A Class in Rebellion

Resistance in HONDURAS continues with marches and neighborhood actions

2009-08-18T22:28:00.015-04:00

Credit: Prensa Latina

By Prensa Latina [Havana]
Published 18 AUG 2009

Tegucigalpa, 18 AUG (PL) Popular resistance against the coup d'état

has now reached its 52nd consecutive day, with marches in the capital and actions to promote public awareness in neighborhoods, leaders of the movement announced

Indigenous leader Berta Cáceres, from the leadership of the Frente Nacional contra el Golpe de Estado, explained that details of these demonstrations will be given in gathering places, for security reasons.

She recalled that members of the armed forces and the police are following the demonstrations, as part of their repressive actions and harassment, for the sake of intimidation.

The general coordination of the Frente, President of the Federación Unitaria de Trabajadores (FUTH), Juan Barahona, confirmed that this Tuesday, the gathering place of the opposition will be in the Universidad Pedagógica Nacional.

The general secretary of the FUTH, Israel Salinas, specified that there the collective leadership of the Frente will adopt actions for the day, in an effort to obstruct repression.

Salinas announced the 22nd communiqué form the Frente yesterday, in which popular organizations confirm that they will maintain peaceful resistance for the return of constitutional order and for the return of the President, Manuel Zelaya.

The document also confirms the desire of those forces to call a Constituent Assembly to draw up a Magna Carta with changes in favor of the impoverished majorities and for a really participatory democracy.

Indigenous leader Cáceres explained that among the actions in the neighborhoods, educational meetings with the population about the meaning and results of the June 28 military coup d'état were scheduled.

The Frente announced a new way to express rejection of the coup plotters for next Wednesday: in the capital, a big caravan of vehicles, from bicycles to heavy trucks, "everything that rolls along and makes noise."

Last Sunday, the alliance of popular organizations carried out a national assembly to analyze strategies of struggle, although it only announced a big concert next Sunday.

During the 12-hour performance, beginning at 9 a.m., Honduran artists and those from other countries like Argentina, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Costa Rica, among them the popular group Los Guaraguao, will show up.

ARGENTINA: In Zanon, the capitalists have been expropriated!

2009-08-14T22:39:00.023-04:00

[From http://www.ft-ci.org] [Cde Alejandro did most of the work on this translation. -- YM]

"Eight years have already passed: we do not want any more sweet talk we want expropriation!" roared the Zanon ceramics workers, accompanied by a big column of state workers, teachers, health workers, social organizations and leftist parties, on the way to the Neuquén legislature, where they would deal with the expropriation of the factory.

The Patagonian wind blew cold and strong, making the wait in front of the provincial Congress unbearable. The ceramics workers, who, eight years ago, dared and seized the plant, started it producing and made their epic a part of the best pages of working-class history of our country, were proudly singing, "Here they are, these are them, the workers of Zanon!" until their throats grew hoarse.

In the days before, Neuquén was a hotbed. Although the Governor had decided in favor of expropriation, complaints were heard from his own party, the MPN, from the right-wing opposition, and from the [union federation] CGT itself, because the factory was being handed over to "lefties," to "criminals." They did not spare any insult, in order to discredit the exemplary struggle of the ceramics workers. The CGT union bureaucracy and the Chamber of Commerce came out to prevent the expropriation from being approved. But they couldn't.

Videos: http://www.pts. org.ar/spip. php?article13388

The anti-coup resistance in HONDURAS has reached the 48th consecutive day

2009-08-14T21:18:00.015-04:00

By Prensa Latina [Havana]
Published 14 AUG 2009

Credit: Prensa Latina

Tegucigalpa, 14 AUG (PL) Today the popular resistance against June 28 military coup in Honduras reached its 48th consecutive day, and its leaders assure the resistance will continue until the return of constitutional order.

Yesterday, Juan Barahona, general coordinator of the Frente Nacional contra el Golpe de Estado, stated in a speech, "We will continue our peaceful struggle, because our force is moral, it is our resolve."

The President of the Federación Unitaria de Trabajadores called for a gathering this Friday in front of the Universidad Pedagógica Nacional, occupied by the military two days ago, and until then, the usual site of meetings by the Resistance.

Yesterday, thousands of people returned to the streets, amidst a climate of tension caused by a vast operation by the armed forces in the capital and the city of San Pedro Sula, 250 km to the north.

The march by the Frente [the Resistance] was constantly watched by a large contingent of Cobras, special anti-riot corps, backed up by dozens of soldiers with firearms.

However, members of the Discipline Committee did their utmost to prevent incidents with the troops that were guarding private businesses located along the route of the march, Prensa Latina stated.

The main aim of the demonstration was to present charges of human rights' violations to the Public Prosecutor's Office, located in an exclusive neighborhood, Lomas del Guijarro, where soldiers were also deployed.

The human rights' prosecutor, Sandra Ponce, received the charges of abuses and tortures suffered by those arrested and promised to take action on the matter.

She confirmed that 27 people are still being held and are being charged with sedition, rebellion and even terrorism; all these charges are denied by the members of the Frente de Abogados contra el Golpe [a lawyers' organization against the coup d'état).

A judicial hearing took place yesterday in the police station when they are jailed, and last night there were still no reports about the results of the hearing.

Meanwhile, yesterday, the Comité de Organizaciones Populares e Indígenas charged that three of its members disappeared after being seen when they were arrested and identified the missing as Ramón García, Marlon René Calix y Julián Martínez.

New imperialist bases in COLOMBIA

2009-08-12T22:33:00.007-04:00

From http://www.ft-ci.org
By Claudia Cinatti
Thursday, August 6, 2009

Álvaro Uribe has just signed a new agreement with Barack Obama for the installation of US soldiers in another seven bases on Colombian territory, that would substitute for the base at Manta, Ecuador, that the United States is vacating because of Rafael Correa's decision not to renew the lease which expired after ten years. In this way, Obama has asserted the military and political alliance with Uribe, one of Bush's main allies in the region.

With the excuse of the "fight against drug trafficking" under Clinton and with Bush's "war against terror," Colombia has become the main military concentration of the United States in Latin America, with thousands of agents, advisers, and intelligence services that have been devoted to training paramilitary militias and death squads, responsible for the assassinations of union leaders, campesinos and members of the FARC. The military incursion into Ecuadorean territory against a FARC camp in March 2008, in which Raúl Reyes was killed, was organized from these bases.

This policy of Uribe has caused tensions with other governments of the region. Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez denounced it as a direct threat, and Brazil complained because it does not agree with the increase in the US military presence in the vicinity of the Amazon. Several Latin American governments, like that of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, are welcoming President Uribe, who organized a regional tour to reduce opposition to his military policy in view of the next meeting of UNASUR, which will be held in Quito on August 10.The expansion of the US military presence in Colombia, along with the role the United States is playing in supporting the coup participants in Honduras, shows that Obama's rhetoric and his alleged "good neighbor" policy are not even sufficient to cover the fact that US imperialism is seeking to reassert its regional power in Latin America, which it continues to consider as its backyard.

On August 5, a demonstration was held in Buenos Aires, repudiating Uribe's visit and the installation of new US military facilities, which constitute a concrete threat to all the peoples of the region. It is necessary to strengthen the mobilization throughout Latin America to expel imperialism from our continent.

In VENEZUELA, the draft law on "media crimes" is no longer current

2009-08-06T14:23:00.013-04:00

LE MONDE.FR 06 AUG 09 13:55 hours • Updated 06 AUG 09 13:55 hours

By Marie Delcas, Bogota Correspondant

The media remain at the heart of Venezuelan political debate. Presented on Monday, August 3, a bill on "media crimes" was buried on Wednesday. "Examining it is not a topic," Ivan Zerpa, secretary general of the Assembly, specified. Several deputies from Chávez' majority had expressed their disagreement with the text, presented by the Republic's top prosecutor, Sra. Luisa Ortega.

But, during a press conference, President Hugo Chávez defended the need for the state to regulate press freedom. "While laws and a constitution exist, no freedom is without limits," the Chief of State recalled, on Wednesday. "If you want to live where there is no law, then go live with Tarzan in the jungle."

Frequencies not renewed

The bill proposed punishments of up to 4 years in prison for the authors of "false" or "manipulated" news undermining "social peace, national security, or public morality." The text caused an outcry among NGO's like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Reporters without Borders. Anxiety of the media and of those who defend freedom of the press is accordingly more intense because, since Sunday, 32 radio stations and 2 local television stations have stopped broadcasting, the national television commission (Conatel) having decided not to renew their frequency. If the commission is to be believed, the punished operators had failed to observe technical and administrative standards. Some two hundred other radio and television stations could experience an identical fate.

The topic contributes to increasing the divisions in the country. President Hugo Chávez considers that privately-owned media -- that remain virulently opposed to him -- are in the hands of an reactionary, even pro-coup, oligarchy. For the opposition, on the other hand, the government is trying to muzzle the press and put an end to freedom of expression.

The tension makes itself felt in the street. On Tuesday, in the east of the country, a demonstration in support of one of the silenced radio stations turned into a confrontation between "chavistas" and "anti-chavistas." Ten people were injured. The day before, thirty supporters of President Hugo Chávez -- some of them armed -- had surrounded the headquarters of the Globovisión television channel, very critical of the government. Security cameras filmed the scene, the tear-gas grenades thrown by demonstrators and the presence among them of Lina Ron, leader of hard-line "chavismo."

The public prosecutor immediately ordered the arrest of the political leader. Hugo Chávez approved the measure and publicly condemned the attack against Globovisión headquarters. "Acts of this nature cannot be tolerated, whether they come from the opposition or not, from revolutionaries or from pseudo-revolutionaries or from whoever it might be," the Chief of State declared. On Wednesday, Lina Ron surrendered to the authorities.

Globovisión is the object of five administrative processes and one judicial investigation for "incitement to violence."

Chavistas physically attack TV station in VENEZUELA

2009-08-04T23:08:00.003-04:00

[Incredibly, it is not enough for Chávez and chavistas that the pro-censorship Venezuelan government has just shut down dozens of media outlets and threatens to silence 200 more. Chávez' followers have now launched a (first) terrorist attack on a dissident TV station, and even that is not sufficient. As reported below, the National Assembly is now discussing a law that would put journalists in jail for publishing criticism of great leader Chávez. What Chávez worshippers refuse to understand is that such repressive legislation can always easily be used against workers' organizations and the left. That's why it must be opposed. -- YM]

[From http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8184671.stm]

Page last updated at 23:40 GMT, Tuesday, 4 August 2009 00:40 UK

Chavez backer held over TV attack

A pro-government activist in Venezuela has handed herself over to the authorities a day after a violent attack on an opposition TV station.

President Hugo Chavez said left-wing militant Lina Ron, who has been one of his most ardent supporters, would now face the full weight of the law.

He deplored the attack on Globovision TV, and said it would help his opponents brand him as a tyrant.

More than 30 people stormed the station in Caracas, firing tear gas.

"She [Lina Ron] handed herself in, and it's good that she presented herself, and has been arrested. There was no other alternative," Mr Chavez said.

He described the attack as a "counter-revolutionary" act, saying that it "gives the enemy weapons to attack me even more as a tyrant".

The attackers have been identified by officials as activists from from the Union Patriotica Venezolana (UPV), which supports Mr Chavez.

Globovision, which has been highly critical of President Chavez, is facing several investigations that could also take it off air.

New media bill

Monday's attack came as the arguments over control of the media in Venezuela became increasingly bitter.

Thirty-four radio stations were ordered off air after the government said they were in breach of the rules for registering or had allowed their broadcast licences to expire. Some 200 other stations are under investigation.

The government in Caracas says it is trying to make the media more democratic.

"The state is retaking control of concessions that were being used in an illegal way over more than 30 and 40 years," said Public Works Minister Diosdado Cabello, who is the head of the telecommunications agency.

"It's an act of justice."

But critics say the move is aimed at giving more space to media that support Mr Chavez and is an attempt to muzzle any critical voices.

Venezuela's National Assembly is due on Tuesday to begin discussing legislation under which journalists could be imprisoned for up to four years for broadcasting or publishing material that attacks "the peace, security, and independence of the nation and the institutions of the state".

Venezuela still has many private radio stations and newspapers that are stridently opposed to the president but in recent years the government has built up its network of state-run media.

VENEZUELA: The government occupies coffee factories

2009-08-04T12:32:00.008-04:00

[Webster defines a quintal, a measure used in the following story, as 100 kilograms, i.e., 220.46 pounds. The nationalizations mentioned in the second paragraph were actually purchases by the Chávez government, at very generous prices, of energy and telecommunications firms. As the story indicates, the occupations of the coffee production factories will be temporary. Chávez has great respect for the sanctity of private ownership of the means of production; one can see that from the fact that after ten years of Chávez in power, Venezuelan workers are still exploited by capitalists. So if the coffee industry is nationalized, the owners will undoubtedly get very, very large compensation for their factories, which proves, once again, that chavismo is simply a lot of flatulent rhetoric, nothing more. Where workers have, in fact, recovered owner-abandoned enterprises and restarted those factories under workers' self-management, as in the case of Sanitarios Maracay, the Chávez government refused to nationalize those enterprises. Just last month, workers from the Vivex enterprise, occupied by its workers for 7 months, marched all the way from Barcelona, Venezuela, to Caracas, 300 kilometers in 12 days, hoping to be allowed to talk to Chávez and persuade him to nationalize their enterprise; those workers were apparently never received by the Venezuelan President. For details, see http://venezuela.elmilitante.org/content/view/6533/164/-- YM]

Venezuela : The government occupies coffee production factories
LEMONDE.FR with AFP 03.08.09 17:24 hours

On the morning of Monday, August 3, Venezuela's socialist [sic] govenment ordered the temporary occupation of the factories of two local coffee producers, accused especially of fraudulent and "monopolistic" practices at the root of the shortage of this product in the country.

"The Bolivarian government has occupied all the factories in the country of the company Fama de América and of Café Madrid, to guarantee supplies for the Venezuelan people," the Minister of Agriculture, Elías Jaua, explained to state-run television. These occupations come within the scope of the law on food sovereignty, promulgated at the end of last year by the antiliberal President Hugo Chávez, who is strengthening control over production by food companies, in order to fight against shortages. As part of his socialist revolution [sic], the Venezuelan President has already nationalized several key sectors of the economy, like energy or telecommunications.

Disloyal and monopolistic practices

According to an association, Alianza Agroalimentaria, coffee production went from 1,400,000 quintals in 1998 to 900,000 today. The Minister indicated that the occupation of the factories should last three months, the time to carry out a complete audit of the two enterprises. "If we could show that smuggling, retentions, disloyal and monopolistic practices had taken place, we could consider nationalization of these enterprises," he specified.

In recent months, the Venezuelan government has ordered the occupation and expropriation of several enterprises producing staples, like rice or pasta, in an attempt to put an end to chronic shortages. Since 2003, the biggest Latin American oil exporter has put in place a strict regime of price control for staple foods. Food producers regularly denounce this measure, asserting that prices do not even cover their production costs.

Chávez attacks press freedom in VENEZUELA

2009-08-02T21:24:00.000-04:00

[For the record, the young Marx began his career as a journalist with several articles blasting censorship by the state. For details, see the first volume of Hal Draper's magnum opus, Karl Marx' Theory of Revolution. So it's fair to say there is a precedent for Marxist opposition to censorship by a bourgeois government, like the Chávez administration, which has 10 years in power devoted to preserving the bourgeois state machine, with the highest inflation rate in Latin America (according to some sources, a really punishing 40%) and zero power for the working class. -- YM]

Venezuela shuts down 34 radio stations and television channels
LEMONDE.FR with AP and AFP Aug 1 09 21:12 hours • Updated Aug 1 09 21:40 hours

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez' government has cancelled the licenses of 34 radio stations and television channels, officially because of administrative reasons, while warning 200 other stations that their broadcasts were also threatened, restarting the controversy over recent attacks ["atteints"] on freedom of expression in the country.

The targeted ["visées"] radio and television stations suspended their broadcasts on Saturday, August 1, and some hundreds of people immeidately gathered at their headquartes in protest. "No to censorship," "People, open your eyes, it's a dictatorship," proclaimed the placards in front of the Caracas headquarters of the CNB group of radio stations, one of the suspended media that was critical of the Venezuelan President.

Organizations defending human rights are accusing President Chávez of tightening his control over the media in order to stifle any dissident voice. "We are witnessing the biggest operation of restricting freedom of expression ever set up in Venezuela, without precedent in the democratic period," declared Carlos Correa, Director of the NGO defending freedom of expression, Espacio Público.

"Media crimes"

These "administrative" closings are taking place just as the government is preparing a series of reforms aiming, according to the government, at "democratizing" a still very concentrated sector. This new law punishing "media crimes," to which the Spanish daily El País is devoting a dossier, should be adopted before the end of the year. This new legislation would punish the owners of radio stations, television networks and newspapers accused of having tried to "sow panic," or, again, having "disturbed the social order." Media that "falsify information with a view to spreading a wrong perception of the facts," are also in the [government's] line of sight.

Private-sector media feel that these reforms would result in strengthening the state's influence on information, a concern that Venezuela's top prosecutor, Sra. Luisa Ortega, who on Thursday insisted that freedom of expression in Venezuela must be "limited," is not seeking to dispel....

Clashes erupt at South Korea car plant

2009-07-21T21:34:00.003-04:00

[Courtesy of cde John L -- May his tribe increase!]

South Korean riot police backed up by armour and helicopters, have clashed with hundreds of sacked auto workers who have been holed up in a car factory outside of Seoul for almost two months. Several of the protesters used high-powered slingshots to fire nuts and bolts at police from factory rooftops as they tried to storm the Ssangyong motors car plant on Tuesday. Some 3,000 riot police have been deployed to the plant at Pyeongtaek, about 70km south of Seoul, in an effort to clear up to 600 sacked workers who have occupied the factory's paint shop.

Ssangyong is South Korea's fifth-largest automaker and the occupation which began in late May has paralysed production at the plant. Police first entered the factory on Monday after the company cut off water and gas supplies to the plant in an effort to force the workers to leave. As they did so, protesters tried to block their path by setting light to vehicles and tyres while pelting police with shrapnel from catapults.

Job cuts

The workers began their occupation on May 21 in protest at job cuts designed as part of a restructuring plan to save the troubled carmaker. Ssangyong, which is majority-owned by Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp., has been in court-approved bankruptcy protection since February. South Korean media reports have said the paint shop, where most of the protesters are holed-up, contains flammable materials that could potentially ignite amid a major clash.

As part of its restructuring plan, Ssangyong aims to shed 36 per cent of its workforce or about 2,646 jobs. According to the company, some 1,670 have left the company voluntarily, but nearly 1,000 opposed the move and some were later fired. Ssangyong mostly manufactures light SUVs and a luxury sedan – sales of which have plummeted in the global economic downturn.

The company sold 13,020 vehicles during the first six months of the year, down 73.9 percent from the same period in 2008, according to South Korea's Yonhap news agency. Government officials have warned that unless the occupation of the factory ends and production resumes, any hope of saving the company will evaporate.

Is Obama Continuing the Bush-Cheney Assassination Program?

2009-07-15T21:46:00.003-04:00

[Courtesy of antiwar.com http://original.antiwar.com/scahill/2009/07/14/is-obama-continuing/]

Is Obama Continuing the Bush-Cheney Assassination Program?
by Jeremy Scahill, July 15, 2009

In June, CIA Director Leon Panetta allegedly informed members of the House Intelligence Committee of the existence of a secret Bush-era program implemented in the days after 9/11 that, until last month, had been hidden from lawmakers. The concealment of the plan, Panetta alleged, happened at the orders of then-vice president Dick Cheney.

Now, the New York Times is reporting that this secret program that had "been hidden from lawmakers" by Cheney was a plan "to dispatch small teams overseas to kill senior Qaeda terrorists." The Wall Street Journal, which originally reported on the plan, reported that the paramilitary teams were to implement a"2001 presidential legal pronouncement, known as a finding, which authorized the CIA to pursue such efforts.

"The plan, the Times says, never was carried out because "Officials at the spy agency over the years ran into myriad logistical, legal, and diplomatic obstacles." Instead, the Bush administration "sought an alternative to killing terror suspects with missiles fired from drone aircraft or seizing them overseas and imprisoning them in secret CIA jails."

The House Intelligence Committee is now reportedly preparing an investigation into this program and the Senate may follow suit. "We were kept in the dark.That's something that should never, ever happen again," said Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein. Withholding this information from Congress "is a big problem, because the law is very clear."

There are several important issues raised by this unfolding story. First, while the Times claims the program was never implemented, the program sounds very similar to what Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sy Hersh described in March as an "executive assassination ring" run by Dick Cheney that operated throughout the Bush years:

"Congress has no oversight of it. It's an executive assassination ring essentially, and it's been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths."

Under President Bush's authority, they've been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That's been going on, in the name of all of us."

Hersh's description sounds remarkably similar to that offered by the Times and the Wall Street Journal. While the House and Senate should certainly investigate this program – and lying to Congress, misleading it, or concealing from it suchprograms is likely illegal – it is also important to guarantee that it has actually stopped. But another pressing issue for the Congress is investigating the Obama administration's adoption of this secret program's central components.

As the Times noted, the major reason – beyond logistical hurdles – that the program was not implemented (if that is even true) was that the Bush administration began increasing its use of weaponized drones to conduct Israeli-style targeted assassinations (often, these drones kill many more civilians than so-called "targets"). These drone attacks, coupled with the use of extraordinary rendition and secret prisons, became the official program for "eliminating" specific individuals labeled "high value" targets by the administration.

The Obama administration has not only continued the Bush policy of using drones to carry out targeted assassinations, it has also continued the use of prisons where people are held indefinitely without charge or access to the International Committee of the Red Cross. Under Obama, Bagram air base in Afghanistan is expanding and, at present, hundreds of prisoners are held there without charges. In essence, the Obama administration is doing exactly what this secret CIA program sought to do, albeit out in the open.

Beyond the Cheney assassination program, what is really worthy of congressional investigation right now is the legality of Obama's current policy of assassination. In 1976, President Gerald Ford issued an executive order banning assassinations. "No employee of the United States government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination," states Executive Order 11905.

White House lawyers – with their seemingly infinite legal creativity – would likely say that the drone strikes are not assassinations, but rather part of war, that putting poison in a cigar of a foreign leader is different from launching missiles at a funeral where an "enemy" is believed to be among the mourners. While the implications of the U.S. assassinating heads of state or foreign officials are grave, it could be argued that, on some levels, the drone attacks are worse in the sense that they kill many more civilians. Moreover, these drone attacks largely take place in Pakistan, which is a sovereign nation. There is no legal or congressional declaration of war against Pakistan.

It is long past due that the Congress investigate this U.S. government assassination program. The politically inconvenient truth, however, is this: An actual investigation would require the Democrats pounding Cheney over his concealment of an assassination program (that allegedly was not implemented) to focus their investigation on how President Obama actually implemented and expanded that very program.

Resistance inside the US Military -- Antiwar soldier freed from San Diego brig

2009-07-11T11:33:00.005-04:00

Army deserter freed from brig in San Diego after serving 12 months
11:39 AM July 9, 2009

Army deserter Robin Long was released this morning from the brig at Miramar Marine Corps Air Station in San Diego after serving 12 months of a 15-month sentence.

Long, 25, of Boise, Idaho, fled to Canada in 2005 to avoid being deployed to Iraq. He said he could not go to Iraq because of his moral opposition to the war that began with the U.S. invasion in 2003.

Long's forced return to the U.S. by Canadian authorities caused a political furor because many Canadians saw it as a reversal of the country's welcoming attitude toward U.S. deserters and draft evaders during the Vietnam War.

"Wow, what a journey the last four years has been," Long said as he left the brig. He was accompanied by Dawn O'Brien, a board member of Veterans for Peace and a leader in Military Families Speak Out.

After being returned to this country, an Army court-martial sentenced Long to 15 months and a dishonorable discharge.

Even after he is processed out of the Army, Long may not be able to return to Canada, where his girlfriend and their 2-year-old son reside. Canadian law prohibits convicted felons from entering the country, although Long's supporters have vowed to appeal.

Long enlisted in 2003 and was stationed at Ft. Carson, Colo., as a private when his unit was ordered to Iraq. In Canada, his application for refugee status was rejected. His supporters said he was the first U.S. service member to be deported from Canada during the Iraq war.

In Canada, Long opened a business encouraging water conservation.

-- Tony Perry in San Diego

No negotiation with the murderous coup participants in Honduras!

2009-07-06T22:40:00.004-04:00

“NO NEGOTIATION WITH THE MURDEROUS COUP PARTICIPANTS IN HONDURAS" PRESS RELEASE

(PTS, July 6, 2009) Christian Castillo, national leader of the Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas (PTS), indicated today that, "in view of the murder of two demonstrators and tens of people wounded this Sunday, during the massive demonstration in the Toncontin Airport, it is necessary to intensify the actions against the coup in Honduras. Words and communiqués of repudiation are not enough. Thousands of us have to be in the streets, repudiating the murderous coup participants and backing the workers, campesinos and students who are confronting them in the streets." Castillo also stated that "we charge that beyond the declarations of rejection in the OAS and the UN, there is a continuing attempt to make the coup acceptable and arrive at an understanding with the coup participants. In order to defeat that, it is necessary to increase the workers' and people's mobilization, both in Honduras and throughout Latin America. For that reason, we say: Down with the coup by the Honduran bourgeoisie, the Armed Forces, the Supreme Court of Justice, the Parliament, the churches and the big communications media! The blood of our Honduran brothers, that was spilled, is not to be negotiated!"

Down with the coup and the state of siege in HONDURAS!

2009-07-04T13:24:00.017-04:00

Friday, July 3, 2009
Press release

Down with the coup and the state of siege in Honduras!
No negotiations with the coup plotters!
All our solidarity with the women and all the Honduran people in struggle

(Buenos Aires, July 3, 2009) The group Pan y Rosas – as it has done from the beginning – expresses its most vigorous repudiation of the coup d'état in Honduras perpetrated by groups of the Honduran bourgeoisie, with the active collaboration of the Armed Forces, the Supreme Court of Justice, the Parliament, the churches and the big communications media. We also reject the state of siege decreed on July 1 by Micheletti's de facto government, that is reducing the democratic freedoms of the Honduran people even more, and we demand the immediate release of the arrested militants.

In addition, we reject the interference of the OAS – commanded by US imperialism – whose Secretary General, José Miguel Insulza, will arrive in Honduras today with the obvious intention of negotiating "a solution to the political crisis" with the coup plotters. This "solution" is nothing other than the reestablishment of a regime that, with or without Zelaya, not only guarantees the interests of Honduran businessmen and landowners, but also future impunity for the coup participants.

