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https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/06/30/oqgd-j30.html
David North
@davidnorthwsws
15 hours ago
30 June 2022
Dear Comrade:
Thank you for your letter of 28 June and its enthusiastic response to the establishment of a new section of the International Committee in Turkey. The formal expansion of the work of the ICFI is, whatever the country or region, an important political milestone. But it is a source of special satisfaction that it has become possible to make this advance in the country where Trotsky, having been exiled from the Soviet Union, so decisively developed the struggle against the Stalinist regime on a world scale and initiated the founding of the Fourth International. During the visit with the comrades of Sosyalist Eşitlik Grubu to the island of Prinkipo, one could not help but be deeply moved by the awareness of Trotsky’s monumental historical achievement. But we could also draw satisfaction from the fact that we are continuing the work that Trotsky initiated on Prinkipo, and that Trotsky would have been in complete solidarity with the political principles and program of the International Committee.
Leon Trotsky at his desk in Prinkipo
The experience of our comrades in Turkey is certainly, as you write, of great significance for the development of a section of the International Committee in Russia and throughout the former Soviet Union. We worked patiently to create, on the basis of a unified conception of the entire historical experience of the Fourth International, a firm foundation for the establishment of a new section.
The resolution of the Sosyalist Eşitlik Grubu deserves the most careful study. The SEG’s recognition of the political authority of the ICFI should not be understood in a merely organizational sense. The political authority of the ICFI is based on its historical association with the defense of the foundational principles and program of Trotskyism. The SEG resolution identified the essential historical content of the continuity of Trotskyism:
4. Only the ICFI represents the political continuity of the world Marxist/Trotskyist movement. This continuity goes back to the founding of the Left Opposition under the leadership of Leon Trotsky in 1923 to defend the strategy and program of the world socialist revolution against nationalist Stalinist degeneration. It was this strategy and program that guided the October Revolution in 1917 led by the Bolshevik Party in Russia under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky.
5. The founding of the Fourth International in 1938 under the leadership of Trotsky after the collapse of the Communist International paving the way for the Nazis to come to power in Germany in 1933; the founding of the International Committee in 1953 by orthodox Trotskyists led by James P. Cannon of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the US against the revisionist-liquidationist tendency led by Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel; the political struggle by the British Trotskyists led by Gerry Healy against the unprincipled reunification with the Pabloites in 1963; and the struggle of the American Trotskyists led by David North in 1982-86 against the national-opportunist degeneration of the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) in Britain and the regaining the control of the IC by orthodox Trotskyists, constitute critical turning points in this political continuity.
Continuity is not conferred upon an organization through some sort of formal proclamation, let alone in the manner of a British knighthood. A young organization must establish its continuity with the antecedent history of the Trotskyist movement by taking up the fight, in the present, against the opponents—Stalinist, Pabloite, state capitalist, social democratic, labor, petty-bourgeois radical, anarchist, bourgeois nationalist, and liberal reformist—of revolutionary Marxism. This fight is conducted on a theoretical, political, and organizational plane, and is always directed toward establishing the complete and unconditional political independence of the working class from the bourgeoisie. However difficult and contradictory the process, the political movement that conducts this struggle expresses with ever increasing clarity the continuity of Trotskyism and, thereby, moves into alignment with the objective trajectory of the world socialist revolution.
Great historical events, such as those through which we are now passing, reveal the essential class nature of a political organization and the interests that it serves. Of course, the response of an organization to a great crisis is conditioned by its antecedent history. The outbreak of the US-NATO proxy war against Russia has rapidly exposed the state-capitalist and Pabloite organizations as contemptible agents of American and European imperialism. Their theory of “Russian imperialism”—closely associated with Shachtmanism and related varieties of state capitalist conceptions—now serves as an ideological justification for support to US and European imperialism and their lackeys in the Ukrainian regime.
In an attack on the International Committee, Oleg Vernyk of the Ukrainian Socialist League (USL) (an affiliate of the International Socialist League-ISL) writes:
We are well aware that in this confrontation with two imperialisms, Western imperialism and Russian imperialism, Ukraine only plays one role: the role of victim.
It is difficult to imagine a more absurd and deceitful statement. The Ukrainian “victim” is a regime that was brought to power by a coup in 2014 that was financed and organized by the United States, using local fascist organizations to provide the necessary military force. During the last eight years, the US and NATO have carried out the training and arming of the Kiev regime in preparation for war against Russia. Thousands of Ukrainian soldiers were directly trained by the United States in the years leading up to the war. In a report posted on June 25, the New York Times wrote:
Representative Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat on the House Armed Services and Intelligence Committees, said in an interview that the relationships Ukrainian commandos developed with American and other counterparts over the past several years had proved invaluable in the fight against Russia.
The scale of US/NATO support for Ukraine—already measuring in the many tens of billions of dollars—is without historic precedent. According to the Times:
The commandos are not on the front lines with Ukrainian troops and instead advise from headquarters in other parts of the country or remotely by encrypted communications, according to American and other Western officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters. But the signs of their stealthy logistics, training and intelligence support are tangible on the battlefield.
Several lower-level Ukrainian commanders recently expressed appreciation to the United States for intelligence gleaned from satellite imagery, which they can call up on tablet computers provided by the allies. The tablets run a battlefield mapping app that the Ukrainians use to target and attack Russian troops.
On a street in Bakhmut, a town in the hotly contested Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, a group of Ukrainian special operations forces had American flag patches on their gear and were equipped with new portable surface-to-air missiles as well as Belgian and American assault rifles.
“What is an untold story is the international partnership with the special operations forces of a multitude of different countries,” Lt. Gen. Jonathan P. Braga, the commander of U.S. Army Special Operations Command, told senators in April in describing the planning cell. “They have absolutely banded together in a much outsized impact” to support Ukraine’s military and special forces.
To claim, in the face of these facts, that “Ukraine plays only one role: the role of victim” is a blatant and contemptible falsification of reality in the interests of imperialism.
The political basis of Vernyk’s endorsement of the imperialist war follows:
However, we members of the USL/ISL have as our basic principle the defense of Ukraine as a political subject, the defense of its working people, the defense of the unconditional right to self-determination of the Ukrainian people and the struggle for the preservation of the integrity of the state.
