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100 Years Ago, Death of Lenin: Leader of Victorious Workers’ Revolution — The Spark #1193
▻https://the-spark.net/np_1193601.html

A century ago, Vladimir Lenin, whose real name was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, died at the age of 53. #Lenin founded the Bolshevik Party, and he was one of the two main leaders of the Russian Revolution of October 1917, along with Leon Trotsky. During that momentous revolution, the working class in Russia overthrew the capitalist class and took power for the first time in history. Lenin then led the first workers’ state in Russia in its first years.

Lenin devoted his life to the emancipation of the working class and, more than anyone else, focused on building the organizations workers needed. He founded the Bolshevik Party, an essential tool for the working class to take power. After the workers took power in Russia, when workers worldwide looked to the Russian Revolution as a model and inspiration for what they wanted to do, Lenin and the other Russian revolutionaries pushed to create the Third International.

The Beginnings of the Bolshevik Party
Lenin was born in 1870 into a middle-class family. He was a brilliant student and could have had a successful career as the lawyer he started out to be. But Lenin was revolted by the backward and repressive rule of the Tsar. When he was 17 years old, his older brother was executed for trying to assassinate the Tsar. Shortly after, Lenin was won over to Marxist ideas. He came to understand that it wasn’t enough to get rid of the Tsar and change the Russian government. The working class needed to get rid of capitalism and exploitation and build a new society. And it wasn’t enough to do it only in Russia. The socialist revolution would become international, or it would not be.

In 1893, Lenin was imprisoned and then exiled for political activity organizing workers’ study circles. Together with many other revolutionaries, he went abroad, where the work of building a revolutionary workers’ party continued.

During the late 19th and early 20th century, socialist parties were being built in many countries. The biggest and most successful, by far, was in Germany. It led the Second International, an international grouping of socialist parties, which Lenin’s party in Russia belonged to.

As these parties gained strength, they spread Marxist ideas and teachings. But their goal was to attract as many people as possible. Among them were people who used these parties to fulfill their own personal ambitions, winning elected positions in the government or privileged positions at the head of trade unions. They often succumbed to the reformist pressures of the middle class or the more privileged workers aspiring to be middle class.

This particular period—the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century—encouraged a decay of the socialist movement. The big capitalist powers of Europe were going through a growth spurt based on the colonization and enslavement of big parts of Africa and Asia, with the plunder and riches from those continents bringing untold wealth. The capitalist class kept the bulk of the booty themselves. But to blunt the rise of the working-class and socialist movements, the capitalists also granted a few reforms to workers inside the richest imperialist countries.

Lenin recognized the dangers of the growth and pressures of the middle class and their reformist goals on the socialist party in Russia. He set a goal of building a party of professional revolutionaries, that is, people committed to the cause of the working class and revolution, as opposed to the looser socialist parties whose goal was to pull in as many people as possible. In 1903, at a party congress, Lenin argued for a much more limited party, only admitting those who had proved their commitment to the cause of the working class and who devoted their activity to the working class. This led to a split among Russian socialists.

At the time, many inside the movement, including other important revolutionary leaders such as Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, did not understand the full meaning of this split and opposed Lenin for pushing to carry it out. But capitalism was producing new crises and wars. What happened in revolutions all through Europe over the next decades would soon prove Lenin right.

The Opening Salvos and the Collapse of the Socialist International
Already, in 1905, in the midst of a disastrous war with Japan, the Russian working class revolted and carried out a revolution that in the end was crushed. But in the process, the workers developed a new form of organization, workers’ councils, the soviets. These workers’ councils decided on their action much more democratically than all the bourgeois parliaments and congresses combined, and they were a very important step that the workers would again take in their successful revolution 12 years later.

The years that followed the 1905 revolution were ones of retreat and demoralization in the face of virulent repression. But the core of the Bolshevik Party held together and went through the experience of both revolution and repression with the working class. In 1912, despite the repression, the workers in Russia carried out a new strike wave. Those strikes might have led to a revolution. But they were cut short by Russia’s entry into World War I.

All the Socialist Parties had denounced war before it broke out and even pledged to lead general strikes to try to stop it. But once the war began, most of those parties reversed themselves and supported their own governments, succumbing to all the nationalistic and racist propaganda that government officials and the news media propagated, justifying the slaughter of millions of workers for the profit of their own capitalist class.

Arming the Bolshevik Party for Workers’ Revolution
Lenin’s deep conviction was that only the workers’ revolution on the scale of the world could finally offer a way out. In his writings, Lenin explained the capitalist economic forces behind World War I, the underlying causes for the collapse of the socialist parties faced with this war, and the need for the working class to smash the old capitalist state apparatus. This meant especially getting rid of the capitalists’ forces of repression, consisting of the army, police, and government bureaucracy—the workers needed to create their own state, serving the interests of all the oppressed.

In February 1917, a new wave of strikes broke out in Russia in the midst of the war’s mass slaughter and the hunger and starvation striking the working class and peasantry. The workers’ mobilization pushed out the Tsar within a matter of days. The workers created new soviets, that is, workers’ councils, to organize their activity. Meanwhile, the capitalists formed a new government called the Provisional Government.

In April 1917, right after Lenin returned to Russia from exile, he called for “all power to the Soviets,” that is, for the workers to throw out the Provisional Government and take power. Many of the leaders in his own party didn’t think this was possible, including Stalin, and they sought an alliance with the moderate socialists of the Provisional Government. When Trotsky, who had remained independent of the Bolshevik Party up until that time, returned from exile in April, he immediately embraced Lenin’s policy and joined the Bolshevik Party, bringing thousands of other revolutionaries with him.

Lenin’s slogans corresponded to a sharpening of the forces of revolution, that is, the growing radicalization of not only the workers but also the peasants. In October, Trotsky led the Bolshevik Party’s insurrection that swept out the Provisional Government and put the workers’ soviets firmly in power in Russia.

The Need for the Revolution to Spread
The 1917 revolution took place in a country that was gigantic and rich in natural resources. But the rule of the tsars and the capitalist class had left Russia poor and backward, with only a few concentrations of industry and commerce, and much of that had been decimated by capitalist war. But the revolution did open a way forward. Everyone understood that the revolution in Russia would not be able to survive if it remained isolated. The idea was to hold on as long as possible while the working class moved ahead in other countries. The revolution would spread.

In the following years, in big countries and small countries, from Germany to Hungary to Finland, all the way to China, the working class carried out revolutions over and over again. But revolutionaries in other countries had not built what Lenin and the other Russian revolutionaries had built: a party of professional militants with deep roots in the working class, that is, a party of the Bolshevik type that could provide an alternative to the collapse and betrayal of the Socialist Parties that had gone over to the side of the capitalist class.

With the Third International, the Bolsheviks rushed to help workers and revolutionaries build new parties in their own countries. But they were trying to build parties in the midst of a revolution. They had no choice. They had to try. And they did. But they did not build real deep-rooted parties in time. One after another, the other revolutions fell backward.

In the following years, the young workers state, led by the Bolshevik Party, did hold on. Those other revolutions gave it some breathing space. The old regime could not come back. But the workers paid an enormous price. Isolated and surrounded by the hostile forces of the big imperialist powers, Russia was beset by civil war, poverty, backwardness, famine, and epidemics, that is, the legacy of the old capitalist society that roared back with a vengeance, even with the capitalists gone.

Under those conditions, the working class in Russia that had made the revolution retreated, bled, battered, and famished. For a time, the working class in Russia was so weakened it practically disappeared. Quickly filling the void was a reactionary bureaucracy with Joseph Stalin at its head. This bureaucracy took over the running of a state that the working class had built, but it was a cancer that relentlessly reinforced its position and privileges against the working class.

