EDITORIAL

War is hell, and the war in Ukraine has been hell on Earth for those in the region, every day, for over a year. Secret U.S. intelligence documents online report as many as 354,000 casualties on both sides of the conflict as of April 2023, including over 60,000 killed in action.

According to the Russian army headquarters, at least 1,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed every day since the beginning of the counterattack that began in June. We can imagine roughly the same number on the Russian side – young people, many of them pulled from poverty or prison, with seemingly no hope for freedom or food other than to fight in this brutal conflict.

This violent clash – the result of years of NATO expansion and culminating in the counter-aggression from the Russian oligarchy – serves no purpose other than to advance the U.S. imperialist agenda by plunging Europe into the deadliest conflict it has seen since WWII. With Biden refusing to rule out the option of using nuclear weapons and with the increased posturing towards war with China, the current conflict has the distinct possibility and even probability to lead the global population into a third world war, complete with the potential for nuclear annihilation.

Meanwhile, millions of working people in the United States face a different kind of hell – the hell of poverty. More than 1 out of every 7 children in the United States lives below the poverty line, and 2.5 million children face homelessness every year. While people are losing their jobs, their homes, and their health insurance, Congress just voted to cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) – a program that provides food to millions – by an average of $90 a month per recipient.

This cut alone “saved” the United States $3 billion per month. But did that money return to the American worker? Of course not. Between January 24, 2022, and February 24, 2023, the United States provided around $71.28 billion in military funding to Ukraine – over twice the amount it would have cost in the same timeframe to keep SNAP running at its previous capacity. 

So where else is the money to fund the conflict in Ukraine coming from? The recent “deal” struck between Biden and Speaker McCarthy – ostensibly to avoid the manufactured and preventable “crisis” of defaulting on the national debt – includes a $50-70 billion reduction in spending to fight and treat Covid-19. As of May 2023, the World Health Organization (WHO) still considers Covid-19 to be a pandemic with thousands of people still dying each week of the disease. What is the health and well-being of millions of people when stacked against the potential for war-profiteers to fill their coffers?

The deal also cuts money from the IRS, which many analysts believe will actually be a net negative to revenue, as more taxes go unpaid. We can guess which tax brackets will see the largest payout from decreased oversight in this area. 

Why is this all happening? Is it, as the corporate media parrot day after day, an expensive but “necessary” fight for freedom of the Ukrainians against a brutal Russian invasion? Of course not. For years, NATO has pushed and pushed eastward towards Russia, knowing full well that it would incite a Russian response. And while Putin is not at all blameless in this – he was not forced to invade – the U.S. has achieved a major geopolitical goal with this war in weakening Russia in the build-up to a future conflict with China.

But most of all, in the advanced states of decaying capitalism, with increased poverty coming into conflict with capital’s ever-pressing need to increase itself without end, war is big business,

The United States has perfected the “trickle-up” economy, with the U.S. taxpayer directly funding the war machine. Indeed, the money being funneled directly into arms manufacturers, oil companies, and other U.S. military contractors flows at a much higher speed than a mere trickle.

Lockheed Martin recently won nearly half a billion dollars in new contracts. And while Raytheon stocks surged in the last year, CEO Greg Hayes is quoted as saying of the conflict, “tensions in Eastern Europe … are putting pressure on some of the defense spending over there. So I fully expect we’re going to see some benefit from it.” In 2022, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, and TotalEnergies made $134 billion in excess profits – mostly as a result of the war in Ukraine.

We must end this madness now! The money must come home to benefit those who produce it – the working class.

The massive transfer of wealth directly from working people into the hands of capitalist war profiteers is fully supported by both parties. Both Democrats and Republicans continue to vote to increase military spending, and both parties agreed to the recent cuts to the social safety net.

How can we end this madness?

A major step would be for the AFLC-IO to break with the Democratic Party – a party of warmongers and profiteers, a party that Vermont AFL-CIO President David Van Deusen calls an “enemy of working people.” [See Open Forum article on page 2.]