This one paragraph exposes the USL (and its ISL sponsors) as reactionary nationalists and bitter opponents of the Marxist theory of the state. It is an ABC of Marxism that the state is an instrument of class rule. How, then, can “the struggle for the integrity of the state” be reconciled with “the defense of its [Ukraine’s] working people”? Of course, Vernyk makes no mention of the fact that the Ukrainian capitalist regime is utilizing the opportunity provided by the war to abolish laws and regulations protecting workers that date back to the Soviet era. Nor does Vernyk ever explain why the alleged “unconditional right to self-determination” applies only to Ukraine as defined by the Kiev regime, but not to the predominantly Russian-speaking populations in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea.
The reactionary basis of Vernyk’s defense of the Ukrainian regime is most starkly revealed in his attempt to rebrand the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its military wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, as a politically heterogeneous movement that included progressive tendencies. Vernyk writes that
in the history of the right-wing political formation of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, there were endless transformations, cracks, radical changes in its slogans, certain inclinations to the left and to the right, cooperation with Hitler and the war on two fronts, among many other events. To this we must add the creation of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in 1943 and the massive entry to that organization in 1939 of the communists of western Ukraine that miraculously escaped total extermination by the Stalinist regime. All of this forms part of Ukraine's history that is often characterized as extremely complex, controversial and ambiguous.
Vernyk leaves out of his discussion of this “complex, controversial and ambiguous” history any mention of the central role played by the OUN and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army as collaborators of the Nazis in the genocidal extermination of Ukrainian Jews and the mass murder of Poles. Seeking to sow political confusion, Vernyk promotes the anti-Marxist national chauvinist tract written in 1948 by Petró Poltava, who was then a leading ideologist of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. In a reprehensible attempt to politically rehabilitate the OUN as an organization that included genuinely left-wing tendencies that espoused a form of socialist-tinged nationalism, Vernyk claims that Poltava represented “a tendency towards democratization” that “was beginning to emerge within the ranks of the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists), toward the ideas of the left and the incitement to a simultaneous war against German national socialism and against Stalinism.”
Vernyk goes so far as to claim that Poltava’s pamphlet “annuls all the arguments of Russian propaganda and its ICFI lackeys regarding the assertion that any nationalist liberation movement in Ukraine should be considered, without exception, a far-right current and Nazi.”
Let us review the text by Poltava that has inspired Vernyk and the USL/ISL. It is titled, “Our Teaching about the National State.” The pamphlet begins with an explicit denunciation of the Marxist theory of the state and nation as “wrong and tendentious.” Poltava wrote:
Their [The Marxists’] view that nations will be able to manage without states in the future is utopian, fantastic, and lacking any basis in reality. In all Marxist theory about the state there is a clear effort to deny that the state has any significance for the people and for humanity in general, as well as any attempt to present history as nothing more than a class struggle—which, as we have already stated, is totally incorrect.
Insisting on the essentially ethnic basis of the state, Poltava inveighed against the existence of multinational states. He declared: “Obviously states of this type should not exist; they should be restructured as soon as possible.” The practical implications of this argument were demonstrated by the OUN in its genocidal attacks on Jews and Poles.
Poltava’s text is suffused with reactionary nationalist mysticism:
We nationalists believe in this eternal truth—that an independent national state is the only form of political organization that guarantees a people the best conditions for all-round development of its spiritual and material resources. Without its own national state, that is, without a state extending over all its ethnic territory, a people cannot fully develop.
At the conclusion of the text, Poltava declared that “the Bolshevik USSR is an implacable enemy of individual subject people and humanity in general.”
Why does Vernyk draw inspiration from this reactionary anti-Marxist ideologue? Clearly, his aim is to create an ideological and political bridge to the present-day Ukrainian nationalists, falsely attributing a progressive content to the war being waged by the Kiev regime in alliance with US and European imperialism.
Toward this end, Vernyk dishonestly attempts to portray Trotsky as an ally of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism. Vernyk cites a brief passage from Trotsky’s 1939 essay, “Problem of the Ukraine,” in which he defended the slogan, in opposition to the Stalinist regime, of “A united, free and independent workers’ and peasants’ Ukraine.” [Italics in the original].
Vernyk conveniently and duplicitously leaves out of his discussion of Trotsky’s 1939 article any reference to passages in which Trotsky vehemently condemned any collaboration with and concession to the organizations and parties of reactionary Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism. Trotsky wrote:
The Ukraine is especially rich and experienced in false paths of struggle for national emancipation. Here everything has been tried: the petty-bourgeois Rada, and Skoropadski, and Petlura, and “alliance” with the Hohenzollerns and combinations with the Entente. After all these experiments, only political cadavers can continue to place hope in one of the fractions of the Ukrainian bourgeoisie as the leader of the national struggle for emancipation. The Ukrainian proletariat alone is capable not only of solving the task—which is revolutionary in its very essence—but also of taking the initiative for its solution. The proletariat and only the proletariat can rally around itself the peasant masses and the genuinely revolutionary national intelligentsia.
Trotsky concluded his essay with the following timely warning:
At the beginning of the last imperialist war the Ukrainians, Melenevski (“Basok”) and Skoropis-Yeltukhovski, attempted to place the Ukrainian liberation movement under the wing of the Hohenzollern general, Ludendorff. They covered themselves in so doing with left phrases. With one kick the revolutionary Marxists booted these people out. That is how revolutionists must continue to behave in the future. The impending war will create a favorable atmosphere for all sorts of adventurers, miracle-hunters and seekers of the golden fleece. These gentlemen, who especially love to warm their hands in the vicinity of the national question, must not be allowed within artillery range of the labor movement. Not the slightest compromise with imperialism, either fascist or democratic! Not the slightest concession to the Ukrainian nationalists, either clerical-reactionary or liberal-pacifist! No “People’s Fronts”! The complete independence of the proletarian party as the vanguard of the toilers!
As is to be expected from this politically bankrupt opportunist, Vernyk attempts to cover up his capitulation to the Ukrainian bourgeoisie with pathetic slanders against the International Committee. He writes that “a United States citizen, Mr. David North, has been defending the interests of Russian imperialism and its propaganda apparatus on issues related to Ukraine.” According to Vernyk, I accepted this assignment “when it became clear that official Russian propaganda no longer has sufficient informational space within the American media or any other country in the western orbit.” Does Vernyk actually imagine that such nonsense will be believed by anyone?
