Palestinian Hamas supporters rally in the Gaza Strip to celebrate following Israel- Hamas truce
The cease fire between Israel and the Hamas Palestinian government in Gaza after 11 days of bombardment is the result of a major failure of Israel in the face of multiple facets of resistance to Netanyahu’s deliberate provocation of this phase of the Zionist war against the Palestinians. The ceasefire was conceded very reluctantly, and no sooner it had taken effect than the Israelis launched another provocation at Al Aqsa, but the public climb down was still significant and allowed the leaders of Hamas in Gaza to claim a victory.
It is a significant victory for the Palestinians against Netanyahu, despite the death of over 200 Palestinians, half of them women and children, and the destruction of numerous buildings, homes, and infrastructure. Israeli casualties from the Palestinian fire were, as is normal, tiny. The Israeli barbarism extended to the destruction of Gaza’s only Covid testing centre, the blowing up of high-rise residential blocks, rendering many homeless, and the destruction of a building housing the international press, from Al Jazeera to Associated Press, simply to stop accurate reporting of Israel’s massacres. Netanyahu had intended to resolve the impasse of his three-times failure to form a stable government coalition after three indecisive elections, and the threat of jail for corruption hanging over him, by flattening Gaza, and a new victorious ethnic cleansing of Al Quds/Jerusalem, even the destruction of Al Aqsa.
Israel is the most enduring and main dictatorship of imperialism over the oppressed peoples of all Asia
Imperialism and Zionism are hegemonic controllers of the world media and bourgeois public opinion. With this propaganda power, they sell the ideological myth that Israel is the only and true democracy in the Middle East. But in this confrontation Israel was unmasked and once again it is proved that in fact Israel is the most enduring and main dictatorship of imperialism over the oppressed peoples of all Asia, even when compared to the worst dictatorships such as those in Indonesia and Myanmar. Recently, this same Zionist imperialist media, at the service of the campaign in favor of Netanyahu, presented Israel as one of the countries that best conducted the fight against the pandemic, even vaccinating more than half of the Israeli population. Here, too, the condemnation of the Nazi-Zionist state is reinforced by the discovery of the increase in the Palestinian holocaust during Israel’s vaccination campaign, which was based on the denial of the Palestinian right to defend itself against the covid, with only 4.2% of Palestinians have been fully vaccinated so far.
The unconditional ceasefire was the result primarily of the resistance of the Palestinians, and particularly of that of the population of the Gaza strip, whose militant defenders fired hundreds of home-made rockets, hitting parts of Israel they had previously been unable to reach. Even though the damage from these home-made weapons was light as they do not have the billions of dollars of military technology and weaponry that Israel has, it was still a crucial act of solidarity with the victims of ethnic cleansing in Sheikh Jarrar, and against the outrageous communalist attack on the Al Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site to billions of Muslims around the world, whose destruction and replacement with a ‘third temple’ is one the key goals of the Zionist right, who are now dominant in Israel under Netanyahu.
But even more shocking from the point of view of the Israeli ruling class was the unified General Strike of Palestinian workers across the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel ‘proper’ within the ‘Green Line’ (the 1948 ceasefire borders). The Palestinian population within Israel, those who escaped the 1948 Nakba and were not expelled (but spent decades under military rule, and then as second-class non-Jewish citizens of a Jewish state), acted in solidarity with their Palestinian brethren right across occupied Palestine between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, underling that despite the Zionist fiction that designates this population as “Israeli Arabs”, they are Palestinians, part of the dispossessed Palestinian nation, and part of a integral Palestinian working class and oppressed population despite the division of his population by borders, checkpoints, separation walls and the Gaza fence. This section of the Palestinian population also fought back hard in mixed Israeli cities such as Lod/Lydda.
Palestine is one nation from the River to the Sea, and the Palestinian working class has considerable power, beyond its formal industrial muscle, which is limited as Israel limits its exposure to Arab labour with the long-term aim of dispensing with it. The political impact of such an act of the proletarian and oppressed masses is what frightened the Israeli ruling class into cutting their losses in this situation and accepting a ceasefire that only days earlier they had ridiculed. This recalls the words of Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto of 1947 when they wrote that:
“Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another.”
In other words, the potential of such a political strike action is in its ability to inspire further such actions, to create and expand a movement around itself, and to thus shake the stability of bourgeois rule itself. It has the potential to inspire other sections of the masses ground down by Zionism and its imperialist supporters around the world, and to endanger the precious ‘stability’ of Israel itself, which still uses its significant Palestinian minority as a fig-leaf to try to disguise the ethnocratic nature of the state. Not only that, but it is capable of inspiring international solidarity actions that further strengthen it. The actions of Italian port workers in refusing to load arms shipments for Israel, and South African dock workers in boycotting Israeli cargo in solidarity with the Palestinians are examples of the huge potential for international workers’ solidarity over this issue and no doubt played a major role in this Israeli setback.
It is no doubt this potential for radicalisation of the struggle that produced the volte-face not only from Israel, but from Biden, who though his Trump appointee and fanatical Zionist UN Ambassador, Nikki Haley, had defied earlier pressure particularly from China, Russia and eventually even France in the UN Security Council and vetoed draft resolutions calling for a ceasefire. Yet suddenly the weaselly US calls for ‘de-escalation’, while insisting on Israel’s supposed ‘right’ to defend itself against its victims, appeared to produce a ceasefire. Evidently it was the resistance that caused this, not anything Biden did.
However, the outspoken statements of Turkish leader Erdoğan and particularly Russia’s Putin, threatening unspecified reprisals against Israel for its blatant killings of civilians, may well have added pressure. In addition, the radicalisation of the Palestinian struggle and the increasing exposure of Israel’s crimes has produced something of a schism in the US Democratic Party, with Biden’s overt support for Israel during this attack coming under fire from what seems to be a growing, more radical layer, from Bernie Sanders to the ‘Squad’ of Black, Palestinian/Muslim, and Hispanic members in the House of Representatives, but not confined to them.
The contradictions involving this layer are potentially quite explosive, as the Israel lobby is not marginal but embedded in very powerful positions within the US ruling class and overlaps with the Israeli ruling class itself through dual citizenship and material investments in many cases. The Zionist lobby is likely to strike back hard through AIPAC, as indeed they already have tried to do, and that could produce a very bitter conflict within US bourgeois politics as Sanders and the Squad now have a considerable social and electoral base among partially radicalised layers of the US working class and oppressed. It could produce something like the confrontation with Corbyn’s supporters in Britain.
This confrontation between Israel and the Palestinians has produced a much larger movement of support around the world, with demonstrations of hundred of thousands in some places despite the pandemic. This needs to be built and strengthened much further into a movement that can generate much more powerful, class struggle actions and interact with the liberation movement within occupied Palestine and the wider Middle East region. To deepen the potential that evidently exists for working class struggles to radicalise, regionalise, and internationalise, pointing to the perspective of Permanent Revolution, the force of the primarily Arab proletariat that can crack Israel though placing itself at the head of the struggle of all the oppressed, for a multi-ethnic workers state in Palestine as part of a region-wide revolutionary struggle, with a world-revolutionary perspective.
● For the end of the Zionist Nazi state and for the extinction of the colonies expanding this imperialist policy!
● For a Multi-ethnic and multi religious Workers’ State of Palestine in a Socialist Federation of the Middle East of Workers’ Councils!
● For the international political strike and For Workers Sanctions against Israel!
● Unconditional Defence of Hamas against the Zionist state!
● For the military victory of the anti-imperialist guerrilla organizations Hamas and Hezbollah in Palestine, Lebanon and Syria!
Today Bukele has fallen out of favour with Biden-Harris and is coming into conflict with American imperialism in Central America, approaching China. Bukele is a bourgeois politician who passed through the FMLN (Farabundo Martí Front of National Liberation), being mayor of the capital San Salvador in 2015, from which he was expelled in 2017. From there he approached the Grand Alliance for National Unity (GANA),with which he took advantage of weariness with the bipartisanship constituted by the FMLN and ARENA, being elected president in 2019 and thus ending almost 30 years of bipartisanship in El Salvador.
Bukele will not be the first or last puppet of imperialism to fall into disgrace with his master in the North. In Panama, the dictador Manuel Noriega, received millions of dollars from U.S. imperialism, for 31 years participating in the crackdown of his country’s government, was a CIA agent for a long time, and was central to the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration. Noriega supported U.S. military operations against Nicaragua’s Sandinista Front and the FMLN in El Salvador itself. But despite this explicit history of services to imperialism, Noriega was overthrown by an American military invasion of Panama in 1989, when it was discovered that Noriega was playing a double game and, only since then, was he accused by the U.S. of trafficking drugs and weapons. Noriega played a double game because he also maintained close relations with staunch enemies of the United States, including Cuba, Libya and Nicaragua. Noriega smuggled weapons from Cuba and the USSR to the Sandinistas, charging much silver for that. Noriega sold thousands of Panamanian passports to the Cuban government for use by its intelligence services. Cuba also used Panama to triangulate the purchase of computers banned by the U.S. embargo. In return, Cuba provided Panama with weapons and military advisers.
Very more recently, in Guatemala in 2015, Pérez Molina, which although having nothing left-wing about him, came into contradiction with U.S. imperialism for proposing the decriminalization of drugs, thus affecting the interests of drug traffickers that stands behind the “war on drugs”. As we noted in 2018 in a document, http://tmb1917.blogspot.com/2018/11/crisis-migratoria.html). The case of Pérez Molina in Guatemala is that of another government that entered into some contradiction with imperialism. It was the international context of the time that stopped his government from approaching the Russian-Chinese pole.
Bukele learned from the experience of Central America and the Latin American group of bourgeois governments that had some contradiction with imperialism. Thus, judicial coupism such as lawfare (legal war) was prevented as in the cases of Guatemala, Ecuador, Argentina, and Brazil, with Bukele himself moving forward in judicial “cleansing” taking advantage of his official majority in the legislative assembly. This was achieved in early May this year, displacing the judges from the constitutional chamber of the supreme court of justice, and also the attorney general. This preventive maneuver by Bukele was explicitly condemned by the sector of US imperialism represented in the Biden-Harris government.https://www.cronista.com/internacionales/estados-unidos-tiene-grave-preocupacion-por-la-destitucion-de-jueces-en-el-salvador/
It should be noted that the attitude of imperialism, as we said, is aimed at not losing influence in Central America, not only in El Salvador. Immediately El Salvador would be relevant to the whole gulf of Fonseca, a geographical point constituted by an inlet on the Pacific Ocean formed in an archipelago that constitutes one of the best natural ports in the world, where three Central American countries have ports: El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golfo_de_Fonseca. The anti-China hysteria of U.S. imperialism sees in this a threat from China to its interests in the Gulf of Fonseca
This is a sign of the times, of the decline of the U.S. and its overcoming by China and its allies: In Honduras, in 2011, Zelaya suffered a coup d’état of imperialism led by the Obama-Biden Democratic Party government, because he flirted with Venezuela and the Eurasian pole. In El Salvador, in 2021, a decade after Zelaya, Bukele flirts with the same Eurasian pole so as not to suffer a coup d’état of imperialism. Both in the Area of the Americas (Central America) which constitutes the area of direct geostrategic dominance of American imperialism.
