and even sanitation tasks on already overworked healthcare workers. The work of nurses affected by coronavirus who had to take medical leaves or care for sick family members had to be absorbed by those still on the job.

Trinity, one of the country’s largest healthcare companies, owns 90 hospitals in 22 states, including five in the Philadelphia area. St. Mary alone has brought in around $58 million in profit each year for the last three years. The company has more than enough to hire needed staff and settle the strike, but instead has retaliated by locking out the nurses until Sunday, claiming it needs time to switch out the replacement nurses.

At Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital, another Trinity facility in the Philadelphia area, 260 nurses had authorized a strike and given the required 10-day notice, but there a deal was struck. Their first contract includes more on-call nurses and a 3 percent raise each year for three years, followed by a 4 percent raise in the final year. This is nowhere near adequate for essential workers in the midst of a historic health crisis.

PASNAP-represented nurses at two other hospitals in Philadelphia — St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children and Einstein Medical Center — also voted to authorize strikes but have not yet given their 10-day notices. At Einstein, negotiations for a new contract have been ongoing for more than a year. The new owners of St. Christopher’s, Tower Health and Drexel University, are not honoring the paid time off accumulated under the previous owners, who went bankrupt — the same bankruptcy that closed Hahnemann Hospital.

Pennsylvania is seeing nearly 5,000 new Covid-19 cases a day, and the pandemic is set to get even worse in the winter. Only in a backwards system like capitalism would hospitals go bankrupt, close, and not even be reopened during a health crisis. That workers must strike for even the most basic staffing requirements to confront a crisis like coronavirus is a testament to the inadequacy of the private health system. Under capitalism, hospitals are run for profit and make decisions based on profit maximization rather than what is needed to keep people healthy and cure the sick.

The strike at St. Mary shows one way to fight back. But with four hospitals and more than 2,500 PASNAP nurses having voted to authorize a strike, the question remains: Why did the union leadership separate the struggle? Surely a larger strike is a stronger strike, and the need for better ratios is felt throughout the healthcare sector. Confronting the pandemic requires ever more audacity.

Palestinian Feminist Organizer Khitam Saafin Detained by Israeli Forces

Wed, 18 Nov 2020 01:26:11 GMT

On November 2, Palestinian feminist organizer Khitam Saafin was arrested by Israeli police forces, along with six other activists, including student leader Shatha Tawil and union organizer Mohammad Jawabreh. On November 9, without being publicly charged or granted a trial, Saafin was ordered to serve six months of administrative detention, a colonial-era policy used for political suppression.

Saafin serves as the President of the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees (UPWC), which is affiliated with the Marxist PFLP Party, and advocates for increased involvement from Palestinian women in politics, with the ultimate goal of ending the illegal Israeli occupation. The UPWC has held conferences on the impact of the occupation on Palestinian women, organized solidarity rallies to support incarcerated women and their families, and released statements detailing Israeli human rights violations. For this work, Saafin and other members have been targeted. She had previously been targeted by Israeli police forces in 2017, when she was incarcerated for three months under a similar detention order.

Administrative detention is a punitive system first introduced under British colonial rule. It is systematically used by Israeli forces to detain Palestinian people without trials or even charges; currently, 370 Palestinian people are indefinitely incarcerated under administrative detention orders, including 40 women. The detention order is based on secret evidence, which not even defense lawyers can access, that is asserted without proof or transparency by the Israeli military. The undisclosed evidence then becomes the basis upon which Palestinian civilians, leftist political activists , community organizers, and many others are incarcerated. These sentences can also be indefinitely renewed, further eroding people’s right to freedom and self-determination.

As the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL) points out, the Israeli administrative detention policy violates Articles 9 and 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which guarantees “Palestinians their right to a fair hearing and the right to mount any meaningful defense.” Administrative defense is more than a violation of

Saafin’s arrest comes in the midst of an outbreak of COVID-19 among incarcerated Palestinian people; recently, over 70 people in Gilboa prison tested positive. As with the recent outbreak in a Wisconsin prison, where over 800 incarcerated people tested positive for the virus in a single day, incarcerated people in Palestine are at higher risk of infection and have few means to protect themselves.