But I must note that his accusation has an ironic character, inasmuch as the “primal sin” of which the International Committee and I personally are guilty, in the eyes of the Pabloites, has been our relentless exposure of the counterrevolutionary character of Stalinism. This included the ICFI’s work on Security and the Fourth International, which unmasked the agents of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Trotskyist movement. Moreover, at a time when the Pabloites were singing the praises of Gorbachev, the International Committee was warning that his policies would result in the culmination of the Stalinist betrayal of the October Revolution, that is, the restoration of capitalism.
The Putin regime is the reactionary resurrection of a bourgeois state that emerged out of the 1991 dissolution of the USSR. But the opposition of the International Committee to this regime, including its invasion of Ukraine, is from the socialist left, not the imperialist right.
Precisely because its opposition to the Putin regime is rooted in its antecedent struggle of the Fourth International against Stalinism and the various revisions of the Trotskyist analysis of the Soviet Union (both Pabloite and “state capitalist”), the International Committee analyzes the current war in the historical context of the dissolution of the USSR, which proved a political disaster for the Ukrainian, Russian and international working class.
The way out of this disaster, from which the present war emerged, is to be found not in alliance with US-NATO imperialism or with Putin’s capitalist regime; but only through the unified struggle of the Ukrainian, Russian and international working class against all the warring states. The working class in Russia as well as in Ukraine must uphold the principle: The main enemy is at home.
These comments on Vernyk might serve, perhaps, as an illustration of how the International Committee upholds the defense of Trotskyism. In the relentless exposure of the enemies of Marxism, the International Committee continues the great historical work of the Fourth International and, on this basis, educates the working class and prepares it for the fulfillment of its revolutionary tasks.
It is our hope that the initiative of our comrades in Turkey will serve as inspiration for the efforts of socialists in Russia and Ukraine to expand the work of the International Committee and raise the banner of Trotskyism in their countries and throughout the former Soviet Union.
With Trotskyist greetings,
David North
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/07/01/nato-j01.html
Johannes Stern
@JSternWSWS
10 hours ago
The two-day NATO summit in Madrid, which ended yesterday, was dominated by the military alliance’s preparations for war against the nuclear powers Russia and China. NATO’s new Strategic Concept describes Russia as “the most significant and direct threat to Allies’ security and to peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area.” NATO “cannot consider the Russian Federation to be our partner” and will “significantly strengthen deterrence and defence for all allies.”
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz during a media conference at the NATO summit in Madrid [AP Photo/Manu Fernandez]
For the first time in NATO’s history, the alliance also has China in its crosshairs. The newly adopted NATO strategy speaks of “malicious hybrid and cyber operations,” “disinformation” and “confrontational rhetoric,” among other things. It therefore plans “to address the systemic challenges posed by the PRC [People’s Republic of China] to Euro-Atlantic security and ensure NATO’s enduring ability to guarantee the defence and security of Allies.”
The cynicism is breathtaking. In fact, it is the NATO powers, and their imperialist allies in the South Pacific—including Japan and Australia, both of which were represented in Madrid—who are the aggressors in world politics. They have been waging war almost continuously for 30 years and have reduced entire countries to rubble. Russia and China have also been systematically encircled with the aim of weakening and militarily subjugating these resource-rich and geostrategically important countries.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a desperate and, at its core, reactionary response by the capitalist Putin regime to NATO’s war policy, which is now being further escalated. The summit launched measures directly aimed at expanding the NATO-led proxy war in Ukraine into an all-out war against Russia.
With the accession of Finland and Sweden, NATO is turning Scandinavia and the entire Baltic Sea into a second front in the war against Russia. Finland alone has a land border with Russia that is more than 1,300 kilometres long. Should “military contingents and military infrastructure be stationed” in these states, Russia would be forced to respond in kind, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned in the Turkmenistan capital Ashgabat on Thursday.
NATO has decided to turn the whole of Europe into a military staging area for war against Russia. NATO’s rapid reaction force (NRF) will be increased from 40,000 to well over 300,000 soldiers, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced at a press conference. The “battle groups in the eastern part of the alliance” would be strengthened up to brigade level.
All in all, it concerns the “biggest restructuring of our collective deterrence and defence since the Cold War”—a euphemism for the preparations now underway for a devastating hot war. What is planned, he said, was, “More pre-positioned equipment, and stockpiles of military supplies. More forward-deployed capabilities, like air defence. Strengthened command and control. And upgraded defence plans, with forces pre-assigned to defend specific Allies.”
The forces deployed would then “exercise together with home defence forces. And they will become familiar with local terrain, facilities, and our new pre-positioned stocks.” This would enable them to “respond smoothly and swiftly to any emergency.” Specifically, the troops are to be ready for war within a few days. According to a report in Der Spiegel, the new NATO documents speak of a so-called “notice to effect.” According to this, troop units “would not only have to be ready to leave within 10 days but would have to arrive at the place of operations and be ready to fight; the rest would have to be ready within 30 days at the latest.”
The Bundeswehr (German Armed Forces) is playing a central role in this massive rearmament. “In future, we will provide credible and substantial support for the new force structure, whose forces the NATO Secretary General has put at 300,000 for the first hours and days of a crisis,” Chancellor Olaf Scholz said at his press conference at the summit.
Germany had set the standard in the alliance with its “announcement to keep a combat brigade [i.e., up to 5,000 soldiers] exclusively available for the defence of alliance territory in Lithuania.” In addition, he said, “the offer to provide a regional naval command for the Baltic Sea region will enable us to assume leadership responsibility in the maritime domain.”
And that is far from all. “In addition, and in high readiness, the Bundeswehr will permanently maintain at its core an armoured division in the order of 15,000 soldiers for the defence of north-eastern Europe, over 60 aircraft and up to 20 naval units,” Scholz added.
Scholz made clear that the ruling class in Germany regarded the offensive against Russia as an opportunity to increase its own weight within Europe and NATO, and to re-establish itself as a leading imperialist power after losing two world wars in the 20th century. “As a logistical hub in Europe,” Germany made “a strategically important contribution to NATO’s collective defence capability,” Scholz explained.