Women in struggle, the working people of Honduras, and those of us who are mobilizing throughout Latin America and the world against the coup, cannot trust that the OAS – that, in its history, recognized all the bloodthirsty dictatorships of Latin America in the 1970's and 1980's, that backed the criminal blockade of Cuba for more than four decades, and that supports the submission of Latin American countries to imperialism – can give a solution that would favor the popular sectors and their democratic freedoms. Quite the contrary: it seeks an "agreed upon" solution with the coup plotters. For that reason, we the women of Pan y Rosas call for the broadest popular mobilization against the coup in Honduras and for trusting only in our own strength, that of the exploited and oppressed, to overthrow the coup and prevent the consolidation of a reactionary conclave in the region, setting a terrible precedent on our continent.

Down with the coup and the state of siege!
No negotiations with the coup plotters!
US imperialism, get out!
Our solidarity is with the women and all the Honduran people in struggle!

Down with the coup in HONDURAS!

2009-07-02T22:32:00.003-04:00

Down with the coup in HONDURAS!

From <http://www.ft-ci.org/>
Declaration of the FT-CI
Down with the coup in Honduras!
By Fracción Trotskista - Cuarta Internacional

Down with the coup in Honduras!
For the broadest mobilization throughout Latin America to defeat the coup plotters

The morning of June 28 witnessed a new military coup in Central America, this time in Honduras, where the ultra-rightists, backed up by the armed forces, but in coordination with the Electoral Court, the Courts of Justice and the Parliament, removed the constitutional President Manuel Zelaya, from office, by force. After a little more than 200 soldiers surrounded Zelaya's personal residence, a confrontation took place between army squadrons and the President's personal guard, and he was kidnapped and expelled from the country.

IRAN: The regime imposes fraud through repression

2009-06-26T10:36:00.004-04:00

IRAN: The regime imposes fraud through repression
By Claudia Cinatti

From http://www.ft-ci.org
La Verdad Obrera Nº 331 / International
Thursday, June 25, 2009

After ten days of massive mobilizations, the repressive apparatus of the Iranian regime seems to have restored order, temporarily, in the streets of Tehran.

In his sermon on June 19, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, reaffirmed his alignment with Ahmadinejad and announced that he had decided to put an end to the movement under way, saying that he was not going to tolerate the protests any more and threatening a "bloodbath."

Read more at: http://my.opera.com/trotskist/blog/iran-repression

Message of the Free Trade Union of Iranian Workers to Iranian workers

2009-06-23T14:43:00.005-04:00

[From the web, it is impossible to know how many workers are represented by the Free Trade Union of Iranian Workers, but this union has an honorable record of participating in coalitions inside Iran that demand rights for workers. The text that follows is courtesy of the Iranian Workers Solidarity Network (IWSN), a very worthwhile organization that promotes campaigns worldwide against the repression that the Iranian theocratic government uses to victimize Iranian workers. The webpage of the IWSN is http://www.iwsn.org/ --YM]

Message of the Free Trade Union of Iranian Workers to Iranian workers

Forty-eight days have passed since the suppression and arrests of the workers’ gathering on International Labour Day - May Day. During this time important events have taken place and have caused widespread and amazing changes in the social movement of the country.

During their televised debates the presidential election candidates accused each other of violating the citizens’ rights, embezzlement, theft, mismanagement, and incompetence. But none of them had any objection to the laws that have allowed the disastrous events affecting the majority of the population. None of them had any objection to the law that takes away a worker’s right to strike, sets his wages at a quarter of the poverty line, takes away his right to [form] organisations, allows mass lay-offs, the signing of blank contracts and forces a one-month temporary contract on him.

On the issues of the freedom of speech, the freedom to dress [as you choose], and tens and hundreds of inhuman case that today govern society, they did not say a word, and if they did point to cases in a superficial way, every one of them was an attempt [by the candidate] to clear himself and accuse the other, as if his opponent has been more strict than himself. In all those debates, clearly and in confronting each other, the candidates themselves proved that they accept all the present laws and conditions and that their only quarrel is on snatching power from their opponent.

Therefore, we workers, under the present conditions, when social protests have taken the form of a mass and huge movement that has come on the scene to achieve its demands, it is our right to turn the leaflet with the demands of our fellow working class people, into our banner and to raise it. These demands are as follows:

1- Immediate increase in the minimum wage to over 1 million tomans [$1010] a month.

2- An end to temporary contracts and new forms of work contracts.

3- The disbanding of the Labour House and the Islamic Labour Councils as government organisations in the factories and workshops, and the setting up of shoras [councils] and other workers’ organisations independent from the government.

4- Immediate payment of workers’ unpaid wages without any excuses.

5- An end to laying-off workers and payment of adequate unemployment insurance to all unemployed workers.

6- The immediate release of all political prisoners including the workers arrested on May Day, Jafar Azimzadeh, Gholamreza Khani, Said Yuzi, Said Rostami, Mehdi Farahi-Shandiz, Kaveh Mozafari, Mansour Osanloo and Ebrahim Madadi, and an end to surveillance and harassment of workers and labour leaders.

7- The right to strike, protest, assemble and the freedom of speech and the press are the workers’ absolute right.

8- An end to sexual discrimination, child labour and the sacking of foreign workers.

Workers! Today we have a duty to intervene, to pose our demands independently and by relying on our own united strength, together with other sections of society, to work towards achieving our human rights

The Free Trade Union of Iranian Workers

18 June 2009

Translated by Iranian Workers’ Solidarity Network

IRAN: Vahed bus drivers union condemns repression, supports mass movement against Ahmadinejad

2009-06-22T22:35:00.005-04:00

[In the following statement from the web, "Syndicate" means workers' union. The Vahed bus drivers' union is a combative workers' organization. More information about this union can be found at http://www.iwsn.org/campaigns/bus.htm --YM]

Vahed Syndicate – Any Suppression or threat of civil liberty condemned
18 June Statement
Any Suppression or threat of civil liberty condemned

In line with the recognition of the labour rights, we request that June 26 Action Day – Justice for Iranian workers – to include the human rights of all Iranians who have been deprived of their rights.

In recent days, we continue witnessing the magnificent demonstration of millions of people from all ages, genders, and national and religious minorities in Iran. They request that their basic human rights, particularly the right to freedom and to choose independently and without deception be recognized. These rights are not only constitutional in most of the countries, but also have been protected against all odds.

Amid such turmoil, one witnesses threats, arrests, murders and brutal suppression that one fears only to escalate on all its aspects, resulting in more innocent bloodshed, more protests, and certainly no retreats. The Iranian society is facing a deep political-economical crisis. Million-strong silent protests, ironically loud with un-spoken words, have turned into iconic stature and are expanding from all sides. These protests demand reaction from each and every responsible individual and institution.

As previously expressed in a statement published on-line in May of this year, since Syndicate Vahed does not view any of the candidates support the activities of the workers’ organizations in Iran, it would not endorse any presidential candidate in the election. Vahed members nevertheless have the right to participate or not to participate in the elections and vote for their individually selected candidate.

Moreover, the fact remains that demands of almost an absolute majority of the Iranians go far beyond the demands of a particular group. In the past, we have emphasized that until the freedom of choice and right to organize are not recognized, talk of any social or particular right would be more of a mockery than a reality.

The Syndicate of Workers of Tehran and Suburbs Vahed Bus Company fully supports this movement of Iranian people to build a free and independent civil society and condemns any violence and oppression.

In line with the recognition of the labour rights, the Syndicate requests that June 26 which has been called by the International Trade Unions Organization ‘Day of action’ for justice for Iranian workers to include the human rights of all Iranians who have been deprived of their rights.

With hope for freedom and equality

The Syndicate of Workers of Tehran and Suburbs Vahed Bus Company

18 June 2009

Shout it from the rooftops! Workers in IRAN support the mass movement against Ahmadinejad!!

2009-06-20T13:35:00.002-04:00

Reports on the web indicate that on Thursday, June 18, the Vahed Bus Drivers union, representing one of the most combative groups in the workers' movement in Iran, issued a statement in support of the mass movement. This union statement recognizes “the magnificent demonstration of millions of people from all ages, genders, and national and religious minorities in Iran” and states clearly that “the Syndicate of Workers of Tehran and Suburbs Vahed Bus Company fully supports this movement of Iranian people to build a free and independent civil society and condemns any violence and oppression.”

In addition, workers at the gigantic Khodro auto factory, the biggest in the Middle East, having almost 100,000 workers, took action on Thursday, June 18, in support of the mass movement. The striking autoworkers' statement follows:

“We declare our solidarity with the movement of the people of Iran.

“Autoworker, Fellow Laborers (Laborer Friends): What we witness today, is an insult to the intelligence of the people, and disregard for their votes, the trampling of the principles of the Constitution by the government. It is our duty to join this people's movement.

“We the workers of Iran Khodro, Thursday 28/3/88 in each working shift will stop working for half an hour to protest the suppression of students, workers, women, and the Constitution and declare our solidarity with the movement of the people of Iran. The morning and afternoon shifts from 10 to 10:30. The night shift from 3 to 3:30.

“Laborers of Iran Khodro”

Thus, class-consicous workers in Iran have answered all those who claim the heroic mass movement in that country is somehow a result of imperialist manipulation. -- Yosef M

IRAN: Rebellion and political crisis

2009-06-19T23:20:00.002-04:00

After the presidential elections--IRAN: rebellion and political crisis
Saturday, 20. June 2009, 01:51:56

La Verdad Obrera 330/International
Thursday, June 18, 2009
By Claudia Cinatti

Since current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was awarded a spectacular victory in the June 12 presidential elections, with 63% of the votes against 34% for his rival, the "reformist" Mousavi, the streets of Tehran and the main cities of the country have been changed into the stage for massive mobilizations, police and para-police repression, confrontations, attacks on university campuses, arrests and death.

To read the whole story, go to <http://my.opera.com/trotskist/blog/iran-rebellion>

Once again, Chávez embraces Ahmadinejad

2009-06-16T12:37:00.003-04:00

[Saturday, June 13 From www.presstv.ir]

Chávez congratulates Ahmadinejad

File photo of the Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (L) and his Iranian counterpart Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has congratulated his Iranian counterpart Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for the success of his re-election bid, in yesterday's poll.

In a telephone conversation with the Iranian president, Chavez said, "The victory of Dr. Ahmadinejad in the recent election is a win for all people in the world and free nations against global arrogance," Iran's Presidential Office reported. Chavez usually uses the term "global arrogance" to refer to Venezuela's arch-foe the United States.

The call came after preliminary results were announced by the Interior Ministry saying that Iran's incumbent president has won a landslide victory, gaining more than 64 percent of the votes.

Chavez also noted that the Venezuelan people and government always stand behind the Iranians.

In his reply, Ahmadinejad said that, "Despite all pressures, the nation of Iran had completely won (the election) and indeed this victory shows the clear road for the future.”

Before the start of the election too, the socialist leader had wished Ahmadinejad good luck in his re-election bid.

Speaking to supporters Thursday, Chavez called the Iranian president "a courageous fighter for the Islamic Revolution, the defense of the Third World, and in the struggle against imperialism.”

We condemn the bloody repression by Alan García's government

2009-06-13T14:24:00.005-04:00

We condemn the bloody repression by Alan García's government
From <http://www.ft-ci.org/>
Declaration of the Fracción Trotskista por la Cuarta Internacional:

We condemn the bloody repression by Alan García's government

We call for international solidarity with the struggle of the indigenous people, and with the struggle of the Peruvian workers and people

By the Fracción Trotskista por la Cuarta Internacional

The violent operation of clearing highways, ordered by the APRA government last Friday, June 5, has left some 50 victims dead, numerous people wounded, and hundreds of people arrested in the Bagua area and other localities of the Amazonas Department, in the Peruvian North. Meanwhile, repression by cops and soldiers and persecution is increasing with the support of the "State of Emergency" declared in the region, and even the access of journalists and doctors is being blocked, in order to erase the traces of the planned slaughter. The repressive deployment includes other regions of the country, to prevent protests from developing; thus, in the region of Puno, hundreds of regular police have been deployed, and in other places, like Lambayeque, union leaders have been arrested. Leaders of legitimate indigenous protest, like Alberto Pizango (President of AIDESEP) have had to flee and are being furiously pursued.

Read the whole story at: http://my.opera.com/trotskist/blog/peru-declaration

We repudiate the repression in the University of São Paulo

2009-06-13T14:17:00.005-04:00

We repudiate the repression in the University of São Paulo
From <http://www.ft-ci.org/>
Brazil: Breaking news

We repudiate the repression in the University of São Paulo
By Fracción Trotskista
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
READ MORE ABOUT THE STRIKE IN <http://www.ler-qi.org/>

LET US REPUDIATE THE CRIMINAL POLICE REPRESSION AGAINST STUDENTS, PROFESSORS AND WORKERS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF SAO PAULO
IMMEDIATE RELEASE OF THE PRISONERS

The USP Rector's Office, run by Suely Vilela, and Serra's government, have shown their true face today, June 9, by brutally repressing the peaceful mobilization of the students, workers and professors of the USP, UNESP and Unicamp. The three groups of the state universities of São Paulo called this mobilization that brought together about 1,500 people, to defend a basic democratic matter: the withdrawal of police troops that have been occupying the University for days, preventing living together inside the campus. violating university autonomy, and as an attempt to hinder the workers from exercising their right to strike, guaranteed by the Constitution.

Read the whole story at:

<http://my.opera.com/trotskist/blog/repression-university-sao-paulo>

US: Obama's administration, shaken by the crisis

2009-02-22T18:57:00.014-05:00

From http://www.ft-ci.org/

US: Obama's administration, shaken by the crisis

By Juan Chingo

Thursday, February 12, 2009

In the heat of the brutal economic crisis that destroyed another 598,000 jobs in January, the enthusiasm between Obama's election and his inauguration and his first days of governing has rapidly dissipated. This is one signs of the problems that he confronts and of the exceptional times we are living through. The hudnred-day honeymoon that is given every new US President has not ended, but in scarcely twenty days his administration seems confused, pulled between pressure from the banks and the financial aristocracy that is running the country to exert pressure so that the costs of the crisis fall on the shoulders of working people, whose expectations that Obama's arrival in power would mean some change in their desperate situation, caused by the deterioration of economic conditions.

Read more

GUADELOUPE: General strike continues and spreads to other French colonies

2009-02-14T21:35:00.022-05:00

From: http://www.ft-ci.org

Caribbean GUADELOUPE: The general strike continues and spreads to other French colonies
By Philipe
Thursday, February 12, 2009

Since January 20, the island of Guadeloupe, a French overseas department (DOM, new name to designate the former French colonies), has been paralyzed by a general strike. The demonstrations are being led by the LKP (Collective against Exploitation), that arose from the union of more than 40 associations, union and political organizations. Among the main demands, we find a net increase of 200 euros [257.75 USD] per month for the lowest wages, a reduction of 0.50 euros [0.64 USD] in the price of fuel, lowering the value-added tax on mass-consumption products, etc.

In Guadeloupe, the big distribution centers are closed or blocked by strike pickets, getting gasoline is nearly impossible, the hotel industry, at the height of the season, is being severely affected, public administration and agriculture are paralyzed. However, the strike has the support of the great majority of the population, and the demonstrations have been massive for three weeks, "the equivalent of 6 million people in the metropolis" (Le Monde, Feb 2, 2009). The magnitude of the srike is such that the "domino effect" has already made itself felt in the nearby French overseas departments: Martinique (another French island) is paralyzed and supermarkets have been blockaded by demonstrations since February 5, the day when the general strike was called and on which between 15,000 and 20,000 people demonstrated in the streets of Fort-de-France, the capital of the island; in French Guiana, a similar movement is beginning. Likewise, the Antillese who live in Paris organized a demonstration of support for the LKP on January 31, which brought together between 700 and 800 people, according to the organizers.

For his part, the Secretary of State in charge of overseas territories, Yves Jégo, only appeared on the island days after the conflict had begun. From the beginning, in an attempt to demonize the protest, he did nothing but denounce "certain unacceptable provocations" and "intolerable attacks on the rule of law" by the demonstrators and announce totally insufficient proposals, like a one-time bonus of 200 euros beginning in April to the 40,000 households in Guadeloupe that receive the lowest wages ..., and, as could not be otherwise, tax breaks for the bosses, to "allow an immediate increase in low wages." Thus it is that on Sunday, February 8, after 21 consecutive hours of fruitless negotiations with representatives of the LKP, the Secretary of State suddenly took a flight to Paris, in order, according to him, to "negotiate" with Prime Minister F. Fillon. This news made a very bad impression on the strikers, who spontaneously went out to the streets of Pointe-à-Pitre to demonstrate their rejection of his attitude that, according to them, is contemptuous. Although the Secretary of State's arrival was originally appreciated, it now seems to have increased the discontent.

On the other hand, the bosses, brought together in the "Guadeloupe Businessmen's Movement," responded with cynicism in a press release to the workers' demand for a net increase of 200 euros per month in wages, saying that "all wage earners that want to get a net increase of 200 euros [253.45 USD], will be able to do that on the basis of voluntary work and from a quota of extra hours" [1]. Nothing more or less than "working more to earn more," the favorite formula of N. Sarkozy during his presidential candidacy! At the same time, several groups of bosses, impatient at the steadfastness of the strikers, are complaining about the absence of the forces of order. In this sense, we have to say that the protest is unfolding, up to now, without big violent incidents.

It is necessary to point out the silence of the French metropolitan communications media as well as that of the political authorities. In fact, recently, in the second week of conflict, the metropolitan media began to cover events on the island more seriously, in many cases, in order to demonize the strikers. For his part, President N. Sarkozy, in his "big televised speech" of February 5 (as the journalists christened it), in view of the economic crisis and the January 29 strike, did not say a word about the conflict in Guadeloupe and Martinique. This silence could be explained, on the one hand, by contempt from the dominant classes of the metropolis towards the inhabitants of the French colonial territories, and, on the other hand, from fear of contagion in the metropolis of the tenacity of the strike in those territories. If we take into account the magnitude of the January 29 general strike in the metropolis, this fear is more than justified.

In short, this determined struggle, of the workers and exploited masses of French imperialism's colonies, like Guadeloupe and Martinique, has begun to revive some questions tied to national and ethnic oppression. These entanglements can be observed in the cries of "Martinique belongs to us, not them," of some demonstrators, noted by an article on the demonstration in Paris in support of the LKP, where it is stated that, in view of the silence of the government regarding the strike, the demonstrators from the Antilles have arrived at the conclusion that "the French government disparages the people of Guadeloupe and considers them only as French people completely separate" [2], in the demand by the LKP that the language (Créole) and culture of Guadeloupe be taken into account in the communications media, and in the denunciation of the concentration of the determining sectors of the economy in the hands of the "béké" (white descendants of the colonists). With this, we do not mean at all that the current strike movement in Guadeloupe is a movement for independence; we only wish to emphasize that these questions are alive among the population of a territory occupied since the seventeenth century and artificially populated with an enslaved people brought from Africa to satisfy the economic ambitions of the elite of the metropolis. The duty of revolutionaries and workers from the metropolis is to fight, above all, against their own imperialism; that is why they must surround the workers on strike in the French colonies with solidarity and, more than ever, follow their example to realize their own demands and so that the capitalists pay for the crisis.

[1] « Réponses des socioprofessionnels réunis en Mouvement des Entrepreneurs de Guadalupe aux revendications de LKP », versión del 2/02.

[2]CaribCreole1.com,http://www.caribcreole1.com/news/france/1,918,01-02-2009-lkp-sur-seine-le-soutien-s-organise-.html.

ISRAEL elects a government from among war criminals

2009-02-12T22:06:00.024-05:00

From: wwww.ft-ci.org

Middle East: ISRAEL elects a government from among war criminals
By Claudia Cinatti

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Parliamentary elections took place in Israel on February 10. At press time, with 99% of the votes counted, Kadima, the governing party, of the current Minister of Foreign Relations, Tzipi Livni, got 28 seats of the 120 in the Knesset (parliament); Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud, 27; Avigdor Lieberman's extreme rightist party Yisrael Beitenu ("Israel, our house"), 15, this is four more seats than it had; and Defense Minister Ehud Barak's Labor Party, only 13 deputies, which involves a loss of 6 representatives. The remainder is shared among 9 other new parties that have exceeded the floor of 2% of the votes, among which is the center-leftist Meretz and the more left-wing Hadash (Democratic Front for Peace and Equality, in which Arab parties and the Israeli CP participate), religous parties like Shas, and other parties of the extreme right. Whoever attains a simple majority of 61 seats, will be Prime Minister.

Both Livni and Netanyahu claimed the victory. Owing to the narrow margin and the extreme fragmentation of the Israeli political system, for the moment, these results left the sign of the new government undefined. Most analysts indicate that, although Livni got more votes, it is Netanyahu who is in better condition to form a government, since what is considered the right-wing bloc -- defined as a whole as those who are opposed to resuming "peace" negotiations with the Palestinians -- headed by the Likud, and within which Lieberman is included, would have 64 deputies, while the so-called "center" or, more accurately, the moderate right, headed by Kadima and the Labor Party, that has declared itself in favor of undertaking negotiations with the Palestinian Authority again, would only get 56 seats.

Lieberman's ultra-rightist and anti-Arab party has become an indispensable component for the future government, since without the support of its at least 15 deputies, it seems practically impossible to form a stable government.

All options are open. The very day of the elections, a feverish race of negotiators from Likud and Kadima to get the necessary partners to form a government, began. Nor can the possibility of a "national unity government" be ruled out, although, for the moment, Netanyahu rejected Livni's proposal. According to the weekly Economist, "if Netanyahu is able to consolidate his right-wing bloc, he will presumably try to convince Livni to set aside her dreams of becoming Prime Minister and enter a broad center-right government." Even weeks could pass before it is determined who the new Prime Minister will be and with that, what the orientation of the next Israeli government will be.

In the final instance, these maneuvers will only decide which war criminal is going to be in charge of governing the Zionist state.

A turn to the right

The elections reflect Israeli politics' profound turn to the right. From Livni to Lieberman, the election campaign took place on the rubble of Gaza and the corpses of more than 1,400 Palestinians left by Operation "Cast Lead," that was supported by more than 80% of the population.

According to a survey published by the daily Jerusalem Post, carried out the same day as the elections, "when those surveyed were questioned about their politics, 30% said they were from the right wing, 13%, from the center-right, 23%, from the center, 13%, from the center-left, and only 6%, from the left, 15% did not respond."

Likud, which was coming from a setback, a result of Kadima's split at the end of 2005, made a notable advance, and their parliamentary block went from 12 to 27 deputies. Their candidate, Netanyahu, has become the standard bearer of the Israeli right wing, that rejects undertaking again any negotiations with the Palestinians that would involve returning the occupied territories. Even Netanyahu was critical of the Annapolis agreements, promoted by former President Bush. In the campaign, he promised to oppose absolutely the division of Jerusalem, the return of the Golan Heights to Syria, and the evacuation of the settlers' settlements on the West Bank.

The other big winner of the elections was Lieberman, who ran a deeply racist campaign directed against the Arabs who live in Israel, proposing to take away their citizenship, if they do not swear loyalty to the Jewish state (their slogan was "No loyalty -- no citizenship") and perform obligatory military service, from which they have been exempted, for obvious reasons. To justify this position, it was based on the mobilizations carried out by Israeli Arabs to repudiate the massacre in Gaza. This group, that comprises around 20% of the population, already suffers "legal" discrimination from the government and the Zionist political establishment, that was about to deprive it of all its political rights and outlaw its parties.

The Labor Party is in deep crisis, in such a state that a columnist of the daily Haaretz suggests that "its existence as an independent party no longer makes sense," and that it should merge with Kadima, that has gone on to dominate the center of the political spectrum, since "there are no ideological differences between them," and "both parties combine political moderation with toughness in security matters" (Aluf Benn, "For the sake of peace, Labor and Kadima must merge," Haaretz, 11-02-09).

The elections also showed the disaster of the Meretz party, traditionally identified with pacifism, but which openly supported the state of Israel's massacre in Gaza and got only 3 deputies.

Thus, all the Zionist leaders favored this political turn to the right in an enclave-state, based on racism against the Arabs and colonial repression.

The weight achieved by the right wing in the Israeli elections will be an argument that the coming government will use, regardless of who heads it, to reduce as much as possible any any eventual concession and increase demands on the Palestinians. Several analysts have suggested that the political map which has arisen from these elections would complicate US President Barak Obama's alleged policy of "dialogue," not only towards the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but also towards Syria and, especially towards Iran. However, this is big-time hypocrisy: Obama justified the Israeli offensive against Gaza and continues to permit the brutal Israeli economic blockade. His "peace plan" is based on the supposed "two-state" solution, that is, on negotiating with the Palestinian National Authority (and eventually with Hamas, that is currently excluded from the dialogue sessions) the Palestinian people's renunciation of their fundamental national rights, by naturalizing the existence of ghetto-like cities lacking any territorial unity, in exchange for some minor concessions, like delaying the building of settlers' settlements.

With the Gaza massacre ever present, it remains clear that the only allies of the Palestininan people are the workers and exploited peoples of the Middle East and the whole world.

VENEZUELA: Spoil your ballot or abstain!

2009-02-11T21:48:00.011-05:00

From www.ft-ci.org

VENEZUELA: In view of the referendum on the constitutional amendment
Spoil your ballot or abstain!

By LTS of Venezuela
Sunday, February 1, 2009

Once again, the national scene is polarized, facing elections, this time, because of the new attempt by Chávez and the government to win approval of the possibility of indefinite reelection of the President. Demoagogy is gushing forth on all sides, both from the right-wing bourgeois opposition extolling the defense of a supposed "democratic alternative," and from the government, talking about a supposed "expansion of the power of the people." We revolutionaries of the Liga de Trabajadores por el Socialismo (LTS) have established our position between the bourgeois opposition's right-wing political project, that seeks to tie the country hand and foot to imperialism, and that of Chávez, who, in searching for greater autonomy from imperialism, is proposing a national development project tied to groups of a supposed "nationalist" bourgeoisie, against which, we call for spoiling one's ballot or abstaining, from a perspective of workers' absolute class independence. We unequivocally maintain that the anti-imperialist struggle Chávez talks about can only be led consistently and to the end by the working class and its independent organization, which is precisely what Chávez is preventing, as has been shown for all these years.

An attempt to avoid a catastrophic scenario for chavismo: the possible departure of Chávez

Chávez and the government managed, in spite of the severe setback of losing some governments like Miranda and Carabobo, as well as the Metropolitan Distract, to recover a part of the percentage of votes lost in the 2007 referendum on the constitutional reform, with which they achieved a certain majority of votes at an overall national level in the last regional elections. This momentary political circumstance is what they are using to attempt to change the constitution again to permit Chávez to be a candidate for the presidency indefinitely. In addition, the elections were planned just before the world economic crisis began to deal harsh blows in the country, and the government, like every bourgeois government, began to "confront it" with anti-popular economic measures that will fall on working people.