That is why now is the time for working class people to engage in “inside-outside” organizing tactics, in solidarity with Khitam Saafin and all other incarcerated people. Incarceration is a political and public health issue; the only solution is to free them all, and abolish the global system of police and military oppression.

A New World Imagined: Working Class Organization after the Elections

Wed, 18 Nov 2020 01:03:21 GMT

The following talk was given at the Left Voice online event: “Fighting the Next Oppressor: Socialist Strategy Post Elections” on November 14. If you are interested in collaborating with Left Voice, sign up here.

Revolutionaries don’t concentrate their full energy on elections. Even less so in a country where the dictatorship of the two parties seems insurmountable for the emergence of other political alternatives. However, in elections where the great masses participate (in the case of 2020 at least 150 million people voted) and in class struggle, we socialists can measure where the passions of the people are. Trump says he represents the working class and the “silent majority.” He lies. He wants to use the fact that he barely won the rust belt in 2016 and now has made a very close election to prove this, as if the rust belt represented the American working class. On the one hand, many rust belt workers did not vote at all in 2016 fed up with a Democratic Party that for decades was dedicated to ruling for the capitalists and Wall Street. On the other hand, the American working class is more than that which was traditionally concentrated in the rust belt. The U.S. working class is EVERYWHERE, is racially diverse and spread throughout the country, moving all the wheels of the capitalist economy.

The working class is in the factories and in the industry, but it is also in the warehouses and logistics like Amazon. It’s in the service industry. It’s in the hospitals. In schools. In transport, the ports, the supermarkets. In meat packing centers. In manufacturing. In the prisons where they work without salary. In the fields exploited by agri-business. In the restaurants. We are undocumented, migrant, precarious, unemployed, organized and unorganized. A large section of the working class supported the Black Lives Matter movement and held their noses when they voted for Biden.

This year we not only had an election. We had a pandemic that is still going on, and between February and May hundreds of worker actions across the country led by frontline workers revealed the fundamental fact that workers are essential, bosses are not. The quarantines were not over when racist police violence claimed the lives of Breonna Tylor and George Floyd. The Black Lives Matter movement moved the country. At its height, 70 percent of the population supported the movement and the West Coast dockworkers’ went on strike, paralyzing 29 ports in solidarity with Black Lives Matter.

The Democratic Party managed to defuse the movement for now. By using the election trap and the idea of the lesser evil and by brutally repressing the activists who continued to mobilize. Still, these movements are very promising and there is an alternative for the future. As Lenin said, quoting the writer Dmitry Pizarev, for revolutionaries:

“It is necessary to dream, but with the condition of believing in our dreams. To examine real life carefully, to confront our observation with our dreams, and to perform our fantasy scrupulously.”

In this context, what this means to me is that preparing for what comes after this election requires a lot of imagination and a lot of realism at the same time. Realism to understand that we can no longer spend energy, effort and activism strengthening the Democratic Party, which cannot be reformed. Realism to understand that we cannot trust the union bureaucracy that works for the Democratic Party or the NGOs that also work for the Democratic Party. Realism to understand that the capitalists are not going to stop climate change. Realism to understand that all our rights are won by struggle: as workers in the 1930s won the right to organize, as black folks won civil rights in the 1960s, as the queer liberation movement won its rights by struggle, as women won the rights we have by putting up a fight, not waiting for the crumbs from our oppressors..

But we also need the imagination to dream as Lenin said. To dream that we can win our basic rights: universal health care, a living wage, decent housing and much more, if we trust our own forces and our own methods of struggle like mobilization in the streets, picket lines and strikes. And to dream above all that we can change everything at the root, that there is a future beyond capitalism because capitalism is leaving us without a future. And that future is socialism. Some comrades believe that we can achieve socialism by reforming capitalism but the capitalists in times of crisis take everything from us (violently). Other comrades think that we can reach socialism by setting up local self-organized communities but the capitalists and the state brutally attack our attempts at self-organization like they did in Seattle earlier this year and we continue to depend on the laws of the market. We believe that to reach socialism the working class and the oppressed have to make a revolution. Yes, a social revolution made up by millions. Take the capitalists out of power, expropriate them and put in place a society organized by the working class and the oppressed where there are no police, no army but the armed people, no exploitation and we all decide how to distribute what we need to live in harmony with the planet. They tell us that we are not realistic.