Eighty-one years ago, on June 22, 1941, Hitler’s army, the Wehrmacht, invaded the Soviet Union and began a war of extermination that claimed the lives of at least 27 million Soviet citizens. Despite these monstrous crimes, the thrust of German imperialism is once again directed towards the East.
“Today, in coordination with NATO, we have already expanded our presence on the eastern flank geographically, and, among other things, by contributing to air surveillance in Poland and Romania with Eurofighters as well as to the NATO unit in Slovakia with currently 500 soldiers and the high-value Patriot capability,” Scholz boasted.
Then, as if moved by the old militaristic megalomania, he exulted that Germany would “further expand its contribution on land, at sea and in the air.” Among other things, he offered to establish a regional maritime command for the Baltic Sea in Rostock. In addition, he “promised that in future, the Bundeswehr will maintain an armoured division for north-eastern Europe, among other things.”
Scholz also used his appearance to defend the massive German arms deliveries to Ukraine, many of which are going to right-wing extremist forces in the Ukrainian army and the country’s so-called territorial defence. It was “right, what we are doing, that we are supplying weapons to Ukraine,” he declared. This included, “of course, the self-propelled howitzers that we have delivered” and the multiple rocket launchers, “but also, all those deliveries that we provide for defence against attacks from the air.” This course would “be continued in this way.”
He said the same applied to the historic rearmament of the Bundeswehr that he had announced previously. “No one should believe that when the 100 billion from the special fund is spent, there will suddenly no longer be a requirement to continue investing accordingly,” he threatened. However, “for the change of direction” one needed “to set the points, so to speak” and this was “the 100 billion euro Bundeswehr special fund.”
Scholz’s press conference and the NATO summit are more than a warning. The imperialist ruling elite have made clear they are preparing for a devastating third world war, for which the working class will pay in every way. As cannon fodder on the battlefields, and in the form of massive attacks on social and democratic rights, and in financing and enforcing the war policy. The only way to prevent a catastrophe is to build a socialist movement of the international working class against war and its root cause: capitalism.
Sign
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/07/01/ftvp-j01.html
Andre Damon
At the conclusion of this week’s NATO summit in Madrid, Spain, the members of NATO, including most European states as well as the United States and Canada, adopted a strategy document outlining plans to militarize the European continent, massively escalate the war with Russia, and prepare for war with China.
The NATO Summit in Madrid. (Jonathan Ernst/Pool Photo via AP)
The document pledges to “deliver the full range of forces” needed “for high-intensity, multi-domain warfighting against nuclear-armed peer-competitors.”
An except from the strategy document
In a sea change from the last strategy document, first published in 2010, the new NATO strategy document proclaims that “the Euro-Atlantic area is not at peace” – all but declaring that the alliance is at war. This is despite the fact that none of the members of the NATO alliance have declared any war within the “Euro-Atlantic area.”
The document declares that "The Euro-Atlantic area is not at peace."
The strategic framework document openly adopts the language of power politics, better known by its German name, Machtpolitik. It references the word “interests” seven times, declaring that both China and Russia challenge the “Alliance’s interests.”
The previous NATO strategic framework, published in 2010, used the word “interests” only once, in pledging to “enhance the political consultations and practical cooperation with Russia in areas of shared interests.”
While the 2010 document named Russia a “partner,” this year's strategic framework proclaims Russia a “threat” and China a “challenge.” The new NATO strategy document explicitly justifies these designations by declaring that these countries “challenge our interests.”
It declares that “The PRC [People’s Republic of China] seeks to control key technological and industrial sectors, critical infrastructure, and strategic materials and supply chains. It uses its economic leverage to create strategic dependencies and enhance its influence.”
The document asserts that China's economic development (expressed as 'control') conflicts with the "interests" of NATO members.
In order to preserve their “interests,” the allies pledge to “significantly strengthen deterrence and defense.”
Critically, the document asserts that the series of actions that triggered the war in Ukraine have been a success, declaring “NATO’s enlargement has been a historic success.” The Kremlin justified its invasion of Ukraine by claiming that Ukraine’s efforts to join NATO and the deployment of nuclear weapons on Russia’s border constituted a threat to its national security.
The NATO document doubles down on the expansion of the military alliance, declaring, “We reaffirm our Open Door policy…. Our door remains open to all European democracies that share the values of our Alliance.” It added, “Decisions on membership are taken by NATO Allies and no third party has a say in this process.”
The war now raging in Ukraine is the largest in Europe since the Second World War, and has already killed tens of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians. In describing the expansion of NATO as having been a success, the alliance effectively declares that these deaths, and many more to come, are acceptable costs for protecting the interests of the alliance’s members.
In response to the challenges to the alliance’s “interests,” the NATO members have pledged a program of militarization that will affect all aspects of society. It declares, “In an environment of strategic competition, we will enhance our global awareness and reach to deter, defend, contest and deny across all domains and directions, in line with our 360-degree approach.”
The document further states, “As long as nuclear weapons exist, NATO will remain a nuclear alliance” and the alliance pledges to “ensure a substantial and persistent presence on land, at sea, and in the air, including through strengthened integrated air and missile defense.” The document added that “NATO’s nuclear deterrence posture also relies on the United States’ nuclear weapons forward-deployed in Europe and the contributions of Allies concerned.”
The achievement of the goals set out in the document requires a massive expansion of the troops, munitions, and supply changes necessary for war fighting. “We will deter and defend forward with robust in-place, multi-domain, combat-ready forces, enhanced command and control arrangements, prepositioned ammunition and equipment and improved capacity and infrastructure to rapidly reinforce any Ally, including at short or no notice.”
The NATO strategy document does not acknowledge or recognize any competing priorities for military resources. The words “hunger,” “poverty,” and “unemployment” do not appear, nor is there any reference to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed tens of millions worldwide and one million in the United States alone.
The comments of US president Joe Biden were fully consistent with the tone of this document.
At a post-summit press conference, Biden boasted: “We provided Ukraine with nearly $7 billion in security assistance since I took office. In the next few days, we intend to announce more than $800 million more, including a new advanced Western air defense system for Ukraine, more artillery and ammunition, counter-battery radars, additional ammunition for the HIMARS multiple launch rocket system we’ve already given Ukraine and more HIMARS coming from other countries as well.”