In accordance with the revolutionary tradition demonstrated by the exploited and oppressed of El Salvador in the 80’s when they became a fighting reference point for much of Latin America and the world, It is necessary to point out the limitations of the contradiction with imperialism that a bourgeois leadership like Bukele manifests today. It must not be forgotten that workers in El Salvador and Central America need to be independent of the Bukele government and all capitalist forces to advance their anti-imperialist demands, uniting democratic with socialist tasks in a process of permanent revolution, part of revolutionary struggles in Central America and all Latin America.
Workers in Colombia are fighting in a series of struggles against the adjustment policy, the “model” of the semicolonial state that imperialism seeks to impose in Latin America.
Faced with protests provoked by the tax package that Duque’s government wants to impose, the government is responding with a deep repression that already has had at least 156 people disappear according to international organizations of which on May 11, it is still unknown where 125 are in the city of Cali alone.
Urubism refers to former President Uribe, paramilitary and agent of the CIA and drug trafficking. President Duque belongs to this ilk, with Uribe being the power behind the throne in Colombia’s current government. Workers in Colombia are directly repressed by the official military apparatus and indirectly by para-military groups.
As of today, May 11 at least 37 were already counted dead, a figure that is above the officially recognized number of fatalities due to the repression of popular protests in Colombia.
Meanwhile throughout the country both the prosecutor’s office and defence attorneys pointed out that they have received 548 reports of “alleged missing” people, and that 189 people have already been located, so there are still 359 “in the process of verification and location”.
The “model” of polity represented by the Colombian state is the model that imperialism seeks to impose in Latin America with its paramilitarism, its unpunished pressure on the judicial and military system, in practice annexed to imperialism, coexistence with drug trafficking, etc. In this sense in Colombia popular struggles face a state model imposed by imperialism on the region. A neocolonial model that is not linked to a particular administration of Trumpists or Democrats, but which is part of imperialist state policy.
A defeat of this political “model” by Colombia’s workers and all the masses of people will bog down the repressive politics and attacks of workers’ living conditions on the South American continent. The defeat of this “model” is one of the transitional tasks of the struggle for a permanent revolutionary process to overthrow the whole of imperialist and capitalist domination in the heart of Latin America. For this, workers in Colombia must organize independently, while the most advanced must have to have for their objective the construction of the party of its vanguard to lead all of Colombia’s exploited and oppressed against adjustment and repression policies, as part of the struggle for a working-class government.
The house seizures and evictions in Sheikh Jarrar, East Jerusalem/Al Quds, the attacks on worshippers at the Al Aqsa Mosque/Dome of the Rock, and the murderous attacks on Gaza by Netanyahu’s ‘caretaker’ government, are a further escalation of the genocidal Zionist project of destroying the Palestinian people. One obvious purpose of this is to prolong Netanyahu’s own personal rule, facing a real possibility of jail for corruption, and having failed for the third time to form a stable government after an election, provoking a conflict with the Palestinians is no doubt a deliberate ploy to stay in power.
The Israeli regime took advantage of Ramadan to brutalise worshippers at the Al Aqsa Mosque while at the same time the ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem, given a green light by Trump’s move of the US Embassy to Jerusalem (which the US will not reverse under Biden), has escalated as Palestinian homes are confiscated to be handed over to more Jewish settlers, part of the annexation plans which the US okayed. The Sheikh Jarrar issue is now tied up in the Israeli Supreme Court, but no one should have any illusions as to the outcome of that; it is the latest episode in the ongoing Nakba of the Palestinian people since 1948. The attack on Al Aqsa is even more serious, as it prefigures what Zionist extremists have long planned to do: destroy Islam’s third most holy site and erect a ‘Third Temple’ on the site; an incredible provocation against the world’s Muslims and an index of Zionism’s vanguard role on the Western far right in trying to foment more predatory wars using religion and a supposed ‘clash of civilisations’ as a weapon.
In response to Israeli attacks on Al Aqsa and Sheikh Jarrar, Palestinian militants in Gaza have fired hundreds of their home-made rockets at Askelon, at Jerusalem itself and Tel Aviv, as a show of force in solidarity with those under attack. Giving rise to agonised calls from the Biden administration and from UK Labour’s Keir Starmer for ‘de-escalation’. Biden will do nothing to stop Israel, of course. Even if the current US administration finds this inconvenient, it has to reckon with Israel’s supporters in in the US ruling class, and at best will most likely continue to vacillate before falling into line with the Zionists. They are, after all, the strategic allies and supporters of US and Western imperialism, which will not lightly cross them. Meanwhile the UK Johnson government has condemned the ‘attacks’ on Israel from Gaza. Openly supporting the genocidal Zionists, of course they say nothing to condemn the ethnic terrorism in Jerusalem, or the murderous ariel bombardment of Gaza that has already led to 24 dead today, including nine children killed.
We in the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International condemn these barbaric attacks and call on the working-class movement and all oppressed peoples to express solidarity with the Palestinians. This must include where possible political strikes and labour movement boycotts directed at the Zionist regime. The Zionist state must be overthrown by the working class of the region, with the Palestinian masses in the lead, and Israel’s population of colonial-settlers must be subordinated to basic democracy. For the unconditional right to return of all Palestinian victims of Zionism! Smash Zionism and all its racist laws and impositions! The Zionist state must be replaced through a process of permanent revolution, mobilising the oppressed masses behind the working class as the champion of all the oppressed, with a multi-ethnic state of Palestine, part of a wider, regional revolutionary offensive.
Communist Fight issue no 5, paper of the Consistent Democrats, British Section of the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International, is out now. Including in hard copy, it is on sale for £2.50 (£1 concession) It contains the extensive May Day statement of the LCFI, which addresses the issues posed for the world working class by the pandemic, the economic crisis that accompanies it, and the continued conflicts in the world occasioned by the decline of US hegemony and the challenges to it, as well as a section on the current situation in Britain.
Also it features:
a major article from our Brazilian comrades on Navalny, who evidently aspires to be the Guaido of Russia and is a truly sinister, far right figure that the workers movement should not be defending.
a united front statement signed by ourselves and other left forces denouncing imperialist threats against Russia over Ukraine.
our statement on Biden’s escalation of US aggression in Syria, and his continuation of Trump’s anti-China campaign.
An article on the recent campaign for unionisation at Amazon at Bessemer, Alabama, also from our comrades from the Americas.
Our statement and political account on the break of the rump Socialist Fight group from the LCFI, and consequently why the British Section of the LCFI is no longer a faction and has thus changed its name to reflect that.
And an account of the fight waged by one of our comrades against being purged from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign by its Starmer-loyal leaders, who effectively act as just another arm of the Israel lobby.
Amazon is the largest online retailer on the planet. The company currently employs about 1.3 million people worldwide, placing it among the top 10 employers in the world, along with the US Department of Defense, the Chinese Army, the UK National Health Service, and private corporations like MacDonald’s and Walmart.
Amazon is a U.S. multinational company that focuses its business on a global e-commerce-based postal service and secondarily in cloud-computing, streaming and artificial intelligence. It is considered one of the five major global technology companies that control almost everything that is digital, commerce, internet searches, information about all users and even more their employees.
Amazon composes the acronym “FAGA”, along with Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook. These trusts are responsible for technological imperialism, based on the exploitation of labor, obviously information control, fake news, trade wars, dumping, currency evasion for tax havens and scheduled obsolescence.
The largest contemporary capitalist private company
During the pandemic, Amazon owner Jeff Bezos increased his fortune by nearly 30 percent, adding $34 billion since January 2020. Bezos began the year 2020 owner of “modest” US$ 115 billion. But with the pandemic and increased sales during social isolation, the company’s revenue and shares skyrocketed.
The company’s slogan is “work hard, have fun, make history.” In fact, Amazon’s 1.3 million employees took the hard, hard work, while Bezos has fun and makes history and could become the first trillion-dollar employer on the planet, achieving a dizzying social ascent with a company founded in 1994. His net worth has grown 34 percent on average over the past five years. In 2012, Amazon bought Kiva Systems to automate its inventory management business. In 2017, Amazon bought Whole Foods Market, a multinational natural products supermarket. The acquisition cost $13.4 billion, expanding Amazon’s physical retail. Amazon Prime is a 48-hour delivery service that has surpassed 100 million subscribers worldwide in 2018. In addition to Whole, Amazon’s trust groups Alexa, CreateSpace, Kindle, Audible, Audible.com, DPReview, Box Office Mojo, Goodreads, Twitch.tv and AbeBooks, among many other companies and technologies. In 2019, Amazon became the most valuable company in the world, surpassing Microsoft.
Intense exploitation of work and anti-unionism
The untheoretical growth of Amazon’s largest retail e-commerce network relies on a really hard work regime. To this end, it dismantled all attempts to form trade unions in the U.S. or to unionize their workers into existing unions, with persecution and layoffs, terror and blackmail, meetings, and anti-union training courses. However, Amazon has not been able to prevent strikes, including savage strikes in both the US and the European Union. At the plants of Germany and Italy the workers have carried out powerful strikes and plucked conquests.
The company establishes journeys of up to 36 hours in a row, shifts from 10h-12h, during which, the selectors are practically all the time working standing; 30-minute intervals between shifts, restriction and monitoring of bathroom use, drinking water and changing work gloves and paying $15.30 per hour. Many workers have been dying because they have been forced to work under these massing rhythms and unhealthy conditions at Amazon’s facilities during the Pandemic.
In early 2020, Amazon fired JFK8 shed manager Christian Smalls because he was organizing workers not to contract coronavirus in the shed after seven confirmed cases, he claimed to close the shed for 2 weeks and establish paid sick leave during that period. After his resignation, the company’s executives immediately began a secret plan to turn him into a villain, accused him of the opposite of what he claimed, to put his co-workers in danger upon returning to the building and possibly exposing them to Covid-19.
The union defeat in the battle of Bessemer
One of the first struggles for the right to unionization at Amazon took place in Minnesota in 2010. However, this struggle failed to boost an internal vote for unionization. In 2014, it was the turn of the workers of the sheds of Delaware. This fight was stronger, managed to impose a vote for unionization but was defeated. In November 2020, workers at the Bessemer Distribution Center, in a poor suburb north of Birmingham, Alabama, where about 6,000 people work, filed a lawsuit with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to hold a unionization vote.
In one of the U.S. states with the largest anti-union tradition, Republican-controlled Alabama was where one of the largest recent battles for the unionization of Amazon workers developed. The battle took place through a vote among workers who will decide whether or not to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), which represents 100,000 members across the United States.