Speaking at a campaign endorsement rally hosted by the AFL-CIO leadership in Philadelphia on June 17, AFT President Randi Weingarten stated that, “President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris are the most pro-labor, pro-public education leaders our country has seen in modern history.”

Working people are getting tired of this empty rhetoric. In fact, to quote Brother Van Deusen. “It is just this kind of alienation which serves as a root cause of working people turning to the right (against their own social and economic interests).”

We must fight for an end to the war ourselves. Toward that end, we demand an immediate ceasefire! All troops must leave Ukraine! Money for jobs, education, healthcare and social services – NOT war!

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OPEN FORUM

WHEN THE NATIONAL AFL-CIO MAKES POLITICAL ENDORSEMENTS …

“Biden is NOT a Friend of Labor”: Commentary by David Van Deusen

Editors’ Note: From time to time, The Organizer Newspaper publishes Open Forum articles that express wide agreement – though not necessarily full agreement – with our political orientation. We have wide agreement with Brother David Van Deusen, president of the Vermont AFL-CIO, when he exposes the anti-labor record and nature of the Democratic Party in his Commentary below.

We don’t, however, support his call to vote for Biden against Trump in 2024 on the grounds that “when push comes to shove, it will be imperative that the neo-fascist Donald Trump be defeated (lest we risk losing those vestiges of democracy which remain in this country).” We don’t support our class enemy at any time.

We support the call by Labor and Community Party (LCIP) to begin building labor-community assemblies at the local level – assemblies that run independent candidates for local office, call on the AFL-CIO to break with the Democrats, and lay the groundwork for building a mass Labor Party rooted in the unions and the oppressed communities.

Following are excerpts from Van Deusen’s Commentary, which appears in full on the Vermont AFL-CIO website. The AFL-CIO endorsement of Biden was announced in Philadelphia on June 17.

June 13, 2023 –Tomorrow, or in the days or weeks that follow, do not be shocked if the National AFL-CIO issues a VERY early endorsement for Democratic Joe Biden for President in 2024. Yes, the same Joe Biden from the same Democratic Party who screwed Union Rail Workers, who promised passage of the PRO Act, and who failed to deliver, and who caved to the Republicans in the debt ceiling deal.

And, yes, this is the same Biden and same Democratic Party, capitalist to the core, which remains seemingly hell bent on World War III, and who does not take any action in Washington DC that is not first approved by their billionaire backers.

Do not get me wrong. … I know that when push comes to shove it will be imperative that the neo-fascist Donald Trump be defeated in 2024 (lest we risk losing those vestiges of democracy which remain in this country), but to gift a candidate and a Party with an early endorsement as reward for taking the right to strike away from Rail Workers (and betraying us once again on the PRO Act) sends the wrong message to our 12.5 million Rank & File members throughout the United States.

Here is the truth: It’s long past time that the National AFL-CIO comes to grip with the fact that the Democratic Party is not an ally or friend. Rather it is the Party, when in power, that gave us the job-killing NAFTA agreement; a Party that lied to us about their commitment to the Employee Free Choice Act under Obama and lied to us again about their commitment to the PRO Act under Biden.

The lies they tell on the campaign trail aside, this is a Party of the capitalist billionaires, not us (the Working Class). Even if they are less dangerous to liberty and Union rights than the further-right Republicans, the fact remains that at the end of the day, they too are our enemy. 

Issuing an endorsement now for the lesser of two evils will do nothing more than confuse, demoralize, and anger large sections of our membership. After all, our members cannot help but see how Biden and his Party has failed us, and how the neo-liberal politics of the Democrats have done little more than lower the standard of living for millions of workers over the last three decades.

To see the Labor Movement now respond by giving them, our enemies, an early political gift will only cause average Union members to feel further alienated from their national Union leadership. And it is just this kind of alienation which serves as a root cause of working people turning to the right (against their own social and economic interests) towards those (like Trump) who peddle in false fascistic solutions to the ills of society.