Chavismo, as a regime and a political movement, arranged itself around the figure of Chávez: he is the direct "leader" of the masses, above the parties and machines that back him, as well as the articulator between the different factions in conflict within chavismo. If Chávez were unable to run again in the next presidential elections (2012), it would not only mean an abrupt change in the arrangement of the regime if chavismo kept the presidency, but it would also involve a change as regards the political movement, since there would immediately take place the dreaded process of searching for a successor, which puts at risk tne very continuation of chavismo in power, since there is no suitable presidential candidate with Chávez' attraction. This, without any doubt, will be the reason for the most virulent, brutal internal disputes, from which chavismo will surely emerge very much more fractured and weakened than now.

The absolute key fact of this whole situation is that Chávez' political project -- bourgeois nationalist development of a semi-colonial country -- is inseparable from the Bonapartist traits of the regime, that is, from the need for a strong presidential figure, both politically and legally, that would be capable of fulfilling the role of the nation's "arbiter," as well as being the country's "strong man" facing imperialism: being the guarantor of peace against a new social explosion -- which implies "mediating" and "disciplining" the parties in conflict -- and bargaining with the imperialisms in order to use a larger portion of the surpluses they removed in "national development." That is precisely the hard core of Chávez' project, admitted by the man himself innumerable times. That is what would enter into open crisis if Chávez could not run again for the presidency of the Republic in the coming elections.

The rancid pro-US right wing and its exaggerated "alternative"

The right-wing bourgeois oppostion, that could survive and revive in the national political life, thanks to Chávez' policies and pacts, is only repeating its accustomed and empty phrases about "democracy" and "freedom," that were trampled on for working people many times during all the years of the Punto Fijo Pact, by the right-wing opposition itself, and again during the brief attempt at the bosses' pro-imperialist dictatorship, headed by the unfortunate Carmona Estanga. This right-wing bourgeois opposition has nothing to offer workers and the people, but it makes use of the servility of most of the Venezuelan left to Chávez, as well as his authoritarian characteristics, to practice demagogy about the people's needs and about "democracy." But it is only the most shameless demagogy: it is obvious that unemployment, low wages, the people's health, lack of housing and land for the campesinos, does not bother them, much less are they worried by the lack of "democracy" for the people, the murders of workers' leaders, like the case of the 3 workers' leaders assassinated in Aragua, repression against the fishermen of Güiria, or the killing of 200 campesinos, that has taken place up to now, by killers paid by landowners, or, most recently, the brutal murder of the two autoworkers at the hands of the Anzoátegui state police, where the chavista Tarek Willian Saab is Governor. In none of these cases are they making much of the lack of freedom and democracy! What really worries them is that if the amendment passes, the possibilities of recovering political command of the country would be more difficult for them.

The right-wing opposition busts a gut talking about "alternatives," but as good bourgeois, they are only showing, very conveniently, the superficiality of the matter: the possibility that those who govern may alternate. This is in no way what is essential in the debate for the exploited and impoverished masses in bourgeois society; the problem is not how many different people who govern can alternate. The problem is that they all govern in order to maintain class society; they are all part of "democracy for the rich," against the people. Those who govern, change, but the social system, private ownership of the means of production and life in the hands of some few people and wage slavery for us, for the majority that produces everything, does not change: this is the meaning of bourgeois alternation. Thus, the right wing is cynically trying to equate its bourgeois interest in running the country with the genuine democratic aspirations of the workers and the people. The openly pro-imperialist bourgeois project is what is behind the "No" vote.

Seeking to recover from strategic weakness

The government has already entered a stage of strategic weakness, beginning with the loss of the December 2 referendum, owing to the defection of some 3 million votes. That situation was not reversed by the recent victory in the regional elections, where, despite keeping a majority in races for governors and mayors, it suffered a setback, compared to what it had previously, but also in a large part of the most economically and politically important zones of the country, where more than 40% of the population is concentrated. Chávez will not be able to continue governing as before, we said after December 2, and that is what characterizes the new political moment: the institutional repositioning (governors' and mayors' offices) of the bourgeois opposition, as well as the incipient workers' struggles, outside of the government's official leadership, confirm this. It is also confirmed by the very fact recently of having had to propose unlimited re-election for the rest of the "popularly" elected offices, as a last-minute maneuver to try to assure getting the majority of votes, at the cost of having, in case it passes, to accept the permanent existence of regional leaders ("caudillos") to challenge Chávez, a scenario that he had always rejected.

In this national setting, Chávez and the Venezuelan bourgeoisie in its entirety will have to "reach an agreement" on minimum points for the leadership of the country, as they already did before: the agreements after the coup d'état and after the strike to sabotage PDVSA, as well as the big agreement on the 2004 recall referendum, are clear examples of how they realized minimal agreements to direct the national situation through "institutional and regular channels", that is, so that the class struggle of that time would not be exacerbated. Chávez no longer has the leadership and appeal among the masses that he had a few years ago, and he does not have the guaranteed absolute majority of votes either, that were the basis of his power to "referee." That is why the regime cannot continue the same, and Chávez must negotiate some agreements with the bourgeois opposition.

Facing that scenario, and the setting of an enormous historical crisis of world capitalism, that has not yet hit the country, but that will undoubtedly strike with great turbulence, certainly for Chávez, "his life depends on it," in this election, since he wants to avoid arriving the least bit weakened at a possible negotiation with the right-wing opposition. If he loses, it will be disastrous, and he will do what he has always done, to yield constantly more to the bourgeois opposition and make the mass movement pay the price (releasing coup-plotters, increasing prices, freed from any controls, repressing the most radical struggles, no large raises in wages, etc.). If he wins, he will reposition himself to negotiate with the right wing under better conditions, and in order to "discipline" the most daring and radical sectors of the workers', campesinos' and popular movement. That is why Chávez will use a possible victory to increase his control over the mass movement (workers, campesinos, poor communities) to block any radical and politically independent, truly anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist cause.

A long government of timid patches

The essential element in the unquestionable fall of the strength of Chávez, for some years, has been the failure to solve the basic problems of the country's working and impoverished masses. As has been shown, the pro-imperialist opposition has not advanced considerably in votes, but it is the government that is losing while its rank and file abstains. The problem is that after 10 long years of governing, with enormous levels of support and the workers', popular and campesinos' movement's willingness to fight, with big defeats dealt to the most ambitious and violent attempts of imperialism and its servants, Chávez and his government have been unable to solve even a single one of the structural questions of working people satisfactorily. Most impoverished campesinos continue to be landless; the numbers of reduced unemployment hide the fact that it continues to be the scourge for the poorest groups in the population. In addition, the levels of precarious employment and flexible work are being maintained and even increasing; the work created is, for the most part, uncertain; wages continue to be quite miserable, compared to the needs of the immense majority of working-class families, needs that are scarcely partially alleviated by the food subsidies the government grants and its "assistance." The drama of the lack of housing persists among more than a quarter of the population; access to health care, which presents more "successes," continues, however, to show enormous inequalities between the rich and upper middle-class strata of the population and the problems poor people go through in order to get decent health care; without mentioning that despite all the boasting and demagogy about justice for women, women's emancipation – and especially that of poor and working women, the most exploited and oppressed people under capitalism – relative to domestic slavery and the power to decide about their own bodies and reproduction, has not advanced even a millimeter.

The reason for this can be sought in Chávez' own project: the search for increased autnoomy from imperialism, by proposing a national development plan tied to sectors of the local bourgeoisie, through an alliance between the state engaged in development and "nationalist" sectors of the bourgeoisie, without excluding specific groups of transnational capitalists. In this equation, the state will be the guarantor of the process, both as owner of the oil income, as well as articulating the "national interest," by convincing the workers and dragging them into a project of class conciliation, coexistence between the exploited and their exploiters. For this reason, Chávez has left the capitalist economic structure of the country intact, and thus the big bankers, businessmen and parasitic landowners, both Venezuelans and foreigners, have remained with their properties, businesses and robust profits and are on the increase, in spite of ten such turbulent years of government. This is the project that Chávez embodies, with his demagogic bureaucrats, and it is what he calls us to support with the "Yes" vote this February 15, as he seeks to use votes to strengthen his control over the mass movement, preventing its independent expression and organization.

Bourgeois alternatives and power for the "arbiter" of the nation

Faced with the arguments of the right-wing bourgeois opposition, the government responds by saying that in reality the "alternative" is guaranteed, because it will be the people who decide between the different candidates, certainly without talking about the class character of bourgeois democracy, of the "alternative." The problem is that in substance, both groups, under different forms of governing and regime, support this society based on exploitation. For that reason, even when one person is elected at each election or several alternate in the governments, what really exists is the continuation of the "dictatorship of capital": exploitation and oppression over the working masses and the people.

[To be continued]

FRANCE--A good beginning in the first test of strength against Sarkozy

2009-02-01T20:42:00.012-05:00

From: www.ft-ci.org

France facing economic crisis
A good beginning in the first test of strength against Sarkozy
By Juan Chingo
Thursday, January 29, 2009

Today's day of action in France was massive: according to the police, more than a million people participated throughout France, and 2,500,000, according to the CGT. Quantitatively, it is the equal of the big demonstrations that forced the government to back down in 2006, in the struggle against the CPE (first employment contract) or, still further back, in 2003, the struggle for pensions and those of 1995 against Juppé, against the reform of the special system for the railway workers and the RATP (subway and urban transport) and social security, although probably slightly smaller than the last of these struggles. However, compared with those actions, what is original (and potentially significant) about today's action is:

(1) The increasing participation, such as has not been seen for a long time, of the workers of private, industrial and service firms, big multinationals like the steel giant Arcelor Mittal, the automotive companies Peugeot Citroën, Renault Ford, the big tire company Michelin, the environmental gorup Veolia, the private telephone company Free, or the big supermarkets like Carrefour or other wholesale businesses like FNAC and Galeries Lafayette. Although not organized, wage earners from the small and medium-sized companies also participated (as can be seen from direct statements or from media reports of the contingents). From this point of view, the participation of public- and private-sector workers or wage earners is the largest in recent decades (one must stress large participation by teachers and health service workers).

(2) Unlike the struggle against the CPE or the 2003 struggle that ended in defeat, or even the government employees' general strike in 1995, the current movement does not possess a clear unifying demand, but is a clearly political day of action against the results of unemployment, the drop in purchasing power, the destruction of health care and public education, uncertainty in employment, especially among the youngest workers, and basically the feeling of unfairness in that there is a bailout for the banks (recently, it was discovered that, in spite of the last quarter's losses, they ended the year with profits), and nothing for wage earners and retirees. This is shown in the widespread sympathy the action enjoyed among the population (around 75% support), something not seen since 1995 and even at levels higher than then.

On the other hand, we must maintain:

(1) Unlike the struggles mentioned previously, where it was a matter of a day of mobilizations, strikes and struggles of several days or weeks, the current struggle was a strike and demonstration of only one day. To a large extent, the union leaderships called it to try to lessen wage earners' anger, which could be expressed (there is a great fear of this) in harsh strikes in some sector, and without any perspective of continuing. However, the success of the day and the goverment's refusal to change the orientation of the stimulus plan even minimally in the sense that the union leaderships are asking - favoring consumption and not investment, or lowering the value added tax, which conflicts with the fiscal deficit, or increasing the minimum wage, a measure fiercely resisted by the MEDEF [largest employers' association in France], even more so in times of crisis - could force the unions to call new days of struggle as joblessness deepens and anger increases.

(2) Although there were groups of very combative high school students, who were chanting with all their might, the student movement, both high schoolers and, even to a large extent, college students, is still absent. Their entry is one of the things the government most fears (as do the unions themselves, as they showed in the last wave of joint struggles in 2008, where the union bureaucracy abandoned the university students' movement, which ended up brutally beaten), because of the radicalism it could add to the situation.

(3) Finally, the transportation strike was not as terrible as expected, which kept the strike action of other movements from being spectacular and forceful, even more so when one takes into account the importance of this sector in capitalist economy in general and particularly in France, where it has been the backbone of the workers' movement in recent decades. However, this fact highlights another characteristic of this day, when many wage earners stayed at home, lots of them probably in support of the measure and others, only taking the day off for themselves or fearing bigger disruptions, which did not happen. As we see it, this element, stressed by some newspapers in order to breathe freely, continues to emphasize the political character of the action.

The question remains open. The government, as an analysis from the daily Le Monde of January 28 commented, is beginning to show symptoms of weakness. The speed in the change of the state of mind of the population, which in the last six months was astonished and shocked, facing the crisis, and passed to the current dissatisfaction, to the return of "France, that resists," has made the optmistic, swaggering face of Sarkozy's hard right government change. The Parisian daily says this in the following way: "Nicolás Sarkozy, facing the syndrome of the regicidal country" and suggests that "the President of the Republic asserts that he wants to continue the reforms, but he also confesses that 'France is not the simplest country in the world to govern.' He recalls that 'the French guillotined a king,' that 'in the name of a symbolic measure, they could turn the country around.' He speaks of France as a 'regicidal country.'"

The key, then, is the ability of wage earners to respond and organize. In the first place, this passes through fighting for the measures to continue by organizing a real plan of struggle and not unconnected days of action, that have already led big movements in the streets to exhaustion in the past. In the second place, it is crucial to approve a real sheet of demands that includes all the most sensitive grievances and demands for working people and youth (and not the tepidly pseudokeynesian plea of of the document of the eight union centers that called today's action) that would truly weld the unity of the working class and the oppressed, especially their most exploited sectors, the youth of the impoverished suburbs ("banlieues") that mobilized to a great extent in the recent marches in opposition to Zionist aggression against Gaza and, as a deciding question, the young wage eaners, who suffer chiefly the uncertain nature of work with contracts of determined length and who are the first to be fired. Third, we must take up again the best traditions of self-organization that the cycle of struggles of the French workers and youth have given, especially, the attempts at coordination in some cities in the 1995 general strike of public sector employees or the example of the student coordinating committee in 2006, and extend that to the entire workers' movement and deepen it. This is the only way to overcome the trap that the bureaucracy set for the big mobilizations of youth and workers in recent years, leading many of them to defeat, or, when the magnitude of the movement prevented that, to mere, partial setbacks that failed to reverse the fall in the population's standard of living, which has now fiercely accelerated with the crisis, and then allowing the government on duty to retake the offensive. In conclusion, the political character of the action makes the problems of program, strategy and leadership of the wage earners more acute than ever, in order to continue the action and raise it to a confrontation and nothing less, against the regime, the government and the France of the big capitalists and bankers.

Only in this way, trusting in their own forces and organization, placing no confidence in the false friends that are now approaching their marches to try to capitalize on dissatisfaction, like the leadership of the Socialist Party (that has already shown in the past that when it governs, it has no difference from the right wing, and now only wants to relocate itself, in view of the next European elections and the growth of the "far left"), will the French workers and youth be able to defeat Sarkozy and his plan to make the workers pay for the crisis once more.

Fifty years after the Revolution: Where are Raúl and the Cuban Communist Party leadership taking CUBA?

2009-01-27T22:02:00.014-05:00

[In the following essay, "restorationist" refers to the restoration of capitalism. -- YM]

From www.ft-ci.org

50 years after the Revolution: Where are the politics of Raúl and the leadership of the Cuban Communist Party leading?
By Eduardo Molina
Thursday, January 22, 2009

The fiftieth anniversary of M26's [Fidel's 26th of July Movement] entering Havana was remembered in a sober manner. The Cuban government invited "family celebrations" without mass rallies or public appearances by Fidel (which caused new speculations in the press about his health). Days before, in his December 27 speech in front of the Asamblea del Poder Popular (1), Raúl Castro had sketched important guidelines about the plans of the Cuban leadership, reaffirming a direction that calls into question the very future of the Revolution.

"People should feel the necessity of working to meet their needs"

Under this slogan, Raúl Castro announced an austerity policy that will affect the workers and their conquests; he enlarged the spaces for "private initiative" (as in agriculture), and he also attempted to spur on and discipline the bureaucracy. Amidst a campaign against [!] "wage equality," his justification was that "if there is no pressure, if the necessity to work to meet my needs does not exist" ... "in order to go on gradually solving the distortions existing in the wage system, we must continue eliminating undue gratuities and excessive subsidies." In addition, he confirmed the raising of the "retirement age" and "the need to increase the number of those who engage in work, its productivity and efficiency." In short, a policy for increasing productivity with the stimulus of differentiation in wages and reducing subsidies that represent a form of "social wages" covering a large part of the basic needs of the people. He was also pleased by the advances in "continuing to put idle lands in the hands of those who are able and willing to make them be productive," whether individual campesinos, cooperatives or companies. Raúl had already announced that state-owned industry will provide materials for individuals to build with, a decision that recognizes the inability of the bureaucracy to solve the dramatic problem of housing (aggravated by the hurricanes Gustav and Ike in 2008) and, in fact, opens new spaces for "private initiative" and the black market.

Finally, Raúl insisted that "there will be no backing down on the intention of strengthening institutions, discipline and order in all the country's spheres," and he announced the "creation of the General Comptroller's Office of the Republic, as a hierarchically superior organ," in an attempt to bring order and introduce new administrative methods in the chaotic state-sector management. These measures are registered in the general direction of pro-market reforms, adopted by Fidel during the "special period" (2) and the years of the 1990's. (Certainly, Cuba, a small state besieged by imperialism and isolated, could find itself forced to make certain concessions, but these retreats must be limited, and they require as a counterbalance, the masses' revolutionary power and control. In the hands of the bureaucratic caste, they [these retreats] push towards decomposition of the nationalized economy, they nurture social differentiation with "newly rich people" and privileged strata, and they strengthen the restorationist tendencies that reside in the Castroist bureaucracy itself.) Now the orientation proposed by Raúl Castro aims at deepening that course.

New, stormy winds

This "desperate gamble" is a bureaucratic response to the accumulation of enormous economic, social and political contradictions. The economic slowdown, after several years of growth (with a record 12% in 2006), is making itself felt with the first effects of the world crisis. The price of Cuban nickel fell by 40% in 2008, and the prices of fish, sugar and other exports also fell. This is in addition to the high cost of imported oil and food and the serious devastation by the three big hurricanes of the year, that left losses of around $10 billion and half a million damaged dwellings.

Social tensions are growing. While the chronic underproduction of food and consumer goods, corruption, increasing inequality, affect the workers and groups of the people that depend on incomes in common pesos to live and can hardly complete their needs beyond the ration booklet, the privileged groups (high-level bureaucrats, the "newly rich", and in general, those who benefited from the reforms, the basis of the growing restorationist tendencies) are improving their situation, gaining access to the free market ruled by the convertible peso and pressing for greater consumption (recently, buying cell phones, computers and other goods was permitted as a gesture to these strata).

The political problems of the succession led by Raúl are accumulating. Absent Fidel's leadership, his brother must still achieve political authority, consensus among the different wings of the bureaucracy and legitimacy in front of the population, in order to apply his plans. Raúl has support among the old cadres of the FAR (revolutionary armed forces) that he led for half a century and that are a key economic institution (they run a collection of 700 enterprises and many of the associations with foreign capital) and as a prop of the state. But he has to contain the "moderate" influences (that prefer more speed in the pro-capitalist reforms and certainly a political "opening"), and he has replaced the "talibans" (some young leaders that accompanied Fidel in the last period). The conflicts in the heights are continuing, and at times they are expressed in a muted manner in the press and in some academic discussions about the course to follow. On the other hand, the deterioration of the institutions, "popular power," the National Assembly, and the Cuban Communist Party, is increasing, and social dissatisfaciton was expressed, for instance, in the "self-critical" campaign of 2007, where 1,200,000 complaints were presented, in the scepticism of youth, and in the criticisms and debates among intellectuals and artists. Because of all that, the call for the Sixth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party ("frozen" for a decade), could be seen as an attempt to provide an outlet for internal conflicts and achieve political support for the application of plans that will attack the social conquests more directly.

The "Cuban road" to disaster

Those who govern Cuba appear increasingly interested in the Chinese and Vietnamese "models," with their combination of pro-captialist economic measures and iron political control by the "communist" bureaucracy, as a guarantee of their own interests. Paradoxically, not only the internal contradictions drive them in that direction, but the better international scene for Cuba, that has improved relations with nearly all of Latin America and has a close alliance with Venezuela, encourages a greater economic opening. The approach to Lula opens the possibiity of Brazilian investments. Besides this, it is possible that the Obama administration will revise aspects of the traditional US policy of blockade and intransigence. But imperialism, with the concurrence of the "friendly governments" of the region and even of the Miami gusano bourgeoisie, will not fail to take advantage of Cuba's difficulties and press for speeding up the "transition" to capitalism (including the political opening for pro-bourgeois forces). The "Cuban road" of gradual pro-market reforms is increasingly eroding the bases of the nationalized economy and nurturing the restorationist counter-revolution. It can only lead to the precipice of capitalist restoration and recolonization by imperialism.

A program of defense of the revolution

The Latin American reformist left backs Castroism without further ado, although its program leads to disaster. Still worse, certain "progressives" and populists would like to hurry the reforms, in accordance with their own thesis that socialist revolution is now "surpassed," and there is now no other solution for Cuba than "more markets" and a "democratic opening," that is, capitalism with bourgeois democracy. There are those on the left who consider capitalist restoration already completed (like the LIT-CI), or that Cuba never was a workers' state (even bureaucratized), which leads to serious programatic and political errors. On the other hand, we reaffirm the validity of a program of political revolution (combining the economic-social tasks that the pro-market measures have discounted) that proceeds from the defense of the conquests of the Revolution that still remain, to bring a revolutionary workers' solution to the agonizing situation of the masses and confront the bureaucracy in all its branches, by fighting for a government of workers' and campesinos' councils and guiding Cuba on the road of international revolution, as had been outlined in 1959.

As part of this program, we propose:

End the US blockade

Review all the "pro-market reforms" in a plan that was democratically decided upon by the workers, in order that the economy can again be based on the needs of workers and campesinos

Down with the bureaucracy with its privileges

For a regime of full workers' democracy, with complete freedom of organization in work centers and legality for those anti-capitalist political tendencies that defend the Revolution

No confidence in negotiations with Obama or the EU; no confidence in the bourgeois "friendly governments" of Latin America, to which Castroism offers political support. The future of Cuba is connected to being a support for anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist mobilization for the Federation of Socialist Republics of Latin America

Notes:

(1) The speech can be read on www.cubanet and other official pages.

(2) The sharp crisis signified by the break of ties with the USSR in dissolution and the isolation promoted by imperialism. See Estrategia Internacional 20 (2003) and the supplement Claves 1 of LVO (2008).

ARGENTINA--Indugraf belongs to the workers!

2009-01-21T21:22:00.004-05:00

La Verdad Obrera Nº 309
Thursday, January 8, 2009

In view of the maneuvers of the bosses and the Ministry, and the threats of expulsion: Indugraf belongs to the workers!

By Ernesto González (worker at the recovered printshop Chilavert)

For more than a month, workers at Indugraf, a big graphics workshop in the Parque Patricios neighborhood, have kept the plant occupied, demanding that it be reopened and that they be paid the wages they are owed. The Martínez family, bosses that had postponed paying wages, closed the plant on November 24 and sent telegrams laying off their 90 workers. The comrades camped out in the entrances of the establishment, and, in a December 10 assembly, decided to occupy the plant to safeguard the machines and jobs. With unusual speed, public prosecutor's office No. 10 heard a complaint of unlawful seizure from the bosses and is threatening to clear the plant.

No expulsion!

From the PTS [Socialist Workers Party of Argentina], as well as other leftist organizations, delegates, militant activist workers, neighbors and students, we have followed this experience, and we are helping the Indugraf wokers with publicity and building the strike fund, and, of course, by being present to defend the occupation. On the other hand, from the beginning, the leaders of the union (Federación Gráfica Bonaerense) have tried to convince the workers to desist from any measure of struggle and, since their defeatist advice finds no echo among the comrades, the union leaders have also refused to make any significant contribution to the struggle fund, much less calling rank and file graphics workers to any action in support.

For workers' management!

The Ministry of Labor, to which the workers turned to demand its intervention to guarantee jobs, revealed its real role during the last meeting they held on Monday, January 5, and attacked the workers' right to undertake a struggle to defend the source of their jobs; at the same time, the Ministry offered no solution to the workers' needs. One of the comrades told us: "It seemed like we were talking to the boss." This caused enormous indignation, and the workers' assembly resolved to intensify the struggle, and they decided to maintain the plant seizure, to block streets and go out to seek support by visiting workers' organizations, human rights organizations and prominent people. Now the comrades are proposing workers' management of the printshop and seeking the money to start the press up under their control. In this situation, the Indugraf workers are not alone: they have the experience of several factories that have been functioning under workers' control, like the comrades of Zanon, Brukman, Chilavert, the Hotel Bauen, and others.

ARGENTINA--Metalworkers blockade the Rosario-Buenos Aires highway

2009-01-18T20:31:00.009-05:00

Thursday, January 15, 2009

From: www.ft-ci.org

Metalworkers from Paraná Metal carried out the decision of the workers' assembly: They are blockading the Rosario-Buenos Aires highway

Metalworkers from Paraná Metal are carrying out a blockade of the strategic Rosario-Buenos Aires highway, demanding that their jobs continue. This action was approved in the last assembly of the workers enrolled in the UOM [metalworkers' union] of Villa Constitución, who are confronting suspensions and layoffs threatened by the bosses, as well as the national government's line of exchanging "job stability" for wage cuts and surrendering what workers had won. The workers' action made itself felt, and the national media that had been silent about this conflict, had to give an account of this big struggle.

At the final moment, however, it was decided by the management of the Villa UOM [metalworkers' union] and the internal commission of Paraná Metal to undertake joint action with the Federación Agraria led by Eduardo Buzzi, ignoring the resolutions of the metalworkers' assembly. From the PTS, in a statement that we handed out to thousands, we opposed carrying out joint action with a group of the bosses of the countryside, that not only demand subsidies together with the Sociedad Rural, but which has also been demanding devaluation of the peso (which drives down wages even more), which is the same demand made by Techint, Paraná Metal, and the bosses' associations, that do not hesitate to suspend and lay off workers. Numerous workers, in fact, questioned that unilateral decision by the UOM [union] leadership and demanded that the road blockade, after those by the FAA had been withdrawn, be extended until 6 p.m., so that this struggle, which is an example for all workers, could have an effect. Numerous union organizations and parties of the left are accompanying the metalworkers during this long day.

With today's road blockade, the struggle at Paraná Metal begins a second stage. The bosses and the government have now shown their cards. Now the workers have started to continue the road that began with the historic march of more than 4,000 workers and Villa residents. With workers' democracy, rank and file assemblies, and struggle committees, coordinating with other workers (without bosses' groups) in a regional workers' congress, and carrying out a regional strike in support of PM, this conflict could be won. The internal commission, the management of UOM Villa, and the CTA and CGT, have this urgent responsibility. Continuing along the road of struggle, this intense contest is being won.