Lenin’s Last Fight
It fell to the relatively small Bolshevik Party to combat this cancer. And in his last years, Lenin—already very sick—led the fight, along with Trotsky and many “old Bolshevik” leaders, against Stalin and the growing bureaucracy. The lack of a successful workers revolution in other countries strengthened the hold of Stalin and the bureaucracy, which took over the Third International and used it to consolidate its own power, betraying workers revolutions in other countries as it did.

The way history is usually taught here, Lenin prepared the way for Stalin. No. Stalin was the gravedigger of the revolution. And Lenin recognized this earlier than anyone. In fact, even as he lay on his sick bed in early 1922, Lenin formally broke personal relations with Stalin, strongly opposing Stalin’s crushing repression against national minorities. And Lenin looked to Trotsky as his main ally in this fight. In his last will and testament, which the Stalinist bureaucracy kept hidden until the 1960s, Lenin called for Stalin’s removal from office.

Lenin did not live long enough to carry out his fight to the end. Stalin erected a mausoleum in Moscow to display Lenin’s body, a “cult of personality” that would have outraged Lenin. Krupskaya, his widow, said that if he had lived longer, Lenin would probably have wound up in prison along with all the other “old Bolsheviks"—all of whom eventually were “eliminated” by the bureaucracy.

Nevertheless, this very first attempt of the working class to take and hold power already shows what is possible. Its success depended a great deal on the struggles carried out by Lenin to build the revolutionary party the working class needed.

Today, as the continual decay of capitalist society leads to new forms of barbarism and impending world war, new workers’ revolutions are on the agenda. What was gained in Russia all those years ago still offers a guidepost for workers who will be pushed to revolt in our day.

Kissinger: Tributes to a Monster — The Spark #1191
▻https://the-spark.net/np1191804.html

This article is translated from the December 6 issue, #2888 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.

Next Year, Workers Can Use Their Power — The Spark #1191
▻https://the-spark.net/np1191101.html

In the last two years, the attacks on the working class escalated as the corporations raised prices much faster than wages. This raging inflation brought down the standard of living of every working person and their families. For more than 40 years now, the working class in this country has seen their lives steadily worsen.

For too many years, there has been little resistance from the working class. But in 2023 more workers began to fight back, with a marked increase in strikes. The strike by UAW autoworkers was the most significant, but not the only one. In Michigan, there were also strikes at Blue Cross and the Detroit casinos. Around the country, there were strikes by hospital workers; by hotel workers in Los Angeles and Las Vegas; by SAG-AFTRA, the ordinary workers who make the film and TV industry run; by Portland teachers; as well as many other smaller strikes. There were organizing attempts and fights by workers at Amazon and even Starbucks.

Certainly, there have been bigger strike waves in the past. But the half million workers who went on strike in 2023 were four times as many as in 2022 and eight times as many as in 2021. This could be the opening to a new period of working class struggles.

Nonetheless, the strikes that did happen show that an opportunity was lost. Two big industrial unions, the Teamsters at UPS and the UAW at Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis, had contracts that expired this year. A fight by those workers together had the potential to bring even more workers into a struggle that could really push back the bosses. That did not happen.

A fight by the Teamsters at UPS could have opened the door for a fight by millions of other workers who work in delivery and transportation—workers who also face low wages and also have jobs that are often only temporary or part-time. But after posturing that they would not extend the strike deadline, the Teamster leadership backed down. They pushed UPS workers to accept a contract that had some pay raises, but allowed UPS to continue to leave the majority of the UPS workers with jobs that are only part-time.

The new leadership in the UAW also promised a stronger stand against the auto bosses. The leaders did call a strike, but the strike was limited to a few plants and less than one third of the workers. When the strike was settled, the new UAW leadership acted just like the old UAW leadership, trying to sell the contract to the workers. They called this contract a “record” contract, even though the pay raises did not nearly give workers what they had lost to inflation. And the contract did nothing to address the horrible working conditions that auto workers face.

The way this strike was organized, there was no way for workers to get what they really needed—not unless, that is, they broke out of the straitjacket that the unions under this “new” leadership put on the strike. To fight for raises that keep up with inflation, to fight for decent working conditions, to fight for full-time jobs—all this would take a fight against the capitalist class. Today every part of that class bases their profits on high prices and low wages, on speed-up, and on jobs that are part-time and temporary. In other words, what is needed is the power of the whole working class.

Shawn Fain, the new president of the UAW, may have said that the working class is in this together. But he didn’t call on other workers to join the fight. Actions, not words, count.

Most of the workers in the auto industry today work for the parts suppliers. They work for even lower wages and have worse conditions than the UAW workers at Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis. Those workers had their owns reason to come out and join a fight together. The problems will not be addressed by one union at one or a few companies. Every worker is involved. Spreading the fight is what the working class needs to do.

That is the perspective and the attitude that the working class needs going forward. The strikes this year may have been limited. But workers who came through them have an experience that can help them gain a wider perspective. There is no reason they have to wait until the next contract to begin their next fight.

A Bigger War Is on the Horizon — The Spark #1191
▻https://the-spark.net/np_11911001.html

What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters, during the week of November 14, 2023.

After a brief cease-fire, Israel has resumed the war in Gaza. Hamas terrorists had killed over 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians. Then the Israeli government unleashed their terror campaign, firing missiles and dropping bombs on hospitals, schools, and apartment buildings in Gaza, killing over 13,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children. At the same time, Israel has exchanged fire with Hezbollah forces in Lebanon.

The U.S. government is in this war. The U.S. has armed Israel to the teeth with military aid. The U.S. uses Israel as its policeman in the region, to ensure access to Middle East oil and profits for U.S. corporations. The U.S. sent two naval task forces and Marines to join all the other U.S. navy, air force and special forces in the region. Within days, the U.S. forces had engaged in fighting with militias in Syria and Iraq. The situation in the Middle East is a tinderbox that could explode into a wider war.

Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine continues. That war is now almost two years old. More than one hundred thousand have died, soldiers and civilians, Ukrainians and Russians. The U.S. is also in this war, backing Ukraine to weaken Russia. The U.S. and its NATO allies supply the weapons to Ukraine. The Ukrainians supply the deaths.

Other regional wars continue around the world. There is a war in Afghanistan, a legacy of the U.S. invasion in 2001. When U.S. forces left Afghanistan after 20 years, they left behind chaos and destruction and the seeds of another war. There is a war in Yemen that has gone on for a decade. Over a million people have died. Wars also continue today in Myanmar, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Somalia. Behind the scenes of most of these wars are the major world powers, including the U.S.

In the last 10 years, the number of wars around the world has gone up by 70%. According to the United Nations, today the number of wars worldwide is the highest since World War Two. The wars we see today are very much like the regional wars that led directly to World War Two and World War One. That is something we can’t ignore. We can’t put our heads in the sand. We have to see what is coming. The warning signs of another world war are there. Today, the U.S. government is steadily increasing its military budget. Many other governments are doing the same. What are they preparing for, if not for war, a bigger war than the ones being fought today, a world war. World War One killed about 22 million people, half of them civilians. World War Two killed 85 million people—3% of the entire world’s population. Much of Europe, Russia and Japan was destroyed.

That is the future that we may be facing today. And if there is another world war, people here will not escape it. The U.S. is the world’s biggest economic and military power. The U.S. government is already directly or indirectly involved in most of the wars going on around the world today. If there is another world war, this country will be right in the middle of it. There will be no escape.