This, my friends, is the wrong road to walk down.

[I]f we are ever to turn a corner and see our Labor Movement come to grips with the fact that hitching our wagon to the capitalist Democratic Party has failed us for decades (and will fail us again), and instead that it is on us and on us alone to build a Working Class left political pole independent of those which have screwed us time and time again, we also must fight to democratize the AFL-CIO and conduct our internal elections by one-member-one-vote. 

David Van Deusen 

President of the Vermont AFL-CIO

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Interview with Nnamdi Lumumba

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[Note: Following are excerpts from an interview conducted by The Organizer Editorial Board member Connie White with Ujima People’s Progress Party Co-Convenor Nnamdi Lumumba. The complete interview is posted to www.socialistorganizer.org.]

Connie White: The Ujima People’s Progress Party (UPP) is an organizing committee and grassroots community effort to build the first Black workers-led electoral party for social and economic justice in Maryland. Would you give us an update on where the organizing committee is at in its efforts to get on the ballot in Maryland?

Nnamdi Lumumba: We have worked out a process of getting on the ballot in Maryland that would give us anywhere from three to four years of ballot-access status. We want to get on the ballot next year and start running candidates where we can.

We are recruiting people and training them, even using some of our financial resources to start having a paid staff who can help with petition-gathering as well. It’s been a big effort for us.

Connie White: Has UPP held a state conference this year?

Nnamdi Lumumba: We did not, partly because we’re working with some other groups in the Pittsburgh, New York, and Missouri areas to sponsor a national Black Radical Political Convention here in Baltimore later this year. We just didn’t have the resources to do two things of that size in the same year.

Connie White: How does UPP view the Democratic Party and Republican Party? More specifically, how does UPP view the Black Caucus within the Democratic Party?

 Nnamdi Lumumba: The Democratic Party is the party of the capitalist ruling class, the white ruling class in the United States. We don’t think there is any way to utilize these parties in an effective way to push the interests of Black workers, Brown workers, or any working-class people.

 I know that there are other organizations that do that, and I think there are some strategic reasons why that might work in some places. But overall, I think we have to be clear that the Democratic Party is a capitalist party, and that there are no answers for working-class people in a capitalist party.

 The existence of parties like ours in this state, and hopefully throughout the country, will give people an option to hear our information, to get political education, and to engage in the kind of work that really needs to be done for working-class people.

 We see the Black Caucus as part of a comprador class, a neo-colonial class that serves the interests of imperialism. It serves the interests of capitalism even though they may present themselves as liberals or even as progressives. 

 Connie White: How does UPP view its relationship to third parties like the Green Party?

 Nnamdi Lumumba: All political parties represent a class interest, an ideological interest. We characterize the Green Party as a petit-bourgeois formation, but that does not necessarily make them the enemy. We try to work with these formations around real, concrete demands.

 We maintain a working relationship with those formations as much as possible, some closer than others, but I think it’s important that we be clear as a working-class organization that we’re trying to win people to an openly anti-capitalist position, hopefully a socialist position, and that people have to be really clear about capitalism, and that even a reform form of capitalism is not going to solve the problems of most Black, Brown and working-class people.

 Connie White: What does UPP see as its role, looking at the U. S. presidential election in 2024? Do you see the possibility of endorsing any presidential candidate?

 Nnamdi Lumumba: We definitely won’t endorse any candidate that runs as a Democrat or Republican. There is an outside chance that we could endorse, a socialist even if that socialist might run in the Green Party or some other third party. I think we have to create a rubric of our demands based upon our class and national interests and ask: “Does that candidate put forward solutions to the questions that we put forward?” as a basis of making an endorsement.

 White: Does UPP have anything to contribute to the conversation around Cornel West running on the Green Party ticket?

 Nnamdi Lumumba: I think the Black Liberation movement — definitely the forces that I’ve worked with — wouldn’t see him necessarily as someone who is closely tied to our liberation struggle. But he is somebody who has always been openly friendly to our struggle. I think it’s important for us not to dismiss him, but to challenge him around our positions.