By our own correspondent

CUBA: 50 years since a revolution that expropriated the bourgeoisie

2009-01-10T15:31:00.014-05:00

From www.ft-ci.org

Cuba: 50 years since a revolution that expropriated the bourgeoisie
By Facundo Aguirre, Thursday, January 8, 2009

January 1 marked 50 years since the Cuban revolution. On that date, the fall of the dictator Fulgencio Batista and the victory of the Rebel Army are commemorated.

The Cuban revolution was the first, and until now, the only victorious socialist revolution in Latin America. The expropriation of the bourgeoisie and the landowners was an extraordinary event that inspired a generation of fighters from workers and the people to fight against imperialism under the slogan that the duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution.

Much has been written recently about the events of the revolution of 1959. We Trotskyist militants of the PTS unconditionally defend Cuba against the imperialist blockade, and we defend the conquests of the revolution, but we clearly point out our differences with Castroism. In this article, we wish to recover the historical meaning of this revolution and the lessons that it has left for the workers and campesinos of Latin America.

The social conquests of the revolution of 1959

The expropriation of the bourgeoisie explains what the even the most hostile capitalist press must recognize, the enormous social conquests on the terrain of health ahd education, that allowed Cuba to eradicate illiteracy and, practically, infant mortality.

To give an idea, in 2006, the infant mortality rate in Cuba reached 5.3 per thousand, while in Bolivarian Venezuela the rate was 22.02 for every thousand. The Cuban revolution gave a big boost to public health. Although in 1958 there was one doctor for every 1,076 inhabitants, in 2007, there was one doctor was every 159 inhabitants, who receive personalized attention, as well as one dentist for each 1,066 inhabitants. The illiteracy rate is the lowest in Latin America, with 1.7%. Argentina occupies second place on the scale of literacy in the subcontinent with 4.7% illiteracy, while Venezuela reaches 6.0%. We must take into account the fact that Cuba achieved these conquests in spite of the criminal blockade of almost 50 years by the US.

Keys of the Cuban revolution

To recover the historical importance of the Cuban revolution, we must separate it from an ideological operation carried out by the supporters of chavismo and the same Castroism that connects it with the so-called "twenty-first century socialism" of Hugo Chávez.

The differences between the Cuban revolution and Bolivarian Venezuela are substantial. The Cuban revolution put an end to imperialist domination by destroying the armed forces of the bourgeoisie, through the popular insurrection and the expropriation of private property in the means of production in the cities and the countryside. For its part, Chávez' government (which has had almost 10 years in power) has kept the armed forces intact; although they have been reformed, they continue to be the pillar of the capitalist state. In addition, private ownership is still in force, although rhetorically condemned, under the idea that socialism must be built together with businessmen. Let us recall that the nationalizations announced by Chávez in recent years were really purchases that the state made by compensating groups of capitalists, while in the Cuban revolution, expropriation had a violent character and put an end to private ownership of the means of production in fewer than two years. In May 1959, the first Agrarian Reform Law, which eliminated large estates, was announced. In January 1960, a second series of expropriations began. In February, 14 sugar companies were nationalizd. Shell and Texaco were expropriated in June. In August, it was the turn of all the US companies in the oil, sugar, telephone and electricity sectors. In October, banking (Cuban and foreign-owned) was nationalized, as well as almost 400 large firms (sugar companies, factories, railroads), and the Urban Reform Law was approved, giving thousands of tenants ownership of their dwellings.

Socialist revolution or a caricature of revolution

Unlike the rest of Latin America, Cuba ended imperialist oppression by having carried out a socialist revolution. The Cuban revolution went beyond the program of reforms originally set forth by Fidel Castro and the Movimiento 26 de Julio [M26], that aimed at overthrowing Batista and restoring he 1940 Constitution. Over the course of the struggle, they added the idea of a very moderate agrarian reform to their demands. Once the bourgeois state was defeated, Manuel Urrutia, former chairman of the Supreme Court and representative of the oppositional bourgeoisie, was set up in the presidency, at the request of M26. Why was M26 unable to carry out its program of democratic demands in the framework of an independent capitalism, as it sought to do? Because the bourgeoisie and imperialism quickly went over to the camp of counterrevolution, out of fear of the workers' and campesinos' mobilization. The absence of a repressive apparatus of the bourgeoisie, which had been destroyed by the popular insurrection, pushed the masses to fight decisively for their postponed demands and punish the killers from the former regime. The combined pressure of both forces radicalized the revolution, that ended by breaking with the bourgeoisie and liquidated private ownership. Che Guevara defined this process as revolution by counter-attack and concluded that for Latin America, socialist revolution or a caricature of revolution was posed. At that time, this reality meant a tremendous ideological blow against the Stalinism of the Latin American Communist Parties, that were preaching revolution by stages (one stage of an alliance of workers and campesinos with the bourgeoisie and another stage of fighting for socialism for the indefinite future) and the institutional road inside the bourgeois regime.

The chavistas -- and the supporters of Castroism -- are now preaching the same type of thinking defeated in its time by the Cuban revolution: collaboration with the national and progressive bourgeoisies. But the 1959 revolution taught that the only way to carry out to the end the struggle for national liberation, for the end of large estates and radical distribution of land and the resolution of the housing problem through urban reform, is not through allying with the bourgeoisie, buy by fighting against it, by destroying its military and repressive apparatus, by expelling it from power and expropriating its properties.

A bureaucratic workers' state

But in spite of its enormous conquests, the Cuban revolution did not signify the creation of a state based on the democratic government of councils of workers, campesinos and militiamen, where all the revolutionary tendencies participate, that would take the construction of socialism in their hands, and promote the class struggle on a continental and international level. On the contrary, the revolution gave rise to a deformed and bureaucratic workers' state that imposed the doctrine of socialism in one country and one-party control, stifling popular freedoms and blocking the revoluionary road in Latin America.

In order to comprehend this dynamic, one must understand the origin of the revolutionary process. As we have pointed out, Fidel and M26 were not a socialist leadership that thought about destroying the bourgeois state and the construction of a workers' state. If they accepted that dynamic of the revolution, it was by getting on the popular revolutionary wave to confront the imperialist threats, but curbing popular tendencies towards self-determination. From the beginning, the Castroist leadership was Bonapartist, and its methods, plebiscitary and paternalistic. Fidel embodied a new type of Bonapartism sui generis that changed its petty bourgeois social content to the tempo of the fall of the old semicolonialist capitalist state. For that reason, when Castroism adhered to socialism, it strengthened its alliance with Cuban Stalinism and the Kremlin, which, after the ebbing of the revolutionary tide, advanced the stifling bureaucratization of the political regime and blocking the revolution's permanent dynamic, both in the sphere of building new social relations and in extending revolution towards Latin America.

Socialism on one island

For a period, and under the central inspiration of Ernesto Che Guevara, the Cuban state promoted the development of guerrilla movements and the idea of revolution in Latin America. Those were the times of the Tricontinental, OLAS and the call to make the entire Andes mountain range a Sierra Maestra. However, with the passage of time and under the growing influence of the Kremlin, Castroism began to play a role of containing the Central American and Southern Cone revolutionary processes. In the first years of the 1970's, it openly supported Salvador Allende's peaceful road to socialism in Chile, which culminated in bloody defeat at the hands of Pinochet. In the 1979 Sandinista revolution, Fidel stated that Nicaragua should not become another Cuba and supported the FSLN policy of surendering the military victory over the CIA-financed Contras at the Contadora negotiations, which led to the defeat of the revolution. He played a similar role in El Salvador as a promoter of the peace accords. But, in addition, Cuba' strategic alliance with the Kremlin -- which Che fought against, but Fidel promoted -- involved on the economic terrain keeping the island dependent on the sugar monoculture, in exchange for Moscow's aid (a line opposed by Che Guevara, who raised the need for industrialization through a centralized plan), which brought Cuba to the verge of collapse after the fall of the USSR in 1991.

The alliance with the Kremlin ended by compromising the international legitimacy of the Cuban revolution, since it collaborated in the antisocialist role played by the Stalinist bureaucracies of Eastern Europe and the former USSR. Castroism declared itself against the workers' and campesinos' mobilizations and the political revolution that sought to end the totalitarian power of the governing bureaucracy and regenerate socialism in that part of the world. Thus, Fidel condemned the Prague Spring led by Czech workers and students in 1968 as an uprising provoked by the CIA; he suported Jaruzelski's coup in Poland in rebellion against the Stalinist bureaucracy in 1981. He backed the Chinese bureaucracy's repression against the workers and students in Tiananmen Square, and he supported the Stalinist bureaucracy of Erich Honecker and the Stasi in the former GDR, to the final moment. The result was tragic for the masses, capitalist restoration and the transformation of the former bureaucracy of those countries into a capitalist oligarchy; meanwhile, Cuba suffered international isolation and weakness in the first years of the 1990's during the so-called "special economic period."

But today still, the international policy of alliances that Castroism proposes is at odds with the defense of the revolution, since it appeals to the national bourgeoisies instead of the masses of workers and campesinos of Latin America. The so-called "battle of ideas" that Castro proposes joins this line of class collaboration and support to the long since failed bourgeois national experiments on our continent, by granting legitimacy to the rhetorical demagogy of "21th century socialism," next to the businessmen and capitalist monopolies, like that of Chávez in Venezuela or Correa in Ecuador.

Conclusion

The Cuban revolution shows the people of Latin America, much more in the current scene of world crisis, the potential of socialist revolution, that is, of the struggle to destroy the political, military and economic power of the bourgeoisie, to win national liberation and achieve improvements in the conditions of life of the masses. On the other hand, the defense of the conquests of the 1959 revolution and the strategy of the Latin American and international socialist revolution in the twenty-first century needs to be separated histoically from the politics and inheritance of Castroism, to restore the Cuban workers' state as a trench of the international revolution through struggle against the bureaucracy and its privileges and by imposing rule by workers', campesinos' and soldiers' councils.

Strikes continue in GREECE

2009-01-08T21:36:00.008-05:00

www.ft-ci.org
La Verdad Obrera 309, Thursday, January 8, 2009
Strikes continue in Greece
By Alejandra Ríos

A month after the murder of the youth Alexis Grigoropoulos at the hands of the Greek police in an Athens neighborhood, protests continue occupying the streets and Greek politics. They did not manage to calm the spirits of the youths, even for the Christmas holidays; on that occasion, the youths went out to burn Christmas trees placed by the government as if nothing had happened.

The brutal murder of Alexis was an escalation of repression that has as its background two years of workers' and students' resistance against the privatizing and belt-tightening attacks of the conservative Karamanlis government of the New Democracy party. There have been 4 general strikes since 2006, with some factory seizures. Furthermore, there were student mobilizations with seizures of buildings, in opposition to the reductions in education. It would also be fitting to mention strikes in some factories and very important unions, like the case of the Siemens workers, the teachers' strike that lasted six weeks, and the strike of postal workers against privatization, and that of the sanitation workers that lasted four weeks.

The student movement responded forcefully. Thousands went out to demonstrate their anger by confronting the repressive forces. Teachers and other groups that were coming from previous struggles rapidly joined the demonstrations, as shown by the December 10 general strike, called beforehand.

The causes of the rebellion in Athens have much more deep and broad reasons than the government and the international press are willing to point out. We must seek the reasons in the economic crisis that the country is confronting and the social policy impldmented by the government, that affects education, the retirement system, and other social services. An expression of this is the fact that the teachers', university and high school students' unions have called a mobilization in Athens for January 9 against the government and police brutality. The union that brings public employees together, ADEY, also called for a cessation of activities and is calling on the workers to leave the workplaces beginning at noon, so they can join the students' and teachers' mobilization. This measure will affect hospitals, government agencies and the whole public adminstration.

There is also a call for a 24-hour strike by subway workers, who will bring service to a standstill on Thursday, to express their rejection of the new proposed collective work contract presented by the company.

All these groups in struggle and in a state of mobilization have scheduled a meeting on Monday, January 12, to discuss the call for a 24-hour strike and plan the continuing measures of struggle. But the Greek resistance movement does not appear to have been shut away inside its own borders: on Saturday, January 3, thousands of people went out to the streets and squares, just like in other big European cities, to repudiate Israel's attack on Gaza. Besides, next Saturday, the member organizations of the "No to the War!" coalition have called another national march that has the support of several militant unions.

A big crisis of the Greek political establishment began with the last elections, in September 2007. New Democracy, which is in the government, and the social democracy, PASOK in the parliamentary opposition, are sinking in the polls, losing all credibility, which has led to talk of the end of the Greek two-party system.

The union leaderships, including the biggest, the Greek Communist Party (KKE), quickly repositioned themselves, owing to pressure from the rank and file, going so far as to recognize publicly that the rebellion underway "is not a matter of anarchist youths that throw Molotov cocktails and break windows, but of a profound dissatisfaction of groups of workers, which has led to the rise of an anti-imperialist and anticapitalist resistance movement."

The struggle underway raises not only the possibility that the government crisis will worsen (the government is trying to emerge from the crisis through reshuffling the cabinet), but that it could go so far as to cause the fall of the Prime Minister. The Greek scene shows the governments and the bourgeoisies what they could face, in trying to apply their anti-worker plans to attempt to save their necks, given the world economic crisis.

ARGENTINA--Workers' struggle at Paraná Metal--The women step forward!

2008-12-29T22:12:00.002-05:00

http://www.pyr.org.ar/spip.php?article623
Monday, December 22, 2008
VILLA CONSTITUCION - SANTA FE

¡Sí, se puede! ¡Sí, se puede! ¡Si una mujer avanza ningún hombre retrocede!”

The chant by the women from Paraná Metal, growing ever stronger, was heard in the Villa Constitución Plaza on December 19. The drums stopped beating so the 5,000 people present could hear: “Yes, it’s possible! Yes, it can be done! If a woman steps forward, no man retreats!”

They are the wives, sisters, mothers of the Paraná Metal workers. They are the women of Villa Constitución, members of the Women’s Commission.

When the Paraná Metal bosses decided to suspend more than 1,300 workers without paying them their wages and stop production, the workers responded. They are at the factory entrances with a tent, taking shifts in the factory to prevent it from being stripped. They are demanding what is theirs.

On December 19, an historic day, they marched from the entrances of Paraná Metal to the Villa Constitución Plaza in a big workers’ and popular contingent, generating support from the entire community of Villa, with businesses closed, with neighbors applauding from balconies. The column grew larger as it proceeded, and workers from Acindar, from Tenaris, from the workshops, hospital workers, teachers, housewives, neighbors joined.

The women of Paraná Metal have gotten organized and already had two meetings of the Women’s Commission in the auditorium of the Villa Constitución UOM [metalworkers' union]. Last Saturday, some 80 women participated. Because, as they said in the meeting, women are the ones who have to keep house, many of them are also workers, and they are ready to fight beside the workers.

This December 24, they are calling on all the workers and all the people of Villa to go with them in the factory entrances to spend Christmas. Donations of food, beef, pork, beverages and sweet bread for everyone, from the city council and several unions, are already promised.

Pan y Rosas is joining this struggle, marching with them, going with them in the tent, on the ticket line. We are also joining the Women’s Commission to offer them our complete support, to contribute so that they will win, and be at their disposal, for whatever they need and decide.

Today the women of Villa Constitución are an example!

34 years ago, other women made heroic history in Villa Constitución, when from the Women’s Commission they organized to support the struggle, through a big strike fund, adding to the community, confronting repression.

Today the daughters of the Villazo are in the street, fighting once more!

Total support to the women from Paraná Metal!
Total support to the workers from Paraná Metal!

Women’s Group Pan y Rosas

ARGENTINA--Workers' struggle at Paraná Metal

2008-12-28T21:38:00.003-05:00

From: http://www.pts.org.ar/spip.php?article11474

Friday, December 19, 2008
Big workers’ and people’s march in Villa Constitución
More than 4,000 people mobilize in support of the workers at Paraná Metal
By PTS Santa Fe

At 9 a.m., they were already gathered in front of Paraná Metal. The mobilization began with a picket at the former Metcom. There was a lot of enthusiasm, and the workers from Paraná Metal were not alone. The workers from Tenaris had already endorsed the call. The women’s commission in struggle was there early, exerting all their strength.

The workers’ contingent was moving foward along the road. The first stop was at the entrances of Acindar. Lots of emotion. Applause. The workers from Acindar, on foot and motorcycles, joined the march. Local workshops also came out and joined.

“You have to jump, you gotta jump. The one who doesn’t jump is management” was heard, growing ever louder. “The people united, will never be defeated.” Two hours of walking, and at every step the column grew larger. Applause again, when the workers and young people who arrived from Rosario in a bus, lined up on the side of the road to join.

Teachers, workers from the hospital, from the EPE, from city government, everyone coming together in the mobilization. Delegations from AMSAFE, ATILRA of Rosario, CCC, Raúl Castells, the women's group Pan y Rosas, the Agrupación Marrón from Rosario, the students' center from Villa Constitución, the PTS, Polo obrero, and others accompanied. During the whole march, the young people from Paraná Metal did not stop chanting very energetically.

When the march reached the city, families were applauding from their balconies, housewives, neighbors, waiting on the sidewalk for the contingent to walk by. All the businesses had closed. The city of Villa Constitución was moved by the struggle of the workers from Paraná Metal.

Finally they got to the Plaza. "If this is not the people, where are they?" A group from Paraná Metal added another chant: "Occupation, a wave of people, workers' control to throw out the bosses!"

The rally was held in the historic Plaza of Villa Constitución (where the Villazo took place). There were speeches by leaders from CTA Rosario, AMSAFE, ATE, CTA Mar del Plata, leaders of the [metalworkers' union branches] UOM Campana, UOM Casilda, UOM Las Parejas, and also a metalworkers' representative from the CUT of San José Dos Campos of Brazil. Leaders of the [metalworkers' union] UOM Villa Constitución concluded the rally. It was very emotional when two women who belong to the Women's Commmission of Paraná Metal went up to the speakers' box. "You can feel it, you can sense it, women are present," and "Yes, we can, yes, we can! If a woman steps forward, no man retreats!" the women were chanting.

Support from Villa, from Rosario, and from all of Argentina, was extremely strong.

Support also arrived from the corps of delegates of the Buenos Aires subway.

One of the delegates from the internal commission announced that through Caló (national UOM) the government will soon give them 500 pesos for each worker before the year ends. They managed to restore the 600 peso subsidy for each worker that the government had already been giving the bosses for wages, but for after January 15. Now the workers continue to be without a single peso to take to their families.

Today they have a meeting at the Ministry of Labor in Rosario, and another on Monday in Buenos Aires with the Buenos Aires secretary of commerce, but until now, there is no news.

The women invited the audience to spend December 24 in the tent alongside of the workers. They already received a donation from the town council of beef and sweet bread for everyone, and donations of pork and food from other bodies. The Santa Cruz oil workers offered beverages for 3,000 people for those days. The Contraimagen Group, which was filming the whole march, publicly offered to screen films in the tent for the workers and their families.

The resolutions from the workers' plenary meeting that took place on Wednesday, December 17, in Rosario, that include a rejection of layoffs and suspensions, distributing the hours of work, workers' putting every plant that closes back to producing, non-payment of the foreign debt, and support for all the struggles, were read from the speakers' box.

It was an historic mobilization, that generated a lot of popular support for the workers' victory in their struggle, for insuring that the workers do not pay for the crisis. The Women's Commission called a broader meeting for 6 p.m. on Saturday, in the UOM auditorium.

From the speakers' box, they called for continuing to back the struggle and participating in the tent.

Today the workers of Paraná Metal are a great example for all workers of Argentina and the region, next to those of GM in Alvear and others. Actis, leader of UOM Villa, and of Paraná Metal, asserted in conclusion that “if all else fails, we workers will set the factory to producing.” This is a report of a great day of an historic struggle.

Total support to the struggle of the workers of Paraná Metal!

PTS Argentina, blasts Israeli massacre of Palestinians in GAZA

2008-12-28T00:15:00.005-05:00

Urgent—Press release
We repudiate the Israeli massacre against the Palestinian people
By PTS, Argentina

Sunday, December 28, 2008

(PTS, 27-12-08) Christian Castillo, national leader of the Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas (PTS) indicated today that "with the massacre of 200 Palestinians in Gaza, Israel again shows that it is a terrorist state, which does not hesitate to bomb the civilian population indiscriminately. It is a state that took the lead in introducing the doctrine of 'preventive war,' the legalization of
torture and murder of its opponents without any judgment, something that afterwards the Bush administration did itself." He also condemned "the complicit declarations of the imperialist governments of the US and the European Union, that want to turn the victims into murderers. This is not surprising, since these are the same states that maintain the colonial occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, among other territories."

In conclusion, Castillo stated that "the Palestinian people are one of the most oppressed on the planet. One and a half million Palestinians, those whom Israel seeks to crush with hunger and terror, are crammed into the worst poverty, in the Gaza Strip, a territory of scarcely 360 square kilometers. We from the PTS are in complete solidarity with the Palestinians. There will be no peace in the region until the oppression of the Palestinians is ended once and for all, a matter that can only be achieved by expelling imperialism from the region, ending the terrorist and colonial State of Israel and setting up a workers' and socialist Palestine where Arabs and Jews may live in peace."

PTS
Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas
Argentina

Social revolt in GREECE: Country paralyzed by 24 hour general strike

2008-12-17T21:22:00.022-05:00

From: www.ft-ci.org

A country paralyzed by a 24-hour general strike:
Social revolt in Greece

By Simone Ishibashi
Thursday, November 11, 2008

A trigger-happy act became the fuse for a social explosion in the streets of Greece, as we relate in these pages. The young people's explosion in Greece is taking place in a context of chronic unemployment and extremely precarious employment and was preceded by different struggles and mobilizations in recent years. In 2006 and 2007, Greek students led harsh conflicts with assemblies of around 70,000 students, massive mobilizations, and seizure of almost all the schools, and then, following their example, high-school students seized almost 1,000 schools. The neo-liberal policies of the Karamanlís administration were also confronted by the workers with a series of general strikes in the last few years. The current rebellion of young people and students in Greece is not an isolated case. In Berlusconi's Italy, a privatizing reform of education was answered by "the people of the schools" in the streets, together with other groups of workers in a big national day of struggle. In Gemrany, privatizations also aroused high school and university students, and teachers, who organized a one-day strike with demonstrations in around 40 cities; more than 100,000 students filled the streets. Similar actions were carried out in the Spanish state and Ireland, as we show in this issue. It is clear that the entire European bourgeoisie has been trying systematically to undermine what remains of the conquests, like public education, with the privatizing Bologna Plan, by striking at the youth, that has been one of the groups most affected by unemployment and the results of the economic crisis. But it is also clear that young people in Europe are ready to resist. The revolt by the "Generation of 700 Euros" (as they call young workers with precarious jobs in Greece) is a sign of that.

On Saturday, December 6, the streets of the main Greek cities, like Athens, Hania, Crete and Salonika, were seized by thousands of demonstrators, who were protesting against the murder of Alexis Grigoropoulos, 15 years old, by the police. The demonstration, in spite of having been harshly repressed by the cops, lasted for hours, stretching out until Sunday and leaving a toll of 40 wounded.

However, the fierce repression did not manage to intimidate the youth and popular groups that rose up against the brutal murder carried out by the police. After the confrontations, university professors, who were already preparing a mobilization against social security reform and the economic policy of the worn-out Costas Karamanlís administration, the right-wing New Democracy Party, announced that they will join the three days of protests, scheduled to occur beginning December 9, while the University of Thessalonika was occupied by hundreds of students, who responded to the attacks of the police with stones and Molotov cocktails. A march on the night of December 8, at which the main Greek unions should appear, was also called by the Greek Communist Party and PASOK, the socialist party.

The repercussions of the Greek social revolt were already going through the European Union. On the morning of December 8, the Greek consulate in Berlin was occupied by 15young Greek citizens who were carrying a sign that read "The state murders." The Greek demonstrations expressed popular rage against the government and the effects of the economic crisis, which have struck Greece harshly, worsening the already dreadful distribution of the country's income, and they could be the herald of big onslaughts in the class struggle, and a profound political crisis of the servile and reactionary Greek government. So the confrontations in Greece are part of the first responses by the movement of the masses to the effects of the capitalist crisis, and they could transform the ancient birthplace of Western civilization into a frontline barricade of the international class struggle, now that it has assumed a political character, to the extent that the government of Costas Karamanlís is being questioned.

Greece: Political and economic crisis

The current Greek political situation is marked by a profound impact from the international economic crisis. Despite the numbers presented by the government, that were certifying advances in the economic indicators beginning with Greece's entry into the European Union in 2001, from the beginning of this year, Greece, beside countries like the Spanish state, was one of the first to see its economy fall. The Greek economy, which is largely sustained by the service sector, with 74.5% of the national GDP, of which, tourism is responsible for a large part, has suffered with the recession of some of its European neighbors. However, it is the industrial sector, responsible for 20.7% of all economic activisty, that has been the most battered: total exports fell by 13.2% compared with last year, while industrial activity as a whole shrank by approximately 3.5%. The jobs created in the last year are still mostly precarious, not having reversed the proportion of 1 in every 5 Greeks living below the poverty line, earning less than 5,000 Euros/year. Furthermore, Greece was already in the sights of the European Union because it exceeded the deficit permitted to countries of the Euro Zone.

The Costas Karamanlís government has been one of the most determined to unload the crisis on the backs of the workers. As a way to heed the opinions of the main imperialisms of the European Union, the government is trying to privatize difference businesses, including the state-owned airlines, besides carrying out reforms that immensely attack the pension system, with a plan that increases retirement age and reduces the value of pensions. The New Democracy government is alos responsible for cutting investments dedicated to social programs, increasing taxes, and attacking higher education. So the popular reaction that exploded in recent demonstrations is also a response to the rescue costing billions, announced by the Greek government to save the finanical system and the banks, following the US and the European Union. Thus, contrary to the bourgeois discourse of greeting Greece's entry into the European Union as a means of economic growth, in view of the crisis, it is obvious that countries with less economic power, besides continuing to keep structurally the same disparities that impose immense sufferings and privations on the masses, entry still means for these countries attacks on historically won rights, in the name of "seeking competitiveness," and "modernization" imposed by the European imperialist powers. This confirms that the European Union, as we have already discussed in other articles, is only an attempt by the main European imperialisms to subjugate their own proletariat and those of other countries of the Continent.