But why do we even have wars in the first place? World wars come from the competition between capitalists for more profits. Capitalists from every country fight over the world’s resources and the profits produced by workers’ labor. They use their own governments to go against the capitalists of other countries. If they can’t settle things peacefully, then they are ready and willing to go to war to gain their advantage. The longer capitalism has gone on, the more deadly their wars have been. The wars of the 20th century were the most murderous in human history. A third world war would be even worse.

But we do not have to accept this kind of future. The ordinary people, the working people of the world, have no reason to go to war. We have no reason to kill each other. Working people can live together in peace.

To change our future, we will have to get rid of the system that produces war. The working class has every reason to do that. The working class has the power to do that. The working class of the world has the power to build a better society, free from those barbarians and war-mongers who are leading humanity to the brink of destruction.

Revolution, the Only Path Forward for the Jews (Leon Trotsky, 1940) — The Spark #1189
▻https://the-spark.net/np1189605.html

The following article is translated from Lutte Ouvrière Issue 2883, November 2, 2023, the newspaper of the revolutionary workers group active in France.

Israeli governments and their supporters make the security of Jews, in the Middle East and elsewhere, dependent on political and military support for Israel by imperialist states. This is already what Zionist activists were proposing in the 1930s, when the anti-Semitic wave was rising in Europe. The Zionists then only saw a solution in the goodwill of Great Britain and in the reception of the Jews in Palestine under British mandate. This is what Leon Trotsky said about it on December 22, 1938:

“The number of countries expelling Jews continues to grow. The number of countries capable of welcoming them is decreasing. At the same time, the struggle is only getting worse. It is possible to easily imagine what awaits the Jews from the start of the future world war. But, even without war, the next development of world reaction almost certainly means the physical extermination of the Jews.

Palestine has revealed itself to be a tragic mirage (…). Now more than ever, the destiny of the Jewish people — not just their political destiny, but their physical destiny — is indissolubly linked to the emancipatory struggle of the international proletariat. Only a courageous mobilization of workers against reaction, the constitution of workers’ militias, direct physical resistance to fascist bands (...) can (...) stop the global wave of fascism and open a new chapter in the history of humanity.”

He added in 1940: “The attempt to resolve the Jewish question by the migration of Jews to Palestine can now be seen for what it is, a tragic travesty for the Jewish people. (…) Future developments in military situations could well transform Palestine into a bloody trap for several hundred thousand Jews. Never has it been as clear as today that the salvation of the Jewish people is inseparable from the overthrow of the capitalist system.”

The extermination of Europe’s Jews tragically confirmed the revolutionary leader’s first remark. The current situation puts the second back on the agenda.

People Did Not Have to Be Set Against Each Other in Palestine — The Spark #1189
▻https://the-spark.net/np1189603.html

British and then U.S. capitalists set the Jewish and Arab peoples against each other. Zionists worked with these great powers to get Jews to see their interests as against those of the Arab Palestinians. But it didn’t have to be that way.

This text from a Jewish revolutionary in 1920 points at another possibility:

“The Jewish workers are here to live with you, they have not come to persecute you but to live with you. They are ready to fight alongside you against the capitalist enemy whether Jewish, Arab, or British.

If the capitalists incite you against the Jewish worker, it is to protect themselves from you. Do not fall into the trap, the Jewish worker, who is a soldier of the revolution, has come to offer you his hand as that of a comrade in the resistance against the British, Jewish, and Arab capitalists.

We call on you to fight against the rich who sell their land and their country to foreigners. Down with the British and French bayonets. Down with Arab and foreign capitalists.”

U.S. Forces Threaten a Widening War in the Middle East — The Spark #1189
▻https://the-spark.net/np1189602.html

U.S. forces have been increasingly involved in the fighting in the Middle East. On October 26 and November 8, U.S. planes struck Iranian facilities in Syria. A U.S. ship earlier shot down missiles it said were aimed at Israel. A U.S. drone was shot down near Yemen.

The U.S. admits to having 900 troops in Syria, plus 2,500 in Iraq. Since the Hamas attack on Israel, the U.S. has sent an additional 1,200 troops to the region. It has two aircraft carrier battle groups nearby, with 4,000 Marines, plus dozens of additional Air Force attack planes sent to the Middle East.

These forces are not there to promote peace. Fundamentally, they are there to ensure U.S. corporations can continue to suck wealth out of this oil-rich region.

They are also part and parcel of Israel’s war in Gaza. While Israeli forces carry out the dirty work, U.S. forces back them up, give them cover, and buy them time. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin himself said that the U.S. was sending forces to the region to “assist in the defense of Israel.”

Their presence also carries the threat of a wider war. After launching an airstrike against what he said was an Iranian warehouse in Syria, Austin threatened: “If attacks by Iran’s proxies against U.S. forces continue, we will not hesitate to take further measures.…” This enormous U.S. military presence is a threat not just against Iran, but against any country that moves against U.S. interests in the region, threatening to broaden the wars that have already engulfed so many people.

The U.S. population has no interest in any of this warmongering carried out in our name.

Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto — The Spark #1189
▻https://the-spark.net/np1189601.html

Right now, an army claiming to represent the Jewish people is invading, bombarding, and besieging what amounts to a giant ghetto, where food, water, and electricity have been cut off. That ghetto, Gaza, is an area of 17 square miles filled with 2.2 million Palestinian people who cannot gain access to their old homeland or citizenship in it because of their religion and ethnicity.

Eighty years ago, we might switch the names of a few groups and be referring to the Warsaw ghetto in Poland. The Nazis crammed 460,000 Jews into a 1.3 square mile section of that city. In the end, at least 390,000 of them were killed, most in the death camp at Treblinka.

We might not be quite there yet in #Gaza, but the logic of nationalism, used by the dominant capitalist powers to suck wealth out of every corner of the globe, has once again set people to push in this direction.

The U.S. Is Dragging the World Closer to a New World War — The Spark #1189
▻https://the-spark.net/np1189101.html

As the latest Israel-Palestine War broke out last month, the U.S. military moved two aircraft carriers, along with several destroyers, cruisers, and missile launchers into the Middle East. They were joined by a nuclear submarine equipped with 147 Tomahawk cruise missiles.

This wasn’t a “peace keeping” mission. It was war—supporting Israel in its war on Gaza and the West Bank; pushing its control over Iraq and Syria, where the U.S. itself had carried out long, brutal wars that killed millions and forced millions more to flee as refugees.

Nobody knows what will happen next. But there is the very real likelihood that the unthinkable could become reality. The already smoldering fires of war in the Middle East could trigger a new world war. How close is the world now to being dragged into a new cataclysm? We will find out.

The Middle East region is explosive today because the big imperial powers, first England and France, and now, the U.S., have dominated the region by playing the different countries and peoples off against each other. This tried-and-true imperialist strategy has allowed a few big oil companies, banks, military contractors, and other instruments of the capitalist class to extract the riches produced out of the Middle East for more than a century, leaving the vast majority of its people in a constant state of poverty and desperation.

The horrible wars that have come out of this imperial domination go way beyond the countries themselves. For example, the ongoing war in Yemen that has already taken millions of lives is a proxy war between two big regional powers, Saudi Arabia and Iran. But behind Saudi Arabia and Iran stand none other than the U.S., Russia, and China. The same line-up of regional and big powers is involved in the current war that Israel is waging against the Palestinians.

The Middle East carries in its womb a world war in embryo.

The U.S. is deeply involved not only in wars in the Middle East. In Europe, with the war in Ukraine, a war that the U.S. has prepared and fueled for more than a decade, the U.S. is using the people of Ukraine as cannon fodder in order to weaken and bleed Russia, an old rival. In Asia, the U.S. has been escalating an economic war with China, the second largest economy in the world, while surrounding that huge country with increasingly more massive military forces.