 We can use this opportunity with Cornel West, possibly as he travels around the country, as an opportunity for working-class organizations to organize. We should be there so that people who come to those events can meet us and get organized into working-class formations.

 Connie White: UPP is a member of Labor and Community for an Independent Party (LCIP). How does UPP view its role in in helping to advance its statement of purpose?

 Nnamdi Lumumba: We are proud members of LCIP because it gives us at ground level an opportunity to be an influence on political ideas and have early engagement around the kind of ideas that we think are important coming out of the Black Liberation struggle and the Black working-class movement.

 We would like to help set a model for other Black and Brown working-class movements that want to come into the LCIP discussion and be able to show them that we can be a part of this movement built upon mutual respect and that we can come as full partners in this discussion.

 We have to honestly struggle around building a national working-class labor party that represents the interests of workers and colonized people, that this is part of the national solution, not investing in strategies that require us to infiltrate the capitalist parties.

 Workers must be organized in their own organizations. They must have control of their own ideas. This is a part of that process of the working-class movement maturing and, hopefully, even undoing some of the errors from the previous period of struggle as well. I think it’s really important, for oppressed peoples in the United States to be aware of LCIP and how they can participate in the most honest way possible.

 Connie White: How do you see UPP in Maryland contributing to one of the tenets of the statement of purpose of LCIP, that is to organize local labor community coalitions/assemblies that can be a building-block, or base, for a working-class political party in this country?

Nnamdi Lumumba: Some of the work we’ve done has allowed us to actively support labor movements. We supported the Amazon workers trying to organize. We supported some of the restaurant workers trying to organize. I think that’s the kind of on-the-groundwork that needs to happen – right where working people are resisting and trying to organize themselves around day-to-day struggles.

 Connie White: Do you have anything else that you’d like to add?

 Nnamdi Lumumba: I think increasingly more and more people are being disenchanted with the political options coming from the Democratic and the Republican parties.

 This is a moment where people are more open to real solutions around their economic and their social interests. Working people don’t want to be a part of imperialist projects and wars that steal resources and oppress people. Opting out of the Democratic and Republican parties isn’t enough. This is a moment where radical working-class socialist anti-capitalist formations have to make themselves available in all kinds of ways.

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By E.J. Esperanza

On July 1, anti-immigrant law SB1718 went into effect in the state of Florida. The law criminalizes undocumented workers in far-reaching ways: it subjects undocumented workers to felony charges for obtaining employment; it requires the use of E-Verify for employers with more than 25 employees; it requires hospitals and medical providers to screen for immigration status; it invalidates out-of-state drivers’ licenses held by undocumented people within the state; and it funds a $12 million program to relocate refugees from Florida to sanctuary jurisdictions in Democratic-run cities.

This is a witch-hunt, and immigrant workers are not waiting to fight back. Already, SB1718 has stirred mass protests from (mostly) Latino workers in and outside of Florida. On May 28, more than 2,000 undocumented workers, faith leaders, and families rallied in the agricultural town of Homestead, Florida, to oppose the legislation and demand a pathway to citizenship for the more than 11 million undocumented people living in the country.

A call to boycott Florida’s economy also spread online. The call to boycott was led by Latino truck drivers who vowed to stop deliveries in the state and called for “a day without immigrants,” in reference to the historic economic walkouts organized by immigrant workers across the country in 2006 and 2007.

On June 1, viral videos online depicted empty construction sites, businesses, and agricultural fields, as well as solidarity protests in over eight states.

The spontaneous strikes by thousands of undocumented workers against SB1718 demonstrate that immigrant workers are increasingly looking to the economic strike as an independent means to fight back.

These strikes from below also challenge the prevailing strategy within labor unions and the NGO-led immigrant rights movement, which rely on electing Democrats as the lesser of two evils instead of organizing strikes and building independent political power among immigrant workers – a strategy that has only emboldened right-wingers like Governor DeSantis in Florida. 