Inside Greece, the effects of the economic crisis are added to a big political crisis that is beginning among highly-placed officials in the New Democracy government. As if the goverment's attacks were not enough, and the harsh situation to which a immense part of the population and the Greek workers are subjected, an endless number of ministers are being accused of corruption. Together with the explosion of the international crisis, in September of this year scandals came to the surface that involved the Merchant Marine Minister, Yorgos Vulgarakis, who was forced to resign after the discovery that hidden, lucrative deals of his family were based on abuses of power. Other institutions that were favored by the New Democracy government, like Orthodox Church itself, were also targets of corruption scandals, which weakens the allies of Costas Karamanlís. In an attempt not to appear even more weakened, the Greek President, after having lost a series of other collaborators, was forced to refuse the request for resignation of Prokopis Pavlopoulos, Minister of the Interior, who was ready to hand over the job because of the murder of the youth in Athens. However, this decision could increase popular rage, contributing to his government still more.

Recover and strengthen the tradition of struggle by workers and young people

Greece has been one of the most unstable countries of Europe, and it was already the stage for several confrontations of workers and popular groups with the government. The social revolt that has exploded in recent days is one more episode that shows the immense fighting spirit of the Greek youth and people. The workers' entry on the stage could raise the demonstrations to a higher level. In spite of the treacherous pacifist line adopted by the PASOK bureaucracy, than, when it was in government in 2001, tried to pass similar attacks on the pension system and was also almost overthrown by popular demonstrations, and of Communist Party (the KKE, according to its Greek initials), it is possible that the mobilizations could break out again, that oculd force the leaderships to go much further thna they wished, giving continuity and radicalizing the different mobilizations that occured since the beginning of this year.

These mobiizations were very large, like the 24-hour strike on October 21, that had the support of 90% of service sector workers and culminated in a march with the participation of 15,000 people in Athens, against the government's attacks, and with the slogan, "We cannot tolerate any more." The high-school and university students' movement actively joined in protest against the privatization of higher education and against cutting budget items for education, culminating in the occupation of 250 institutes and schools throughout the country. The strike ended with the occupation of the central building of Olympic Airways by workers, who were also harshly repressed by the police. The shutdowns continued on October 22, and this time included rural groups, that had almost 100% participation.

Today, many people are already comparing the social revolt detonated by the murder of the teenager with the demonstrations led by the students in 1985, when the police also murdered a young man who was participating in the tributes to the November, 1973actions. It is a tradition of the Greek youth, popular groups and workers to go out to the streets to remember the fall of the so-called "Colonels' dictatorship," a regime led by General Yorgos Papadópulos, that had subjugated the Greek people and workers with great brutality since the coup d'état driven by the colonels on April
21, 1967. The 1973 demonstrations, with the students as vanguard, quickly became massive, including broad popular and workers' groups, that made the occupation of the Athens Polytechnical School the epicenter of the mobilization. This movement helped enormously for the fall of the Colonels' dictatorship in 1974.

So it is necessary that the workers enter the stage with their historical methods of struggle, equiping the social revolt that was setting the streets of the main cities of the country on fire, with a program capable of imposing a workers' solution and finishing the road opened in 1973, preventing the economic crisis from being unloaded on the backs of the workers and the Greek people. The combative working class and the Greek youth need to surpass their leaderships, now in the hands of the KKE and PASOK, and unify their ranks, by struggling to impose a definitive solution to the misfortunes imposed by the Costas Karamanlís government and its bourgeoisie connected to the interests of the European Union. Let us follow attentively.

VENEZUELA--Punish those who murdered the 3 workers' leaders in Aragua

2008-12-13T15:03:00.006-05:00

[From www.ft-ci.org]

In view of the murder of three workers
Big national demonstration in Venezuela

By the LTS of Venezuela
Thursday, December 11, 2008

On Thursday, December 4, the big national protest meeting against hired killers and against impunity, called by the Unión Nacional de Trabajadores of Aragua state and several leftist political organizations, was carried out. Different national and regional coordinating committees of the Unión Nacional de Trabajadores, rank and file union leaders and hundreds of workers from the various factories of Aragua and the rest of Venezuela, participated. The event took place in Maracay in the facilities of Saniplásticas (opposite the enterprise Sanitarios Maracay, at the end of Avenida Aragua). The meeting had as its central objective denouncing the murder of the three union leaders of the regional union federation in Aragua, comrades Richard Gallardo, Luís Hernández y Carlos Requena, and demanding speed and transparency from the national government and the appropriate entities in the investigations of those responsible for this horrible homicide. The meeting is part of the regional plan of struggle adopted by the union federation of the state of Aragua to condemn and confront the scourge of paid assassins in the region and in the whole country. The members of the workers’ commission negotiating with the regional government presented a report on the state of the agreements. The Liga de Trabajadores por el Socialismo (LTS) was present at this big meeting called by the comrades of UNT-Aragua, as part of the tireless struggle that this crime should not remain unpunished, since, as we had said, this triple murder constitutes a harsh blow against the working class and its organizations. If we let it pass and remain as an unpunished act, the bosses, who daily resort more and more to “Colombianization” as a method to decide workers’ struggles (paying hired killers and paramilitaries to eliminate trade unionists), will not hesitate to rise up against all those workers that are calling for their basic rights and demands. It is the blood of the workers that is at risk, in view of the impunity of capital and the secret cooperation of the government.

During the demonstration, there was a call for the big national march that will take place in Maracay on Thursday, December 11, at 2 p.m., leaving from Avenida Bolívar and Ayacucho, and ending up at the former regional government headquarters, located beside Plaza Bolívar.

VENEZUELA--Reflections of the crisis in petro-"socialism"

2008-12-04T21:52:00.021-05:00

Venezuela: Reflections of the world economic crisis in petro-"socialism"
By Max Trinidad Cerén
Sunday, November 30, 2008

One of the elements that shows that the government of Chávez is moving without foresight and is adrift in the context of the international economic crisis, is the fact that among strong international economic storms and a clear world recession, it approved a national budget of 167.4 billion bolívares fuertes, based on US$60/barrel, and after just a few days, it found itself forced to rush out to correct the numbers, given the sudden drop that has already hit the floor of US$45/barrel on average for crude so far this month. In this context, the situation of world economic crisis and the repercussions of the recession that are happening in the economies of the main countries of the world, and their impact on oil prices, will have an effect on the national [Venezuelan] economy, to become the determining element for the certain adjustment measures they will apply, that highly-placed members of the [Venezuelan] government are already expecting.

For the last week of November, according to figures from the Ministry of Energy and Petroleum, a barrel of Venezuelan oil was at $40.68 US, the lowest level recorded since the first quarter of 2007. In July, it had reached the maximum of $129.50 US, which shows it is not a matter of just any decrease. If this dynamic continues, the loss of income will be considerable, which could worsen as the recession of the world economy deepens. For some analysts, although an average price of $60 US/barrel will prevail during 2009, Venezuela will experience a reduction in its oil income of almost 40%, around $25 billion US, and that is sufficiently serious for a country where public expenditure is the motor that keeps the economy active, a country more closely tied than any other, to what happens in the unpredictable casino of oil prices. Taking into account the fact that oil represents 94% of Venezuela’s exports, and that only oil makes it possible to pay for imports, obviously shows the extremely volatility of the Venezuelan economy and its great dependence on international fluctuations.

During the whole election campaign, the [Venezuelan] government did everything possible to avoid talking about the subject of oil, because it wanted to create the feeling that things are going well, and that the Venezuelan economy is immune to what is happening with prices. But the specter of the world crisis is hanging over Venezuela; it is sufficient to recall that around 1998, the price of oil approached less than $10/barrel, also because of the effects of an international financial crisis – in that case, because of the 1997 crisis in Asia. Now with a barrel below $45, which looks like a breaking point in Chávez’ plan, marked by the bonanza in crude oil.

In spite of the government’s insistence at the beginning of the world crisis that Venezuela was not in the path of the hurricane, the faces have begun to change, and quite rightly, since, if the crisis deepens, big contradictions will come to light, and the crisis will unmask the rhetoric of Chávez’ “twenty-first century socialism,” that is no more than “socialism with businessmen.” And the problem is, Venezuela is a country that is closely connected to the international economy, like all the dependent countries, but it has the characteristic that it is a net exporter of oil and importer of everything needed for consumption and production. It is a country in debt to the international financial markets, with a public debt of about $50 billion US.

And by way of example, regarding only current conditions, the Venezuelan economy slowed down in the third quarter of 2008, with an index of 4.6%, reflecting a drop compared to the second quarter that had an index of 7.1%, and for the end of the year, a GDP rate of 2% was predicted, when the economy was growing. While petroleum activity kept growing from 3.2% to 6%, the non-petroleum sector fell from 7.8% to 4.5%; in that sector, construction activity went from 12.8% to 7.2%, manufacturing fell from 4.4% to 0.3%, transportation and storage, from 6.6% to -0.5%, etc. At the same time, inflation continued to be out of control, with a cumulative rate of 24.7% in the first ten months of this year, a much higher figure than the initial goal of 11%, and now it is estimated that in 2009 inflation will reach about 39%. If a more severe economic slowdown, combined with high inflation, develops, it will open up the unflattering prospect of stagflation in the country.

The oil bubble created incentives on which the government bet a lot, in view of the exuberant expansion of public expenditure and state economic activity. The impact of that global economic recession environment will come from an extreme slowdown of economic growth, from increased fiscal costs because of a drop in oil income, given the lower prices of oil production and of a likely fall in the Venezuelan oil supply.

In spite of the cushion of economic reserves, we will suffer the consequences already in 2009

It is true that the quantity of funds that Chávez' government would have cumulatively, for discretionary use, in organizations like the Central Bank, the Economic and Social Development Bank BANDES, and the Treasury Bank, have created a shock absorber to be taken into account; the point is, what will happen after the surplus resources run out? Because the behavior recorded by prices up to October is what allows the year's average to be around $97, guaranteeing a surplus of $62/barrel, since a reference price of $35 was anticipated for hte current year. Beyond the fact that in immediate terms the abrupt drop in Venezuelan crude is not affecting the fiscal accounts, since income continues to come from invoices signed three months ago and bought and sold at prices above $100/barrel, when it makes itself felt, the government will have to apply belt-tightening measures to make up for this abrupt drop. A report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) stressed that Venezuela needs prices between $85 and $100 to keep its accounts balanced in 2009, and for some analysts, like Maza Zabala, Venezuela, with the reserves it has, could enjoy a truce of one and a half years or two, which is really an excessively optimistic forecast.

But, outside of the effects on ordinary expenditure, the drop in prices is affecting the so-called "parallel budget." Given the increase in prices, the government manipulated the tax on the sudden profit in crude oil, which is applied when Brent exceeds $70, and the resources that originate in that way nourish the National Development Fund. Between June and September, that tax generated $5.8 billion, but in the face of the behavior of Brent this month, there is a reduced possibility that the industry and mixed enterprises will make those additional payments. As a result, an international scene with reduced growth or prolonged recession would impact the levels of income of Venezuela both for oil income and fiscal income that results from a reduction in tax collections from the petroleum and non-petroleum sectors, owing to less growth of export prices and royalties, as from our economy in the different sectors.

And beyond all the anti-Bush rhetoric that the government has maintained, economic dependence on the US, the main epicenter of the world economic crisis, is large and significant: the bulk of petroleum exports continues to be directed to the main North American power. For Venezuela, this is intensified, taking into account the fact the crisis we are now witnessing originated in the heart of the world capitalist system, the US, and has spread from there like a poisonous stain, seriously striking the European Union, Japan, Russia, and the countries of the capitalist periphery.

From the government, they had been talking about diversification of the oil market, taking China as a market, but that country is also feeling the crisis with the collapse of the myth that the Chinese economy could be “unfastened” from the crisis: the numbers reveal that China continues to be an economically dependent country that lacks the ability to act like a great power: it occupies position number 100 in terms of per capita income and represents only 6% of the global economy.

In the face of the deepening of the crisis, a workers’ solution

Although in the context of high oil income, the distribution of the national income left much to be desired, in the economic scene, the contradictions for the government will be sharper, taking growing demands into account, since the limits will be more serious for any policy of distribution Workers’ demands have been making themselves felt, where the struggles for readjustment of wages is spreading throughout the country and through the most diverse sectors of the working class, forming a very widespread picture of struggles such as has not been seen for many years, the result of big political polarization and Chávez’ immense leadership over the entire mass movement.

As James Petras states, about the government, “Venezuela will blame the fall of profits coming from oil and world recessions on the coup; the flight of capitals is increasing in spite of controls, and private capital is reducing investments or withholding credit in spite of considerable incentives. The government is unable to continue its large-scale financing of public social and economic projects, and, at the same time, subsidize private exporters, the food and agriculture, and, above all, importing luxury articles.” But in a more general sense, the proposals from the government and the local and continental chavista movement, do not go beyond being utopian. A meeting of economists was promoted by the Miranda International Center and the government; the economists published their “Responses to the world economic crisis from the South,” which proposed as a solution, the strengthening of ALBA and the Banco del Sur, new, regulated economic institutions, and a Latin American monetary agreement, to face up to the crisis, turn out to be completely utopian, These projects, which could not even be seriously set up during the previous period of economic growth, clearly remain without any foundation.

Faced with this situation and the crisis that could begin, the working class and the people must fight for a program that strikes at the material bases of the capitalists, that Chávez’ “socialism with businessmen” has limited itself to concealing, instead of taking serious measures. Faced with threats of layoffs, we must demand that the accounting books be opened and the expropriation without compensation of any firm that closes or has layoffs, and its being put into operation under workers’ control. Not a single bolívar to save the banks and capitalist enterprises. To prevent the flight of capitals and guarantee cheap credit for working-class families, small-business owners and the impoverished middle classes, it is necessary to fight for the state monopoly of foreign trade and for expropriating and nationalizing all the banks into a single state bank controlled by workers and depositors’ committees. It is a matter of setting up the power of the working class and of showing the only realistic road so that they do not unload the crisis on our shoulders: the struggle for a government belonging to the workers and impoverished people.

ARGENTINA--Big demonstration in front of the Venezuelan Embassy

2008-12-02T21:49:00.009-05:00

[From the Partido de Trabajadores Socialistas, Argentina]

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

In repudiation of the massacre of workers in Aragua

Big demonstration in front of the Venezuelan Embassy

(PTS, 01/12/08) Today a big rally and demonstration was held in front of the Embassy of Venezuela in Buenos Aires to repudiate the brutal murder of the comrade workers' leaders Richard Gallardo, Luis Hernández and Carlos Requena and to demand an investigation and punishment of the murder. Around a thousand comrades from the different tendencies of the left that had called the action accompanied a delegation of leaders that delivered a statement before the authorities of the Embassy. Juan Carlos Giordano (Izquierda Socialista), Vilma Ripoll (MST), Néstor Pitrola (PO), Christian Castillo (PTS), Juan Carlos Beica (Convergencia Socialista) and Héctor Heberling (MAS) had an interview with an official, who could not answer why up to that moment -- three days after the cowardly murder -- President Hugo Chávez had still not repudiated this massacre of workers. Then a comrade from Izquierda Socialista read a report of the different workers' and popular mobilizations that took place after the crime against these workers' leaders and part of the plan of struggle launched by the leader Orlando Chirino and the comrades of the UNT to demand the investigation and punishment of the massacre. Finally, the national leader of Izquierda Socialista, Juan Carlos Giordano, spoke, giving a moving biographical sketch of the life of dedication to the workers’ cause of these comrades, explaining that a harsh blow against the class-conscious left had taken place, but that “from every Richard, from every Luis, from every Carlos, from each one of them, a thousand class-conscious, anti-imperialist and socialist workers will go out, just like they were.” “They will not be able to finish this struggle for class independence; they were struggling for a truly socialist society, without exploited or exploiters, a society without businessmen, for a society that is not the present Venezuela: that is why they killed them.” Comrade Giordano also recalled how, 24 hours before he was murdered, comrade Richard Gallardo had raised the need to prepare workers’ self-defense, “a question that he did not actually see, but that is set out now more than ever, in the Venezuelan working class.” In his intervention, Giordano rejected the version, promoted by the right-wing Venezuelan opposition, that the comrades were murdered for having made public an alleged fraud in the last Venezuelan elections, when two of them were independent workers' candidates for the Unidad Socialista de Izquierda (USI): "The facts are more than clear; the comrades were actively backing the struggle and the seizure by the workers of the Colombian multinational 'Alpina,' and they had been violently repressed by the Aragua state police the very day of their assassination, after they demanded a repudiation by the brand-new Governor Elect from the PSUV." In ending the demonstration, Christian Castillo stated that "we promoted this united demonstration as a first step of an intense internationalist campaign that we have now begun with the comrades of the Fracción Trotskista (Cuarta Internacional) from Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Europe, together with tendencies like the UIT-CI, the LIT-CI, the comrades of the PO, of the MST, and all the tendencies that are present here today to repudiate and demand the investigation and punishment for the massacre of the class-conscious leaders of Aragua." "The fascist assassins acted in accord with the repression against the workers of 'Alpina,' repression that should not surprise us in the so-called "socialism of the twenty-first century," of Venezuela. We have already seen repression against the workers of Sanitarios Maracay and the workers of Sidor; such a strange 'socialism,' that permits exploiting and murderous multinationals like 'Alpina' or that of Pepsi Cola, where comrade Luis Hernández was a leader, multinationals that hire assassins with complete impunity, to eliminate those who fight for their rights, and their businesses are defended by the repressive forces of the [Venezuelan] state."

The demonstration ended with the emotional cry: "RICHARD GALLARDO, LUIS HERNÁNDEZ Y CARLOS REQUENA: ¡PRESENTES! ¡HASTA EL SOCIALISMO SIEMPRE!

VZLA--Repudiate the brutal murder of workers' leaders

2008-11-30T22:23:00.005-05:00

Urgent: Venezuela
REPUDIATE THE BRUTAL MURDER DE THE WORKERS’ LEADERS RICHARD GALLARDO, LUIS HERNANDEZ AND CARLOS REQUENA!

By LTS of Venezuela
Friday, November 28, 2008

Repudiate the brutal murder of the workers’ leaders Richard Gallardo, Luís Hernández and Carlos Requena!

For a big national and international campaign to demand trial and exemplary punishment for the material and intellectual authors of this crime!

Yesterday, Thursday, November 27, comrades Richard Gallardo, national coordinator of the UNT and chairman of the Aragua section, Luís Hernández, union leader at Pepsi Cola, and Carlos Requena, work safety delegate from Alpina, militants of the Unidad Socialista de Izquierda (USI), were murdered in Cagua (Aragua state).

These comrades were leading the effort of solidarity with the Alpina workers, at a business owned by Colombian capital, that the workers seized in struggle against a breach of the contract and in the face of a threat to close the firm. Just that day, the workers had to resist a fierce police repression that included cops entering the plant and an eviction, with a toll of four workers wounded. As a result of the solidarity offered by workers and union leaders of the UNT, the workers recovered the plant again. That afternoon, the comrades had publicly demanded a statement by the recently elected PSUV governor, Rafael Isea; they also warned that if the factory was closed, the workers would opt for starting production under their own control, following the example of the comrades from Sanitarios Maracay. That night, comrades Gallardo, Hernández and Requena were shot in the La Encrucijada district, in Cagua.

Already on previous occasions, leading comrades of the UNT-Aragua, one of the most combative regional sections of the UNT, had received several threats. This brutal murder is not isolated from the situation of sharp labor conflicts in Aragua, not accidentally the state where the exemplary struggle by the Sanitarios Maracay workers for nationalization under workers’ control gained a lot of strength, including carrying out the first regional workers’ strike in almost a decade, in May last year.

Already last year, we could see how in the conflict at FUNDIMECA, the Valencia factory for making fans, the bosses used paid assassins to try to smash the hard struggle by the women workers for their rights, with the result that one female comrade got shot in the leg. All this happened with the complicity of the judges and state police.

From the Liga de Trabajadores por el Socialismo (LTS), together with our workers’ and student leaders, we declare our solidarity with the grief of the relatives and fellow militants of the comrades, a sorrow that is also ours, since we have shared a trench of joint struggle on more than one occasion. We join the call to the political organizations of the workers’ and socialist left, to political and intellectual personalities, to the union, student and human rights organizations, to declare themselves forcefully against this crime and carry out a large and active national and international campaign to demand exemplary punishment for the material and intellectual authors of this crime against the working-class vanguard of our country. We demand that the national and regional government immediately open an investigation in the hands of a commission made up of workers and human rights organizations, to discover the truth about this crime.

This is one more action that shows not only that there is no revolution nor socialism in the country, but that the institutions of this bourgeois state, as could not be otherwise, are completely on the side of the bosses’ interests against the struggles of workers and the impoverished people, when hundreds of murders of peasants and workers at the hands of paid assassins have gone unpunished. Between repression by the Guardia Nacional and the police on one hand, the “justice” system on the other, and murderers hired by the bosses, without the need to agree, they form a pair of pincers against the most hardened struggles the working class is beginning to wage. Our slogan must be to trust in our own class forces, without putting any confidence in projects of class conciliation!

Liga de Trabajadores por el Socialismo
Caracas, November 28, 2008

LTS
LIGA DE TRABAJADORES POR EL SOCIALISMO
www.lts.org. ve
lts@lts.org.ve
Member of the FRACCIÓN TROTSKISTA - CUARTA INTERNACIONAL

IRAN--Free Farzad Kamangar now!

2008-11-28T11:30:00.001-05:00

Free Farzad Kamangar now!

Following an appeal from LabourStart and Education International yesterday (26 November), many trade unionists throughout the world sent protest emails to the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran protesting against Farzad Kamangar's imminent execution. Those writing to Ayatollah Khamenei included Brendan Barber, the General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress (in Britain).

According to Education International, the international teachers' federation, he was taken from his cell in Tehran's Evin prison on 26 November in preparation for execution. The guards told him he was about to be executed and made fun of him, calling him a martyr.

Fortunately Farzad Kamangar has not been executed. His lawyer has spoken to him and he is, considering the circumstances, quite well. The rumours and preparations for his execution are despicable stunts that highlight the real danger that this Kurdish teacher still faces. However, even though his arrest, the five minutes' trial and long imprisonment have been based on "absolutely zero evidence" there is nothing to stop the death sentence being carried out at a whim.

His arrest on trumped up charges, subsequent trial and death sentence have not only mobilised exiled labour activists but have also provoked protests in Iranian Kurdistan itself - including a picket by around 300 teachers.

We urge all trade unionists and labour activists to support the LabourStart campaign by filling in the online protest form.

Iranian Workers' Solidarity Network
27 November 2008

For more information on Farzad Kamangar see the special section at
http://www.iwsn.org/campaigns/teachers.htm

SPAIN--Student movement on the rise

2008-11-22T23:16:00.017-05:00

From www.ft-ci.org
Spanish state: A student movement on the rise

By Carlos Munis and Susana Penna
Wednesday, November 19, 2008

The academic year in Europe had a hot beginning. Although the plans by the bourgeoisie for privatizing public education had already been in preparation since the 1998 Bologna Declaration, now the crisis of capitalism at an international level is forcing the acceleration and hardening of these measures.

The November 13 strike: One more step against the Bologna Plan and the capitalist crisis

In the Spanish state, the government of Rodríguez Zapatero, in keeping with the rest of the European bourgeoisies, is making a considerable gift of 150 billion euros to the banking interests, with the resulting emptying of the government coffers, that is precipitating, among other things, the reduction of the budget for the universities. University financing is decentralized and belongs to the autonomous communities. [1] Thus, for example, the Madrid community made a 30% cut, or the Valencia community, that cut [the university budget] by 25%, and in both, it will be impossible to guarantee payment of the wages of workers and university teachers, if things do not change. This budget cut is similar to the indebtedness of the autonomous communities to the central government.

The first step in the Spanish state was the October 22 strike against privatization of education. The mobilizations had been growing, and the last one, on November 13, was one of the most massive. 20,000 people came out in Madrid, a somewhat larger number in Barcelona, in a demonstration joined by teachers in secondary education, fighting against a privatizing law pushed by the Govern Catalá, 5,000 in Salamanca, 2,000 in Valencia, and 1,000 in Zaragoza. The mobilizations were not the only demonstrations of the spirit of struggle among the students; departments, like Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia, were also seized, with the possible extension to other cities. These processes could mean the first steps this school year in organizing a vanguard group.

We need a combative, massive, democratic and grass-roots student movement

The struggle has only just begun: it is necessary to turn the assemblies into mass bodies. The student movement must be grass-roots and democratic, with delegates subject to recall. It must take as an example struggles like the one in France against the CPE. [2] We must recover these experiences to strengthen the offensive against the current crisis and all its privatizing plans for public education, which has already been much degraded.

For a worker-student pact, to fight against the capitalist crisis

Capitalists and their governments want to make not just us, but all the workers, and especially immigrants, legal or undocumented, pay for this crisis. Worker-student unity is more needed than ever.

Coordinating and unifying our demands, next to those of the workers, will allow us to be stronger, by taking up again the lessons of May 1968, or that of the Spanish state in 1986-1988, where the workers and students were the leaders. We should support the current struggles of the workers, like that of the Nissan workers in Barcelona, and back them actively, as we are able.

Down with the Bologna Plan!
Not a single Euro for the bankers!
The capitalists must be made to pay for the crisis!
Oppose layoffs and precarious employment!
For a decent job once studies are finished!
For an education that serves the working class!

* * *

[1] "Spain is divided into 17 autonomous communities," Wikipedia.
[2] Contract of first employment.

ITALY: General strike, December 12!

2008-11-22T00:47:00.018-05:00

From http://www.ft-ci.org/, November 20, 2008
General strike, December 12!
By Ciro Tappeste, from Rome

This weekend, the center of the nightly scene of Roman youth moved to the University City of La Sapienza. Until a late hour of the early morning, groups of students from all over Italy could be seen on the steps of the occupied departments, in lively discussions of the prospects of the student movement; others, hungry, in search of some improvised dining room where some helping of pasta is left, and the tired ones, after almost twelve hours of an assembly, preparing their sleeping bags for rest in one of the lecture halls. The 2,000 student activists who met in Rome this weekend made clear what their program was: In opposition to the plans of Minister Gelmini, they are raising the prospect of reforming the university from below, "auto-reform," and against the policy of the government and Confindustria, the Italian bosses, they are determined to continue mobilizing and still support the December 12 general strike. The "tsunami," as the student movement calls itself, "onda anomala" in Italian, is, in reality, to continue the metaphor of climatic and natural phenomena, only the tip of a deeper iceberg that is called "class struggle."

The student "tsunami," staggered strikes, wildcat strikes: an X ray of the social mobilization in Italy

In fact, the last 15 days were particularly turbulent. Although a large part of the Gelmini counter-reform has been definitively adopted, the high school and university students did not let down their guard, quite the contrary. Without any doubt, the biggest mobilization was the national demonstration of 200,000 people on Friday, November 14, which coincided with the general strike in university research proclaimed by the CGIL and the UIL, joined by students mobilized from all over Italy, after which the first national student coordinating committee met.