“Alabama is one of 27 ‘right-to-work states’ where workers don’t have to pay fees to unions that represent them because employer’s legislation ‘freed’ workers from the union tax. In fact, the state is home to the only Mercedes-Benz factory in the world that is not unionized.”
In 2019, Bessemer with a poverty rate of 30% of the population was named “The worst city to live in” in the State of Alabama, (https://247wallst.com/special-report/2019/07/22/worst-cities-to-live-in-every-state-4/2/)
Alabama was one of the largest slave states in the Southern Confederacy. Today, blacks make up 25% of the population, while the national average is 13%. More than 70% of the city’s population is black. In the Bessemer shed 85% of workers are black, much more than the 22% for workers in other distribution centers in the country. Then, after the year 2020, marked by the largest wave of protests against racism in U.S. history, the union struggle united with the struggle for dignity and respect of black workers in opposition to the racism contained in capitalist exploitation.
However, in the vote inside the factory, the struggle for unionization to the RWDSU was defeated by a ratio of 2 votes to 1. Only 738 of the factory’s 5,800 workers voted in favor of the union within a total of 3,215 voters, 1,798 voted against, not counting spoiled and disputed ballots. The fact that less than 13% of workers voted for unionization at RWDSU is a defeat that needs to be explained.
The causes of defeat point to the conditions necessary for victory
Like almost everything in life, several contradictory determinations have combined for a phenomenon. One of the causes of the defeat was the fact that Amazon played hardball in its campaign, resorting to different forms of persuasion, from intimidation to conducting sympathetic anti-union indoctrination meetings, betting on different modes for different audiences, thus involving coertion, threats of layoffs, surveillance and also the appeal to individualism, the distrust of workers with the union that would only be interested in discounts on paychecks.
The company also distributed anti-union bottons “Vote No” and “asked” its employees to display them on the cords of their functional badges: “Almost everyone uses them,” said Daniel Tarvese, a 36-year-old Amazon worker. Many young workers were also seduced by the company’s demagoguery at anti-union meetings conducted entirely by gentle black instructors,
“They were nice, they were just telling us what the union was doing,” said Jeremiah Okai,19. It was the presentation on union contributions that helped persuade him to vote against the Amazon union in Alabama – The union] will take money from me – Okai said – I don’t want any money taken from me.”
As part of the arsenal of this corporate hybrid warfare, Amazon also appealed to the so-called Hawthorne Effect, developed in a light bulb factory in Australia a century ago. It is about instilling in workers the belief that they were valued, cared and that someone cared about their workplace, even when they are being subjected to the risk of dying by Covid (!). In addition, anti-union seminars were made a theater that workers were having the opportunity to discuss changes to increase productivity in the company, while collaborating with the denial of their elementary labor and union rights.
One of the main ballot boxes was installed in front of the company and managers insisted that workers fill out ballots and deposit them at the ballot box in front of them as an open vote.
But this was already expected by the bosses and it is only the purest fatalism justifying defeat just because the other side was stronger and used all its legal and illegal weapons to win, as they try to justify the union. Moreover, it is also not new that it was from corporate espionage against the political and trade union organization of workers, through Pinkerton detective agencies, that were born, in the early twentieth century, the powerful international spy agencies of the United States.
“Jeff Bezos would not be the richest man in the world if he were not versed in the fundamentals of maximizing profit – among them, the suppression of labor costs and the flight of regulations. Unionization is antithetical to this goal because unions exist to ensure better wages and safer and more comfortable working conditions, which raises labor costs and lowers profits. If Bezos gets what he wants, there will never be a shed with even unionized workers on Amazon.”
(Companies like Amazon hire spies to crack down on union formation all the time, https://jacobin.com.br/2020/10/empresas-como-amazon-contratam-espioes-para-reprimir-formacao-de-sindicatos-o-tempo-todo/)
The problem is that if on the one hand it was the largest valuable of the world’s exploitative workers’ companies, on the other hand, a bourgeois and bureaucratic campaign was carried out by the leadership of the movement for unionization. This other side merely held an identity struggle against racism but did not establish a single concrete claim of workers against Amazon, which is an essential function of the union, “forgotten” by RWDSU and the arch-bureaucratic central trade union AFL-CIO. They also did not try to build a national movement and work with other unions to try to reach various Amazon facilities across the country at the same time.
The campaign for unionization was supported by the Democratic Party, including the explicit support of “Socialist” Senator Bernie Sanders, U.S. President Joe Biden and even Republican senators like Marco Rubio. But America’s working class is too disgusted with the politics of Democrats and all their traditional political representatives, including unions. Not by chance, Trump was elected in 2016 and was voted most in Alabama in 2020 because a part of the working-class electorate, historically voters of Democrats who protested in a reactionary way, seduced by Trump’s false “apolitical” appeal and rejecting traditional establishment politicians, including the AFL-CIO that integrates the regime and supported the spin on the financialization of the economy, industrial relocations, factory closures,wage reductions that have caused one-third of industrial jobs to be destroyed in the U.S. in the last 50 years.
One of the progressive reactions to this rejection of the establishment was the “socialist” wave unheard of in the US, headed by Bernie Sanders in 2018-19, which was also soon betrayed and buried by Bernie Sanders himself.
So, it is no wonder that, on the basis of the very alienation of labor, the individualism stimulated in bourgeois society, and especially in the decadent American society, Amazon’s campaigns against unionization have worked. Even so, from this filter of demoralization and employer indoctrination, 1/3 of the workers willing to face the consequences of corporate espionage and the risk of dismissal itself still escaped. And this 1/3 is due a lot to the organization of workers in the workplace:
“Without a strong organizing committee, already involving the boss in the factory floor action, the workers did not have the ability to see the potential positive side of the union because they never saw the union in action on the factory floor before being called to vote to join it. … the organizing committee already acts as a union, winning workplace campaigns to change things and defending co-workers who face unfair discipline. … In huge facilities with thousands of workers like Amazon, the process of building a strong organizing committee and trust in the organizing committee through combined actions can sometimes take years. RWDSU had begun its campaign last June when outrage over unsafe working conditions during COVID was high. Although they showed great momentum and initial interest, they never developed a strong organizing committee that was concerned with building trust through actions on the shop floor and organization against the boss. Instead, they precipitated a union election, or did what is known in the union organization as “hot shopping,” where union organizers hope to take advantage of an outburst of anger at a facility over things like poor COVID working conditions to force and win and a fast-track union election. However, initial support for union enthusiasm collapsed under the weight of Amazon’s sophisticated anti-union campaign, which combined threats of job loss with promises of improvement if workers rejected the union. Many workers in interviews who voted against the union admitted they knew little about unions. This allowed the company, through anti-union meetings, to create fear about the change that unions could bring about, warning workers that their wages may actually decline due to a contract or, worse, that their facilities may close.”
Despite the defeat in Alabama, the fight continues and internationalizes outside and inside Amazon.
A win in Bessemer would boost a domino effect on all Amazon plants in the US, with workers feeling encouraged to put a stop to these degrading working and low-wage conditions. After the union’s defeat, many workers are likely to face retaliation. But this defeat also stimulates the construction of union and political work to organize the class patiently by ad hoc workplace. While the results were being counted in the battle at Bessemer, even not unionized, Amazon workers from Chicago began a new battlefront, with a wildcat strike, claiming wage increase of $2 per hour, division of costs of transport to and from work and modifications in the shift of 10.5 hours. They organize under the name Amazonians United Chicagoland:
Unionizing is not a moment, it’s a process. Unionizing is a moving process when workers meet to formulate claims and a plan to sign most co-workers. Unionization is happening when uninvolved coworkers join class actions against management and when a new member of the organizing committee distributes Amazonians United newsletters during the break. We’re unionizing as we develop a sense of family among ourselves as we gather for barbecues and kickbacks while helping each other through times of need. That electricity in the air after we roll up a manager, making him nervous when he delivers our petition and expressing our demands as a group, knocking him and us up. … That feeling is our union, a workers’ union, coming to be.
We’re building a real union, not a useless business union, which is simply an extracting organization of law firm employees for workers to call. We are not interested in handing over our collective power to a bureaucrat who appears every three years to ′negotiate′ a concession contract through backroom agreements with our bosses. We don’t need the recognition of the NLRB or the Amazon to form our union, grow our union, or fight as a union. Our union is us workers, organized, acting collectively, building unity, growing in solidarity, fighting as one.
So, what does it take to unionize Amazon? It will take perseverance, humility and struggle. It will lead many workers with a deep commitment to organize the spread throughout the Amazon facilities, forming OCs that face issues that resonate with co-workers. Every time we gain a change through the organization, co-workers see the power to act collectively. This is how we begin transformations across the workplace from the standard individualistic mindset to a collective mindset. This is how we create a culture of militancy where we all put our incompetent managers in their place instead of bowing our heads to their disrespect. Each organizing committee, committed to the principles of the United Amazonians, is the foundation of our union, and we grow from there, collectively developing our strategy and vision as we go. ”
Not only was the trillion-dollar slave boss, capitalist racism, the imperialist White House becoming an ally, the Democratic trade union bureaucracy, not only all these obstacles against their emancipation, some “Trotskyists” who appear to help, hinder even more. The ICFI organization, which owns the WSWS website, campaigns against unionization by releasing pamphlets that say they are not organized in the unions, organize with the WSWS (!?). Bezos thanks them and even more thanks the imperialist Democrats because with this sectarian policy the most conscientious workers will repudiate the “Trotskyist” sterility and continue to be deceived by Sanders and Biden.
Even empirically, Amazon’s most combative and conscientious workers know they need to organize for the fight against bosses, and if bosses pursue union activity, even if most unions are bureaucratized, it is necessary to boost the union’s class organization. And in this sense follow the struggle the workers of Amazon of Chicago, or Germany and Italy.
A capitalist post office, as a model of a socialist institution
As Lenin believed, the union is a school of class struggle, the first single front of workers against their employers. From this school of economic and immediate struggle it is possible to move on to the political and strategic struggle. From the struggle against an individual capitalist or corporation, to the fight against all capital, against the system of assembly and thus, advance in the consciousness of the proletariat by the expropriation of expropriators, by a new social and economic order. The communist consciousness is not only built after the passage of trade union struggle, but there is no communist organization with proletarian work of the masses, with renunciation of immediate and economic work.
Soon, soon, even the most conservative sectors, but the rearguard of the proletariat of Amazon is going to realize that they were cheated with lies and techniques of persuasion. Illusions will pass, fear will pass, only work overload, slavery and misery will remain. The fight against Amazon is a contemporary class struggle school.
The company seemed politically stronger than the manifest will of the U.S. president and his party. As it was the interests of the workers, the support of the Democrats and Biden was nothing more than proselytizing. Biden was so vehement in defending the unionization of Amazon workers when disinterested in their victory. You could have used any state device to pressure Bezos, but you didn’t. “It wouldn’t be ethical,” in their logic.