He added that the total commitment of the US allies included “nearly 140,000 anti-tank systems, more than 600 tanks, nearly 500 artillery systems, more than 600,000 rounds of artillery ammunition, as well as advanced multiple launch rocket systems, anti-ship systems, and air defense systems.”
Yet when asked about the costs to the American public of the war, Biden did not express that this was even a consideration in determining that this was not even taken into consideration.
At the press conference, Biden was asked by a reporter, “G7 leaders this week pledged to support Ukraine, quote, ‘for as long as it takes.’ And I’m wondering if you would explain what that means to the American people—‘for as long as it takes.’ Does it mean indefinite support from the United States for Ukraine? Or will there come a time when you have to say to President Zelenskyy that the United States cannot support his country any longer?”
Biden replied, “We are going to support Ukraine as long as it takes.”
Another reporter asked about the “high price of gasoline in the United States and around the world… How long is it fair to expect American drivers and drivers around the world to pay that premium for this war?
Biden reiterated, “As long as it takes.”
Biden: Gas Prices Will be High for 'As Long As It Takes'
Biden’s declaration is an effectively unlimited pledge of social resources for the war effort. Having gutted COVID-19 funding, meaning that uninsured workers will be forced to pay out of pocket for vaccines and COVID-19 hospitalization, the American ruling class is instead pressing ahead with funneling vast social resources into the war effort.
The plans outlined in the latest NATO strategy document will have incalculable consequences, not only for the war itself, but also through the endless diversion of social resources to military spending, which will be coupled with the slashing of spending for health care and pensions, and reductions in workers’ wages.
As workers enter into struggle all over the world against the surging cost of living, it is critical that they take up as a critical demand the struggle against war and militarism.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/07/01/pers-j01.html
David Walsh
8 hours ago
The current US Congressional hearings into the events of January 6, 2021 have exposed harsh truths about the diseased, precarious state of American democracy.
The hearings have incontrovertibly proven that Donald Trump and his allies led a serious, determined effort to overthrow the constitutional system and establish a fascistic presidential dictatorship, that this conspiracy embraced a substantial portion of the Republican Party, the judiciary and no doubt elements within the military, that it came within minutes (or perhaps seconds) and inches of succeeding and that its failure was not the result of any organized resistance whatsoever but rather happenstance, logistics, inexperience and so on.
This last fact needs to be emphasized. The American media is eternally generating “heroes,” and yet even it has not been able to come up with a single political figure identified with resistance to the January 6 insurrection, not one daring or gallant action, no photo opportunity, nothing. Fleeing politicians, people hiding beneath their seats—not an image, a phrase, a gesture associated with opposition, not one act of even symbolic confrontation.
The ongoing hearings have revealed the magnitude of the event. They have brought to light important, even explosive new facts. But the latter only raise more starkly this issue: Why has it taken 18 months to make the public aware of the reality? In any event, there is not the slightest indication that the hearings will become the basis for any action. President Biden continues to refer to members of the Republican Party as “my friends.”
It is clearer than ever that neither before nor during the coup was there any attempt to forestall or obstruct it in any way. Now, the contrast between the scale of the crimes revealed and the meagerness of the reaction is staggering.
Why did this fascistic coup come so close to succeeding?
Its preparation was no secret; it was organized in plain sight to a large degree. Trump spelled out his plans again and again in the weeks and months leading up to the 2020 election.
The WSWS at the time pointed repeatedly to the ongoing threat. In September 2020, for example, we commented that “Trump is an out-and-out fascist who is conspiring to erect a presidential dictatorship... If the [presidential] debate made one thing clear, it is that he will not accept the outcome of the election.” In October, we argued that “Trump has a strategy to steal the election, the Democrats have no strategy to oppose it.” A score of such citations could be presented.
No faction or individual in the political establishment attempted to prevent Trump’s criminal operation ahead of time. No one alerted the population to the immense risks it confronted in January 2021. The democratic rights of the American people were left entirely vulnerable for the fascist rabble to trample on.
On January 6 itself, there was no effort to put down the coup d’état while it was in progress. Trump’s extreme right supporters came close to murdering leading officials in the US government. Biden issued no statement for hours. Nor did Nancy Pelosi or Charles Schumer. The military and the police-intelligence agencies bided their time, waiting to see who would come out on top.
The coup attempt was not halted, it merely petered out. A grand total of 60 people were detained January 6—on the occasion of a concerted, violent effort to overturn the American government and the Constitution in operation for 232 years—at the US Capitol, in downtown Washington D.C. and along the National Mall, combined. Only 10 were arrested on the spot for unlawfully entering the Capitol, where they planned to assassinate leaders of Congress. The coup plotters, for the most part, made their way home and “lived to fight another day.”
Had the coup succeeded, it would have been accepted by the Democrats and the political-media establishment. Their preoccupation would have been to block, demobilize and demoralize popular opposition. Just as the Democrats accepted the theft of the 2000 election, they would have accepted the suppression of what remained of American democracy.
Had the Democrats planned to act against Trump and the fascist coup makers, they would have done so by now. They will do nothing. This is an imperialist party, a party of Wall Street and the oligarchs, propped up by the trade unions and the upper-middle class race and gender fanatics. The Democrats fear arousing the population against the far right, which all the present circumstances render entirely possible, a thousand times more than they fear each and every far-right conspiracy.
The Democrats primarily differed with Trump while he was in power over his handling of foreign policy, the Ukraine-Russia situation in particular. They wanted him to be more focused and aggressive against the Putin regime—it was this on which they based their impeachment efforts, not the president’s obvious dictatorial tendencies.
The inaction of the Democratic Party in response to January 6, despite the hand-wringing and verbal jousting, comes as no surprise. No less passive and no less criminal roles were played by the AFL-CIO and the rest of the labor federations. In the modern era, resistance to far-right dictatorship depends upon the existence of a powerful, politically vigilant working class movement. On January 6, the AFL-CIO was an irrelevancy. Then-President Richard Trumka did nothing to mobilize resistance, issued no call for a general strike or widespread protest. The only intervention along these lines was the spontaneous action of Twitter employees to cut off Trump’s account and halt his fascist provocations.