The world has become a bloody madhouse. An Israeli government cabinet minister casually raised the possibility of Israel dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza, like it is the most ordinary thing in the world. And he wasn’t even fired, only suspended!

But not to worry, says President Biden. “I think we have an opportunity to… unite the world in ways that it never has been,” Biden said from the White House on October 20. “We were in a post-war period for 50 years where it worked pretty damn well, but that’s sort of run out of steam… It needs a new world order in a sense, like that was a world order.”

Amazingly, this justification for a new barbaric world war comes from the President of the United States. According to Biden, World War II resulted in a new world order, a step in the right direction. Forget, infers Biden, the human toll, the 85 million people killed, the thousands of cities and towns destroyed. Eyes straight ahead, says Biden, the world needs a new world order. In casual fashion, he calls for a new global war, which will bring with it an even more terrible toll.

“I’m optimistic,” said Biden. That’s what politicians said during World War I, which killed more than 20 million people, but was supposed to be “the war to end all wars.” It’s what the politicians said about World War II—even as the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on women, children and the elderly in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the very end of the war in order to demonstrate the explosive ascendency of the new U.S. superpower.

Those world wars didn’t lead to Biden’s 50 years of peace, but only to bigger wars. The 20th century was the most murderous century in history, with two-thirds of the casualties being civilians. And the present century promises to be even worse.

Who says it has to be this way? Working people can live together peacefully. But only if the cause of the wars is destroyed, the domination of the planet by a tiny minority of capitalists and other parasites, who are in constant competition with each other for wealth and power.

Doing away with this domination and barbarism is the historic mission of the working class. Working people may not realize this, nor are most of them prepared to accept this mission today. But their class, the working class, has the power and every interest to do just that. And the world, hurtling toward war, will bring the working class face to face with this necessity. There is no other way out.

The Israeli Army, A Battalion for the United States
▻https://the-spark.net/np1188603.html

This article is translated from the October 27 issue, #2882 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France :

L’armée israélienne, un bataillon pour les États-Unis
▻https://journal.lutte-ouvriere.org/2023/10/25/larmee-israelienne-un-bataillon-pour-les-etats-unis_727285.h

London Arms Fair 2023: Why They All Love Wars
▻https://the-spark.net/np1188601.html

This article comes from the October 13 issue, #147 of Workers Fight, the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in England.

Film: Born in Gaza, 2014, streaming on Netflix
▻https://www.netflix.com/nl-en/title/81077863

https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img924/297/fYAfP3.png

This documentary film tells the story of life in Gaza through the words of about ten children of Gaza. They describe to us how their families lived in Gaza and how they supported themselves by farming, fishing, or in retail or factory work. And they tell how the constant bombardment by Israel in the conflict of 2014 has injured or killed friends or family members and how it crippled their ability to survive. The children take you to the sites where the bombs fell and show you the tatters of their lives.

After watching this film, you gain an intimate understanding through the clear voices of the children.

▻https://the-spark.net/np1188201.html

Not in Our Name! Stop the Massacre in Gaza! — The Spark #1188
▻https://the-spark.net/np1188101.html

Since October 7, terror has fallen on Palestinians in the thin strip of land called Gaza. Homes, hospitals, UN-administered schools, mosques, churches ... the two-and-a-half million inhabitants have nowhere to shelter from the bombardments. Nowhere to get food, water, fuel, or medicine.

With more than 7,700 dead and 19,000 injured as of October 28, entire neighborhoods razed, and hospitals overwhelmed, the tragedy unfolds before the eyes of the world. This is a policy of blind vengeance on the part of the Israeli State, and it is being done in the name of the entire Israeli population. Nothing can justify such an act.

Friday, October 27, saw the heaviest bombardment yet in this three-week-long series of attacks. The bombardment included “bunker-buster” bombs—supposedly aimed at collapsing the network of tunnels Hamas had built under Gaza. No one knows if they reached the tunnels. But what we do know, and what cannot be denied, is that the bombs did destroy all the buildings on top of the ground, killing or injuring anyone still in them. And what we do know is that the U.S. paid for these bombs.

Israel had ordered all civilians in the North—that is, over one million people—to evacuate to the south of Gaza—now it treats everyone left in the North as enemy combatants. In fact, that evacuation has been next to impossible. Israel bombed southern Gaza after announcing that evacuation would allow civilians to be safe!

Under cover of this bombardment, the Israeli army carried out an unannounced ground invasion. The Gaza Health Ministry has said that over 400 Palestinians were killed in the first several hours of the invasion. The area is now in darkness, with electricity and phone service severed.

How far will Israel take this invasion? The future of Palestinians and Israelis will be determined by these events for decades to come. The future of the whole Middle East depends on them. And who can be sure that this conflict will not set the planet ablaze?

The carnage perpetrated today in Gaza is done with the complicity and the full approval of all the imperialist powers. U.S. imperialism is managing the genocide, giving the Israeli military “advice” and using its firepower to “contain” the Gaza killing zone. There is nothing astonishing in this: the U.S. has never prevented Israel from the systematic oppression of Palestinians, whether they live in Gaza, in the West Bank, or in Israel.

For decades, the U.S., at the head of all the Western powers, has made the State of Israel its armed enforcer in the region to prevent the different peoples of the region from fulfilling their aspirations to live together with each other in peace and in countries not controlled against them.

And, of course, there is oil—the reason U.S. imperialism, along with French and British, moved into the Middle East in the first place.

U.S. imperialism and its allies have created an explosive situation in the whole region. In this oil-rich Middle East, they have imposed their domination by carving into the flesh of peoples, relying on the most reactionary monarchies and dictatorships, like that of Saudi Arabia. And when those regimes do not fall in line enough, they crush them, as they did in Iraq.

Today, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Lebanon, Jordan, Iran, and Yemen are ticking social bombs as well, with tens of millions of poor people in as desperate a situation as the Palestinians. In a tinderbox where the slightest spark can cause a blast, the U.S. let Netanyahu play with fire.

Hope can only come from the peoples of the region themselves. It will come from those who rise up against imperialism and its maneuvers. It will come from those who understand the need to fight capitalism and the big bourgeoisie. And from the U.S. working class when it recognizes that the same imperialism has its foot on our throat as well.

Overthrowing imperialism to establish an egalitarian society, free of exploitation and relations of domination, is the only way out for humanity. This perspective is the opposite of nationalist policies aimed at defending the interests of one people at the expense of others—the opposite of Netanyahu’s policy in Israel, but also of Hamas’ policy in Palestine. It is the opposite of the policies that U.S. imperialism engineers in our name.

Only a union of the workers of all countries against the world’s leaders will be able to break the vicious cycle of war they’re dragging us into.

La domination impérialiste produit la guerre, la mort et la destruction
►https://the-spark.net

Une autre guerre barbare a éclaté au Moyen-Orient, engloutissant cette fois Israël et Gaza. Le gouvernement américain et les médias accusent le groupe palestinien Hamas d’avoir déclenché cette guerre.

Oui, les combattants du Hamas se sont livrés à un carnage meurtrier, tuant plus d’un millier d’Israéliens et en blessant des milliers d’autres. Il s’agit d’une violence aveugle et elle doit être condamnée. Mais les États-Unis ne sont pas en mesure de condamner cette violence. Leurs mains ne sont pas propres.

La réponse de l’armée israélienne à ce déchaînement explique comment nous en sommes arrivés là. Car l’armée israélienne a lancé une guerre contre l’ensemble de la population de Gaza, soit plus de deux millions d’habitants, dont la moitié sont des enfants. Le gouvernement israélien a coupé toute eau, électricité, gaz, nourriture et fournitures médicales dans la bande de Gaza, condamnant d’innombrables personnes à la maladie, à la famine et à la mort. Les avions de combat larguent chaque jour des milliers de bombes sur Gaza, tuant des milliers de personnes et transformant des quartiers entiers en décombres. Et tandis que l’armée israélienne rassemble une armée lourdement équipée de 300 000 soldats le long de la frontière, elle a ordonné à tous les Palestiniens vivant au nord de Gaza de se déplacer vers le sud, provoquant une panique massive, un exode et certainement davantage de morts.