Bezos acted as if the president’s words were a dead letter, and the White House too, to the anguish of the “socialists” and Democratic unionists and the next big deal demonstrated how windy were the words of Biden’s statement. On April 13, Blue Origin, an aerospace company founded by Jeff Bezos, ran a lucrative business with the U.S. State. Bezos signed a $2.5 million contract with the Pentagon to design a nuclear-powered spacecraft. The commander in chief of the Pentagon is Biden. The outcome of this dispute also points to those who are in charge of the relationship between the imperialist state and the increasingly powerful global monopolistic corporations.
Amazon and USA; Alibaba and China
In this sense, it is a good benchmark for the contradictory relationship between the Chinese state and the Alibaba conglomerate, whose businesses, like those of Amazon, are based on electronic commerce. Alibaba accounts for 60% of the volume of deliveries in China.
The Chinese capitalist state well knows that it needs to maintain control of the market and corporations in order not to lose control of the economy if its plans are to follow its U.S. outperform route. Against Chinese billionaire Jack Ma, owner of Alibaba, the Chinese government imposed heavy fines and blocked the opening of capital of the Ant Group on the Shanghai and Hong Kong Stock Exchanges. With more than 1.2 billion users, Ant Group is in practice the world’s largest fintech.
According to the Chinese government and press, Ma was slowed by making acquisition agreements contrary to antitrust laws and having announced that he would hold the largest IPO (the initial public offering of shares) in the history of the Stock Exchanges. ‘If they leave the company uncontrolled, their own control can be eroded.’ Prevent disorderly expansion of capital’.
The Chinese techno-bureaucracy, which claims as a reference its formation in dialectical materialism (under Maoist vices), knows that controlling the growth of an individual multimillionaire is fundamental to continue with the planned advance of Chinese capitalism. So while the U.S. is bitter at the unstoppable if not world war of its hegemony on the globe, Chinese capitalism is still thriving for the time being. China’s economy grew by 18.3% in the first quarter of 2021 compared to the same period in 2020. It was the largest increase in gross domestic product (GDP) since quarterly data began to be collected in the early 1990s. 2021 surpassed the previous record increase of 15.3% in the first quarter of 1993.
Victorious today, Amazon prepares the conditions for its strategic defeat tomorrow.
The owner of Amazon is the richest individual capitalist on the planet. Amazon is the largest online retailer. Amazon with all its weapons offers us the most sophisticated conditions of contemporary capitalism to learn how to fight it. So far, the parasite Bezos and his entourage have fared better in battles. But our sidelearns, strengthens in number, before the first wave of the pandemic in March 2020, Amazon announced that it would hire 100,000 more workers for its sheds in Canada and the USA. And equally important is that the experience of battles better selects the commanders of the fight on ourside, making the Democratic bureaucrats be overcome by new combative leaders. We learn how to beat their secret agents, their technological pitfalls, their cyber espionage. Amazon won the battle of Alabama, but the private post-office company, now dominated by the dictatorship of the capital, will one day lose the class war.
The dynamics of global corporations like Amazon imposes the need for the organization of the international struggle of workers, which transcends the corporate activity of local unions. The very global character of these capitalist corporations generates the material premises for this organization of international struggle to be possible.
Referring to the post companies of his time, Lenin indicated in his work State and Revolution:
“Around 1870, a witty social democrat regarded the mail as a model of a socialist institution. Nothing fairer. Currently, mail is an organized administration, according to the type of monopoly of the capitalist state. “
However, the mail-like companies known to the socialists of the beginning of the century were state and national monopolies. Amazon is a private and multinational monopoly, that is, subject to an organized global administration, which merges e-commerce and production. Lenin continues:
“Imperialism gradually transforms all trusts into organizations of the same kind. The simple workers, hungry and overworked, remain subjected to bourgeois bureaucracy, but the mechanism of social enterprise is ready. Once the capitalists are overthrown, once broken by the iron hand of the armed workers, the resistance of their exploiters, once the bureaucratic machine of the current state has been torn down, we will be faced with the admirably perfected mechanism free of the ‘parasites’ and that the united workers themselves can very well put into operation by hiring technicians, masters and accountants and paying them all for their work as all ‘public’ employees in general, a worker’s salary. This is the concrete, practical and immediately achievable task for all trusts, aimed at freeing workers from exploitation; this task has already been initiated practically, in the governamental domain, by the Paris Commune.
We must take this experience into account. All economic life organized the way of mail, in which technicians, inspectors and accountants all employees will receive a salary that does not exceed the salary of a worker on the direction of a control of the armed proletariat – this is our immediate goal. This is the state, this is the economic basis we need. This is what will annihilate parliamentarism, while maintaining representative institutions; this is what will make these institutions, currently prostituted to the bourgeoisie, institutions at the service of the working classes.”
This year gone many billionaires doubled their wealth and 500 new ones emerged. While 150 million more pushed into extreme poverty.
Capitalism must be overthrown!
For May Day 2021 the working class internationally faces the direst situation since the early 1930s, and in some ways worse. Capitalism is squeezing our class around the world from many directions. The Covid-19 Pandemic is a result of capitalist despoilation of the environment and a terrible by- product of its wanton exploitation of nature. Its apparent origin in China is no doubt a by-product of the commodification of that society through capitalist restoration, but such despoilation of nature, which creates risks of spill-over biological events that can do enormous harm to humanity, are possible in many places. Nature is being degraded by capitalism all over the world.
We are being affected by a multi-sided crisis of considerable complexity and the need for radical and even revolutionary solutions, and the political leadership that can bring them into being, is a felt need of masses of people all over the world. The last century or so since the Russian Revolution of 1917 has been a century of wars, revolutions, and counterrevolutions. Since the 1980s, however, we saw a wave of counterrevolutions, when the conditions and gains achieved by working class people the world over have come under concerted attack from neoliberalism, the capitalist ideology that aimed to free monopoly capital from all the restraints on it resulting from a century of working class struggles and gains, in the name of a ‘free market’ which under todays concentrated, monopoly/corporate capitalism is a complete myth and lie.
The destruction of a number of so-called ‘Communist’ countries a generation ago: which were in fact deformed workers states, damaged by-products of the Russian and international workers’ struggles of 1917 onwards, has not led to a world of freedom and democracy, “the End of History” as neoliberal ideologues such as Francis Fukuyama proclaimed a generation ago in the midst of counterrevolution in the East. It has led to the unrestrained despoilation of the planet by neoliberal capitalism, and the re-emergence of pandemic disease on a scale last seen in 1918-20, after what was then the most terrible world-wide war in history, the product of imperialist capitalism.
The crises we face today: the pandemic and the millions of deaths it has already led to, the climate threat it is linked to, the economic crisis that was already a problem and the pandemic is deepening into a depression that is already desperately impoverishing the masses in semi-colonial countries in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, as well as hurting the masses in imperialist countries also. According to Forbes, nearly 500 new billionaires joined Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk last year as the world’s richest became $5 trillion richer (see https://www.businessinsider.com/billionaires-became-5-trillion-richer-during-pandemic-forbes-list-2021-4). Meanwhile, the World Bank estimated last October that the pandemic would :
“… push an additional 88 million to 115 million people into extreme poverty this year, with the total rising to as many as 150 million by 2021, depending on the severity of the economic contraction. Extreme poverty, defined as living on less than $1.90 a day, is likely to affect between 9.1% and 9.4% of the world’s population in 2020, according to the biennial Poverty and Shared Prosperity Report. This would represent a regression to the rate of 9.2% in 2017. Had the pandemic not convulsed the globe, the poverty rate was expected to drop to 7.9% in 2020.
https://tinyurl.com/askdcje8
All these things, like the two world wars, are products of the untrammelled capitalism that led to world war then and, unleashed, is pushing the world toward a similar or likely worse catastrophe today. Capitalism is incapable of solving the problems it has brought into being in the early 21st Century. It is incapable of ceasing to destroy our environment and thus avoiding more future catastrophes such as pandemics and wars that threaten our existence, because the fundamental nature of the system is the unlimited, expanding production and realisation of surplus value for private profit.
Only when humanity takes all production out the hands of capital and plans production and distribution in accord with both the needs of all humanity at a global level, and the preservation and sustainment of the natural world on which we depend, removing the profit motive from social production, can the future of human civilisation and nature be saved from otherwise inevitable destruction. In the meantime, we need to demand that workers, peasants and other oppressed layers around the world who are forced to quarantine by the deadly threat of Covid-19 be fully paid and compensated for their loss of income, with full sick pay. Imperialist capitalism, which sucks the blood out of the working masses of the world and has accumulated enormous wealth, whose value representation is stored away in tax-havens around the world, must be forced to pay for this, on pain of igniting an international working-class movement against them that can be the gravedigger of capital globally.
It was the existence of the workers states, latterly severely damaged, of which only Cuba and North Korea now remain, as a systemic alternative that forced the capitalists to make concessions to workers in the three decades after the Second World War, that are being plundered by neoliberalism today. Obviously, these workers states and what remains of those gains need to be defended against counterrevolution, but above all we need a new thrust towards an international revolution against capital. We need to create the mass movements and parties to lead that.
Deadly Populism
The pandemic is the immediate question of the hour facing the world working class; the trillion-dollar capitalist pharmaceutical industry is now kicking into gear and has launched mass vaccination campaigns in the imperialist countries, having perfected a suite of quite effective vaccines. The Trump regime caused hundreds of thousands of working-class people to lose their lives because it refused to implement basic quarantine measures and as part of this right-wing populist form of neoliberalism, employers routinely forced workers to work in unsafe conditions. Trump even supported protests by right-wing libertarians against State public health measures. This cost the US 575,000 deaths and counting, a calamity more than ten times greater than US losses in the losing Vietnam colonial/counterrevolutionary war, which was previously the benchmark of national catastrophe in the US. Now Trump is gone, a more efficient and formidable US imperialist administration is taking steps to eliminate Covid among its own population and has embarked on a mass vaccination drive that is rapidly outpacing anywhere else where the disease was allowed to run rampant.
This is also happening in Britain: the demise of Trump appears to have forced Britain’s mini-Trumpian Brexiter Johnson to focus on mass vaccination as the way to sustainably re-open the economy, after a year of staccato lockdowns that were repeatedly sabotaged from above before they could be fully effective. In the European Union, issues involving disputes about limited supplies of vaccines and about vaccine side-effects, mean vaccination has been slower than expected, and some similar issues have slowed vaccinations in Japan. However, particularly in Britain, this has been laced with racism. Johnson’s government changed its approach to testing and quarantine at the borders at the end of 2020, with the third wave. Previously in 2020 the government was very reluctant to close borders and indeed for part of the year, in the summer Britons were encouraged to take overseas holidays to 59 countries, notwithstanding the pandemic. In the third wave, however, they have banned all pretty much all travel. However, they plan in May to introduce a traffic light system, that bans all travel to and from a large number of mainly Global South countries, mixing those like Brazil, Mexico and India with appalling Covid epidemics and new strains of the virus which are indeed a threat, with other places that have had much lower Covid rates than much of Europe. Europe meanwhile appears to be largely exempt.