But we are hyper realistic! We know that the capitalists are turning our planet into a dirty prison as Leon Trotsky said. But we also know that making a revolution requires preparation. Sooner or later, the working class and the oppressed will rise up. We saw it in France, in Chile and right here in the United States with the Black Lives Matter movement . But rebellions are not enough; we must blow up the whole system and build a new one. That’s why we think that the best we can do with our lives is to organize now for that perspective, and that requires us to have an organization of the working class and the oppressed that prepares for revolution, not just in the U.S. but all over the world.

Try to imagine that. Try to imagine an organization made up of folks that, instead of knocking on doors for the Democratic Party, knock on doors for Black and socialist candidates of a socialist party of its own. An organization that instead of making agreements with the bosses and union bureaucrats, is part of the efforts of the rank and file workers to get their unions back, to build fighting unions, and to kick out the cops.

We need an organization that is part of the Black struggle and fights to unify the Black movement and the working class to fight racism with forceful measures such as the general strike. An organization that drives the struggle from the grassroots and the workplaces to organize for the self-defense of our communities and their safety against the racist gangs that Trump has reactivated. An organization that does not close its eyes to the monstrous acts that the two parties are committing all over the world against our brothers and sisters in the global south. An organization that, if we have representatives in congress, will not vote for the budgets of the capitalists to finance the police and the army and that will bring our voice to the masses and call out the war criminals who rule the countries of the world. .

This is what we prepare for at Left Voice and as part of the Trotskyist Faction in Mexico, Costa Rica, Peru, Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, France, Spain, and Germany. But we know that this organization needs to be anchored in very strong ideas and that it requires hundreds of supporters, a platform, and a program that is very clear about what our objectives are. As Leon Trotsky said:

“Dear friends, we are not a party as other parties. Our ambition is not only to have more members, more papers, more money in the treasury, more deputies. All that is necessary, but only as a means. Our aim is the full material and spiritual liberation of the toilers and exploited through the socialist revolution. Nobody will prepare it and nobody will guide it but ourselves”.

At Left Voice, we want these ideas, truly socialist ideas, to reach thousands. That’s why we have a website to forge that stream of ideas into flesh, into material strength in every struggle. We started out very small. Now our readers number in the hundreds of thousands That means that our website and our social media can go much further, from California to Florida and beyond.

I know that many of you are looking for a political home. We want to build that political home side by side with all of you. We want to invite you to be part of this socialist newspaper so that we can reach as many people as possible.. Surely you have many questions: why a website? Why are you Trotskyists? What is a revolutionary party? Our goal is to know you all better, to answer all your questions and to learn from you by making a common political experience. In the immediate term, from the newspaper, our workplaces, communities and the streets, we will have to fight the austerity plans of the Biden government, systemic racism, the attacks on our democratic rights, and imperialist attacks against our brothers and sisters in Mexico, Palestine, Cuba, Iran, Venezuela and beyond. But this is only the beginning. It’s all about preparing for the revolutions to come.

Our aim is to take up the work of Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci, CLR James and to carry through to the end the struggle begun long ago in this great country by the martyrs of Chicago, the workers of the Seattle Soviet in 1919, the insurgent workers of the Toledo and Minneapolis strikes, the black community fighting against the racist terror of the KKK, police, and even the conquest of civil rights that cost the blood of our martyrs, Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P Johnson and the other heroes of stonewall and so on. Long life to those who fought, our best tribute is to destroy the system that causes us so much hardship. Long live the working class.

Now Is the Time to Build the Fight against Biden

Tue, 17 Nov 2020 22:12:24 GMT

The following speech was given at the Left Voice Elections Discussion on November 14. If you are interested in collaborating with Left Voice, sign up here.