Gaza est un petit territoire, deux fois plus grand que Chicago. C’est l’une des zones terrestres les plus densément peuplées de la planète. La plupart des gens sont des réfugiés qui ont fui d’autres guerres et conflits. Ils sont extrêmement pauvres. Et ils sont déjà piégés, complètement encerclés par des troupes, des gardes, des clôtures, des murs et des navires de guerre. Gaza est une prison à ciel ouvert qui a été périodiquement bombardée et envahie guerre après guerre.

L’armée israélienne se propose maintenant de l’envahir – cela signifie une guerre urbaine, des soldats combattant de rue en rue, de maison en maison, et bien plus de morts et de destructions. Et qu’est-ce que cela va produire ? Nettoyage ethnique ? Cela entraînera davantage de guerres, des guerres sans fin. Ce que cela n’apportera pas , c’est davantage de protection ou de sécurité aux différents peuples – évidemment pas aux Palestiniens, mais certainement pas aux Israéliens non plus.

Israël, les États-Unis et le reste des grandes puissances accusent le Hamas de terrorisme. Mais ce que ces grandes puissances exercent contre la population palestinienne est une terreur et une violence indescriptibles de la part de l’une des armées les plus grandes, les plus avancées et les mieux équipées au monde.

Biden, le gouvernement américain et l’armée américaine affirment que leur soutien à Israël est le soutien au peuple juif. C’est un mensonge. Les États-Unis soutiennent l’État d’Israël pour une seule raison : l’État israélien est le flic de l’impérialisme américain au Moyen-Orient, une région riche en ressources pétrolières, ce qui signifie d’énormes profits et richesses pour les compagnies pétrolières américaines, les financiers, les entrepreneurs militaires, la classe capitaliste ainsi que un ensemble.

Afin de sauvegarder ces profits et ces richesses, les États-Unis et les autres grandes puissances ont divisé les différents peuples et groupes ethniques de la région les uns contre les autres. Diviser pour régner est la manière dont les États-Unis et les autres puissances impérialistes ont toujours imposé leur domination. Ces divisions ont produit un fondamentalisme nationaliste et religieux et de très nombreuses guerres : au Liban, en Irak, en Syrie, au Yémen et toutes les guerres entre Israël et les Palestiniens. Pour la population israélienne, cela signifie être en première ligne, tuer ou être tué, encore et encore.

Tous les peuples du Moyen-Orient pourraient vivre ensemble en paix, malgré toutes leurs différences, ethniques ou religieuses. Cela ne pourra être réalisé que lorsque la classe ouvrière et les pauvres de tous les pays du Moyen-Orient se soulèveront et renverseront leurs propres dirigeants pourris, fanatiques religieux et parasites qui les oppriment et les divisent. Cela leur permettra de se débarrasser du système qui provoque l’aggravation du cycle de guerres et de conflits ethniques : le capitalisme et l’impérialisme. Et ce faisant, ils aideront les puissantes classes ouvrières des grands pays impérialistes à faire de même.

La paix n’est possible que lorsque la classe ouvrière prend le pouvoir à la petite minorité capitaliste qui dirige la société aujourd’hui, afin de diriger la société dans l’intérêt de la majorité.

Imperialist Domination Produces War, Death, and Destruction
►https://the-spark.net

Another barbaric war broke out in the #Middle_East, this time engulfing #Israel and #Gaza. The U.S. government and news media blame the Palestinian group, Hamas, for setting off this war.

Yes, #Hamas fighters carried out a murderous rampage, killing over a thousand Israelis and wounding thousands more. This is blind violence, and it has to be condemned. But the U.S. is in no position to condemn this violence. Its hands are not clean.

The Israeli military’s response to this rampage explains how we got here. For the Israeli military launched a war against the entire Gaza population of more than two million people, half of whom are children. The Israeli government cut off all water, electricity, gas, food, and medical supplies to the #Gaza_Strip, condemning countless people to sickness, starvation, and death. Warplanes have been dropping thousands of bombs every day on Gaza, killing thousands and turning entire neighborhoods into rubble. And while the Israeli army masses a heavily equipped army of 300,000 troops along the border, it has ordered all Palestinians living in the north of Gaza to move to the south, provoking a mass panic, exodus and certainly more death.

Gaza is a tiny territory, half the size of Chicago. It is one of the most densely populated areas of land on Earth. Most people are refugees, who fled other wars and conflicts. They are extremely poor. And they are already trapped, completely surrounded by troops, guards, fences, walls, and war ships. Gaza is an open-air prison that has been periodically bombed and invaded in war after war.

The Israeli military now proposes to invade—this means urban warfare, soldiers fighting street to street, house to house, and much more death and destruction. And what will that produce? Ethnic cleansing? This will bring more wars, endless wars. What it will not bring is more protection or security for the various peoples—obviously not the Palestinians, but certainly not the Israelis either.

Israel, the U.S., and the rest of the big powers denounce Hamas for terrorism. But what these big powers carry out against the Palestinian population is unspeakable terror and violence from one of the biggest, most advanced, and heavily equipped militaries in the world.

Biden, the U.S. government, and the U.S. military say their support of Israel is the support of the Jewish people. That is a lie. The U.S. supports the state of Israel for one reason: the Israeli state is U.S. imperialism’s cop in the Middle East, a region rich in oil resources, which means tremendous profits and wealth for U.S. oil companies, financiers, military contractors, the capitalist class as a whole.

In order to safeguard those profits and wealth, the U.S. and the other big powers have divided the different peoples and ethnic groups of the region against each other. Divide and rule is how the U.S. and the other imperialist powers have always imposed their domination. Those divisions have produced nationalist and religious fundamentalism, and many, many wars: Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and all the wars between Israel and the #Palestinians. For the #Israeli_population, that means being on the front line, kill or be killed, over and over again.

All the peoples of the Middle East could live together in peace, despite all their differences, ethnic or religious. That can only be brought about when the working class and poor of all the different countries in the Middle East rise up and overthrow their own rotten rulers, religious fanatics and parasites who oppress and divide them. This will allow them to get rid of the system that is causing the worsening cycle of wars and ethnic conflicts: capitalism and imperialism. And in so doing they will help the mighty working classes in the big imperialist countries to do the same.

Peace is possible only when the working class takes power from that tiny capitalist minority that runs society today, in order to run society in the interests of the majority.

#imperialism

The Israeli State: Created and Used by U.S. Imperialism from Its Beginnings — The Spark #1187
▻https://the-spark.net/np1187601.html

The Israeli state currently creating an enormous human disaster in Gaza is a direct product of U.S. policies aimed at dominating the Middle East. The Israeli military is deploying U.S.-made weapons, largely paid for by U.S. taxes, and the U.S. has already announced new weapons shipments. U.S. naval forces have moved to back up the Israeli military. U.S. political leaders, starting with President Biden, have announced unlimited political support for Israel.

The foundation of Israel as a Jewish state was only possible from the beginning because of U.S. support. The U.S. did not support the creation of this state out of any altruistic concern for the Jewish people, or out of a desire to create “democracy” in the Middle East, but because it intended to use the state of Israel as the most reliable armed outpost to ensure its domination of this oil-rich region.