On the most directly social front, the CGIL had to reconsider their positions in the last few weeks. Meanwhile, the national leaderships of the CISL and the UIL, more disposed to dialogue, were trying to maintain a certain balance between the sense of "responsibility," that is, negotiating with the government and the bosses over the attacks that have been swooping down on the subordinate classes, and the noticeable anger among the unions' rank and file. The CGIL leadership and its different federations are being pressured by the existing dissatisfaction among the workers because of the economic situation and the avalanche of announcing layoffs, because of right-wing provocations by the government and, in the final instance, because of the student mobilization that is serving as a social and political sounding board symbolized by the famous "we will not pay for your crisis," sung at all the university marches.

The CGIL leadership among government employees, had to keep the staggered strike during the first half of November, while the CISL and UIL drew back and preferred to negotiate with Berlusconi. In the commercial sector, one of the most precarious in Italy, the CGIL called the November 15 mobilization. On Tuesday, November 11, the main Italian cities had been paralyzed by a force general transportation strike, the third this year. On that same day, the workers of Alitalia, threatened with 2000 layoffs, stopped working at the Rome airport ... in a "wildcat" strike, that is, without legal authorization and against even the most combative unions that until now had opposed the plan to dismantle the company agreed to by the bosses, the government and the union confederation bureaucracies.

Meanwhile, at a local level, above all in the north of the country, calls to strike against factory closings, as in Turin on November 20 and in Brescia on November 21, were circulating, and the National Assembly of the FIOM metalworkers' delegates, decided to call the December 12 strike. This date ended up becoming a general strike called by the CGIL, as Roman students in struggle had requested at the end of October, a strike that rank and file unions now joined.

Towards the December 12 general strike, to be organized from below and coordinated, the better to prepare the confrontation with the "Cavalier" and the bosses

As some militant students and workers explained in the discussions this weekend in the University City, after several weeks of mobilizations, one can begin to draw some conclusions.

All these struggles show how the union bureaucracy, especially the CGIL, that "turned to the left" in the last few weeks, is in a state of tension, between continuing to negotiate and the bosses, and, at the same time, being part of the struggles and even leading them, so as not to lose control. That explains the apparently paradoxical character of the current policy of Epifani (leader of the CGIL). Alhtough in Alitalia the CGIL signed the agreement privatizing the company, scabbing on the workers' struggles, and although in the transportation sector the three main unions called for a strike, the better to resume negotiations with the government, Epifani found himself forced, at a global level, to change the call for a December 12 metalworkers' strike into a call for the general strike for the first time since 2004.

Acting as a social and political sounding board, the student vanguard in struggle, in a certain sense, has made a qualitative leap in the last few weeks, as shown by the main points of the appeal by the universities in Rome, adopted on October 31, after the massive strike by teachers and students. In that appeal, reference is made to the need to coordinate all the struggles underway, and that December 12 should bethe occasion for all the union leaderships to call a strike jointly, beyond their differences. The appeal also mentions the need to set up, for the first time in years, a national student coordinating committee, that ended up by meeting on November 14 and 15 in Rome. Although student pressure managed to impose the united front between the CGIL and rank and file unions and organize a national coordinating committee that would give the mobilization a political profile of greater scope, the road we have before us continues to be very complex, to guarantee that we workers and students really do not pay for the crisis.

As shown by the ambiguous orientation of the union bureaucracy, that buries the struggles on the one hand, and calls for mobilization on the other, the question of building the strike from below among workers and students, immigrants, workers in precarious situations, and the jobless, is more urgent than ever so that the general strike will be the most incisive possible. On the other hand, the national student coordinating committee showed that students organized from below achieved more weight than if the conflicts are fragmented. A struggle to set up a national worker and student coordinating committee of the vanguards in struggle would be the best way to build a tendency capable of opposing the vacillating line of the bureaucracy in an organized fashion and at the same time the best guarantee that the current wave of mobilization goes on, by creating the most favorable possible conditions for continuing to confront a shamelessly right-wing and reactionary government and bosses that have announced a million layoffs for the coming months.

Rome, November 19

GERMANY: Workers and students mobilize

2008-11-21T22:14:00.013-05:00

From www.ft-ci.org
GERMANY: Workers and students mobilize
By Antje Berlinger and Marcelo Torres
Thursday, November 20, 2008

The German working class is showing signs of wanting to follow in the steps of their class brothers in Italy and Greece. In Germany, a significant increase in struggles over demands that largely exceed the policy of wage moderation that the union bureaucracies have tried to impose, can be observed. Thus, last week, workers belonging to the metalworkers' union IG Metall partially shut down production in the heart of the German economy: automakers and electricity. Up to 550,000 workers of the plants of Opel, Mercedes Benz, Ford, Audi, BMW, Bosch, Nokia, Siemens and MAN forced the union leaderships to call warning strikes, work stoppages and demonstrations. They were demanding 8% wage raises, a demand that the IG Metall bureaucracy quickly betrayed, given its fear of calling a strike of indefinite duration, by arriving at an agreement, behind the backs of the workers, for a 4.2% raise, way below the 8% demanded originally.

While the President of the employers' association, Dieter Hundt, was welcoming the agreement as representing a "sign of common sense in a difficult economic situation," groups of rank and file workers were demanding and are still demanding "repudiation of that meager result and immediately beginning with a strike referendum," since "they cannot unload the crisis on our shoulders." According to estimates, in the coming year, 350,000 workers will lose their jobs, half of which would be in the automotive sector. Now, temporary workers have already been thrown into the street, and neither staff reductions of workers with permanent contracts nor wage cuts can be ruled out.

And the problem is that the "German marketplace" depends in large part on countries consuming its products, countries that are now stricken, as trade partners: the US, the United Kingdom, and the Spanish state. According to some estimates, exports, the preeminent German economic motor, will suffer a big sudden halt that will lead to only a 0.4% growth in exports (after this year's 4.2%) or even complete stagnation.

"Managers, out of the universities!"

Attacks by the bourgeoisie are also intensifying in the educational sector, where, besides the directives of the Bologna plan, a wave of privatizations is being carried out, from the kindergartens up to the universities, which intensifies the class character of the educational system. For instance, at present, only 16% of university students are sons or daughters of workers, and only 3.3%, children of immigrants. Last Wednesday, facing this situation, high school students, accompanied by university students and some professors, organized a 24-hour strike with demonstrations in approximately 40 German cities. More than 100,000 students filled the streets, demanding an end to inadequate funding of education, and a quality, unrestricted, and popular education, gratis. Students in Hannover surpassed the limits of bourgeois legality by blockading the regional parliament, and in Berlin they seized the Humboldt University by assault, waving red banners from its balconies. They forcefully entered a large room where businessmen were negotiating patent rights for universities, and they forced the businessmen to hold their signs while they helped themselves to the culinary delicacies from the banquet prepared for the occasion, to the cry of "a -anti -anticapitalist" and "managers, out of the universities."

These most recent acts are one more proof that young people in Germany are starting to wake up from their lethargy, beginning to see the need to find responses to the dominant ideologies and demand active participation in [determining] the conditions they live under. Precisely in this social climate where people are beginning to feel that in the context of the ideological failure of neoliberalism and the lack of responses from the bourgeoisie to face up to the economic crisis and from the traditional parties, the youth univerisites of the party Die Linke are organizing circles for reading and discussing Capital by Karl Marx. After years of the exile of Marxism from the universities, 2,000 young people meet every week in more than 40 German universities to read and debate that work, next to leftist intellectuals. After years of de-politicization and silence, of the alleged end of history, groups of young people are putting criticism of capitalism on the agenda.

General Strike in ITALY

2008-11-03T22:30:00.018-05:00

From http://www.ft-ci.org/

A big call by rank and file unions
General Strike in ITALY
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
By comrades of the Communist Collective of Via Efeso

Berlusconi’s government is getting ready to unload the crisis, at its beginning, brutally onto the workers and the popular classes. Like Prodi, his center-left predecessor, he is seeking to isolate wage earners more and more, to pad the effects of a hidden crisis that had become obvious some time ago. In addition to racist measures against immigrants, an educational reform that continues the privatizing and pro-boss measures imposed under Prodi and a brutal campaign against state workers, with cutbacks and increasingly precarious employment, Confindustria, the big Italian employers’ association, is trying to impose a reform of the national work agreements. However, autumn in Italy has begun to get hot. Groups in the working class and among young people, that now count 15 million of their fellow Italians below the poverty line, are beginning to act. In September, the heroic resistance of the Alitalia workers showed that something could be changing in the workers’ state of mind. In turn, the “second generation Italians” from the suburbs (children and grandchildren of immigrants, born in Italy) showed up massively, with clashes and antiracist demonstrations. Protests among teachers, secondary-school and university students are growing, with marches by parents and teachers, and occupations of schools and universities in big Italian cities. The latest news is that Berlusconi is threatening to use cops to put an end to student protests and the seizures of universities and schools. This new social climate forced groups of the union bureaucracy to relocate. Another symptom of the intensity of the current wave of struggles: Veltroni’s Democratic Party, having wavered about keeping its October 25 national demonstration, in the name of “a sense of national responsibility” because of the economic crisis, nevertheless is now calling for a mobilization, and, while we were closing this note, it requested the withdrawal of the Gelmini reform, in order not to be cut off from the mobilizations. On the other hand, this new climate filled the demonstrations, that had been planned some time ago, with a different content, like the October 11 demonstration, called by Rifondazione Comunista (PRC) and the Italian Communists, that served as a means of expression for tens of thousands of young people and workers fed up with the government’s policy, and the massive October 17 general strike, called by rank and file unions, that we report on below.

The national demonstration that went across Rome showed that the general strike called by rank and file unions (RdB-CUB, Cobas and SdL [1]) had a big success. Support for the strike was higher than anticipated. In spite of the rain that fell all morning on the capital, an impressive demonstration (500,000 people according to the organizers, 350,000 according to La Repubblica) marched for more than four hours between Repubblica and the Piazza San Giovanni.

Other anti-government mobilizations were organized in the length and breadth of the country. In Milan, a demonstration called by the CUB and the SlaiCobas [2] joined with two other demonstrations, one, by the teachers, and the other, by the students, and then they marched towards the Rectorate Building. After having thrown eggs and firecrackers, the students knocked down the barriers and, in front of the main entrance, they left a banner on which was written, "We are blocking the decree [of the reform of the educational system], occupation! The school is opposed to Gelmini [the Minister of Education]! The revolt is in the street and has hardly begun!" Strikes and demonstrations also paralyzed traffic in Naples and Palermo, while students in Florence, Pisa and Siena mobilized, occupying the universities.

... On October 17, a clear message was sent to Berlusconi. The strike set forth that his policy of wage cuts, attacking civil servants, and attacks on education, displeases many people, not least, the most dynamic groups of workers and students. The strike made it clear that the government will not be able to get its policy approved automatically, at least, not without having to "pay some price." What is more, the more Berlusconi has to pay for the attacks he is unleashing, if the government is weakened, the better the conditions will be for the working class of the peninsula to struggle and reorganize its ranks.

Students, teachers, state employees, transportation workers, workers with uncertain employment: all united

Who were the ones who came out to the street and for what reasons? The most visible sector was the one the Italian press calls "the people of the schools," teachers, hit three times: by the widespread offensive against the working class (reform of the national labor agreements, reductions in wages and in retirements), by cuts in public services, and by the attack on education (the Gelmini reform anticipated a reduction in the number of workers, privatization, in the final instance, of the universities, through their transformation into "foundations," the implementation of a more authoritarian and even repressive educational model, etc.).

They were also public sector workers.... Berlusconi is trying to deepen an orientation carried out during the last few years, by both center-left governments and those of the center-right, that consists of continuing with the cuts in public adminstration, both from the point of view of wages and jobs.... In the different marches, the considerable number of transportation workers was observed. Traffic in several cities was disrupted with the strike, as attested, for example, by the 33% rate of participation in the strike in Rome.

There were likewise workers with uncertain employment, especially from the public sector....

In short, the mobilization went beyond all those sectors influenced by rank and file trade unionism. There lies perhaps the greatest innovation and potential of the mobilization and of the current phase. Among the demonstrators, there were many unorganized workers or others who have the membership card, especially of the main union organization in Italy, the CGIL.

What perspectives after the October 17 strike?

The fact is that the aims defended by the organizers of the October 17 strike (no to the cuts in public services, no to precarious work, for wage raises and the sliding scale, against bank and stock market speculation, for a social wage) have a reformist-redistributionist matrix (leftist Keynesianism). It is also a fact that those who participate in the strike and the real movement impose a content on it. From this point of view, considering the reduction of the spaces for redistribution, the workers that struck and went out to the street could become more "opposed to the system" and "incompatible" with respect to the demands proposed by the leaders of the rank and file unions.

Before the October 17 strike, the bureaucratic leaderships of the unions in the Confederation had announced (without giving any date or specifying the form of the actions of force) a series of mobilizations in the educational sector and the civil service. At the same time, however, they declared themselves prepared to continue a dialogue with the government, as shown by the public statements of Bonnani, leader of the CSIL, and of Angeletti, main leader of the UIL.

The call for measures of force by the bureaucracy of the Confederation had as its aim, weakening the strike by the rank and file unions. It is also a symptom of a change in the state of mind in some mobilized groups. Taking into account, for example, the assemblies of state workers in which we participated: all the workers attacked by the government, few of them unionized, who have not yet broken with the bourgeois political leaderships of the center-left, nor with the bureaucratic leaderships of the unions, are today demanding a real, effective and united struggle, although timidly and without having the ability to impose it.

Considering the stage we are going through, the October 17 strike cannot remain as a mere work stoppage, whose main objective consists in organizationally strengthening the space that the rank and file unions have at their disposal. If the leaders of the rank and file unions pose the problem of building a real and effective counteroffensive against the government, if they know how to take up again the banner of the different struggles that are crossing the peninsula now, then the October 17 strike could become the first stage of a movement that would serve to build a broader, more permanent and combative front of struggle.

With the October 17 strike, the workers and students that joined the measure of force more massively than anticipated, marked a milestone. Will the union and political forces that consider themselves militant and class-conscious respond to their demands? In the national post-strike communiqué, the Cobas leadership sets forth that "the exciting demonstration in Rome sends a united message of increased awareness to continue stronger than ever in defending social rights and workers' rights for everyone: forward!" Continuing in this direction would mean carrying out a consistent and united struggle (based on workers' assemblies, with openness to current struggles, up to and including when they are led by the bureaucracy of the Confederation, etc.) to broaden the current front of struggle and transform it into a more general movement against the government and the bosses.

[Notes]

[1] According to the abbreviations in Italian, Representatives of the Base-United Confederation of the Base (RdB-CUB), Confederation of the Committees of the Base (Cobas), Inter-category Union of Workers (SdL), the three main rank and file union organizations in Italy. Although small, they are characterized by more radical positions than those of the historical union confederations, CGIL, CISL, and UIL.

[2] The Intercategory Union of Self-organized Workers-Committees of the Base (SlaiCobas, according to its Italian abbreviations), of lesser size, compared to the other rank and file unions, generally defends more militant and class-conscious positions.

General Strike in GREECE

2008-11-02T22:36:00.002-05:00

From http://www.ft-ci.org/

Europe: General strike in Greece

By Celeste Murillo

Thursday, October 23, 2008

In Greece, on Tuesday, October 21, a 24-hour general strike in which millions of workers from the public and private sector participated, took place against the bailout announced for the banks, costing millions, against privatizing the state-owned Olympic Airlines, and to demand wage raises.

Most of the economic and transportation activities of the country were paralyzed because of the action by the workers, who responded unanimously to the call from the General Federation of Workers and the Civil Servants Union, that, between them, represent 2,500,000 workers, half of the country’s workforce.

The strike affected both public transportation in the cities and air traffic, which caused the cancellation of 200 domestic and international flights in a single day. There was no activity in the ports, and the state railway company suspended almost all services; the electric and suburban trains and the trolleybuses did not run either. Public offices, post offices, schools, universities and hospitals were closed; hospitals were on duty for emergency cases only. According to the unions, compliance with the strike was massive: 90% of workers participated in the action.

In Athens, 15,000 people marched to the government palace to oppose conservative Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis’ privatization plans. The police blocked the way of the demonstrators, and clashes occurred. Thousands of young people and workers participated in the march with signs that showed the Greek people were fed up with watching the government bail out the banks while a large part of the population is suffering the consequences of the economic crisis.

The strike demanded a wage raise at the same time that it asked the government to increase social spending to help working-class families that are already suffering the results of the economic crisis. Another one of the slogans was rejection of privatizing the state-owned Olympic Airlines and rejection of the already unpopular plans to reform the retirement system. The protests continued on Wednesday, October 22, and the unions and other organizations announced that they are going to intensify the actions if the government fails to back down.

This week, the Greek parliament was supposed to discuss the 2009 budget and look for ways to reduce the deficit, that already brought Greece to the attention of EU, because it exceeded the deficit allowed the countries of the Eurozone. For this, the government is planning a series of privatizations, including that of the state-owned airline, cutting the budget for social programs and reforming retirements and pensions.

Faced with protests and the unpopularity of the government, Costas Karamanlis has promised wage compensations and measures to alleviate the rise in prices. So far, the main expenditure announced by the government was the promise of the Finance Minister, George Alogoskoufis, to pay out 28 billion euros to support the banks of Greece. Meanwhile, one out of every five Greeks is already living beneath the poverty line, according to official data. The first consequences of the crisis and its impact on the daily life of millions of workers could impoverish millions more.

The recent general strike and the struggles that have taken place in the country during the last two years (including the March 2006 general strike and the big student mobilizations in March 2007) show that the workers and the Greek people are not prepared to pay for the crisis of the capitalists.

MEXICO: Victory to Morelos teachers struggle!

2008-10-15T22:00:00.032-04:00

Saturday, October 11, 2008
Solidarity Bulletin from the LTS-CC
Long live the Morelos teachers' struggle!

In recent days, the teachers, together with groups of workers, campesinos, the indigenous population and the people, were repressed on the highways and in the communities of Morelos state, by the cowardly action of the repressive forces, with helicopters, armored vehicles, clubs, and tear gas. Faced with this, the teachers and inhabitants of towns and communities bravely faced the police-military operation and showed that they are ready to fight to the end against the anti-education plans and against the Alianza por la Calidad de la Educación [ACE].

Dozens of arrested people and several people who disappeared, as well as more police and military raids against communities, is the result of the savage represison that seeks to protect the plans of the state and federal governments. In spite of this, the spirited sit-in by the teachers continues in the main square of Cuernavaca, and together with the indigenous people, campesinos, students and workers, they declare they will not retreat a single step.

It is time to show and increase solidarity and support for the teachers and the people of Morelos.

The sections of the CNTE throughout the country must now call a national solidarity strike. The teachers in the whole country must wage a united struggle, repudiating the ACE and for the removal of Elba Esther from office. Halt the repression! Down with the Governor!

We must not abandon our comrades from Morelos. The UNT and the SME must also call for immediate mobilization actions and a national strike in support of this heroic struggle. It is time for these unions, that present themselves as opponents of the government, to join this great movement; if we postpone the task of unifying the struggle, it could be too late. We must now strengthen the only struggle that is intimidating the government. If Section 19's struggle is victorious, and they defeat the ACE in the state, it will more difficult for the government in its attempt to twist the arm of the other sections of the CNTE. In addition, that will strengthen the struggle against privatization of the energy industry, as well as defense of the contracts, and against the impoverishment of the working class, that will be intensified by the economic crisis. We will have a better chance of defeating the labor reform and reforms of the collective work contracts and of social security.

The broadest solidarity of all the workers', social, human rights and political organizations is urgently needed, first of all, to demand the immediate and unconditional release of everyone who was arrested and the return, safe and sound, of everyone who disappeared.

Down with the ACE! Dismissal of the union boss Gordillo!

Down with the state of siege in Xoxocotla!

NATIONAL STRIKE of solidarity by the CNTE, the UNT and the SME!

FOR THE VICTORY OF THE MORELOS TEACHERS' STRUGGLE!

[MEXICO] DECLARATION: RELEASE THE STUDENTS ARRESTED DURING THE OCTOBER 2 MARCH

2008-10-05T14:02:00.027-04:00

Once again, the October 2 March was violently repressed, once again provocations were staged by infiltrating thugs, judicial police and cops dressed as civilians, in exactly the same way as during the years when the PRI governed. Once again, the real "coordination" that the government of the Federal District and the federal government have achieved is against youth and students. These governments are the ones who murdered the young people in the News Divine discotheque and the very ones who repressed the rejected students, the street vendors, the teachers, the campesinos, the workers, and the groups in struggle. Once again, a media campaign to legitimize repression against students, to criminalize them, and to place the blame on them, when an obviously planned repressive operation took place.

Participants in the march have charged that the arrested students were detained by persons dressed in civilian clothes who put them in unmarked cars. Some students were arrested when they were part of a barrier to prevent cops from entering the Zócalo. This has also been documented by daily papers like "El Universal" on its website through videos and photos, where it is mentioned that the confrontations began once the arbitrary arrests had commenced. And thus, while provocateurs that were seen later inside Agency 50 of the Ministerio Público, with absolute impunity, at that time, they were inciting the confrontation with the police; riot police and alleged cops entered the contingents of the march and carried out the arrests with beatings, violating every guarantee of democracy. Now there are students, many of them minors who have injuries, bruises on their eyelids, and various lesions on their ribcages, arms and legs. Six students have already been moved to the Norte prison and a female comrade, to the Santa Martha Acatitla prison.

We declare ourselves in favor of the immediate and unconditional release of the students arrested during the October 2 march; we hold the government of the Federal District, the police of the Federal District, and the corps of riot police, completely responsible for this repression, and we demand an investigation to determine those responsible for this provocation, as well as punishment for the material and intellectual authors of this repression. For this purpose, it is necessary to form an independent commission of investigation, headed by human rights organizations.

We call on the students, workers and academics of the UNAM, the IPN [Instituto Politécnico Nacional] and the UAM, to repudiate this repression emphatically and to demand that the campaign against them be stopped. We also call on democratic lawyers and human rights organizations to declare their support for the defense, in the face of dozens of irregularities in the penal process. We call on social and political organizations, the unions and workers', campesinos' and indigenous organizations, to condemn this repression and to discuss a real plan of struggle against repression and for the release of political prisoners.

Finally, we call for carrying out informational assemblies and organizing action plans in the schools, to free our comrades and continue advancing in students' coordination and coordination with other groups.

Halt the repression!
Immediate release of the arrested students!
Thugs out of the schools!
Dissolve the repressive forces!
For student coordination and organization!

From the Liga de Trabajadores por el Socialismo-ContraCorriente and the university group En Clave Revolucionaria, we call for broadly disseminating this deunciation and for continuing to fight for a big National Coordinating Committee against Repression.

Cde Christian Castillo on the US/world financial crash

2008-09-30T09:34:00.010-04:00

Tuesday, September 30, 2008 [Buenos Aires]
Press Release
Christian Castillo: "The internacional financial system is in free fall"

(PTS, 9/29/08) Christian Castillo, national leader of the Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas (PTS) indicated today that “the rejection by the US House of Representatives of the plan for bailing out the speculators, that produced an historic fall in the markets of the whole world, is a new sign that we face a crisis of a magnitude comparable only to that of 1930. Up to now, the government bailouts costing millions have been completely useless. The international financial system continues in free fall and refutes not only those who believe in the market's self-regulation, but also all those who assert that this crisis can be contained with a little more regulation and state intervention."

Castillo also stated that "the rejection was caused by a combination of factors, that go from the rejection by a large part of the population that pressured the legislators, to the mistrust of the financial market itself, given certain limits that were put on the original bailout plan. The rejection shows that a big political crisis has begun, that jeopardizes both Bush and McCain and Obama, who went out to say the the bill had to be approved in the next few days."

The PTS leader also explained that "in this context of an acute crisis of world capitalism, the attitude of the Argentinean government, of paying the debt to the Club of Paris and opening a new exchange for bondholders, is a combination of appeasement and provincialism, since the argument that these measures are necessary to assure financing is odd, when the whole financial system is collapsing. The development of the crisis makes the demand for nationalization under control of the banking workers and the monopoly of foreign trade more timely than ever. The government, in turn, prefers to pay an illicit and illegitimate debt to bankrupt speculators, instead of allocating these funds for healthcare, education, housing and guaranteeing an 82% sliding scale retirement."

PTS - Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas

Wall Street struggles to survive: The US on the verge of the crash

2008-09-20T18:37:00.065-04:00

[From http://www.ft-ci.org/]

Wall Street struggles to survive: The US on the verge of the crash
By Juan Chingo Thursday, September 18, 2007

Maybe the rescue will be successful, it cannot be ruled out. The US authorities and the central banks of the whole world are doing the impossible, although they are dragged down by events. But never since the crisis of 1929 has the US economy been so close to the crash. As the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve [the Fed], Alan Greenspan said, these are phenomena that happen “once-in-a-half-century, probably once-in-a-century.”

The crisis has already destroyed the neo-liberal dogma that the market fixes everything. But also, against what some neo-Keynesian economists maintain, this crisis is not a result of “neo-liberalism”; in reality, the collapsing financial hypertrophy is a byproduct of the only possible capitalist solution to the crisis of over-accumulation of capital, which has been taking place since the end of the postwar boom.

The falls of the US financial heavyweights, like Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest US investment bank, which survived the Civil War, the two World Wars and the Great Depression, Merrill Lynch, which has been in existence for 94 years, and the colossal rescue of the gigantic insurance company AIG, can only lead to a greater discrediting of the US ruling class’ “free market” ideology, as well as its political and economic system, presented until recently as the capitalist panacea for the whole world.

The Fed, behind the events

The authorities of the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury, the only remaining “pilots” amidst the devastating financial hurricane, are being pulled along by the phenomenal shock wave.

Last week, forced by the role of the giants Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac in the real estate market, and especially because their fall would have sunk foreign investors like China, Russia or Japan, that are financing the enormous US deficit, they carried out the so-called “mother of all rescues.” This weekend, wishing to restore the appearance of market rules, while, on their knees, they were begging the “semi-healthy” small banks that exist in the US to save the “bad banks,” whether by buying them or continuing to do business with them, they let Lehman Brothers fall, which in turn hastened the sale of Merrill Lynch to the Bank of America, in an act of desperation, before Merrill Lynch could itself fail. The unprecedented development, unthinkable until recently, of the possibility of a US government default, that, although to a slight extent, began to be evaluated by the credit markets, was also hovering over the head of Henry Paulson, US Treasury Secretary, to adopt this course. But the Federal Reserve, two days after “drawing the line” on massive state rescues, at the final hour on Tuesday, with Treasury backing, went out to offer an $85 billion loan to avoid the bankruptcy of the main insurance company on earth, AIG, by, in fact, nationalizing the insurance market, although, contrary to expectations, without calming the markets. In turn, by other ways, they go on opening the faucet of liquidity even further, with increasingly desperate measures, like lowering the creditworthiness of the below par assets accepted at the liquidity windows of the Federal Reserve, up to including variable-rate assets, and even permitting companies to use deposits by their customers to finance their investment banking. That is, using deposits by those with savings accounts to avoid bankruptcy from their speculative activities. Incredible!