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July 5, 2023

Following the brutal murder of 17-year-old Nahel on Tuesday June 27, a wave of legitimate anger is sweeping through society:

Workers and young people demand justice for Nahel.

Being shot at point-blank range for a so-called “refusal to obey” is intolerable!

The murderer must face charges and be convicted.

This is also the responsibility of this regime, which uses police brutality to maintain capitalist domination, feeding on racist oppression and data-gathering.

This regime leaves no prospects for young people.

Macron’s government has only worsened the misery in which young people and workers in working-class neighborhoods live, by making extensive use of all the anti-democratic arsenal available under the Fifth Republic.

They are destroying public schools and jobs.

They are preparing to militarize young people with the SNU (Universal National Service) from the age of 15.

With its policy of hunting down immigrants, it is paving the way for the far right.

This government is a long way from defending the interests of us, young people and workers: its policies only go in one direction, and that is the direction of the bourgeoisie.

To defend ourselves against the violence of the bourgeois state, we need to destroy its roots. After five months on strike against pension reform, we have seen that the leaders of the trade unions refused to call for a general strike, and that the leaders of the “left” parties have called for respect for the institutions of the Fifth Republic.

Only workers and young people, united with independent organizations, can put an end to this government at the service of a handful of capitalists.

Justice for Nahel!

Justice for all the victims of police violence!

We demand that those responsible be punished!

Out with the Macron-Borne government!

Out with the Fifth Republic!

For a workers’ government in the service of workers and young people!

Contact address : contact.fjr2021@gmail.com

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In Defense of Higher Public Education!

By Fernando Márquez

Students of Anthropology of the University of California Berkeley have been occupying the Anthropology Library for months as a response to the University’s decision to disappear the library

This is one of only three specialized libraries in Anthropology in the U.S.

This is another of the series of attacks of capitalist elites against public education. The occupying students have been trying to get university admins to find a way to keep the library open but until now the university admins only proposal is to give a one-time-only US$40,000 support, which would only allow to keep the library open for around 9 months. 

To this situation we say:

NO TO THE LIBRARY CLOSING!

DEFEND PUBLIC EDUCATION!

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Letter to the Editor

Thank you for celebrating the life of Esteban (Seva) Volkov Bronstein, who we know foremost in relationship to his grandfather Leon Trotsky and preserving Trotsky’s legacy. Seva professionally had been a chemist who made an important contribution to women’s reproductive freedom.

Early on, he worked in the laboratory in Mexico where the birth control pill was developed. He also made an important contribution to the industrial production of birth control pills which allowed for their dissemination throughout the Americas.

A reader,

Vallejo, CA

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Eugene V. Debs Speaks Out Against First Imperialist War

Presentation by Mya Shone

Eugene V. Debs “was a famous labor organizer and strike leader – a man of action – long before he came to socialism,” wrote James P. Cannon, on the centennial of Debs’ birth (Nov. 15, 1855-Oct. 20, 1926). Debs, Cannon continued, “never lost his love and feel for the firing line of the class struggle after he turned to the platform.” In Chapter 2 of a remarkable pamphlet, Cannon discussed Debs’ transformation into a revolutionary socialist. Cannon focused his critical eye on the limitations as well as the potential of the Socialist Party and Debs’ role in shaping it.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1956/debs.htm#p02

Debs was the perfect example of an American worker whose life was transformed by the ideas of others, and imported ideas at that. Many influences, national and international, his own experiences and the ideas and actions of others at home and abroad, conspired to shape his life, and then to transform it when he was already on the threshold of middle age.

The employers and their political tools did all they could to help. When President Cleveland sent federal troops to break the strike of the American Railway Union in 1894, and a federal judge put Debs in jail for violating an injunction, they made a great, if unintended, contribution to the auspicious launching of the native American socialist movement.

The inspired agitator began to “study socialism” in Woodstock jail. That was the starting point of the great change in the life of Debs, and thereby in the prospects of socialism in this country. It was to lead a little later to the organization of the first indigenous movement of American socialism under the name of the Socialist Party.