Israel’s Origins in British Palestine
At the conclusion of World War I, Britain took Palestine from what had been the Ottoman Empire. As everywhere, the British used the policy of divide and rule to maintain their control.

They allowed, and even encouraged, a limited Jewish immigration into this overwhelmingly Arab territory. These Jewish immigrants were themselves fleeing oppression in Europe. They might have sided with the Arabs, also oppressed. But instead, the Zionists, or Jewish nationalists, sought to find a place for only their own people. They bought land from large Arab landowners—then evicted the Arab peasants who often worked as sharecroppers, setting these peoples against each other. When the Great Arab Revolt broke out in 1936, the Zionists sided with the British, even providing auxiliaries to the British Army that repressed this revolt with enormous bloodshed. And so from the beginning, the Zionists constituted an armed force that could be used by imperialism against the Arab population. They were also a convenient target for Arab rulers, who sought to direct the anger of their populations against the Jewish people, instead of the big powers, in order to be able to maintain good relations with the dominant imperialist countries.

The U.S. Helps Found the State of Israel
After World War I, Zionism attracted only a relatively small minority of Jews. A large number participated in the socialist and communist movements, standing for international working class solidarity, rather than Jewish nationalism, and many were trying to assimilate into whatever country they lived in.

With the Great Depression of the 1930s, antisemitism was ramped up by forces defending the interests of the capitalist class, serving to divert the populations’ anger away from the capitalist system. By the end of World War II in 1945, six million Jews had been murdered, and hundreds of thousands were homeless refugees. The U.S. and the countries of Europe accepted only a small number. Many turned to Palestine, hoping to find peace and safety there.

Britain did not want to let these refugees into Palestine because they would help the Zionists launch a Jewish state, and Britain intended to keep the region for itself. But the balance of power had shifted—the U.S. was now the world’s dominant power, in the Middle East as everywhere else.

U.S. corporations had increasing interests in the region’s oil. But their interests were potentially threatened by rising Arab nationalism. They saw that a Jewish state surrounded by hostile Arab countries and dependent on the U.S. might be useful in that situation. The U.S. pushed Britain to allow the Jews entry into Palestine and to allow for the creation of a new country that would be divided between two states, one Jewish and one Arab—with no one proposing that the two peoples might live together in a shared homeland.

In fact, there was no real shared Jewish national identity among the hundreds of thousands of refugees arriving from more than a dozen different countries. To impose a new Jewish state, the first religion-based state in the Middle East, its founders artificially created a supposed Jewish identity to unite the population behind them. They brought back a dead language, Hebrew, that was only spoken in religious services, and made it the national language. And even though most of the founders were themselves secular, they made Jewish religious dogma the law of the land. This opened the door to the rise of today’s Jewish religious fundamentalists and terrorists.

The moment the Zionists declared the state of Israel in 1948, the new state found itself at war with both the Arab states surrounding it and the bulk of the population of Palestine itself. In the ensuing war, the Israeli army and the paramilitary groups linked to it carried out a planned policy aimed at “Judaizing” the territory, to drive out the Arab population and create an ethnically pure state. Between 700,000 and 800,000 people fled. Hundreds of thousands of these Palestinians were forced into vast refugee camps. Many who live in Gaza today are the grandchildren—or great-grandchildren—of these refugees.

Proving Itself Useful to Imperialism
In the period after World War II, movements against the regimes the British or French had put in place swept the Arab countries. For instance, in Egypt, nationalist military officers took power and took a somewhat nationalist, independent stance against the domination of their region by Britain, France, and, increasingly, the United States.

When in 1956 Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, which had been owned by British and French investors, the Israeli military jumped in to help British and French forces try to stop the Egyptians. Then, in 1967, Israel attacked the surrounding Arab states, taking the West Bank and Gaza and weakening the states it defeated militarily. In 1973, Israel fought another war with these same states. These wars and the pressure of the Israeli military helped push Egypt more or less permanently under the domination of the U.S.—a domination which continues to this day.

And yet, the Egyptian regime remains fragile, like the other Arab dictatorships. An explosion of the poor population or even a revolution is always possible, like those that swept the region in the Arab Spring starting in 2011. The Israeli state, on the other hand, rests on a population pulled behind the Zionist project and thus totally dependent on U.S. support.

While proving once and for all Israel’s usefulness to imperialism, the conquests of 1967 also created a new problem. The Israelis could not just drive out the populations of the territories they conquered in 1967, as they had in 1948. They could have tried to integrate these populations into their own country, which was more developed and had the possibility of offering a higher standard of living. But doing so would have meant abandoning the project of having a Jewish state.

And so instead, Israel has militarily occupied these territories for the last 56 years.

From Intifada to Suicide Bombing
In 1987, the first Intifada broke out. Every day, for six years, young Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza threw stones at Israeli soldiers. These responded with batons, tear gas, and bullets. But they could not contain the revolt against an Israeli occupation which kept the Palestinian population trapped in a permanent prison camp.

Finally, Israel and the U.S attempted to find a way out by agreeing to the creation of a Palestinian state in 1994 that they hoped would control the Palestinian population, something Israel had found itself unable to do.

Up to this point, the Palestinian resistance had been organized by nationalists who did not emphasize religion. But seeing themselves increasingly bypassed, the Islamists in 1987 created their own political organization, Hamas.

The Israeli state continued to tighten the screws, continued to take land and build settlements in the Palestinian territories for Jews only, pushing the Palestinian population into deeper poverty. The new Palestinian Authority was unable to meet even the most modest expectations of the population. It was in this context that Hamas was able to win young Palestinians to agree to carry out suicide bombings aimed at Israeli civilians. It is a mark of the desperation of the population that Hamas found young people willing to blow themselves up in this way—but it was also a dead end not just for the bombers, but for the population. Instead of a mass mobilization against an occupying army, as had characterized the first Intifada, Palestinian resistance increasingly took the form of terrorism against the Israeli population—which threw that population more fully into the arms of the most reactionary Zionists, and behind them, the U.S.

When Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007, Israel almost completely cut it off, depriving people of any way to leave. Gaza has remained an open-air prison ever since.

The Only Way out Is Solidarity Among the People
Today, about five and a half million people live under Israeli occupation or blockade in Gaza and the West Bank, compared with about six and a half million Israeli Jews and two million Arab citizens of Israel.

The history of the Jews themselves demonstrates the dead-end of nationalism: they were first the victims of European nationalisms that excluded and then massacred them by the millions, and those who accepted Jewish nationalism (Zionism) are now trapped in the prison of the Israeli state, even if they now play the role of the prison guards.

But more fundamentally, this entire situation is the result of the imperialist domination of the world. It is imperialism—first British, and then American—that has set these peoples against each other. And it is U.S. imperialism that benefits first of all from the existence of an Israeli state, armed to the teeth, counterposed to the peoples of the region, and totally dependent on the U.S. for survival.

Imperialist Domination Produces War, Death, and Destruction — The Spark #1187
▻https://the-spark.net/np1187101.html

Another barbaric war broke out in the Middle East, this time engulfing Israel and Gaza. The U.S. government and news media blame the Palestinian group, Hamas, for setting off this war.

Yes, Hamas fighters carried out a murderous rampage, killing over a thousand Israelis and wounding thousands more. This is blind violence, and it has to be condemned. But the U.S. is in no position to condemn this violence. Its hands are not clean.

The Israeli military’s response to this rampage explains how we got here. For the Israeli military launched a war against the entire Gaza population of more than two million people, half of whom are children. The Israeli government cut off all water, electricity, gas, food, and medical supplies to the Gaza Strip, condemning countless people to sickness, starvation, and death. Warplanes have been dropping thousands of bombs every day on Gaza, killing thousands and turning entire neighborhoods into rubble. And while the Israeli army masses a heavily equipped army of 300,000 troops along the border, it has ordered all Palestinians living in the north of Gaza to move to the south, provoking a mass panic, exodus and certainly more death.