However, in spite of these "containment measures," the crisis is not stopping, and it promises to drag down new banks. The problem is that the Lehman bankruptcy could start a run on what is left of investment banking, like Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley or other investment banks or brokers that are part of the big commercial banks like, for instance, JP Morgan and Citigroup. The problems are repeated in other firms like Washington Mutual (WaMu), whose shares plummeted, as investors lost confidence in the ability of the main US savings bank to raise new capital or find a buyer who will let it continue business. In turn, another one of the financial firms that the market is focussing its concerns on is Wachovia, one of the largest commercial banks, that has suffered $16 billion in losses, as a result of the credit crisis caused by "garbage" mortgages. This is not counting the thousands of local or regional banks that could fail. As is obvious, there is no part of the US financial system that could be rescued in the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, that has at the same time, set off the biggest process of concentration and centralization of banking capital since the 1930's. To put it clearly, we are facing the survival of the strongest, whether through the bankruptcy of firms with a smaller capital base, or the takeover and creation of mega-firms like the Bank of America, that has already absorbed the mortgage company Countrywide Financial and has now taken the investment bank Merrill Lynch, that has a tentacle in all the sectors of the US financial system. Although it still remains to be seen if this was a good deal or if, on the contrary, the "garbage" title deeds ("toxic," in the financial language of these days) that they got from the firms with problems they purchased could torment their new owners, by eroding their capital ratios (or base), something that, if it happened, would open an even more ominous prospect for the entire financial system since, the more banking mega-giants that are formed as a result of the crisis, the greater could be their fall.

In turn, the setback of the main mortgage bank of the United Kingdom, HBOS, in talks with its British rival Lloyds TSB, shows that the financial crisis is not limited to the US. The fears that HBOS will not be able to refinance 100 billion pounds in the coming months, nor find funds to do it in the present market conditions, have put this company in a coma.

The culprit is not "deficient" regulation, but the insatiable thirst for profits

The current setback of investment banking and its opaque character, have provoked the rise of a series of analysts that, confronted with the hypertrophy and the greater sophistication of the financial system, blame the regulatory agencies for behaving with liberal logic and not measuring up to the need to impose strong control on these banking practices. This explanation ignores the real causes and is, in turn, a self-interested vision from apologists for the system, currently in retreat, that naturalizes capitalism and considers that its excesses are the only problem. However, the explanation is different.

The development of investment banking and the securitization and titlization that accompanied it, like a shadow follows a body, in other words, the transformation of all credit into a negotiable security, that increased exponentially for the last thirty years, from the beginning of the neo-liberal offensive, were actions by capital (more precisely, capital as ownership) of subjecting and limiting the autonomy of the productive part of capital (more precisely to functioning capital) to increase the profits from invested capital. The universal titlization that was generated, to the detriment of the intermediary role of the old banking, towards a more direct financing, followed the logic of not being tied to management of real assets, in order constantly to seek the best yield. Increasing exposure to risk, even with a small capital base, or the fact that a large part of the expansion of financial products and services in the last five years originated in transactions between financial firms (incredible development of fictitious capital) should not blind us to the fact that the main reason for such changes in the financial system was to increase pressure on the management of enterprises, by approving of or penalizing their performance through buying and selling stock. The subprime mortgage crisis (or, better expressed, the sub-primary character of the US financial system) has punished this form of growth that the US ruling class had as a way of making up for the fall in profitability that devastated it in 1970, when the beneficial effects of the postwar-era boom were exhausted. This form of growth has revealed the fragile and unstable character of the current financial system, based on diversification and arbitrage of investors between different places as a way of getting superprofits, which, in turn, puts at risk the viability of the entire finanical system, as the current financial crisis, the biggest since the crash of 1929, shows.

Deregulation of the operations of the big corporations, approved by both Republican and Democratic administrations, removed all the legal limits to obtaining profits and promoted the accumulation of increasingly obscene levels of wealth in the hands of a financial oligarchy, to which both parties answer. Big sectors of the US industrial base were destroyed as part of this process, by relocating production in areas with cheap labor, that would allow getting superprofits, and provoking enormous social inequality, to the benefit of the more well-to-do groups in society, one of the structural bases of the historic decline of US capitalism.

And has it hit rock bottom?

It is still very premature to know whether a crash will be avoided. Wall Street has not seen the bankruptcy of an investment bank since the fall of Drexel Burnham Lambert in 1990, and today the interconnections of the sector through the derivatives market have grown beyond all limits. The debt of US financial groups to their counterparts has doubled since the beginning of the 1990's, reaching 112% of the US gross domestic product (GDP). Lehman's bankruptcy means the firm's inability to face up to its current payments, a standstill in its ordinary activity, and its beginning a process of liquidating assets, with unpredictable consequences. We are talking about $600 billion up to June, with considerable exposure to mortgage titlizations of doubtful intrinsic value, the market for which has contracted to the point of being almost nonexistent. The adjustment to market prices ("mark to market"), that could be derived from the process of forced disinvestment from the US investment bank, could be devastating for the rest of its counterparts, unless the authorities continue opening an accounting window to avoid entering a spiral of losses that threaten to sweep away the entire financial system. In the case of AIG, the US insurance company that had broad exposure to the segment of the Credit Default Swaps (CDS), including those of Lehman, the authorities were unwilling to take another risk. The CDS are a type of derivative where it is agreed to pay a certain amount of cash (with a certain frequency) to the seller, in exchange for having protection against default on a bond or loan from an enterprise or country. The sums that AIG owed, in the face of the insolvency of the current credit system, turned AIG into a sure bet for bankruptcy. Overall, the commitments in derivatives are far in excess of the assets of the big banks. Morgan Stanley has an exposure ten times greater than Lehman to the derivatives market, although Lehman's risk, compared to its weakened capital base, seems to have been worse. In turn, 97% of the derivatives in the hands of the commercial banks are held by the five biggest: JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, Wachovia and HSBC. Will these be the next victims? Who knows, but the waters are still too unsettled to let down one's guard.

Where is the US and world economy going?

As we say in the beginning, never since the crisis of 1929 has the US economy been so close to the crash, that is, a situation with innumerable bank failures (with a loss of deposits of millions of savers), firms going bankrupt, massive unemployment (that in the 1930's reached 28% in the US), etc. But, although there is not yet a crash to begin this generalized process, it is already possible to imagine an extremely severe recession in the main imperialist countries, with high unemployment. It is possible that we are entering a combination of the feared credit crunch (a drying up of credit) or lack of credit, and a synchronized emergency landing of the world economy. The dizzying collapse of Lehman Brothers and the absorption of Merrill Lynch have removed an enormous quantity of liquidity from the economy, to the extent that securities built up during decades of speculation are evaporating. As Paul Krugman explains in his column in The New York Times with the suggestive title, "Financial Russian Roulette,"... the system has been experiencing postmodern bank runs. These don't look like the old-fashioned version: With few exceptions, we're not talking about mobs of distraught depositors pounding on closed bank doors. Instead, we're talking about frantic phone calls and mouse clicks, as financial players pull credit lines and try to unwind counterparty risk. But the economic effects - a freezing up of credit, a downward spiral in asset values - are the same as those of the great bank runs of the 1930s.... That creates the real possibility that 2008 could be 1931 revisited." (The New York Times, September 15, 2008).

US industrial production contracted by 1% in August (12% in the auto industry), a matter that happened totally unnoticed amidst enormous financial stagnation. But the strong interrelation between finances and the economy will soon make itself felt and could lead to the worst US recession in decades. First, the debt relief crisis pointed out above will reduce the availability of credit in the economy. Second, the fall in the price of housing and of stocks will reduce the so-called "wealth effect" and the resulting consumption. Third, the problems in the credit and stock markets will have a worldwide effect, because of which it will be less and less likely that world economic activity will go on supporting the US via increasing US exports, which, together with the temporary effects of the tax cut, has until now avoided a big fall in the US GDP.

On the other hand, the world economy is deaccelerating. The euro zone and Japan are already in recession. England is rapidly headed there. And the so-called "emerging economies" are beginning to show signs of weakness, if not panic. On Monday (September 15), worried by the effects that the bleak prospect that is closing over the world economy could have on its own economy, as well as the sharp decline in the price of housing in the summer, China reduced interest rates. In Russia, on Wednesday, the regulatory authorities decided to suspend operations in the two main stock markets of the country, to hold back the stock market collapse that was reaching its third consecutive day (on Tuesday, September 16, the two main indices, the RTS and the Micex, tumbled by 11.5% and 17.45%, respectively). Among the stocks hit were those of two of the largest banks in Russia, the Sberbank and the VTB, that today (September 17) depreciated around 20%. This collapse of the Russian markets is tied, on the one hand, to that of Wall Street, that has affected all the emergent markets, the strong geopolitical tension with the US that jumped with the war between Russia and Georgia, and finally, but not less important, to the rapid fall in the price of oil, that has caused worries in an economy supported mainly by its exports of raw materials. Likewise, we must wait to see how the crisis affects the international bonds market of the Russian enterprises, the true source of their financing.

Like in 1930?

So, will a crisis like that of 1930 be repeated? In his September 16 blog, Julio Sevares, from the Argentinean daily Clarín, basing himself on some definite elements, denies it: "In the 1930's the world economy ... was fragmented, there was control of exchange and protectionism.... There was no common international currency, because the pound was weak and most of the time, non-convertible, and the dollar was not widespread, and the USA, the big international creditor, was unwilling to function as a moneylender of last resort; after the crisis, the Federal Reserve responded with monetary restriction, different from what is happening now. It is frequently mentioned that the Roosevelt administration responded with the expansive policy of the New Deal, but it is forgotten that in 1931, the US increased tariffs, worsening the world depression (the Smoot-Hawley Act), and that in 1933, it carried out a brutal devaluation of 30%. And in 1932, Great Britain responded to the USA's protectionism with the Treaty of Ottawa, with preferential tariffs for the Commonwealth. France was engaged in accumulating gold, contributing to illiquidity [an insufficiency of cash], and Germany was in debt and in crisis after the departure of capital, that went to speculate in New York during the upturn. The responses of protectionism and devaluation impeded the recovery, which only arrived with rearmament. The level of commercial and family indebtedness was infinitely less than at present; for that reason, the mechanism of transmission of crisis now is more financial than commercial. Unlike what happened in the thirties, there are state systems with "anti-cyclical" instruments and international institutions of consultation and regulation." But while it is true that the situation is not the same as that of 1930, the "anti-cyclical" mechanisms can affect the tempos and the forms of the crisis, but a scenario of a widespread crash cannot be ruled out. To rule that out, right when capitalism is openly showing its explosive contradictions, would mean having confidence in capitalism and denying that it can open catastrophic situations, not only in the semi-colonial countries, like the Argentinean crash and default of 2001, but even in the main imperialist countries.

Furthermore, if we bear in mind the increasing geopolitical tensions at an international level, the accelerated hegemonic decline of the US and the growing weakness of the dollar, that, strangely, had been rising in its exchange rate since the end of June when US stocks were collapsing, owing to the strong manipulation of US currency by the US Treasury, with the active support of the Chinese central bank and, very probably, of Japan and Europe, an increasingly untenable operation that could accelerate the collapse of the monetary system based on the dollar, all these elements make one expect that the world economy has entered a period of profound commercial wars and inter-imperialist tensions, full of threats.

Millions could lose their jobs: Get ready for the catastrophe

The recession is just in its first stages. Strong contractions of the GDP are to be expected in the coming quarters. According to the last report from the International Labor Organization (ILO), the financial disaster could lead to an increase of five million in the number of unemployed people in the world in 2008.

For the US working class, the current financial collapse means a rapid growth of unemployment, of poverty, of the number of homeless people, and of suffering in society. The government, Wall Street and the presidential candidates of both parties are getting ready to unload the consequences of their own greed and incompentence onto the shoulders of the working class. The crisis is already devastating certain groups of wage earners, especially those who work on Wall Street or in the City in London, who got part of the crumbs from the incredible credit and speculative bubble. In the US, the epicenter of the current crisis, in the face of the catastrophe that capitalism represents for the workers, it is now necessary to raise a program to make the capitalists pay for the crisis, a program that would begin with the suspension of all foreclosures, distribution of the hours of work among all available workers, putting into operation a public works plan to restructure basic industries and repair the obsolete infrastructure of the country, creating millions of jobs financed by taxes on the big fortunes, and basically carrying out a true nationalization of the banking and financial system, but not in the service of the rich, Wall Street, and in the hands of the financial oligarchy; rather, under bank workers' control and serving all workers. This program involves breaking with the Democratic and Republican parties and the adoption of an independent course by the working class.

This program, that is beginning to be ever more necessary for the US, to the extent that the crisis develops in the coming months and years, will be raised for action, for ever broader groups of the working class and the exploited of many countries in the world, since the crisis seems to be spreading like a poisonous cloud throughout the globe.

But basically the current crisis sets forth the need for the workers of the whole world to confront the collaborationist union bureaucracies of each country, that will be accomplices in the plans to unload the crisis onto their backs, and get organized politically not just on a national level, but by rebuilding proletarian internationalism and forging a new revolutionary workers' international. Although today these ideas are very remote from the present consciousness of the workers as a result of years of social fragmentation, of the damages that endure in consciousness and organization because of the neoliberal offensive and the Stalinist experience, the severity and sufferings from the crisis could make many workers, especially their vanguard, again grasp in their hands the tools and the program of revolutionary Marxism, the only one that can lead them to defeat that caste of parasites and exploiters: the bourgeoisie and its governments, that threaten the whole planet with further and bigger catastrophes.

=====

Who will pay for the capitalist crisis?

"The First World that used to paint us as the Mecca is falling like a bubble," maintained the President [of Argentina, Cristina Kirchner] a few seconds after espousing the economic "model" of the Kirchners and predicting that Argentina is "steady in the middle of a heavy sea." Fantasizing about an economically solid Argentina avoiding the tumultuous crisis that world capitalism is experiencing, is really living in a bubble. The international conditions that favored Argentina's growth cycle are disappearing. The current international capitalist crisis is the biggest since 1929; in spite of the hundreds of billions of dollars spent by the governments of the imperialist countries to contain the disaster, big banks continue to declare bankruptcy. The firms that are quoted on Wall Street are adding losses of their value of more than $4 billion dollars, the equivalent of 100 times the reserves of the Central Bank of Argentina. The US, Europe, Japan and the main economies are declining. The only horizon that capitalism has to offer is the combination of recession and inflation: more unemployment, more poverty and hunger for millions throughout the world. And this is what, in recent decades, they have been commissioned to present as the only viable system. The new international situation poses confronting the plans with which they will try to unload their losses on the backs of the workers, by overcoming the collaborationist union leaderships and preparing the mobilization of a powerful social and political force capable of imposing a program to make the capitalists pay for the crisis. Faced with the international nature of "the catastrophe that threatens us," it is urgent to rebuild the workers' internationalism and a new revolutionary international that intends to put an end to this system of exploitation and oppression.

Russia strengthens its power in its “backyard”

2008-08-20T22:42:00.009-04:00

La Verdad Obrera 290 / International

Thursday, August 14, 2008

The Caucasus, after five days of a reactionary clash
Russia strengthens its power in its “backyard”

By Juan Chingo

The forceful advance of the Bonapartist Russian regime in its operations in Georgia in the last four days is a sign of Russia’s reemergence, after its decomposition in the decade of the 1990’s, and, fundamentally, of the acceleration of the US hegemonic decline after its disaster in Iraq.

The Russian achievements

Russia has achieved a tremendous victory. The terms of the ceasefire, broadly favorable to Russian demands, negotiated by French President Sarkozy, current temporary President of the European Union, prove that (although new skirmishes cannot be ruled out).

From the military point of view, Russia has shown its ability to drive Georgia out of South Ossetia and Abkhazia completely, in addition to having smashed the Georgian military machine.

On the political plane, it has enormously destabilized the Georgian government of Mikheil Saakashvili, who, in spite of the march of support in Tbilisi on August 12, attended by hundreds of thousands of people, was fatally wounded, after having begun a war and then failing to carry it through.

Last and most importantly, Russia has managed to show the powerlessness of the West and, at the same time, to weaken every serious prospect that Georgia will join NATO or the European Union. The US failure to support its main puppet regime in the region in its hour of need, because of excessive US commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, is a big blow to US influence in the Caucasus and in the other former Soviet republics, that allows Russia to move forward to rebuild its zone of influence in its borderlands.

“Galteriada”?

For some analysts, the attack launched by Saakashvili’s pro-imperialist government against the capital of South Ossetia, recalls the last years of the Argentinean military dictatorship, when in 1982, then de facto President Leopoldo Fortunato Galtieri launched the invasion of the Malvinas Islands. At that moment, the Argentinean general was confident that, to say the least, the US would maintain neutrality in case of a conflict between Buenos Aires and London, because of the importance the dictatorship had for Washington since it was operating in a semi-secret manner against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. In the same way, Saakashvili’s overestimation of Georgia’s role as an outpost against Russia was the key to his miscalculation.

Nevertheless, however interesting it may seem, this comparison has its limits. It is difficult to believe that Georgia decided to challenge Russia without having any kind of gesture by the Pentagon, as, for instance, former Soviet Chairman Mikhail Gorbachov suggests. The current Georgian regime was prepared by Washington, promoting the Rose Revolution in 2003. In addition, the Pentagon has had a strong presence in Georgia, training their army and anti-terrorist forces since 1999; the Georgian government receives big sums of money in armaments with the aim of reinforcing the geopolitical encirclement of Russia, as well as looking after the only pipeline that carries oil from the Black Sea to Europe without passing through Russian territory.

One or the other: either US intelligence made another miscalculation, like the one that led it to get bogged down in Iraq, or else the US saw Russia through the prism of the 1990’s when, in addition to the paralysis of the Russian government, the army was demoralized and lacked financing, which came from the exhausting conflicts in Chechnya. More generally, the US has not seen a decisive military movement by Russia beyond its borders since the war in Afghanistan, that ended in a humiliating defeat (“the Russian Vietnam”). For years, Russia has taken care not to carry out this type of military operations. In this framework, it is not absurd to think that the same people who believed the Iraqis were going to welcome them with flowers for having toppled Saddam Hussein, expected that the Russians would not respond to the Georgian attack.

The real miscalculation is not to have taken into account the fact that Russia got stronger all these years. It has not only reconstituted its army and the Great Russian patriotism of the population as the state ideology through its control of the communications media, but also reconstituted itself economically – unlike the years of Yeltsin when it defaulted on its enormous debt in 1998 – now it has the third largest amount of foreign reserves worldwide and has a big trade surplus, driven by gas and oil. In this context, both militarily, because of the weakness of the Georgian forces, and in economic terms, because of the European Union’s dependence on its energy, Russia did not see the operation as being very risky. On the contrary, it was the moment Russia was waiting for, to reaffirm its powerful new role to counteract its loss of influence in its backyard and among the European nations. Russia was waiting to mark a red line after the imperialist advance with the Orange Revolution in Ukraine (whose definitive passage into the NATO camp meant a fundamental threat to Russia’s national security), and, more recently, support by the US and the European Union for Kosovo’s independence, brazenly ignoring Russia’s objections (Russia was opposed to damaging the principle established by the victorious powers in the Second World War in Europe, of not modifying borders, to avoid conflict, a question that could open a Pandora’s box in the Russian Federation, formed by different nationalities and ethnic groups.

For its part, US imperialism, still trapped in Iraq, needs Russia politically to exert pressure to impose sanctions on the Iranian regime. Above all, it wants to prevent the Russian state from selling weapons to Iran or Syria, especially its highly effective air defense system, in the face of an eventual war. With its humiliation, Georgia paid for the geopolitical reality that shows that Iran and the Middle East are now more important in calculating US foreign policy.

A conflict with two reactionary camps

The ultimate origin of the conflict, is, on the one hand, the Russian resurgence after the rise of Putin’s Bonapartism, and, on the other, the continuation of the US policy of encircling Russia to curb its ambitions for power and to give Russia’s integration into the world economy dominated by imperialism, an increasingly semi-colonial character, like the Russian dynamic – only temporarily reversed -- was in the decade of the 1990’s, during Yeltsin’s administration. For the US, the independence of Georgia, or, for the Russians, the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, are only pocket change in the calculation of US imperialism or of the rising Russian capitalist state in their quarrel over influence and power in the system of relations between states.

Demands by the US and Great Britain that Russia respect the “territory integrity of Georgia,” that is, Tbilisi’s right to repress and kill the separatist population of South Ossetia, are totally hypocritical, coming from those who keep Iraq and Afghanistan under occupation. Equally dishonest is the Russian request, advanced in the UN during the crisis, in defense of the right of self-determination of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, when, for years, Russia has been denying self-determination to the Chechens by blood and fire.

In this context, from the first day, we revolutionaries clearly indicated that this was a reactionary conflict, because of which we repudiated Georgia’s attack on South Ossetia and demanded the withdrawal of Russian forces from Georgia. We are opposed, both to the advance of NATO in the region, and to every militarist attempt of Putin–Medvedev’s Bonapartist Russian regime to use the crisis in South Ossetia to reconstruct a zone of influence over the territories of the former Russian empire. At the same time, we struggle for the fall of Saakashvili's repressive, neo-liberal, pro-NATO government, a puppet of imperialism that has had the third-largest contingent of troops in Iraq, and the biggest in proportion to its population, and for the expulsion of all the US political and military advisers. A semi-colonial country guarded by NATO is no alternative to the historical oppression that all these nations suffered under Great Russian nationalism. On the contrary, the existence of pro-imperialist governments, as in Georgia, the Ukraine and the rest of the Republics of the former USSR, is an obstacle to awakening the Russian workers and facilitates the xenophobic propaganda of Putin and Medvedev’s Bonapartist government against the Georgians and other nations, accusing them of being part of a Western conspiracy to prevent Russia from overcoming its exhaustion in the 1990’s and recovering its imperial role. This reactionary propaganda serves to reconstitute the Russian state internally, against the historic interests of the workers and oppressed nationalities in the current Russian Federation. For that reason, Putin’s Great Russian nationalism, in spite of the fact that it has disagreements with Washington, is not a progressive alternative to NATO.

The struggle against the policy of reconstruction of the zone of influence of growing Russian capitalism, that aspires to be recognized as a regional power, is only possible from the most implacable opposition to the advance of NATO in Eastern Europe and in the Republics of the former USSR and opposing the penetration of this region by European and US imperialisms. As we have said in view of the recent conflict, only a Georgian workers’ and peasants’ government that breaks with US imperialism and that of the European Union and at the same time raises the right of self-determination and even secession of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, if they so desire, could have the authority to stop Great Russian nationalism by appealing to the only force capable of defeating it: the Russian workers. They must break with the xenophobic policy of the Russian government, that only guarantees big deals for a handful of big capitalist barons and friends of the central government, and return to the proletarian banners of internationalism and defense of the peoples’ self-determination, that permitted the temporary solution of the national problem of old tsarist Russia during the first years of Bolshevism until the Stalinist counterrevolution. Only a party that has fought against Stalinism and draws a sharp balance sheet of this monstrous experience not only for the masses of the former USSR, but on a world level, the Russian Section of the reconstructed Fourth International, could offer this perspective.

KEYS

Georgia: A Russian protectorate from 1783, in 1810 it was annexed to the Russian empire. After the Russian Revolution, it formed part of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Transcaucasia, together with Armenia and Azerbaijan, which was dissolved; in 1936 it became the Soviet Socialist Republic of Georgia. After the fall of the USSR in 1991, Georgia declared its independence. Tbilisi: capital of Georgia.

South Ossetia: In 1922, it was declared an Autonomous Region of Georgia. In 1989, the local parliament declared South Ossetia an Autonomous Republic inside Georgia, an act ruled unconstitutional by the Georgian parliament. In 1990, the sovereignty and the creation of the Republic of South Ossetia were proclaimed; in response, Georgia considered South Ossetia’s autonomy abolished, which caused the beginning of confrontations between South Ossetia and Georgia from 1991. These confrontations stopped after the Dagomis Agreement was signed in 1992 (between Russia and Georgia), after which Russian “peacekeepers” were deployed, that backed South Ossetia with armaments and money. In 2006 a referendum (not recognized by Georgia) was held, where more than 90% of the population voted for independence.

The Orange Revolution and the Rose Revolution: Also known as the color revolutions, processes that happened during 2003 and 2004, channeled electorally, through which pro-Russian candidates in the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia were defeated by candidates supported by the US and the European Union.

Nadezhda Krupskaya, by Andrea D'Atri

2008-07-20T00:04:00.003-04:00

Nadezhda Krupskaya, by Andrea D'Atri

[From http://andreadatri.blogspot.com/2008/06/nadezhda-krupskaya.html
Cde D'Atri is a leader of the Fraccion Trotskista http://www.ft-ci.org/]

Nadezhda Krupskaya is widely known for having been Lenin's partner until her death. However, that recognition does not honor the great personality of the one who was also a great Bolshevik leader that, after the October Revolution, created the new Soviet educational system and set up the libraries of the workers' state. Born in Saint Petersburg in 1869, she joined a Marxist circle while she was studying at the Women's School, and educated the workers in socialist ideas. At the age of 25, she married Lenin. Shortly afterwards, she was arrested for her revolutionary activities, and, together with the Bolshevik leader, was sent into exile, where she wrote her first book, The Working Woman. The tsarist regime sentenced her to live in Germany, Great Britain and Switzerland, but did not prevent her from actively participating in the revolutionary movement of the Russian exiles. Thus it was that she took an essential part in the publication and secret distribution of the newspaper Iskra ["The Spark"], where she was responsible for relations with the committees inside Russia, that were the ones that nourished the newspaper with workers' news and reports.

When the revolution broke out in 1905, she returned to Russia as secretary of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party. But from 1907 until after the February Revolution of 1917, she lived through ten difficult years in exile again, which she used to improve herknowledge of subjects of popular education, and she wrote another book, People, Education and Democracy. In 1914, she participated in editing the newspaper Rabotnitsa ("The Working Woman") and in 1915, she made up the Russian delegation to the Third International Women's Conference, organized by Clara Zetkin, that declared itself against the imperialist war. With her knowledge of education, she collaborated in the Russian Revolution of 1917; shortly after the seizure of power, she was appointed Commissar of Education, a position equivalent to that of a Minister. From there, she promulgated the education laws of the new workers' state, sponsored literacy campaigns, set up many cultural institutions and developed library science. When Lenin was ill, and the Stalinist bureaucracy had already decided to isolate him, with the excuse of not disturbing his fragile state of health, Nadezhda continued passing on political and party news to him. This allowed Lenin to write, shortly before his death, his famous Political Testament, where he indicated that Stalin "had accumulated too much power inside the Party; so much that I was not sure he was always going to use it with sufficient prudence." For Trotsky, Lenin's death and the beginning of the process of bureaucratization confused Krupskaya: "her revolutionary instinct conflicted with her spirit of discipline." It was thus that, opposing Stalin's clique, in 1926 she lined up briefly with the United Opposition (1), from which she later moved away. Stalin collaborated in isolating her, respectfully honoring her for being Lenin's widow, but separating her from party life, controlling her movements, censoring her articles for the press, damaging her reputation, even slandering her in private.