The pandemic coincided with the ascendancy of right-wing populism not just in advanced countries, but around the world, including not only the Trumps and Johnsons, but also the grotesque Bolsonaro in Brazil who has made the pandemic considerably worse.
The frustration of the masses with the left-wing populist wave of the first 15 years of the century (particularly in Latin America) in overcoming the ills of capitalism, favoured the appearance of right-wing populism. In making this observation, we do not put an equals sign between populism on the right and on the left. We defend the working masses and their historical rights against the rise of right-wing populism. We defend the oppressed countries and the remaining workers’ states against imperialism. But, at the same time, we signal the failure of populism on the bourgeois left. The working masses cannot continue to be deceived forever by different options of their class enemies, they must break and overcome the demagogues of capital in their struggle to expropriate all expropriators.
Other important countries such as India and Mexico have struggled with out-of-control Covid epidemics due to a combination of massive poverty and incompetent governments, in the case of India the desperate plight of its people has been made worse by nationalist extremism, with Modi forbidding the use of tested vaccines from abroad in favour of a home-grown vaccine that had not even got past its trial phases. India is one of the chief sites for vaccine manufacture and export, but its own home-grown vaccine programme is in chaos.
The historical dimension of the current massacre of the Brazilian people at the hands of the Bolsonaro government
No previous massacre killed as many Brazilians as the current one, neither in the criminal war of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay against Paraguay (the greatest war in Latin America), nor during the “Spanish flu” (1918), nor in the second world war. The population is being defencelessly exposed to the virus, the defences have been withdrawn by the government and the regime on which it is based. The health care system has been dismantled. Labour rights have been withdrawn. The prices of food, medicine, oxygen, fuel, have skyrocketed. The real wages of the proletariat have been reduced. The beds have been reduced. The vaccine was not purchased. The information given was untrue and all of this caused this historic amount of death. The government that was supposed to defend its people, has disarmed it for war and the people are being wiped out like never before. For all these reasons, it is not allowed to believe that there is no control over the pandemic, but an orientation clearly aimed at creating collapse, creating chaos, despair, and the precariousness of the population’s life is being guinea pig for an unprecedented experiment in history.
The analysis of the devaluation of wages allows us to unveil a main expression of this capitalist experiment. The real wages of the proletariat have been cut in half. The “emergency aid” for the pandemic, which was half the minimum wage in 2020, became a parameter for the informal and real national minimum wage has become the new reference value for the devaluation of the workforce. Now, in 2021, the misery of the masses has increased a lot, together with the inflation of goods, with dollarized prices. The “emergency aid” for the pandemic was expected to increase according to the needs of the workers but ended up being reduced to a value corresponding to 1/4 of the minimum wage. and, in increasingly broad sectors, also by new technological applications. Capital is profiting a lot from the pandemic, greatly expanding the exploitation and degradation of the workforce. Wages paid are less than the value of the labour power, preventing this class from reproducing in their normal way of life. For this reason, hunger, and many other ills favoured by misery are created, including the aggravation of the pandemic itself for the poorest. The degree of exploitation of work was also deepened by new technological tools that prolong the journey and occupy the moments of the workers’ day and night to the maximum, now with work also at home. The intensification of work and the compression of wages below their value are two causes that counteract the fall in the rate of profit, already pointed out by Marx in Capital, used by capitalists to avoid, or get out of crises for more than 120 years. Another important element of this experiment is the increase in social control justified by the pandemic. This second element favours the degradation of wages because it puts workers on the defensive even more, creating an additional obstacle for them to fight for their wage and labour rights and their working conditions.
The result was that Brazil became “a danger to the world” in the words of the president of Venezuela, Maduro, because of the carnage there and the space given for more harmful variants to evolve and accumulate. Due to the economic crisis and the pandemic that were made use of by Bolsonaro and the entire bourgeoisie that supported the 2016 coup, in 2021, 116 million Brazilians became hungry poor, and 20 bourgeois became new billionaires. Thus, despite the historic slaughter, Bolsonaro continues to have strong support from the vast majority of businessmen and bankers.
Bolsonaro
But if no fraction of the bourgeoisie, if the bourgeois opposition of the traditional right does not wish to take Bolsonaro out of power, the left-headed opposition headed by the PT also does not consistently and truly defend the mass struggle against Bolsonaro. Today, the vast majority of the working class wants the return of Lula and the Workers’ Party. The PT was beaten in 2016 and Lula was prosecuted and imprisoned for 580 days in one of the most scandalous and infamous judicial hoaxes in history, assembled from the U.S. Department of Justice during the Obama-Biden administration. This process prevented Lula from being a candidate and favoured the election of Bolsonaro in 2018, supported by Trump and the Brazilian bourgeoisie. However, it seems that Lula’s conciliatory vices remain stronger than all the possible learning during the coup process. The PT seeks bourgeois allies among those who participated in the conspiracy that overthrew Dilma, promises to privatize state companies, does not undertake to revoke all the coup measures that harm the working class, as well as social security and labour reforms, and invited the biggest billionaire in the country to be vice-president on his ticket. Even worse is that, relying on the pressure that the pandemic exerts on the working class to not take to the streets to protest, the PT, the union central CUT and the MST, do not rely on their social bases to stop the coup process and return to government from the struggle for the overthrow of Bolsonaro or even in the 2022 elections. Lula and the PT are betting on a policy of increasing commitments to the coup capital. This tactic of trusting the enemy was the one that favoured the entire coup process to be successful without the coup-takers having to fire a single shot or resort to tanks to achieve their goals. All of this means that despite all the crises and bizarre events, Bolsonaro’s maintenance in the government is also based on the weakness of those who oppose him, especially in the policy of reconciling the leaderships of the workers and popular movement with the coup regime established since 2016.
Argentina and the pandemic
In Argentina the economic situation worsened with the pandemic and inflation led to an increase in poverty levels. At the same time, the government of Alberto Fernández did not take a single initiative to investigate the debt inherited from Macrismo. The right wing and opposition media groups are promoting protests that are incipient forms of hybrid warfare, given the measures taken by the Fernández government in relation to the pandemic.
It is in this context that workers must organize themselves so as not to be victims of the pandemic and defend their living conditions, without placing expectations on the Government of the Frente de Todos or on the union bureaucracy complicit in it.
Global Health Apartheid
The most explosive issue is the deprivation of vaccines from many countries in the Global South. As reported in February, 130 Countries have had zero supplies of any vaccine. This is largely because of the patents on the products produced by pharmaceutical monopolies in Western countries, such as Pfizer, Astra-Zeneca, Moderna etc. These patents ban the production of generic, i.e., unbranded versions of these vaccines, which if it were done would allow a much greater, and global vaccination programme to be organised. No country in the world has yet defied this and violated these patents and indeed there would likely be practical difficulties in the way of doing so without cooperation from the original manufacturers in terms of assisting with quality control and safety considerations.
Bill Gates-inspired UN Covax programme is counterposed to waiving patents and producing generic vaccines to immunise the bulk of humanity.
The Covax progamme, for supplying vaccines to poor and middle level developing countries, initiated by the WHO in conjunction with various other bodies concerned with vaccine distribution, including UN bodies, is quite slow and simply does not have the resources. A proposal to suspend patents and produce generic vaccines, proposed by India and South Africa, achieved the support of most members of the World Trade Organisation in October, but was vetoed by Britain, the US, and the EU. Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who Covid-denying paranoids denounce as seeking world domination by seeking to vaccinate the world, is in fact an important figure resisting the dropping of patents. That is a real crime, putting profit margins for capital above the need of the bulk of the world’s poor for vaccines to wipe out this deadly disease.
Another manifestation of imperialism’s callousness is Israel’s refusal to vaccinate the Palestinian population whose territories it seized, while carrying out a massive drive to vaccinate the Jewish population preferentially. The clear intention is Jews will be immune while the disease will become endemic among the Palestinian population, a genocidal policy using Covid-19 effectively as a racist biological weapon. This policy is so blatant that Israel is coming under a certain level of pressure from its imperialist allies to relent a bit on this. But the complex, overlapping relationship of the Israeli ruling class with the ruling classes of the major Western countries tends to blunt such pressure. This is because of the influence of a powerful faction, with communal loyalty to Israel, within the those ruling classes, whose core is a disproportionately numerous layer of Jewish bourgeois, most of who have Zionist politics, as well as other fellow travellers, such as Christian Zionists in the US. The only consistent ally the Palestinian people have to counter the genocidal Zionist project is a revolutionised, class conscious world proletariat.
Breaking the imperialists’ monopoly on vaccination are the vaccines created and manufactured by the Cuban workers state, and former workers states Russia and China. Cuba has three vaccines in preparation, Russia is distributing the Sputnik-V vaccine and China the Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines. Sputnik-V appears to be as effective as any of the Western vaccines; China’s Sinovac vaccine appears less effective and may have been responsible for a relapse after widespread vaccination in Chile. Its other vaccine, Sinopharm, seems to have a better reputation, though so far only Western vaccines have gained full regulatory approval by the WHO.
In any case, the admirable efforts of the remaining workers states, or non-imperialist capitalist ex-workers states like Russia and China, cannot substitute for the productive forces of world imperialism, including its ‘Big Pharma’. The pharmaceutical industry needs to be expropriated, collectivised, and planned on a global level, so the global problems that increasingly globalised capital imposes on the working people, can be dealt with on a global level by the proletariat. We need to re-create the Fourth International as a World Party of Socialist Revolution to carry out such a global programme of expropriation and planning of the world’s resources for human needs on a universal basis, not private profit, or backward-looking national chauvinism.
All the terrible events of the pandemic have seemingly put in the shade the conflicts, war drives and attacks on workers and peasants, and on democratic rights that imperialism is waging around the globe. The exploitation of the pandemic by the wealthy has led to another massive redistribution of wealth from the poor to the super-wealthy billionaire bourgeoisie, just as did the financial crisis of 2007-9. The upshot of this was that workers were often mobilised behind reactionary demagogues like Trump who directed their social anger at other workers, particularly migrant workers, and created the basis for a further rise of capitalist reaction. We need to ensure that this time, social discontent is directed against capitalism, not its victims.
The pandemic has come to embody the continuation of imperialist politics by other means. The Trump administration, for instance, sought to mobilise hostility to China in the United States through dubbing Covid, in crude racist terms, as the ‘China virus’ and ‘Kung flu’. Biden has abandoned the racist crudities, but at the same time has continued with Trump’s insidious policy of innuendo and accusation that Covid was an experimental virus that ‘escaped’ from a Wuhan laboratory etc, implying it was a Chinese biological weapon. Biden is thus trying to mobilise the crank layer that wallow in conspiracy theories about Covid, Bill Gates etc, against China in the service of an imperialist war drive.