When all is said and done, the 2020 Election will have lasted 1,258 days. That’s more than three years of campaigning, with close to $7 billion spent on the presidential race alone. In the end, we were asked to choose between two parties of imperialism, capitalism, and racism. At least 5 million more chose to support Biden, not because of any love for him or his policies, but because they hated Trump. And so now, it’s a waiting game until Trump is out of office. And I’m not sad to see him go. Trump is a racist and a war criminal who has brought nothing but attacks on the working class, people of color, and the most oppressed. But we should be very clear: this election is far from a victory for working people.

Biden is set to rule as a true-to-type neoliberal, with mass deportations, austerity, more defense of killer cops, and war on the Global South. This is the tragedy of the bipartisan system: as the health care system falls apart, millions are unemployed, a housing crisis threatens to explode, and student debt is reaching unheard-of levels, we are presented with Trump and Biden, two men with no solutions to any of these issues. And therefore, many supported the Democrats in the hopes that they will bring about some much-needed reforms. But all of the members of the Democratic Party, no matter how left they might appear, are going to be complicit in the coming attacks on the working class and oppressed under a Biden administration. Because that’s what Democrats do.

We need a party of our own because we can’t keep supporting our class enemies in hopes that this time, finally, things will turn out differently.

While much of the mainstream media painted the elections as a triumph of democracy, this election showed again that American Democracy is a farce. The Electoral College, not the popular vote, determines who wins. The Senate gives the smaller, whiter and more rural states a disproportionate amount of power. And widespread voter suppression keeps millions of young people, immigrants, and the formerly incarcerated from casting a vote.

This election doesn’t show the strength of American democracy but instead, its many failings. We must organize to fight not only Biden but the entire system of capitalist democracy, which is no democracy at all.

And let’s be clear, Trump may be gone but Trumpism wasn’t defeated. Trump received more votes in 2020 than he did four years ago. Meanwhile, several Trumpist Republicans were elected to Congress, including Madison Cawthorn, the Hitler fanboy, in North Carolina and Majorie Taylor Green, the QAnon supporter and anti-masker, in Georgia.

Trumpism and right-wing populism won’t be defeated at the polls. And you certainly can’t defeat the right wing with the same neoliberal approach that gave rise to Trumpism to begin with. You beat back the Right with left-wing organizations of the working class and through class struggle. We beat them by mobilizing in our workplaces and in the streets. We beat them by organizing a united front with broad sectors of the working class and oppressed.

I think that needs to be said again: Biden is not the lesser evil. He’s the more polite evil. Sure, as president, he probably won’t launch unhinged tweets on a daily basis or be so bold-faced about his corruption and racism. And sure, he probably won’t explicitly dog whistle to white supremacists. But, as president, Biden will still implement racist and white supremacist policy.

This isn’t speculation; he’s said it. He even said that it was Trump who wants to defund the police, not him. Biden is a cop supporter through and through which means that he is perfectly fine with the racist war cops wage on communities of color. Indeed, he’s not only fine with it, he helped create the current mass incarceration epidemic when he wrote the crime bill in the 1990s.

On international issues, Biden might be even more of a war hawk than Trump. Biden, after all, ran on a platform of being “tougher” than Trump on China, has completely supported Israel his entire career, and helped to whip votes for the war in Iraq. Just in the past few days, Biden brought on Cecilia Munoz to his transition team, who helped orchestrate the record-setting deportations under Obama. Bien is the former Vice-Deporter-in-Chief and is gearing up to do it all over again.

So Joe Biden, who promised his billionaire and millionaire donors that “nothing would fundamentally change” and who was elected to bring back capitalist stability, is a warrior for this system. His transition team is full of CEOs; does anyone really think that he’s going to pop off with anything resembling good policy for the working class?

As President of the United States, Biden will almost certainly move to the right in order to build bridges with the Republican Party. In fact, in many ways, he has already begun to do so. Who can forget his (and Kamala Harris’) passionate defense of fracking? his constant opposition to Medicare for all and the green new deal? Or his callous remarks that the police don’t need to be defunded, but simply better trained to shoot people in the leg rather than the heart?