The transformation of Debs, from a progressive unionist and Populist into a revolutionary socialist, didn’t happen all at once, as if by a sudden revelation. It took him several more years after he left Woodstock jail, carefully checking the new idea against his own experiences in the class struggle, and experimenting with various reformist and utopian conceptions along the route, to find his way to the revolutionary socialism of Marx and Engels.

But when he finally got it, he got it straight and never changed.

In May 1918, Congress expanded the Espionage Act of 1917 to include prohibitions on speech. The amendments, known commonly as the Sedition Act, forbade “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the U.S. government, its flag, or armed forces. Within one month of its passage, Eugene V. Debs was arrested — and later sentenced to ten years — for making a passionate speech in Canton, Ohio that exposed the war as solely in the interests of the capitalists and concluded by calling upon workers to “unite and act together” in both the industrial and political fields in order to “develop the supreme power of one class that can and will bring permanent peace to the world.”

Eugene V. Debs Canton, Ohio Speech June 16, 1918 (excerpts)

https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1918/canton.htm

Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. In the Middle Ages when the feudal lords who inhabited the castles whose towers may still be seen along the Rhine concluded to enlarge their domains, to increase their power, their prestige and their wealth they declared war upon one another. But they themselves did not go to war any more than the modern feudal lords, the barons of Wall Street go to war. The feudal barons of the Middle Ages, the economic predecessors of the capitalists of our day, declared all wars. And their miserable serfs fought all the battles. … And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose – especially their lives. 

They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people. …

And now for all of us to do our duty! The clarion call is ringing in our ears and we cannot falter without being convicted of treason to ourselves and to our great cause. …

In good time we are going to sweep into power in this nation and throughout the world. We are going to destroy all enslaving and degrading capitalist institutions and re-create them as free and humanizing institutions. … We need industrial and social builders. We Socialists are the builders of the beautiful world that is to be. … In due time the hour will strike and this great cause triumphant – the greatest in history – will proclaim the emancipation of the working class and the brotherhood of all mankind.

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Our comrade and friend Ralph Schoenman, one of the founding members of Socialist Organizer, died Monday, July 3 at the age of 87, felled not by the bullets and bombs that sometimes whirled around him or by the disinformation campaigns that sought to undermine his efforts, but by the devastating effects of Parkinson’s Disease, which he developed very late in life.

We are preparing a special tribute issue, celebrating his life and immersion in the struggle for socialism worldwide.

Ralph never was one to stand silently by. There is hardly a continent in which he wasn’t active and engaged. Today as the Zionists unleash yet another barbaric assault on the Palestinian refugees in Jenin, we must pay homage to Ralph’s longtime commitment to the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, the many campaigns and interventions he organized, as well as his extensive writing. Thawra Hatta al Nas’r (Revolution Until Victory!)

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Israel Launches Deadly Assault on Jenin!

In the early hours of July 3, over 1,000 Israeli troops descended on the Palestinian city of Jenin, including the crowded Jenin refugee camp, in a brutal and wide-ranging military invasion. Reports say that at least ten Palestinians, including children, had been killed.

The Israeli military invasion cut off water and electricity in Jenin, blocked ambulances from reaching injured Palestinians, attacked journalists, bulldozed homes and roads, and even attacked the Jenin Freedom Theater, where Palestinian families were seeking refuge. Israeli troops remain in the city — Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has stated that this invasion will continue for “as long as it takes.

This attack on Jenin, including Israeli airstrikes, is the largest invasion of a Palestinian city in the occupied West Bank in over 20 years.

The Biden administration refused to condemn this horrific assault. It is the U.S. government’s ongoing complicity in the Israeli military’s crimes against Palestinians that allows these horrors to continue unabated — particularly the $3.8 billion that the U.S. hands unconditionally to the Israeli military every year.

End All Aid to Apartheid Israel!

For a Democratic and Secular Palestine!