The rabidly chauvinist, pro-capitalist American union hierarchy would not be especially troubled by the prospect of a dictatorship in the US. After all, it has helped organize enough of them in Latin America, Africa and elsewhere.
The absence of opposition to January 6 extends to the academic world. Is there a single prominent intellectual who has spoken out or offered a way forward in the face of Trump’s coup? Professor Noam Chomsky rightly observed that the January 6 participants “were united in the effort to overthrow an elected government,” but then went on to blame “[white people’s] fear of ‘losing our country’” for many of the difficulties.
Authors Sinclair Lewis, Jack London and Philip Roth, among others, turned the fascist danger in America into convincing fiction. Now that the threat is more actual than at any time in US history, shamefully, the novelists, poets and dramatists have nothing to say.
The upper-middle class pseudo-left refused to take the coup attempt seriously. Historian Bryan Palmer, for example, claimed that the events of January 6 were not an insurrection and derided those who warned about their significance: “Hyperbole flowed as the trail of tears grew to a tidal wave.” Jacobin magazine lulled its readers to sleep, arguing that the “defeat” of the January 6 attempt and its “quick repudiation by the political and economic elite made plain that there is currently little base in the state or among big capital for a Trumpist coup.” Jacobin issued this immortal pronouncement: “Capital, it seems, is still committed to liberal democracy.”
What’s left of academic “radicalism” has been fatally infected by the race and gender obsession. For such people, class has been abolished as a gauge in politics. While Trump was putting together his plans for authoritarian rule, the identity politics forces in Hollywood, on campuses and in the media were maniacally focused on the persecution and prosecution of individuals over allegations of sexual abuse. To them, Harvey Weinstein, Woody Allen and Kevin Spacey represented a far graver danger than the fascist mobs.
The refusal of these elements to resist the extreme right’s attempt to seize the US government has been mirrored in their attitude toward the murderous COVID-19 pandemic and the US-NATO proxy war with Russia, which threatens a new world war.
A vast flood of cash has corrupted the media, academic life and artistic circles. Following stock market and real estate values and pursuing one’s career have largely replaced a serious concern for social issues and the fate of the broad masses.
Frederick Engels, in 1886, observed that insofar as the German intelligentsia had “set up its temple in the Stock Exchange,” it had “lost… the aptitude for purely scientific investigation, irrespective of whether the result obtained was practically applicable or not, whether likely to offend the police authorities or not.” The “old fearless zeal for theory” had been replaced by “an anxious concern for career and income, descending to the most vulgar job-hunting.” That process has metastasized in our day.
Only one movement was correct in its analysis and warnings on a daily basis of the Trump plot—the WSWS, the Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International.
The WSWS is the expression of the objective, revolutionary role of the working class, and it consciously articulates the organic resistance of workers to capitalism. As this resistance becomes more pronounced, as militancy and open struggle re-emerge, the correlation between the WSWS and the struggles of the working class will become more evident and powerfully intersect.
The January 6 coup and the response of the entire political establishment to it demonstrates that opposition to dictatorship can only come from a movement that is based on the working class and fights for the overthrow of capitalism. The WSWS does not have to suppress the truth because the program of revolutionary socialism corresponds to the logic of objective developments. The exposure of capitalism is critical to the development of a movement for socialism.
Those who recognize the necessity of this struggle must make the decision to join the SEP.
https://popularresistance.org/europeans-have-far-more-reproductive-freedom-than-americans/
In both access to abortion and a pro-family welfare state, Europe beats the US hands down.
Since the end of Roe v. Wade, numerous European political leaders have lamented the decision. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson labeled the Dobbs decision a “big step backwards,” and French President Emmanuel Macron said abortion “must be protected,” as his country prepared to place a nationwide right to abortion in its constitution.
In response, conservatives have cried hypocrisy, both to deflect criticism and to cast doubt on European institutions in general. “Many of the leaders who criticized the United States for the decision have laws that are either comparable to the Mississippi law at the center of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which outlawed abortion past the 15th week of pregnancy,” Charles Hilu writes at National Review. “Americans should be very skeptical of the opinions of leaders across the pond.”
But this is not true on multiple levels. Though there are some moderate restrictions on abortion access in most European countries (and strict ones in a few), in practice almost all of Europe had far greater access to all aspects of reproductive freedom than Americans did even before Roe was overturned, and vastly greater freedom now.
Let me start with abortion rights. As Politico Europe points out, every major European country except the U.K., Poland, and Finland allows abortion on demand for at least part of the pregnancy term, typically the first trimester, and the U.K. and Poland have wide latitude in their rules. (Andorra, Liechtenstein, Malta, Monaco, and San Marino have stricter rules, but they are tiny.)
As the Center for Reproductive Rights elaborates, there are some moderately burdensome requirements in some countries, like waiting periods in Eastern Europe or mandatory counseling in Germany. In countries like Italy, it can be hard to find a doctor willing to perform one. But none of these countries are anything like Mississippi, where a restrictive abortion law is combined with systematic legal harassment that had closed down every abortion clinic but one by 2004.
Moreover, outside of Poland, major European health care systems render these restrictions far less meaningful than they might sound. The overwhelming majority of people who want an abortion will get one as soon as possible, and thanks to the fact of universal health care in most European countries it is a relatively simple matter to get an appointment and arrange payment. Pregnancy is a difficult, dangerous, and often quite unpleasant experience, and doubly so if the pregnancy is unwanted; very few normal people will procrastinate about ending one if they can help it. Almost all abortions happen either very soon after becoming pregnant, or after learning of some terrible medical problem later in the term, in which case it is widely acceptable across Europe.
Unfortunately for Americans, our awesomely horrible health care system often means tremendous obstacles to even the simplest medical needs. About 9 percent of Americans are uninsured, and a further quarter are underinsured—and thanks to the Hyde Amendment, Medicaid will not cover abortions except in case of rape, incest, or if the mother’s life is in danger.