Trump lost power through a decisive popular vote in the US in large measure because of his policy on the pandemic, one of malign neglect, and the resulting carnage. His attempt to stay in power despite the loss of the election was a frontal attack on the democratic rights of the US masses, particularly the black and Latinx population, given his virtually open white supremacism. That needed to be resisted by all means.
Biden’s miserable plan will not reactivate the decaying US economy
The centre of US concerns today is the decline of its imperialist hegemony over the planet in the face of China’s growth. In the first quarter of 2021, China’s GDP grew 18%, a historic record. The USA grew 4.3%. Biden then launched an economic reactivation plan called the ”American Rescue Plan Act”. Many were impressed and have believed that this is a break with neoliberalism and a return to Keynesian politics such as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s. Firstly, we defend any material aid that will alleviate the miserable situation of workers. However, we cannot fail to highlight how miserable Biden’s stimulus package is, more concerned with seducing the domestic electorate with humanitarian and climate marketing and in the dispute against China. But, the Biden plan is much more modest than the New Deal. Roosevelt’s own plan failed to lift the US economy out of depression and reduce unemployment. It was the Second World War that reactivated the US economy in 1941, when they reached full employment. The Biden Plan does not increase salaries, does not represent any significant fiscal change against the big bourgeoisie (limiting itself to raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%), does not create a universal, public and free health care system like the NHS British or the Brazilian SUS (despite the more than 570 thousand deaths and millions having no medical assistance in the country), it does not nationalize any branch of the economy, it does not make any change in quality in relation to neoliberal policies. The plan only relieves the poorest who are on the edge. At the most, it will encourage large companies to increase their profits based on the renewal of internal infrastructure, the drive for semiconductors and energy alternatives, to technologically strengthen the United States against China. But in fact, as announced, it cannot recover the economy, much less reverse the loss of American hegemony.
Trump won in 2016 because he received support from the rust belt frustrated by Democrats’ financial and de-industrialization policies. Trump lost in 2020 because he frustrated the proletarian electorate of the “rust belt”, as well as political wear and tear with the pandemic and the biggest anti-racist demonstrations in US history after the assassination of George Floyd. Democrats took note of this and try to do electoral marketing and run out of time to seduce the electorate before the mid-term elections that take place in Congress and the Senate in 2022, where Republicans can win if the population is very frustrated with the Democrat. In fact, just as in the 1930s, the main measure of reactivation of the economy known to imperialism is the arms race and, in this Biden-Harris are working in a frantic war of positions surrounding Russia and China on all sides.
Oppose Imperialism’s War Drives!
But Biden coming to power has replaced a dysfunctional US imperialist regime with a more efficient, organised, and equally if not more dangerous enemy of those oppressed by imperialism. Biden’s policy seems to be of cutting the US’ losses, aiming a complete withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan by September, something that had already been earmarked to carry out by Trump had he retained power. But the quid pro quo is redeployment of US resources to the Asia-Pacific region, i.e., bolstering its forces to combat China and laying the basis for future crises, confrontations or worse, with the aim of subordinating China to imperialism. The encirclement of both China and Russia with hostile forces and imperialist basis is a key imperialist stratagem.
The recent coup in Myanmar, that overthrew the semi-nationalist, semi-liberal regime of Aung San Suu Kyi, was driven by her inadequate, in the eyes of the very nationalist military, prosecution of the war against the Muslim Rohingya people, and was not directly connected with this. We do not support such coups, nor do we politically support treacherous nationalists like Suu Kyi, who herself betrayed the Rohingya, but we also oppose attempts to exploit this issue to support imperialism’s drive against China. Likewise with the imperialist outcry about supposedly genocidal terror by China against the Muslim Uyghur people in Xinjiang. We note that the sources for these allegations are few and compromised by their own relations with imperialism, and that if the Uyghurs were subjected to the Western powers, they would likely be treated as terrorists like many other Muslim peoples. This is evidently part of the same kind of hybrid war campaign we see over Ukraine, a tried and trusted imperialist tactic as part of a drive to exploit a wide variety of grievances for ‘regime change’, which only benefits imperialism. We do not endorse the Han Chinese chauvinism of the new hybrid bourgeoisie, interpenetrated with the state, that rules China, but we do defend China against imperialism and do not join in imperialist anti-China warmongering campaigns.
Other manifestations of this are Biden’s launching of attacks in Syria within only a few weeks of taking office, as well as his escalating the drive to bring Ukraine into NATO, upping the rhetoric about Russian troop movements in Russia that even the US admits are exercises. The US though is trying to follow through on a long-standing Imperialist project of seeking to subordinate Russia. At the time of fall of Stalinism in Eastern Europe, promises were made to the last Soviet President, Gorbachev, that NATO would not be extended into the former Soviet bloc. Doing the opposite has been a key element of US strategy ever since, and Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic were followed into NATO by the three Baltic former Soviet Republics. Ukraine is next on the list. We defend post-Stalinist Russia, based on a form of relatively backward dependent capitalism, against imperialist attempts at regime change through hybrid wars waged to destabilise countries on Russia’s periphery, such as Belarus, with the ultimate target being Russia itself.
The relations of US imperialism with Iran in the aftermath of Trump’s defeat are problematic, as Trump junked and broke with Obama’s 2015 deal with the Iran leadership, the JCPOA. The Israel lobby exerted ferocious pressure on Obama against this and Likudniks in the US Israel lobby were Trump’s biggest funders. Even If he wanted, Biden cannot wind back the clock to before Trump, and it is not clear that he wants to. A prolonged process of haggling and pressure is going on, as under the gun of Trump and Israeli militarism, Iran developed its nuclear processing well beyond the confines of the agreement that Trump junked. Israel has been engaged in sabotage and terrorism against Iranian facilities and given that Trump failed in his mission to destroy Iran, would no doubt like Biden to carry on with that mission. However, Obama’s deal when it was signed had bipartisan support because the US bourgeoisie in decline needed economic interaction with Iran; it is a sizeable country and would be difficult to defeat militarily without being drawn into a disaster that would dwarf that of Iraq. So, US imperialism is conflicted about how to deal with Iran.
The overall situation is that US imperialism in this period is facing resistance on several fronts when it tries to assert its dominance and hegemony. In particular from a bloc of semi-colonial countries and ex-workers states: from Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, as well as the two remaining deformed workers states, Cuba and North Korea, which are de facto a part of this non-imperialist bloc, which sometimes acts as an anti-imperialist bloc. It is in South America where perhaps the highest level of class consciousness exists, as the merging of anti-imperialist sentiment with a diffuse socialist aspiration is obvious when you look at Venezuela and Cuba. This kind of diffuse socialism was also dramatically demonstrated in the recent Bolivian election victory of the MAS, which overcame the coup imperialism mustered earlier against Evo Morales. Now something similar looks to be highly likely in Ecuador.
Blocs to counter imperialism are problematic and can prove fragile, as shown by the fate of BRICS in the past. The only consistent anti-imperialist force is the world proletariat, mobilised behind a revolutionary programme, and bringing that force into consciousness and action is still the strategic task of revolutionaries today.
Cops in Bristol brutally beat sit-down protesters with the sharp edges of riot shields
Tory Brexit Britain and Labours Nose-Dive
In Britain today, the Brexit Tory government of Boris Johnson has recovered somewhat in popular support from the severe discredit it suffered because of the huge number, over 150,000, who have died of Covid. The government originally had an outrageous policy of ‘herd immunity’ without vaccines, then shifted under pressure from below to a series of half-hearted lockdowns, which it actually sabotaged by lifting them just as they were on the verge of being effective, to allow profit making to resume. Now that the widespread vaccination programme is showing signs of generating real herd immunity, Johnson’s regime is taking the credit.
It is only able to get away with this because under the Blairite Keir Starmer, there is no opposition to the government, and everyone knows it. Starmer said not long after he became leader that he was seeking consensus with Johnson, that Labour will support the government, whatever it chooses to do.
Starmer supported the reckless re-opening of schools that was the starting point both for the second wave, that essentially began in September though there was no lockdown to combat it until November, which was half-hearted and really a mockdown. Testing had been abandoned as a system in March 2020 and what was re-established in June was a gravy train for Tory donors to pocket billiions of pounds of government funding, not an instrument for tracking down and isolating to eliminate Covid. But Starmer supported all this and sacked Rebecca Long-Bailey as Education spokesperson for opposing unsafe school reopening, covering this up by smearing her as ‘anti-Semitic’. This gave the virus space to mutate into the much more infectious Kent variant which ran amok in the third wave that began around Christmas time. Starmer is as responsible for this as Johnson, as he supported all of it.
Starmer also refused to oppose outrageous Tory legislation such as the ‘undercover cops’ bill, that legalised such crimes as murder, torture and rape carried out while infiltrating those who the ruling class regard as ‘subversive’ to their power. Labour abstained on a bill that gave blanket immunity from human rights laws in military operations overseas. It was going to abstain and let the Tory Policing, Crime and Sentencing Bill, which massively expands police power to ban protests, go through unopposed. But the huge outcry over police brutality against a vigil over the murder, by a male police officer no less, of Sara Everard in South London highlighted this bill, which the Tories had been hoping to sneak through under cover of the pandemic. So, Labour had to belatedly oppose it. Starmer’s Labour people mimic the Tories in that every time Starmer or his cohorts appear on television on Zoom etc, they always have a Union Flag visible behind them. This flag-shagging, to grovel before backward ex-Labour voters who supported Johnson on a reactionary basis, has made Starmer into a despised joke.
And there is the huge witchhunt of the left in the Labour Party, hundreds of thousands, the clear majority of the party if you realise that in the leadership election in early 2020, more Labour members refused to vote for any candidate than voted for Starmer as leader because there was no leadership candidate who was not a witchhunter. The smear of ‘anti-Semitism’ is used against anyone who expresses any sympathy for Palestinian rights, and the number of expulsions and suspensions of leftists have gone through the roof. Over a hundred thousand members have reportedly left Labour since Starmer became leader, though the leadership keeps the figures close to its chest. Starmer’s pronouncement that he supports Zionism ‘without qualification’ during his leadership campaign, his open collaboration with right-wing Tory-Zionist racists such as the Board of Deputies, and Labour’s own right-wing saboteurs, against his own members, his endorsement of the Tory EHCR fraudulent report, and the victimisation of black and Asian members and even MP’s who have contradicted Labour’s virulent Zionists, show that Labour under Starmer is openly racist and Zionist and deserves no support from socialists and class conscious workers. Only those who are in some way at odds with the Starmer leadership over these things deserve support in elections. But now they are usually not allowed to stand.