Krupskaya died in March 1939. In his obituary, Trotsky would remember her with these words: "In addition to being Lenin's wife –which was certainly not accidental – Krupskaya was an outstanding personality because of her devotion to the cause, her energy and the purity of her character. She was undoubtedly an intelligent woman.However, it is not surprising that her political thought was not developed independently while she was with Lenin. She had too many opportunities to be convinced of the correctness of his thought, and she was accustomed to trusting her great comrade and leader. After Lenin's death, Krupskaya's life suffered an extremely tragic upset. It was as if she had to pay for all the happiness she had gotten through luck."

Trotsky adds that "Stalin always lived with the fear that she would protest. She knew too much. She knew the history of the party and the place Stalin occupied in it." And against those who criticized Nadezhda for not being completely in the political struggle against Stalin, Trotsky defends the figure of this revolutionary of her generation with the following moving words: "Nothing is further from our intention than criticizing Nadezhda Konstantinovna for not having been sufficiently decisive as to break openly with the bureaucracy. Political personalities much more independent than she, vacillated, tried to play hide-and-seek with history and perished. Krupskaya felt very bound by her sense of responsibility.Personally, she had the necessary courage; she lacked mental audacity. With profound sadness, we say goodbye to Lenin's loyal partner, to an irreproachable revolutionary and to one of the most tragic figures of revolutionary history."

====

(1) Fusion between the Left Opposition, led by Trotsky, and the so-called New Opposition, which arose in 1925, directed by Zinoviev and Kamenev.

IRAN--Kurdish teacher Farzad Kamangar sentenced to death

2008-06-01T15:09:00.000-04:00

[Confirmation of the death sentence against Farzad Kamangar is a disturbing step towards a ghastly crime by the Islamist regime that runs Iran. Friends, we must do everything in our power to prevent the death of this worker. A text for a model e-mail to the Iranian authorities can be found at http://iwsn.org/campaigns/kamangar-letter-may08
--Yosef M ]

[From the Iranian Workers' Solidarity Network, http://www.iwsn.org/]

Kurdish teacher's death sentence confirmed

On Tuesday 27 May the Iranian regime's judiciary for the first time confirmed the death sentence passed against Farzad Kamangar. The death sentence was originally passed by a court in Tehran three months ago. His lawyer is preparing an appeal.

Farzad Kamangar, a teacher, journalist and civil society activist in Kamyaran (in Iranian Kurdistan), was sentenced to death for alleged Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) membership.

According to his lawyer, the Revolutionary Court of the Iranian regime passed this sentence against the 33-year-old Kurdish teacher on 25 February 2008 - with the prosecution producing "absolutely zero evidence" to support its case! The closed-door court hearing lasted less than five minutes "with the judge issuing his sentence without any explanation and then promptly leaving the room."

The Iranian regime's security forces detained Kamangar in July 2006, shortly after he arrived in Tehran from Kamyaran. Since his arrest, the authorities have held him in various prisons in Kermanshah, Sanandaj, and Tehran. In a letter written in Sanandaj prison in October 2007, Kamangar gave details about his torture and his family and lawyer have seen clear signs of this when visiting him.

Kamangar's lawyer has said that the prosecution and death sentence are an indication of "discrimination against Kurds" within the judicial system. It is indeed common practice for this regime to condemn journalists from the ethnic minorities - as well as labour and other activists - on no evidence, then to treat them harshly during their prison terms (or while awaiting their execution) and in jails far away from their home town (or even province).

Farzad Kamangar should be freed immediately and unconditionally and those responsible for his incarceration and torture held to account. Help us put pressure on the Iranian regime by sending a protest e-mail to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President.

Iranian Workers' Solidarity Network
29 May 2008

Workers and the Crisis

2008-05-31T17:11:00.000-04:00

[From http://www.ft-ci.org/]

Workers and the Crisis By Celeste Murillo
Claves No 3 Thursday, May 29, 2008

Hurricane Katrina, which destroyed New Orleans in 2006, revealed a society where millions of poor people are marginalized, among whom African-Americans and Latinos are a disproportionate majority. Now, more and more people state that the US is headed toward a recession, and the biggest financial crisis of recent decades, together with growing inflation, is already hitting workers and people in the US. (1)

A snapshot of the crisis

In 2007, foreclosures increased by 57% (after increasing 42% in 2006). This percentage means thousands of newly homeless people, who are moving in with relatives or friends, or, in the worst cases, living in their cars. The first months of the crisis created a new landscape in cities that were, until very recently, highly-valued, like San Francisco: empty houses, abandoned by their owners who can no longer pay the installments or have been evicted. The US Senate recently approved a $300 billion assistance plan in new mortgage loans. (2)

Faced with this economic catastrophe, with no end in sight, the Republican and Democratic political establishment is responding to the interests of big businesses and big banks, as shown by the injection of more than $780 billion (3) from the Federal Reserve, to create liquidity in the market, a measure that is no less than an enormous life preserver for those who amassed millions of dollars in profits in recent decades.

Meanwhile, it is estimated that 28 million people are going to need food stamps, the most significant increase since the 1960s. Astronomical mortgages, unemployment and the rise in food prices are forcing many workers, in spite of having a job, to depend on government assistance.

In this setting, in spite of the fact that many governments, including several in Latin America, are sowing expectations that a future Democratic administration will manage the crisis in a more “progressive” way, both parties are getting ready to unload the crisis on workers and the people.

Scars from neo-liberalism

The solution that the bourgeoisie found for the crisis that began after the end of the postwar boom, culminated in an enormous setback for the working class on an international scale. The bosses’ offensive led by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher had a big epicenter in the US. Although the bureaucracy of the AFL-CIO union federation carried out several actions at the beginning of the 1970s, under pressure from rank and file workers, as the crisis deepened, collaboration between the leadership of the unions and businesses increased. The turning point was reached with the defeat of the 1981 air traffic controllers’ strike, which was used by Reagan as a point of support for launching his attack on what workers had won. From that moment on, there were more and more big defeats that weakened the strength of the working class, by fragmenting and splitting its ranks. Now, after more than two decades of neo-liberalism, under Democratic and Republican administrations, union membership is at its lowest level, near 10%. And although Bush’s two terms have meant a worsening of bad conditions, massive layoffs and a looting of workers’ wages, Democrat Bill Clinton’s two terms were not far behind in cutting public spending, creating terribly inadequate jobs and destroying social programs.

A working class divided and fragmented

Recent decades have meant big fragmentation in the ranks of workers: between first-class workers and second-class workers with uncertain, temporary or part-time jobs. Moreover, there are big ethnic and racial divisions exploited by the bosses and the bureaucracy that encourage strong racial prejudices, mainly among white workers, as well as tensions between African-Americans and Latinos. Added to this, women and young people continue to be sectors of the US proletariat that get passed over.

The US working class is a powerful social force of more than 140,000,000 (4) people. However, fragmentation and weakening of its organizations have diluted its political weight, reducing it to participation in the elections inside of the two-party system (where only a sector of the workers participates). Although the Democratic Party was its historic political representation, since the 1980s, a big part has turned to the Republican Party.

Industrial centers like Detroit, the headquarters for automobile factories, are now impoverished cities, since a big number of businesses moved overseas in search of cheap labor and to the “free states” inside the US. In those states, the bosses have more “opportunities” to boycott or prohibit unions, as one of main US employers, the Wal-Mart supermarket chain, the icon of destroying what workers have won, has done.

The “Wal-Mart model” (5) is pushing wages down, as has happened in the auto industry, where the low wages of the Dana auto parts’ company shortened the “yardstick” that “the Big Three,” General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, shared. When the UAW negotiated wage reduction and the double pay scale (new workers start with lower wages and no medical insurance), the Big Three demanded the same. This, together with structural deterioration of the auto industry (6), is causing devastation in the most concentrated sectors of the working class.

It is on this setback for the working class (and the exploitation of the semi-colonies) that imperialist democracy is built. The productivity that the economy of the world’s most powerful country brags about, is supported precisely by increased exploitation: more hours at work for lower wages. A US worker with a full-time job worked 46.2 weeks in 2004, 10.2 weeks more than a Swedish worker, and while in Europe there is a minimum time for annual vacations (4 weeks) for a worker on the books, in the US, it depends on the will of the companies. Nor is there anything in the US like maternity leave for women workers, to give but one example of the gains destroyed during the neo-liberal decades. (7)

As we indicated above, although this offensive was undertaken by both parties, it is a reality that Bush’s two terms have meant a consolidation of the legal and economic anti-worker structure, increasing the number of the poor and benefiting the rich with tax cuts.

The difference between first-class and second-class workers is combined with the ethnic and racial divisions that we mentioned, for example, an African-American worker earns 70% of the wages of a white worker for performing the same job. To this gap is also added the difference with Latino workers (more difficult to measure because their jobs have been made enormously uncertain and because of undocumented workers). However, this gap can be observed in the degrees of poverty among workers. Although they are a minority in the total population and in the workforce, poor Latinos (21.9%) and impoverished African-Americans (24.7%) are than double the percentage for whites (10.8%). (8)

Richer businessmen and poorer workers

In the context of this offensive by the bosses, the concentration of wealth has enjoyed sustained growth: what was lost by workers not only will not be recovered, but the gap between rich and poor is constantly growing larger.

Since 1979, the income of the richest 5% has grown by approximately 42%, while that of poorest 80% only increased by 10% (9) (see the graph).

In the land of opportunities, it is increasingly obvious that these opportunities are for few people: between 1992 and 2005 an average CEO saw his pay stub increase by 186.2%, while an average worker only had a wage raise of 7.2%, that is, in 2005 an executive earned 262 more than a worker. (10)

The negative aspect of this phenomenon was the impoverishment of broad layers of the working class. Although the US economy has increased its productivity by 67% since 1979, a worker’s average wages grew by 8.9% (and 7.7% of that increase occurred only between 1995 and 2000) (11). Increases in income during recent years correspond to an increase in hours worked, and not to higher wages, and growth of consumption was owing in large part to the enormous indebtedness of working-class families, which are now facing their debts with devalued housing and greater unemployment.

The Latinos

The incorporation of Latinos into the workforce has been significant, with almost 20 million immigrant workers (mainly Latinos), around 15% of the workforce. In spite of the fact that Latinos have the worst jobs and lowest wages (together with women and African-Americans), they are a big part of tendencies towards recovery of union organization in workplaces.

The fact that one of the biggest unions is SEIU-HERE (services, cleaning, gastronomy, and restaurants) with 2 million members, two-thirds of whom are Latino immigrants, speaks about this phenomenon. This process was already in evidence some years ago, when Latinos participated in defensive struggles in spite of the difficulties in getting organized, and in antiwar demonstrations, adding the support of their community, especially of youths, the children of immigrants (born in the US), a sector very active against anti-immigrant laws in 2006.

As part of the working class, Latinos show a tendency which, though small, is encouraging for all workers. Even amidst a hostile climate for Latinos in general and the undocumented in particular, they are a big part of the new sectors organized in new unions, in previously existing unions, or in struggle alongside their communities. In addition to their economic weight, their union membership is also substantial: around 2 million, more than 10% of the organized working class, in spite of raids, arrests and deportations. In spite of the historically xenophobic policy of the unions, 1 out of every 10 unionized workers is an immigrant. Without ignoring the problem of the low rate of unionization, the growing participation of Latinos in unions is encouraging, since it represents a large portion of the young sectors of the working class, that are not burdened by decades of betrayals and defeats, and that can revitalize the unions’ struggle with their action.

The strike at Smithfield Foods, the pork processing plant (one of the biggest in the world with 5,500 workers, a majority of whom are African-Americans or Latinos) in 2007, for recognition of their union the UFCW and against racist intimidation directed at the workers, was a small example of this tendency. The workers fought side by side, defending their undocumented comrades, and went beyond the halfhearted actions of the union to defend their organization from being sabotaged by the bosses. They aimed at a victory for all the workers of the plant.

However, it must be pointed out that while racist prejudices persist in a large part of the working class, the bourgeoisie and especially the Republican Party and conservative sectors have mounted a big political initiative within the Latino community. The impressive display of government and the Republicans during the recent visit of Pope Ratzinger, organizing a ceremony with more than 60,000 people, of whom the overwhelming majority were Latino, in New York, was an indication of this. We need only remember that the Catholic Church, though still in a minority, already played a big role in the varied immigrants’ movement in 2006, by encouraging divisions and deflecting the process into the dead end of Congressional debates.

Not only did a big sector of resident Latinos vote for the Republicans in the last presidential elections (more than in the year 2000), but the Republican Party also won a big base for Bush’s proposed “guest worker” program.

The thing is that the most reasonable sectors of the imperialist bourgeoisie see in Latinos, even in the undocumented, an enormous source of cheap labor, without rights of any kind. This explains the rejection of harsh anti-immigrant laws and the strange “support” by the US Chamber of Commerce for legalization of the undocumented (certainly a legalization “made to order”). Participation by sectors of the union bureaucracy in the immigrants’ movement takes place for the same reason, since Latinos form a significant social force in important sectors of the economy. Even when the bureaucracy has been one of the biggest groups inciting US chauvinism and encouraging the silence of an accomplice about the mistreatments and persecutions, it found itself forced to support, in some way, the demand for the minimal democratic right of legalization.

Faced with this reality, a workers’ response is urgent. Otherwise, aberrant phenomena like African-Americans supporting anti-immigrant policies will recur; the divisions will continue to grow, and the longest-established sectors will win the contest for this big group, legalizing modern slavery and in this way weakening the struggle of all workers. Contrary to racist prejudices, white workers have their best allies in the immigrants and the most exploited sectors, for strengthening the entire working class and preparing its struggle to confront the effects of a crisis that has already begun to afflict the poorest people, and for getting organized in spite of big difficulties.

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The AFL-CIO bureaucracy

The AFL-CIO rose in 1955 from the union of the traditional AFL (American Federation of Labor) and the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations), created in 1932 with a more militant profile at its beginnings.

In August, 2005, the first big split took place, with the withdrawal of the Teamsters Union (IBT), the Hotel Employess and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE), the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), that formed the “Change to Win” coalition

The division took place over the war in Iraq, and especially over the policy of organizing new sectors, promoted by "Change to Win," which demands that more weight be given to the new sectors to gain neogitating power. However, the new coalition has not represented any alternative, as shown by its position on the anti-immigrant laws (that affect a big sector of these unions), nor has it set out a workers’ independent politics. Like the AFL-CIO, “Change to Win” supports the Democratic Party in the elections, with some for Obama and others for Clinton. At the end of the 1970s, only 22% of workers were affiliated with a union, after having reached the historic maximum of 36% in 1953.

The industrial working class, so renowned in the Democratic Party primaries, has seen how the union bureaucracy surrendered each and every one of its conquests. The conciliatory politics of the bureaucracy have weakened the unions as organizations for struggle, and their leaders have become direct representatives of the bosses.

The most recent example was the open betrayal of the UAW in September 2007. For the first time since 1976, 73,000 workers of 82 General Motors plants in the US carried out the first national strike against the company. Two days later, the leaders ended the strike, saying that it was necessary to make some concessions because “if the company wins, we all win." The union reached an agreement with Ford and Chrysler in the same way, thus offering "the Big Three" automakers what they were demanding: reduction of wages and of medical coverage, suspensions and voluntary retirements "to compete better." Just a few days later, the union surrendered the lengthy struggle by the autoparts workers at American Axle (a subsidiary of GM), that paralyzed the factory since February (affecting national and international production) against a 50% reduction in wages. Amidst this enormous crsis, when jobs have been cut for four consecutive months, the bureaucracy is threatening workers who want to struggle with the specter of factory relocations and layoffs, accusing them of putting their comrades' source of employment at risk.

The US before the crisis (Data from 2006)

304,000,000 total population
51.7 million were living in poverty
35 million went hungry (inlcuding 13 million boys and girls)
45 million were without medical insurance (The US has no public health service)

The US work force (Source: National Jobs for All Coalition and the US Census Bureau. Counting civilian workers)

158,757,000 total work force
141,131,000 employed
5,200,000 underemployed
7,626,000 unemployed
4,800,000 no longer seeking work

(1) To read more about the financial crisis and its consequences, see J. Chingo, “La crisis amenaza al sistema financiero de EE.UU.”, www.ft-ci.org.
(2) The assistance that no more than 500,000 people affected will receive, will not be direct but new credits will be funded.
(3) This is the cumulative figure since August, 2007.
(4) Bureau of Labor Statistics (US Census Bureau).
(5) In 2004 a Wal-Mart cashier made 44% of the wages of a cashier in any other chain, and wage reduction "to Wal-Mart levels" that employers were demanding was what set off the California supermarket strike that year.
(6) See more on the erosion of the industrial base in “La debacle en Irak y la decadencia de la hegemonía norteamericana” in Estrategia Internacional Nº 23.
(7) The State of Working America 2006/2007.
(8) Ibid. It should be emphasized that the data were gathered during 2004, when the economy was in expansion, after 2002 and 2003 that also registered growth.
(9) Economic Policy Institute, based US Census Bureau data from 2007.
(10) The State of Working America 2006/2007.
(11) Ibid.

FT on May 1968 in France

2008-05-25T02:15:00.001-04:00

[The Fracción Trotskista (FT) is a principled Trotskyist tendency with comrades in Europe and throughout Latin America. The FT webpage, from which the following account of May 1968 in France is taken, is at http://www.ft-ci.org/. -- YM]

Lucha de Clases No 2 Thursday May 15, 2008
The French May 1968

Forty years have passed since the French May, and visions that present the events merely as a “student revolt” or a “cultural rebellion” are multiplying. Daniel Cohn-Bendit himself, a student leader of those days, in his capacity as a Deputy of the European Parliament now maintains that “the revolt had as its aim confronting the moral atmosphere, an authoritarian conception of life, authoritarian morals.”

This is a limited interpretation or, more accurately, a way of diminishing what the French May really was: a magnificent process of struggle and of student political radicalization that opened a road to the biggest general strike in the history of France and insubordination of working-class youth, defying authority in those days of May.

The antecedents of May

“May” did not fall like a lightning bolt in a peaceful sky. The conditions that made it possible were given by different events provoked after the Second World War. And these were preparing the political and ideological climate of that year.

Stalinism was losing prestige. To its “peaceful coexistence” with capitalism was added the revelation of Stalin’s crimes and the repression of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, crushed by Soviet tanks. Together with this, the Chinese-Soviet conflict was provoking a split in monolithic “official communism” and facilitating the rise of tendencies to the left of the Communist Parties.

On the other hand, revolutions in the colonial and semi-colonial countries, like the Cuban Revolution of 1959, were welcomed with enthusiasm the world over, and Che Guevara, murdered in Bolivia in 1967, became a banner of leftist youth.

But in France itself, one event was going to be highly significant: the anti-colonial war of Algeria (1954 – 1962). The war, showing the brutality of French imperialism, will have a strong impact on French youth: the day of the victory of Algeria’s independence, students of the Sorbonne are going to raise the flag of the Algerian National Liberation Front. People began to break with the leadership of the French Communist Party (PCF) that had offered “critical support” to the French government during the war.

However, the event that would be decisive in the prelude to 1968 was the war in Vietnam. A turning point would take place at the beginning of 1968. US optimism was beginning to collapse, since the Vietcong launched an offensive at the end of January of that year against the capital of Vietnam, besieged Saigon, and the US Embassy itself is attacked by a suicide commando team. Now nothing was simple for the US.

Like their US peers, French youth move to the front of the mobilizations against the war. Unlike the PCF, which was holding poorly-attended marches with abstract content: “Peace for Vietnam,” the radicalized organizations and activists seize the anti-imperialist struggle by organizing grassroots committees in neighborhoods, on campuses and in high schools, calling together tends of thousands of French youth to fight for driving the US out of Vietnam. The idea that imperialism could be defeated was already being prepared in the streets.

On March 20, during a protest march against US intervention, some 300 activists from the National Vietnam Committee break the glass windows of the American Express bank in Paris. The police immediately grab several demonstrators, among them Xavier Langlade, a Trotskyist leader of the Revolutionary Communist Youth (JCR). In opposition to the arrests, 150 students occupy the administrative councils of the Nanterre campus. The “March 22” movement, uniting the entire vanguard of Nanterre, was born. In particular, Daniel Cohn-Bendit stands out at its head, with the Trotskyist Daniel Bensaid.

The imagination to power

To this feeling of social and cultural opposition against capitalism the youths were experiencing, is added the repudiation of the university reform (the Plan Fouchet: modification of the curricula and new required courses). Everything begins to be called into question. The students summarize it with a phrase: “From criticism of the class university to questioning class society.”

The model of teaching in the bourgeois university and the relation between “educators” and “those educated” are also being repudiated. Against the entrance exam and the attempt to exclude those who failed courses, the student movement reponds: “Down with selection!” Mobilizations had been occurring since the end of 1967, with a strike called by the National Union of Students of France (UNEF). High school students, who are prohibited from political activity inside schools, join the struggle.

Student protests in Nanterre are answered with repression, and eight students are seized, among them Cohn Bendit. On May 2, this campus is cleared out and shut down.

The next day, 500 people gather in the courtyard of the Sorbonne in solidarity with the Nanterre 8. Police enter the university, arresting several demonstrators. That day, the first cobblestones are thrown at the forces of repression in the Latin Quarter. During the days following, the student mobilizations will grow in magnitude, and the first barricades appear.

For its part, the PCF attacks the mobilizations, describing them as actions of “small leftist groups,” while the government closes the Sorbonne.

With the support of the population, all the universities of France go on strike for the release of those arrested, for reopening all the campuses and withdrawing the cops.

On May 10, barricades multiply in the Latin Quarter. “The night of the barricades” will be the dawn of the big movement of the French May, an historic day on which students and working-class youths (spontaneously arriving from the suburbs of Paris) fight heroically until dawn of the following day, resisting the repression unleashed. It was the beginning of worker-student unity.

The student movement’s struggle moved up and detonated the workers’ movement's entrance on the stage. In May, the students acted as a sensitive layer expressing the contradictions of the entire society: disagreement with the conservatism of daily life, loathing for De Gaulle’s Bonapartist regime and the workers’ malaise in the factories. The ideological radicalism of the students and their methods of struggle, were a direct questioning against the French capitalist regime, opening a political crisis.

Part of this questioning will also be profound criticism of the bureaucratic apparatus of the PCF and its conciliating politics, that will allow the strengthening of the “extreme left” where the Trotskyist groups will acquire a lot of weight.

From the barricades to the general strike

The PCF enjoyed iron control over the workers’ movement. Now, under pressure from the rank and file, the trade union federations are forced to call the general strike for May 12 throughout France. In this way, the working class will burst into the national crisis. The bureaucracy was trying to reduce the strike to partial demands, but the strike was already acquiring a political character: “Ten years are enough!” the demonstrators chant, referring to a decade of Gaullist rule. On May 14 and 15, seizures of factories and strikes spread throughout the country.

With action by the workers, the student movement gets a new boost. Worker-student unity increases: thousands of working-class youths march to the Latin Quarter to express their solidarity with the students, who respond by mobilizing to the seized factories with the shout, “Take the banner of struggle from our frail hands.” This unity will be targeted for attack by the PCF union leaders. Besides rejecting “outside interference,” they call for “fighting and isolating all the small ‘leftist’ groups that are trying to damage the democratic movement by hiding behind revolutionary phraseology.”

The PCF has to put itself at the head of the strike to limit it as much as possible. Despite the PCF, the strike spreads throughout France. Ten million workers are on strike. It is the biggest general strike in the history of the country and one of the biggest in the workers movement in the West.

Betrayal

To try to curb the torrent unleashed, the CGT and the government implement the Grenelle agreements (wage raises are offered in exchange for a return to work). But on their arrival at the main factories with the proposal, the union leaders are jeered. “The struggle continues,” the workers answer.

The PCF will then have to modify its strategy to deactivate the movement. Now the way is to negotiate the workers’ demands sector by sector, in an attempt to atomize and divide.

The decisive break will take place on May 30. De Gaulle announces the dissolution of the National Assembly (the parliament), the calling of elections, moved forward, and the “re-establishment of order.” The CGT and the PCF accept, guaranteeing “the return to normalcy,” by trading the struggle for the elections. The union bureaucracy negotiates small wage raises and union rights during the first days of June. Slowly, the return to work begins.

The betrayal was completed, opening the door to the harshest repression against the vanguard of the workers and students. Beginning on June 7, the most violent days take place, through clearing out the factories and confrontations with the police, where several workers and students lose their lives. On June 12, the government decrees the dissolution of the political organizations of the far left and begins arresting its main leaders.

The last bastions to fall will be two of the symbols of May: on June 17 the Sorbonne is cleared out, and between June 17 and 24, the automotive workers, who are the last to abandon the struggle, return to work. In this way, the regime manages to take the crisis toward the parliamentary terrain, and elections are held on June 23 and 30. De Gaulle and the right wing consecrate their victory at the polls: the working class had refused to vote for the PCF.

Conclusions

What was “May”? In the first place, a profound cultural, social and political criticism of capitalism, a protest against all the injustices and inequalities brought about by the system. May witnessed the radicalization of students and working-class youths, the vanguard of a general strike that disputed, in actions, who owned the power. Through the action of the masses, De Gaulle’s fall was possible, and, in this sense, the situation was as revolutionary as the leaders allowed.

In spite of the fact that sectors of the vanguard clashed with the PCF, they could not come close to creating widespread bodies for self-organization, nor was there in existence a revolutionary leadership that could overcome the PCF’s betrayal. The Trotskyist organizations had arrived at May too weak to be an alternative.

The workers and the students could not win. However, their struggle had an indisputable merit: the banners of May 1968 were the spearhead of events like the Hot Autumn in Italy, the Prague Spring, the Revolution of the Carnations in Portugal, the Córdoba uprising in Argentina, the Cordones Industriales [workers’ self-defense organizations] in Chile, and an endless list of workers’ and students’ uprisings the world over.

May will be the beginning of a rise of class struggle in the semi-colonial countries, in the imperialist centers, and in the workers’ states of the East. It inaugurated a revolutionary decade that disputed the bourgeois order and also the reformist and bureaucratic leaderships like the Stalinist apparatus.