For the global south, the working class, the oppressed, and the planet Biden is no lesser evil.

This whole election, in fact, has made clear the utter failure of the strategy of pushing the Democratic Party to the Left. In 2016, I was a big Bernie Sanders fan. I really believed that he was going to change things. But, after he first fell in line behind Clinton and then, this year, totally fell behind Biden and uncritically backed him it became clear to me what he represented. Sanders was just a more reformist face for the same old Democratic Party. He supported imperialism and capitalism, as long as they were done in slightly “better” ways and put forward the idea that it was possible to “fix” capitalism by passing a few reforms.

In fact, Sanders turned out to be exactly what the Democrats needed because he helped them, over the past four years, rebuild and re-brand their party. He brought new people into the party, stopped others from leaving, and helped create the illusion that the Democrats could be a left-wing party. And despite his efforts, the Biden administration is now marginalizing Sanders and the progressive wing of the party.

And that’s all that is: an illusion. Because the Democratic Party can’t ever be a left-wing party because it’s owned and operated by and for the wealthy. This is the central conceit of the Democrats: they allow capitalists to don a better costume, appeal to social movements, weaponize their power to get elected, and then unceremoniously kill them in the night.

Look at recent history: Obama got elected on the back of the anti-war movement but then, as president, not only didn’t end the war but escalated it with drone strikes while the anti-war movement fizzled away. And nothing changed. Look at the Women’s March: they got a million people onto the streets to oppose Trump but then they pushed their “power to the polls” and campaigned to elect another president accused of sexual assault. There weren’t even mass demonstrations against Amy Coney Barrett whose confirmation represents a potentially deadly attack on reproductive rights. Instead the call was: Vote for Biden.

Just look at the Black Lives Matter Movement from this summer. Millions of people took the streets in the largest ever social movement in U.S. history to protest racist police violence. And then the Democrats (with their allies in the Unions and Non-Profits) managed to con them into voting for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris — who took up none of their demands — because it was the pragmatic choice against Trump. But they were never true allies of the movement.

In fact basically all of the cities where protesters were repressed were run by Democrats. It was Democrats who oversaw the beating and gassing of activists, and it was Democrats who were in charge of the police department that killed George Floyd. This is the lesser evil they offer us: crocodile tears about how we all need to learn and grow and then more of the same racism and violence.

This is what Democrats do — and, ultimately, what Sanders did as well.

It’s the same story time and time again: progressives and activists bite a bullet and compromise their principles in the name of “pragmatism” and then elect a Democrat who enacts policies that hurt the very people who got them elected. It keeps happening but still, every election, we are told that we must be “pragmatic” and vote for a party that has done nothing but steal our slogans and stab us in the back. There is nothing pragmatic about following a bad and losing strategy.

We can do better.

Going forward, we need to organize ourselves to fight back Biden’s attacks on the working class and oppressed — both in the U.S. and around the world. This may sound like a daunting task and, in many ways, it is, but we’ve already seen the beginnings of this.

This year we saw essential workers organize to fight the pandemic and the capitalist austerity associated with it. We saw a mass movement against state violence and a dockworkers strike that shut down all the ports on the West Coast in solidarity. Internationally, we saw huge movements in France, the Middle East, and in Latin America. In Chile, the working class forced the government to call an assembly to rewrite the constitution.

We run everything. We make their entire economy work and, when we decide to, we can shut it all down. We need to organize to weaponize that power to overthrow the entire capitalist system and end the oppression and exploitation that it represents. We need to build a real political alternative that can take on the Democrats and the Republicans and not instead focus only on small local projects. We are locked in a fight against an enemy that is organized internationally. To defeat them we must also organize ourselves at this level. To quote Malcolm X: “we’re not out numbered, we’re out organized.” The working class and the oppressed vastly outnumber the capitalist exploiters. Now we need to organize ourselves to seize our power and take down the whole system.

Thank You Comrades.