Gaza is a tiny territory, half the size of Chicago. It is one of the most densely populated areas of land on Earth. Most people are refugees, who fled other wars and conflicts. They are extremely poor. And they are already trapped, completely surrounded by troops, guards, fences, walls, and war ships. Gaza is an open-air prison that has been periodically bombed and invaded in war after war.

The Israeli military now proposes to invade—this means urban warfare, soldiers fighting street to street, house to house, and much more death and destruction. And what will that produce? Ethnic cleansing? This will bring more wars, endless wars. What it will not bring is more protection or security for the various peoples—obviously not the Palestinians, but certainly not the Israelis either.

Israel, the U.S., and the rest of the big powers denounce Hamas for terrorism. But what these big powers carry out against the Palestinian population is unspeakable terror and violence from one of the biggest, most advanced, and heavily equipped militaries in the world.

Biden, the U.S. government, and the U.S. military say their support of Israel is the support of the Jewish people. That is a lie. The U.S. supports the state of Israel for one reason: the Israeli state is U.S. imperialism’s cop in the Middle East, a region rich in oil resources, which means tremendous profits and wealth for U.S. oil companies, financiers, military contractors, the capitalist class as a whole.

In order to safeguard those profits and wealth, the U.S. and the other big powers have divided the different peoples and ethnic groups of the region against each other. Divide and rule is how the U.S. and the other imperialist powers have always imposed their domination. Those divisions have produced nationalist and religious fundamentalism, and many, many wars: Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and all the wars between Israel and the Palestinians. For the Israeli population, that means being on the front line, kill or be killed, over and over again.

All the peoples of the Middle East could live together in peace, despite all their differences, ethnic or religious. That can only be brought about when the working class and poor of all the different countries in the Middle East rise up and overthrow their own rotten rulers, religious fanatics and parasites who oppress and divide them. This will allow them to get rid of the system that is causing the worsening cycle of wars and ethnic conflicts: capitalism and imperialism. And in so doing they will help the mighty working classes in the big imperialist countries to do the same.

Peace is possible only when the working class takes power from that tiny capitalist minority that runs society today, in order to run society in the interests of the majority.

Israel, One of Imperialism’s Outposts, Erupts in a New War against People | Editorial
►https://the-spark.net

Hamas, which has controlled Gaza since 2006, launched a military offensive on Israel. Armed commando groups, breaching the military barriers that divide Gaza from Israel, attacked Israeli civilians, taking hostages. Rockets rained on heavily populated areas, including the capital of Tel Aviv.

Israel’s military was apparently taken by surprise. But it quickly mounted a vast response. Its chief of staff warned that Israel’s “enemies will pay a price beyond anything ever seen before.” The words were aimed at Hamas, but the weapons used by Israel were aimed at the Palestinian people.

By the end of the first day, over 500 people had been killed, both Israelis and Palestinians. On that same day, the Israeli army warned all civilians to leave Gaza. Most Palestinians have no place else to go in Israel’s apartheid framework. So they will be a target in Israel’s military “cleanup” of Gaza.

The Hamas offensive may have been prompted by a threatened Israeli-Saudi Arabian deal that could challenge Hamas control over Gaza. But it flows from long-term Hamas policy, whose main aim has been to force Israel and the imperialist powers to recognize Hamas as a legitimate part of their world.

By attacking Israeli civilians, Hamas may be aiming to shake support for Israel’s government. But just as in earlier wars in the region, the resulting mayhem is more likely to drive Israelis back into the arms of their government, with its vicious apartheid-like policies. And Hamas, with its organized terrorist violence, gave no perspective to the Palestinian people, only the likelihood of becoming unwitting victims of the violence coming from both sides.

Israelis are also caught in the dead-end trap of nationalism—the idea that Israel can maintain itself only by carrying out organized violence against the Palestinians. This gives the Israelis themselves no perspective other than living in a permanent state of war. It shows that a people who oppress another people cannot live in freedom themselves.

Israel came out of the attempt to build a refuge in Palestine for the Jewish people, themselves victims of Europe’s most atrocious racist violence. But the state of Israel was founded through violent attacks on the Palestinian people to drive them from their land. It guaranteed that Israel would live in a constant state of warfare with all the peoples in the region.

Based on a policy that divided it from its neighbors, Israel became an outpost of British and American imperialism. In exchange for weapons and economic funding, Israel turned itself into one of imperialism’s cops. Its military and advanced weapons were used to control the hotspots that regularly broke out in the Middle East.

Israel wasn’t fated to play this role. And the Jews, who had been severely oppressed or killed in Europe, were not fated to become the oppressors of the Palestinians. There were many socialists among the Jewish refugees from Europe’s violence. Their perspective was to emigrate to Palestine, to try to build a multi-nation country together with the Palestinians already living there.

But the socialists were not organized, and the Jewish nationalists were.

Seventy-five years ago, the nation-state of Israel was born as a specifically Jewish state, a religious state. Most Palestinians were driven out. Those who remained were relegated to an inferior status. Given that violent founding, all of the populations of the region have lived in a constant state of war ever since.

This does not need to be humanity’s future. We can build a different one. We can be part of a common struggle by all the oppressed. We can fight, all of us, against our own leaders and against the wealthy classes they serve. This was possible in Palestine in 1948. It is possible in this country today. It is possible around the world, the only level where such a struggle will finally succeed.

UAW Strike: Contract Negotiations — Handcuffs on the Workers
The Spark #1186
▻https://the-spark.net/np1186601.html

The following are excerpts from a presentation given by Gary Walkowicz at the SPARK meeting on September 24. A video of the entire presentation is linked on the SPARK website: ▻https://the-spark.net/2023-09-24.html

On September 15, the UAW leadership called a strike against the Big Three auto companies—Ford, GM, and Stellantis. They shut down one assembly plant at each company. A week later, the union leaders did not strike any more assembly or parts plants; they only called out the parts distribution centers at GM and Stellantis, which did not have an impact on any vehicle production.

UAW autoworkers today have every reason to make a fight against our corporate bosses. We have a lot to fight for … because we have lost a lot. Up through the early 1970s, autoworkers had gained an adequate standard of living. It was better than what their parents had and opened the door for a better future for their children. Autoworkers gained these things by waging many, many strikes against the auto companies, starting with the sit-down strikes. In the time period after World War II, the American capitalists had become the dominant military and economic power in the world. So when autoworkers did strike for better wages and benefits, the auto corporations gave up a little. Autoworkers also pulled other workers up with them. The higher pay in auto meant that people wanted to get jobs at the Big Three. The jobs were hard, but autoworkers at least had a somewhat tolerable standard of living. Not anymore.

After decades of concessions, the standard of living for autoworkers has been drastically reduced. Higher seniority workers have fallen way behind. From 2007 up to today, autoworkers’ hourly wages, when adjusted for inflation, have gone down by 30%. Second-tier workers, those hired after 2007, start out at half pay, with fewer benefits and no pension. Today, many of the new hires in auto have to work a second job just to survive. It’s shocking how far auto wages have fallen. And autoworkers have lost even more when it comes to jobs and working conditions.

Demands to Gain Back
When the current contract negotiations started, the new leadership in the UAW said they wanted to gain back what had been lost. They put their monetary demands on the table—a 46% wage increase over the life of the contract and the restoration of cost-of-living adjustments. The UAW leaders demanded an end to tiers and temporary workers—bringing every worker up to full pay. They demanded pensions and retiree health care for all the workers who don’t have them, over 60% of the workforce. And they demanded higher pensions for the workers who do have them.