The theoretical expansive access provided by Roe did not actually translate into reality for many: In the 2014 Guttmacher Institute Abortion Patient Survey (the most recent one), 53 percent paid for theirs out of pocket. It also found half of abortion patients below the poverty line, and another quarter below twice the poverty line; it can take weeks or months for such a person to scrape up even a few hundred dollars if they can do it at all. And now, of course, outright bans are either enacted or coming soon in something like 26 states.
Second, the punishments for European abortion regulations are almost always far less punitive than ones written by American reactionaries (again, except in Poland). Criminal penalties of any kind are relatively rare, and nowhere is there anything like the deranged bounty hunter law Texas cooked up.
On the other hand, there is the positive aspect of reproductive freedom—that is, the freedom to choose to have children. For workers living on wages (that is, most people), having a child is a problem for three reasons. First, one’s childbearing years come early in life, when one’s income is typically at its lowest point. Second, one must take time off work to care for the child, especially when it is first born. Third, children cost tons of money to raise, which creates enormous inequality between families based on how many kids they have.
Hence the European welfare state for families, which addresses these problems through paid leave for new parents, a child benefit to help with expenses, public provision of child care, and public school. Though institutional details vary considerably across the continent, on these terms Europe is simply blowing America out of the water.
The Nordic countries set the highest bar; their systems are incomprehensibly generous by American standards. Norway, for instance, has one year of parental leave that can be split up in various ways, and both public day care facilities and subsidies for private options, a child allowance of about $170 per month for children under six and $107 per month for children six and over, and public school (along with several other smaller benefits).
The U.S., by contrast, has no national paid leave (one of only two countries on Earth without it) and no public child care. For a year, we had a jerry-rigged child allowance that all parents were theoretically eligible for (though incompetent design left out many of the poor), but Joe Manchin killed that, and today the poorest parents with little or no work income once again get nothing from the Child Tax Credit. We managed to sneak through public school, though not universal pre-K.
American reactionaries barely even pretend to care about the massive anti-family coercion created by our atrocious welfare state. A 2004 Guttmacher survey of abortion patients found fully 73 percent including an inability to afford another child among their reasons for terminating a pregnancy, yet the best movement gurus like Chris Rufo can come up with are addle-brained schemes to provide a pitiful three months of paid leave by pushing back parents’ retirement age. The belief expressed by eternally optimistic people like Ross Douthat or Peggy Noonan, that now will be the moment that conservatives combine their concern for the life of a fetus with support for parents who have to take care of the child after birth, is so ludicrous that it gets laughed at routinely in polite company.
In right-wing utopia, all Americans will find abortions difficult or impossible to obtain, even in cases of medical necessity, and then those new parents (the ones who survive giving birth, that is) will get very little government help raising the child they didn’t want. Almost no Europeans live like this and they are right to be proud of that fact.
https://popularresistance.org/teens-work-drive-and-pay-taxes-they-should-be-able-to-vote-too/
Greater Civic Engagement Will Depend On Enfranchising Young Voters.
low • er • the • vot • ing • age
noun a campaign to enfranchise younger voters for U.S. elections
“Well, you didn’t vote for me.” — Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D- CALIF.) to a 16-year-old Sunrise Movement activist in 2019, who was asking her to support the Green New Deal.
Just how young are we talking?
The most popular proposal is to give everyone 16 and up the right to vote. In the United States, 16-year-olds are working full-time, paying taxes and driving, so why not voting? And most live with their families, which may be a better time for them to cast their first vote — rather than when they’re in the midst of major life transitions a few years later.
In countries like Scotland and Austria, where 16- and 17-year-olds can vote in some or all elections, the teens vote at higher rates than their slightly older cohorts — and research shows voters who begin earlier stick with the habit. Civically engaged teenagers at home might even boost the participation of parents and other family members.
Enfranchising more young people could also combat what writer Astra Taylor has termed the “gerontocracy”: a generational cohort making long-term policy they won’t be around to deal with. While the electorate is growing more diverse and progressive overall, the system is rigged against outcomes reflecting that reality.
Do teenagers really care about politics?
They probably should. Some of the biggest problems facing society — climate change, gun violence, student debt — weigh most heavily on the young. Meanwhile, half of Congress is over 60.
What would it take to lower the voting age?
We’ve done it before. After years of mass protests (and more than 2 million Americans drafted to Vietnam), the 26th Amendment reduced the voting age from 21 to 18, adding 11 million new voters for the 1972 election.
Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D‑Mass.) revived the issue in March 2019. A month prior, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D‑Calif.) had been curtly rebuking youth climate activists, a scene that went viral. Pressley’s plan continues to face bipartisan opposition.
There is more movement at the local level. Efforts have faltered in San Francisco and Boston, but several small cities have lowered the age to 16 for local elections, where the policy has been effective and popular. Takoma Park, Md., was the first, back in 2013; under-18 voters had a turnout rate four times higher than those over 18.
What if the teens make bad decisions?
Youth are at the forefront of some of the most dynamic movements of our time. If you’re still not convinced, consider a simple counter: Are adults really doing such a great job?
https://popularresistance.org/this-southern-appalachian-town-uses-co-ops-to-build-new-communities-around-old-industries/
Morganton, North Carolina – In the foothills of western North Carolina, the small town of Morganton is home to a growing co-op movement that’s reinvigorating the region’s once-struggling textile and furniture manufacturing industries, and refashioning them around egalitarianism and localism.
This expanding collective of frontline workers and artists is changing the way people there view industry and the nature of work.
From Sharing To Solidarity
The birthplace of bluegrass and home to the oldest mountain range east of the Mississippi River, Southern Appalachia is not only fertile soil for the sharing economy, but a co-op-driven movement known as the solidarity economy.
Aimed at generating locally rooted wealth and ensuring its equitable distribution, the solidarity economy is fiercely democratic.
For Sara Chester, co-executive director and founder of The Industrial Commons (TIC), a 501(c)3 organization that fosters employee ownership, in a solidarity economy “workers are appreciated not just for their labor but their ideas, insights, and innovations. Workers are not just a piece of the business, they are the reason the business exists.”
Sometimes referred to as the co-op model, this approach is about creating prosperous and resilient communities by emphasizing worker agency and ownership, environmental sustainability, and the value of place.
According to Tea Yang, manager of values and culture at TIC, co-ops offer a “system wide approach to ensuring everyone benefits” from a business, as compared to exploitative entrepreneurial models that tend to treat workers like expendable resources.