Huge numbers of left-wing former Labour people, both members and those more broadly supportive, who were drawn to and radicalised by Corbyn’s rise a few years ago in hundreds of thousands if not more, despise Strarmer to the extent that they are determined to punish Labour by withholding their votes. So Starmer’s Labour, according to one recent opinion poll, is 14 points behind the Tories. This is not because Johnson is popular, in fact his government is now facing the eruption of major scandals over corruption, which may prove extremely damaging, but because Starmer’s Labour is deeply unpopular and not seen as an alternative. So, the Government is on top for now, but only because the pandemic has limited political mobilisations, and only by default.
Our British section is outspokenly not supporting Starmer’s Labour at this point in time, prominently using the slogan ‘No Vote to Zionist New Labour’ to draw the political line against those who would capitulate to the concrete manifestation of Labour treachery.
Britain has the potential for huge social struggles as the pandemic begins to wind down. The movement against Priti Patel’s law to restrict the right to protest is huge in its potential. There have been such struggles as the British Gas workers against ‘fire and rehire’ which the trade union bureaucracy stabbed as usual, but there are likely to be many more struggles against these new attacks. Masked by the pandemic, Brexit is proving a disaster. The fishing industry, which was a key force in pushing for Brexit populism, is in deep trouble because of the economic consequences of Brexit. The position of British ‘expats’, i.e., emigrants who left to live in European countries and styled themselves ‘expat’ to deny being migrants, a considerable number of whom in their arrogance supported Brexit to keep ‘foreigners’ out of Britain, is now a newsworthy issue since a number of them have fallen foul of the end of free movement and been thrown out of Spain, among other places. And the North of Ireland has been destabilised, with loyalists erupting in riots, by Johnson’s Brexit deal which has put a trade border down the Irish sea to avoid one at the border with the Irish Republic.
There is considerable potential, therefore, for a left-wing challenge to Labour from the hundreds of thousands of dissident and disillusioned Corbyn supporters, which has the potential to lay the basis for a genuine working-class party to emerge in Britain from the crisis of Labourism. Our comrades in Britain are getting involved in this through the Resistance Movement, initiated by Chris Williamson, which looks like the most promising vehicle for such a movement.
The latest episode in the efforts by PSC/Labour Party functionary Ben Soffa, and the PSC Executive, to defend their indefensible and unconstitutional behaviour in seeking my expulsion from PSC purely for my Marxist political views about Zionism, is immediately below my reply, which suggests some constructive ways out of the hole the PSC leadership has dug itself into over this case.
Below Soffa’s letter to me is an exchange between Soffa and Tony Greenstein which, in which, though it really does not solve the question, Tony makes some good points about the lack of natural justice of the PSC appeal process which asks the AGM to consider complex matters that would be better considered by an elected, impartial body. And Ben Soffa concurs, that this is a flawed process that basically denies natural justice in complex cases.
Be that as it may, breaches of natural justice and workers democracy must be fought in the here and now, and the attempts to evade this in Ben Soffa’s latest letter are obvious.
Reply to Ben Soffa by Ian Donovan, 20 April
Ben,
I am sorry. There is a simple remedy for this problem. You must be aware that it simply is not even possible to encapsulate the complex political and constitutional issues involved in this case and to provide those considering the case with proof of what is said in the appeal in 400 words.
When the Labour Party did a report on multiple and questionable allegations that were made as part of a large-scale purge of this type, they ended up producing a report 850 pages long in PDF form. My appeal is 15 pages long in Word format. If it were in the desktop-published PDF format of that report it would likely be less, maybe only 10 pages. Why is such a small document so difficult for you to circulate? It’s hardly like the Labour Party report!
The text and appendixes contain evidence and context of your multiple violations of the PSC Constitution as well as explanations of the views of the LCFI on Zionism which I am being purged for. Referencing the existence of a longer text is simply not good enough since that longer text will not be circulated to the participants in the AGM and it is virtually certain that most of the participants in this AGM will not follow up footnotes references to an unfamiliar website.
This is a question of principle. It is simply wrong for evidence in an appeal of this nature to be excluded from what is presented to those judging the appeal. Particularly on the say so of the other side in a dispute of this nature. I gave you plenty of notice of the scope of my appeal, and time to refute me.
I did not drop it on you at the last minute before the 10-day deadline but sent it to you on 7th March. I gave you SEVEN WEEKS NOTICE! That was principled behaviour because I don’t believe in smears and gamesmanship. I believe in the need for workers democracy as a matter of principle. You have had plenty of time to formulate a response that refutes it in full. If you cannot, that is because your case is weak. And you don’t have any right to exclude evidence and argumentation because your case is weak, and in reality non-existent.
My appeal is not of book length. It is only 15 pages or less depending on format. You have no valid reason to suppress it. If you choose to do so the moral and political responsibility rests on you.
Even Tony’s intervention in this case does not properly address the questions of principle involved here. If the Executive breaks constitutional clauses as you stand accused of in my appeal, with considerable evidence and argumentation to back that up, it is a matter of principle that the AGM should hear the full evidence under clause 16. Not to allow that breaks clause 16, contradicts natural justice, and even more importantly puts the Executive in command of the AGM when in fact it should be the other way round.This is not my doing. You rode roughshod over democracy and the PSC Constitution at the previous AGM and part of my appeal is about holding you accountable for that.
If the AGM is to hear appeals, then it has to do it properly and allow proper consideration of the evidence in those appeals. If it does not do so and is not allowed to do so then this process is contrary to natural justice. You appear to have conceded this in your exchange with Tony on the AGM’s capacity to conduct such appeals.
And you should be aware that proceedings that are contrary to natural justice are also dubious in their legality.
An even simpler solution to the dilemma that you have put yourself in would be this: call off your purge. Simply withdraw the expulsion and allow the appeal without the need for any interruption of the AGM. I will pay the back dues to PSC over the past year or so since the incorrect and unjustified expulsion to maintain continuity of membership. And PSC should organise a proper, public debate or even policy conference of PSC members on the nature of the Zionist lobby (and what to do about it) later in the year, when hopefully the pandemic is over. I will help in organising it. There are so some powerful speakers on this who would no doubt be delighted to address PSC members, such as Norman Finkelstein, Phil Weiss of Mondoweiss perhaps, as well as Tony and myself. That will solve the problem of disruption to the AGM which has been caused by your appalling bureaucratism, not those resisting it, and begin to repair the damage you have caused.
Communist Greetings Ian Donovan
Ben Soffa email to Ian Donovan, 19 April
Ian,
as you will have seen in my response to Tony, I am taking a very flexible approach in an attempt to facilitate your appeal. Despite the two previous deadlines having passed, I still stand ready to receive a statement of up to 400 words from you (which could reference the existence of a longer text) by noon tomorrow (Tuesday).
In the absence of that, the process will sadly need to continue without you putting your case directly to members – but that will be your choice.
Yours sincerely,
Ben
Ben Soffa response to Tony Greenstein, 19th April
Dear Tony,
thank you for your email. I agree it is only correct to separate what is a fair process from the merits of any individual case. We are trying really hard to facilitate this and would still be willing to accept a statement from Ian of the appropriate length (I will email him further on this imminently).
As you may have seen from the correspondence Ian has published, we have now on multiple occasions encouraged him to submit a statement that can be distributed to members. We have extended the deadline when he rejected the initial request and been clear about how we would proceed were he not to make a 400 word submission.
Within the realms of the current constitution we have replaced the previous practice of a three minute speech (which as you know, caused issues for those less well equipped to speaking in such an environment) with a written statement of broadly equivalent length. With the statements being distributed ahead of the AGM this will give members the ability to consider the item more carefully and if they were to wish to, to seek out further information on the matter. I would suggest that this is not only a fairer, more accessible process, but probably acts somewhat in favour of most appellants.
I also agree that the AGM is not the most appropriate mechanism for appeals to be heard. Indeed back in 2012 we consulted on diverting appeals to a committee of three patrons. A small standalone committee elected by the AGM would also seem like a perfectly reasonable way forward. Hopefully this is something that can be resolved in the review we wish to undertake this coming year.
I would much rather be able to put both sides of the argument in front of members and have them decide than have any dispute about process, so I’d once again encourage Ian to submit an appeal of the requested length which we can distribute.
Many thanks, Ben
Tony Greenstein letter to Ben Soffa, 19th April
Dear Ben, I have only just seen this and I have read nothing of the proposed expulsion so I can’t form a view on it though I have my suspicions.
I do though have serious disagreements with Ian, as he knows, over his view on the ‘Jewish Question’.
However this is a question of democracy since Ian has the right of appeal. Clearly as you say the AGM can’t spend half the day considering this and 400 or 500 words is, on the face of it reasonable. If Ian wishes that people read a much longer document comprising 15 pages (which I doubt many will) the obvious answer is that the 400 or so word summary links to the longer document and that this is made clear in the documents sent out. That way people have a choice.
On the wider question. It is unsatisfactory that appeals should be heard by the AGM anyway, not least because they are not in a position to seriously consider them. Consideration should be given to the election of an independent appeals panel of 3, elected by PR and not consisting of employees or Executive members to hearing such appeals. That will of course require a constitutional amendment but that is the way to proceed in my opinion.
In the light of the previous chronicling of my case, as in yesterday’s article about the blatant conflict of interest involving an official of the openly pro-Zionist Labour leadership excluding anti-Zionist activists from PSC, and my original appeal itself, the latest letter from Ben Soffa on behalf of the PSC Executive blatantly tears up the PSC Constitution and all pretence that PSC is any sense a democratic organisation.
Reply by Ian Donovan to Ben Soffa, 18th April
Dear Ben Soffa,
Thank you for your email. But you already have my appeal. It was submitted on 7th March, long before any deadline or procedure that you artificially set to try to provide a flimsy pretext for this kind of malpractice on your part. It is up to you whether you rule it out of order in the same corrupt way you ruled out my motion asserting Peter Gregson’s right to appeal. In doing that you tore up article 16 on the right of the conference to ratify constitutional disputes.
Now you are tearing up the right to appeal in Clause 4, sub-clauses 5 and 6 of the Constitution. There is nothing in that clause about the right of the Executive to decide what the AGM is allowed to consider regarding the content and evidence contained within appeals.
This is a matter of principle and cannot be ducked. The constitution says that the AGM ratifies such matters and hears appeals, i.e., makes the decision on them obviously according to the rules of natural justice. If the Executive is allowed to veto evidence because there is ‘too much’ such evidence against it provided in an appeal, or to veto its content because it is objectionable to the executive, then it is the executive which is making the decision not the AGM and the right to an appeal that is not rigged, like the 2020 AGM was rigged, has been abolished.