Certainly, autoworkers deserve every damn penny of those demands. In fact, we need much more than that because those demands don’t even make up for all the concessions that were taken from us.

We can see that some of the money they took from us has gone into the pockets of CEOs like Mary Barra and Jim Farley. They are now paid over 20 million dollars a year. They got a 40% raise. But most of the money stolen from us is not so obvious; it has gone to the people behind the scenes, to the people that we don’t see—the Wall Street capitalists who own the auto companies. They are making billions and billions off our labor.

The media, who are also owned by big corporations and Wall Street, have been crying and lying about the union leaders’ demands.

Companies Have the Money
A more realistic estimate by Deutsche Bank said that all of the UAW’s contract demands would cost about 5 billion dollars a year. Hell, Ford alone paid out that much money to their stockholders in dividends this year. GM gave their stockholders more than 14 billion dollars in stock buybacks. They have plenty of money, more than plenty. The Big Three made 250 billion dollars of profit in the last decade. If the workers get more of that money and the stockholders get less, so what? We deserve it. It should be our money. Workers’ labor and blood and sweat produced every penny of those profits, and we produced every penny of those stock buybacks and dividends.

It is possible that the auto companies will offer some raises in the face of this strike. But raises alone, even raises that might seem big, are not going to give autoworkers the lives they deserve. Because raises alone would not even touch the biggest thing that has been taken from autoworkers—the hundreds of thousands of jobs that have been taken away. Raises don’t help you if you don’t have a job or if your kids won’t be able to get a job or be able to have what you had.

What has really made the auto bosses rich and made workers’ lives poorer is that the companies have been cutting jobs and getting much more work out of many fewer workers.

Jobs Taken Away
In 1979, there were 450,000 UAW workers at GM alone. Adding Ford and Chrysler, there were almost a million workers at the Big Three. Today, there are only 145,000 UAW workers at the three companies combined. Where did all the jobs go? A lot of the jobs were taken away through speed-up. Many hundreds of thousands more jobs were taken away by outsourcing. UAW members at Ford, GM, and Chrysler used to make many of the parts for the cars and trucks. Then, the Big Three set up subsidiaries to outsource the work, spinning off the parts plants to Delphi, Visteon, and Acustar. Then they broke up the subsidiaries and they moved the work to other companies, to other auto part suppliers. Every time the work moved, the workers got paid less and less money. That was the bosses’ goal. Today, there are hundreds of thousands of workers in the auto industry working at these supplier plants; some of them are unionized, and many are not. But they all work for poverty wages. In Michigan alone, there are about one thousand auto supplier plants that are not part of the Big Three. Many of them are producing parts that were once made by Ford, GM, and Chrysler workers. These low-paid workers are the 3rd tier, the 4th tier, and the 5th tier of auto workers.

And today, auto companies are openly planning to eliminate more jobs as they transition to building electric vehicles. Right now, those jobs in battery plants pay a lot less than full-pay auto jobs. Even after the UAW leaders negotiated a raise at the GM joint-venture battery plant in Ohio, those workers are still making $12 an hour less than full pay at GM. What we are seeing now is the beginning of the next round of outsourcing jobs and creating lower pay tiers.

On top of the transition to electric vehicles, there is another threat to autoworkers’ jobs. The Big Three auto companies have made it clear that they want to sell only high-priced vehicles in the future—trucks, SUVs, and luxury vehicles. Ford, for example, is planning to stop building almost all their car lines. Ford CEO Jim Farley admitted that the company is planning for a future where fewer people will be able to afford to buy a vehicle. In the future that the auto bosses are planning, not only will autoworkers not be able to afford to buy what they build, and there will also be fewer vehicles produced, which would mean fewer jobs. This is how the auto companies are planning to increase their profits even more, at our expense. This is the future they are planning for us.

Working Conditions Are Worse
Another way the auto companies have increased their profits is by imposing horrible working conditions in the plants. Working in an auto plant was never easy, but in the last few decades, things have gotten much worse. Every year, year after year, the company eliminates jobs and adds the work to the remaining workers. That’s the speed-up we talked about. Today every worker is doing the work of 2 or 3 or 4 workers. On top of working harder and harder, autoworkers have had their break time reduced. The result of the speed-up and less break time means that every day, autoworkers go home exhausted. It means autoworkers end up with broken bodies—they have carpal tunnel and other repetitive motion injuries; they have shoulders that need rotator cuff surgery and damaged knees.

The auto bosses also have increased their profits by implementing insane work schedules in the auto plants—having people work 10 hours, 10.7 hours, and 12 hours a day. The companies have people working mandatory overtime, working 6 and 7 days a week for months at a time. Then there are the people who are forced to work split shifts, working day shift and night shift in the same week. Working exhausting jobs and exhausting schedules will take years off your life. That’s what they want us to sacrifice so that more money will go to Wall Street.

We need wages that provide a decent standard of living. We need decent working conditions that don’t cripple and exhaust us. And we need to have a job and keep a job! And we need jobs that will be there for our children, jobs for the next generation. Right now, we have none of those things. And even if the auto companies met the UAW leaders’ money demands, that would not improve working conditions in the plants or get back the jobs that have been lost.

The loss of jobs, the horrible working conditions, the reduced pay—these are all the result of autoworkers and their union not resisting the war that the bosses waged on us. From 1976 to 2019, the UAW did not wage a single major companywide strike against the auto companies.

A Fight Starts
In 2019, the old UAW leadership called a strike against GM—this was the first show of resistance in 43 years. But it was only at one company. Today, the new leadership of the UAW has called another strike—at all three companies, but so far, it has engaged only about 25,000 workers out of the 145,000 UAW autoworkers. At this point, fewer auto workers are on strike than in 2019. So far, the autoworkers called out on strike have been used by the UAW leaders as a negotiating tool and a scare tactic to get the auto companies to give up some money.

Autoworkers certainly have more power than they have used so far. Autoworkers can fight for more than some small raises. Autoworkers can fight for more jobs, better working conditions, and a comfortable standard of living.

But that would require a different fight than the one proposed by either the old UAW leaders or the new UAW leaders.

People will say that the UAW workers at the Big Three can’t do it by themselves. That’s right, we can’t do it by ourselves. But UAW workers don’t have to stand alone. First of all, we have to use all of our forces—145,000 Ford, GM, and Stellantis workers together to make a fight, not just a few of us.

Then we have to pull in all those hundreds of thousands of workers from the auto industry who work in all those parts plants, workers who are even more underpaid and more exploited. There are also all the autoworkers at the non-union transplant auto companies who have their own reasons to fight for more.

And for every job in auto, there are six more jobs connected to it, workers in steel, rubber, plastics, and transportation. This is a big part of the working class.

The whole working class has the power to make a fight in every factory and every workplace. They can fight everywhere—inside the factory, outside the workplace, and in the streets.

People will say this kind of fight can’t happen. Well, in 1936 and 1937 and again in 1945, strikes by autoworkers spread throughout the working class. Other workers came out, not just to support autoworkers, but to join them by making their own fight. That’s why those strikes accomplished so much.

This time, we do not have to stop.

Mexico: To “Transform” Mexican Society Today — Class Struggle #116
▻https://the-spark.net/csart1165.html

– Spain’s North American Colonies
– The First “Transformation”: The Wars of “Independence,” 1810–1821
– The Second “Transformation”: “Reformation,” or the Reform Wars, 1857–1867
– The Third “Transformation”: The Mexican “Revolution” and Its Aftermath, 1910–1940
– Bourgeois Development in the Shadow of Imperialism
– And in Imperialism’s Direct Glare
– The Force Exists That Could “Transform” Mexico