The power of the worker coop model can be found not only in its egalitarianism but its solution-making mechanism.
“Those closest to the process know the issues and solutions best,” Yang continues. “It’s a matter of giving them a voice, the opportunity for leadership development, and the organizational structure to enact change.”
In Morganton, TIC continues a long tradition of cooperative and solidarity movements in Southern Appalachia.
According to the “2021 Worker Cooperative State of the Sector” report, produced by the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives, North Carolina is the eighth largest worker co-op state in the country, with more than 20 democratic or worker-owned workplaces.
Raised in Morganton, Chester believes the solidarity economy goes hand in hand with the region’s character and topography.
“I think there is something about Southern Appalachia and being in the mountains that have instilled a spirit in individuals and communities of a cooperative mentality,” she says.
With resources being scarce and communities often isolated, there is a long history in Southern Appalachia of individuals working together to achieve their goals.
She believes this ethos has been further nurtured by other newcomers bringing “a spirit of cooperation to our region,” including a large immigrant Guatemalan/Mayan community.
Reclaiming, Renewing, Rebuilding
Due to the region’s abundant timber, furniture manufacturing once thrived, but economic instability has plagued Southern Appalachia for decades. TIC is working deliberately to overcome that, Yang says, and capture the energy of the region’s “deep and rich history in textile and furniture craftsmanship and manufacturing.”
Once considered the furniture capital of the United States, North Carolina lost more than half of its furniture manufacturing jobs between 1999 and 2009, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.
In part, this is a result of large manufacturers moving business overseas, often where worker wages are considerably lower than domestically—alongside other less worker-centric policies.
TIC’s bold goal, to rebuild “a diverse working class based on locally rooted wealth,” is a common refrain among team members.
What makes [Southern Appalachia] prime grounds for co-op and circular economic development is that we’re not trying to replace these existing industries, but revitalizing them by doing the work in a way that benefits everyone and the environment — not just a few people. — Tea Yang, manager of values and culture at TIC
Aware of the region’s strong cooperative spirit, Chester, TIC co-founder, saw an opportunity to enhance what was happening and wanted to ensure that local economic growth wasn’t being concentrated, but rather “shared by everyone in our community.”
TIC grew out of Opportunity Threads, a worker-owned, cut-and-sew textile plant started by Molly Hemstreet in 2008. Hemstreet and Chester met in 2012, and shortly thereafter founded the Carolina Textile District, which eventually evolved into TIC in 2015.
TIC is an incubator for regional co-ops and service programs, including the Carolina Textile District, a member-governed collection of textile manufacturers in North and South Carolina; Material Return, which uses a circular economic model to transform textile waste into new products; and Good Books, a worker-owned, women-led, cooperative bookkeeping group for the many coops and businesses in the region.
Ashley Dula, a training and hospitality coordinator for the Carolina Textile District and head instructor of their youth sewing program, says her students start with repairing their own clothes, and later develop a “skill set for potential employment. The income provided by these skills gives students the opportunity to have an affordable lifestyle in the community versus working an odds-and-ends job.”
Among these more explicitly economic endeavors are arts and educational programs, such as TOSS, a collection of arts initiatives in Morganton, including writing, murals, and art classes for children, designed to foster TIC’s shared values of solidarity economics, racial justice, and environmental sustainability.
Hometown Walkabout (HW), a guided, educational tour of regional cultural landmarks, highlights the diverse ethnic, racial, and cultural history of the surrounding county, which may surprise participants who hold very different expectations for the demographic makeup of a small Southern Appalachian town. These include a statue celebrating local African-American blues artist Etta Baker and sites related to the “Maya of Morganton,” to name a couple.
HW tours facilitate challenging conversations around race and community. For instance, participants discuss the implications of a 20-by-30-foot Confederate flag that furls next to I-40 as visitors drive into Morganton, a protest by the Sons of Confederate Veterans against the movement by other Southern Appalachians who want to take down Confederate Statues and other related symbols—including a county monument in downtown Morganton.
The program connects participants with personal narratives and conversations about the diversity of the region, and has been designed and offered to specific cohorts in the region, including attendees from UNC Healthcare, Western Piedmont Community College, and the North Carolina School of Math and Science, a residential high school focused on STEM, which recently opened a new campus in Morganton.
Some models of change focus exclusively on economic development as a means of addressing poverty, but TIC asserts a more well-rounded and grassroots approach is needed.
”We know that providing a good job that pays a liveable wage is not the only solution to eradicating generational poverty, so we take a system-wide approach that includes bringing racial equity, diversity, and inclusion to the forefront of all of our work.” says Tea Yang. “So much of systemic racism is directly tied into economic mobility and stability.
Making A Better Place — For Everyone
When asked whether there has been much pushback from the wider community — businesses, government, or residents — Sara Chester says she has “never had anyone approach us as a critic.”
People are mostly just curious, she says, which is why TIC has prioritized keeping its doors open, and being as collaborative with the community as possible.
TIC has strong partnerships and collaborations with local, city, county, and state governments, Yang notes. This may be due, in part, to their nonpartisan focus on making material changes.
“No matter the political spectrum of our partnerships,” she says, “our interests are aligned in the shared desire to develop a vibrant and thriving economy and that is something everyone can get behind.”
Nonetheless, challenges remain.
For instance, North Carolina is a right-to-work state, where state laws make it difficult for workers to unionize or have greater leverage when negotiating with employers.
While this may not completely undermine the co-op model, Yang believes it is one of their “biggest challenges,” especially as TIC helps businesses transition into worker-owned enterprises.
However, she hopes that TIC’s vision will help people become more open and interested in the co-op model.
“We do not shy away from criticism or curiosity,” she says. “We invite anyone who is skeptical about our work to engage with us and learn more about the ‘why’ behind our mission.”
TIC’s work always comes back to strengthening relationships with members of the local community — giving everyone the means to stay in a place, liberated from the pains of poverty.
“I’m from here and hope to live here for the rest of my life,” Chester remarks. “Being committed to place allows you to go deep where you live and not be worried about moving on to the next professional step or location. We’re here and we want our community to be a better place — for our children and grandchildren and everyone else’s children and grandchildren.”