I note that you do not specify what is ‘defamatory’ in my appeal, or who is being ‘defamed’. Is it the allegation that there is a conflict of interest between your employment by Keir Starmer’s Labour leadership as ‘Head of Digital Organising’, and being a PSC lay official, given Starmer’s widely publicised statement that he supports Zionism, the political force that dispossessed the Palestinians, ‘without qualification’? That is obviously true. Or it the allegation that Starmer himself is an enemy of the Palestinian people, given his support for Zionism ‘without qualification’? That is also true. Is it the allegation that Louise Regan is a member of Socialist Action, as are you, and that this whole purge is a factional act decided by Socialist Action in pursuit of its own interests and nothing to do with solidarity with the Palestinian people? This is also true. Or is it the allegation that the Palestinian members of the Executive are generally supporters of the Palestinian authority, which tortures Palestinian dissidents on Israel’s behalf and which the late Edward W. Said compared with the Nazi-collaborationist WWII French Vichy regime in its collaboration with Zionism? This is also true. Nothing here is defamatory. It is all true. You just find it objectionable for these criticisms to be made.
The only defamatory element in this affair is your smear that our politics represent hostility to Jewish people in general. Our views on Zionism are demonstrably based on the theories and work of Karl Marx and Abram Leon on the Jewish Question. Both for being Jewish, and for his Marxist views, Leon was murdered by the Nazis in Auschwitz.
The idea that abolishing democracy in PSC is somehow in the interest of the Palestinian people is fatuous. The Palestinian people like all oppressed people have an interest in democracy, not in political corruption and anti-democratic behaviour within the solidarity movement and the left. The rights that exist in a properly constituted bourgeois court should be the minimum standard within the left and the workers movement, not something to be done away with on the pretence that this is in the interests of solidarity with the Palestinian people. If you did not want to take up the time of the AGM with this then you should not have broken the PSC Constitution in the first place!
Also, since you seem to be trying to put an ‘interpretation’ on the constitutional right to appeal that is novel, to say the least, I would point out that any dispute about the interpretation of what the Constitution says about such matters has to be ratified by the AGM according to clause 16. That means the AGM has the right to hear all evidence relating to this to decide under clause 16. So once again, you are in breach of clause 16 of the constitution in seeking to deny the right of the AGM to make an informed ratification of these matters, which means that the AGM must have access to all the evidence submitted. Since the Executive is one of the parties in the dispute, it is again contrary to the principled of natural justice for you to decide what can or cannot be given in evidence either in an appeal under sub-clauses 4.5 and 4.6, or clause 16.
This is clearly not being done in the interest of the Palestinian people. It is being done in the interests of the Zionist leadership of the Labour Party, the opportunist interest of the secretive Socialist Action group which I am informed you and Louise Regan are both members of, and that of the supporters on the Executive of Abbas’ Palestinian Authority, which maintains friendly relations with the Zionists while supressing and torturing dissidents on their behalf. The Exec obviously wants similar relations with Zionist New Labour here and you are the link man as not only a member of this secretive group, but also a Labour Party official.
So, you have torn up Clause 4 of the PSC Constitution as well as Clause 16. You have torn up the PSC Constitution itself. And you have done it in full public view. The only defamation is of me, by yourselves and this will be publicised widely as will your tearing up of the PSC Constitution.
You are not even smart tactically. If you distribute a statement of your own dismissing my appeal, but not my appeal itself, it will be obvious to everyone in the conference that you are breaking the Constitution and denying the right to appeal. Because your statement is a response to an appeal that you are not allowing the AGM to consider. You will expose yourself in front of the PSC members and delegates splendidly and it will be all your doing.
As a Marxist, I am loyal to the historic interests of the working class, not any particular grouping that claims to be for solidarity with the Palestinians, or any political group or formation. If your group betrays the movement and its interests by subservience to the enemies of the Palestinian people, by acting as enemy agents (as you are) or by attacking labour movement democracy, then it needs to be exposed and replaced with something better.
I will not compromise on the issues of principle in this case; workers democracy is a core principle. My appeal is already online and has been widely circulated and read both on the web in general and in Facebook groups of the Labour left and Palestinian activists.
Your letter will also be online shortly with this reply. So I am quite happy for you to be seen clearly by the socialist public rigging the 2021 PSC AGM. You are exposing yourself as the anti-democratic Zionist stooges you are, and that exposure is progressive.
Communist Greetings
Ian Donovan
Ben Soffa response (17 April) to Ian Donovan’s Earlier Letter (16 April)
Dear Ian,
thank you for your email, the contents of which have been noted by the Executive Committee.
Whilst you are entitled to your views, I must stress that all significant decisions, including that to terminate your membership, are taken by the full Executive Committee of PSC and not by me personally. We are not dealing with a complaint made against me, with which I would have no dealings, but with your appeal against the decision of the Executive which stems from your published statements.
As you are aware, PSC’s constitution provides that the AGM of the campaign shall consider such appeals. Whilst you state “the text of my appeal is of reasonable length by legal standards”, the AGM is not a court convened for the purpose of considering a submission of a length of your choosing, but a gathering of members to take forward the campaign for Palestinian rights, with this being one item of many on the agenda.
In common with much AGM business, there is either a word or time limit. This allows each item to be reasonably engaged with by the hundreds of activists who take part in the AGM. I would strongly suggest many more members will be able to engage with a submission of up to 400 words than will do so with your current proposed 15 page submission which runs to many thousands of words.
We wish to properly facilitate your appeal and unless withdrawn by you, the item will be considered by the AGM this coming Saturday. Under the agreed rules, the Executive Committee will be submitting up to 400 words arguing that our decision be upheld. We wish this to sit alongside up to 400 words from you in support of your appeal. However, if you fail to make a submission under the rules of the process, regrettably the statement of the Executive will stand alone and will be the sole basis on which members will be asked to vote on your appeal. This is a situation we would much rather avoid, but as confirmed by today’s Executive Committee meeting, we will hear the item in any case.
As noted, given PSC will be distributing these documents to hundreds of people in a permanent form, these submissions must not contain defamatory statements.
I therefore would like to ask once again that you submit up to 400 words by noon on Monday. This will allow the two statements to be distributed to members in good time for them to absorb the arguments ahead on Saturday’s AGM.
This exchange of correspondence relates to my appeal against expulsion from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign over a year ago, to be presented to the PSC AGM, which this year will be virtual and online, on 24th April. The entire text of the appeal is available here. Amazingly, since much of the content of the appeal is a complaint about repeated violations of the PSC Constitution in which Ben Soffa appears to have been a prime mover, if not the prime mover, I am written to by … Ben Soffa, demanding that I shorten, and censor, my appeal.
With PSC, there is not even a pretence of due process or impartiality. The person handling the appeals process is the person whose violations of the constitution the appeal complains about. There is no even nominally impartial body handling this. Key people organising the expulsion of a member of PSC purely for views/opinions, are paid officials of a political party whose leadership is opposed to everything PSC is supposed to stand for and which supports the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. This is like something out of a novel by Franz Kafka.
Further developments will be documented here. If there was some pretence of due process, and some semblance of impartiality, I might not be rushing to go public with all aspects of this correspondence. But Ben Soffa’s involvement in trying to censor and change an appeal that makes serious allegations of unconstitutional behaviour and conflict of interest against himself, is so farcical that it cannot be treated as confidential. It is reminiscent of the conduct of Boris Johnson in ignoring all sense of basic procedure. In any remotely democratic organisation, let alone one that is supposed to operate as part of the left and the workers movement, it would be a scandal.
Reply to Ben Soffa, 16 April
To: Ben Soffa, PSC Secretary
Dear Ben,
Thank you for your email. I am again actually quite astonished to be hearing from you personally about my appeal, since you are the main person complained about and accused of anti-democratic, bureaucratic, and unconstitutional behaviour in my appeal.
In my appeal I complain at length about the conflict of interest in your being the Secretary of PSC and acting to expel anti-Zionist socialists and anti-racists from PSC, when you are also an employed national official of the Labour Party, led by Keir Starmer.
Starmer is an avowed enemy of the entire purpose of PSC, support for Palestinians, due to his public statement that he supports Zionism “without qualification” and his purging of numerous Labour Party members for their opposition to Zionist racism and support for the Palestinians.
A far as I am concerned this conflict of interest makes you to all intents and purpose an enemy agent and fifth columnist.
Your demand for a word limit on my appeal has no justification at all. It is an attempt to exclude evidence of my being victimised, by you, from my appeal. Since this appeal is also an indictment of yourself and the EC for violations of the PSC constitution, your demand that my appeal be re-written is an outrage and an attempt to censor the evidence of your wrongdoing. The text of my appeal is of reasonable length by legal standards, it is necessary to explain the full complexities of the case. The appendices consist of evidence of your misconduct and that of your associates, and commentaries that provide full context. They will not be removed, and I do not agree.
The claim that PSC will be the ‘publisher’ of my appeal if it is circulated is spurious. The only defamation involved in this case is your defamation against me, and this fraudulent purge. This is my appeal, not yours, and the membership of PSC have the right to read the full content of my appeal to fully judge the context. The only item that can be safely removed from my appeal and its accompanying evidence/appendixes is the full text of the PSC Constitution, which has now been replaced by relevant extracts. That reduces it from 20 pages to 15 pages, including the images which are also evidence – of your role as a functionary of Zionist New Labour and of the left-wing, anti-Zionist activism of Peter Gregson who you also purged and whom I was purged for defending from your anti-democratic behaviour. One page for each year of my membership of PSC before being purged by Zionist stooges. Not too much to ask.
You do not even have the excuse about trying to conserve paper, as this year’s AGM is virtual, and material will be circulated online. One modest sized email attachment is hardly excessive.
Apart from that, this is my appeal, and nothing will be changed. If you are planning to censor or refuse to circulate my appeal, then that will be another breach of the PSC Constitution by yourselves on top of the previous ones. Members have the right to be fully informed of ALL the circumstances of an appeal and ALL the evidence of any appeal. That is a basic principle of natural justice.
I am copying this letter to the Labour Campaign for Free Speech and the Left Legal Fighting Fund initiated by Chris Williamson, both bodies which I support, both of which deal with Zionist witch-hunting in the Labour Party and labour movement. Your purging of me is clearly part of the ongoing witchhunt in the labour movement against anti-Zionists, of which we are the most consistent trend, and I will not collaborate or submit to it in any way. This exchange will be made public immediately.
Letter from Ben Soffa regarding appeal, 13th April
Dear Ian,
thank you for your earlier notification that you intend to appeal against the termination of your PSC membership. I note the attached document runs to some 20 pages. Please could you provide a version of your appeal edited to be no more than 400 words in length and not including any images.
As we will be distributing the text of the appeal to those attending the AGM, PSC will in effect be acting as the publisher of your statement. We will not be able to publish any defamatory statement that would open up PSC to legal liability, therefore, to ensure your appeal can be distributed in full, please avoid comments that could reasonably be held to be defamatory.
If you could please provide the statement by 5pm on Sunday 18th April, we will be able to distribute it, alongside a statement from the Executive Committee, to delegates next week.
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