#11

Naufragio del 2013 a Lampedusa, identificata dopo 11 anni una delle vittime

La salma di #Weldu_Romel, identificata col codice «AM 16», è stata tumulata nel cimitero di Caltagirone

Sono serviti 11 anni, ma adesso il migrante «Am16» - vittima della strage del 3 ottobre 2013 - ha un nome e cognome. Il ventisettenne eritreo, Weldu Romel, morto assieme ad altri 367 migranti, riposa nel cimitero di Caltagirone. E il 6 maggio sulla sua lapide, finalmente, ci sarà un nome. Lo hanno reso noto dl Comitato 3 ottobre, spiegando che l’identificazione è stata possibile «grazie al prezioso lavoro dell’istituto Labanof dell’università di Milano e al commissario straordinario per le persone scomparse».

La salma di Weldu Romel, identificata col codice «Am 16», è stata tumulata, nell’ottobre 2013, nel cimitero di Caltagirone.

Alla cerimonia per la posa della lapide con incisi il suo nome e cognome, che si terrà lunedì alle 10.30, parteciperanno, tra gli altri, il prefetto di Catania, Maria Carmela Librizzi, l’imam di Catania, Kheit Abdelhafid, monsignor Salvatore De Pasquale, vicario
generale della Diocesi di Caltagirone, Tareke Brhane, presidente del Comitato 3 ottobre, Angela Ascanio, referente progetto Sai
di Caltagirone e Vito Fiorino, nominato «Giusto» per aver salvato 47 persone mentre si consumava la tragedia.

«La nostra battaglia è per dare un nome e una degna sepoltura alle vittime dei naufragi - sottolinea Tareke Brhane - negare, infatti, questo diritto è contro ogni principio di umanità. Ogni persona ha diritto a una degna sepoltura così come i familiari hanno diritto di avere un luogo in cui ricordare e piangere i propri cari. Siamo felici che oggi, finalmente, a Weldu sia stata ridata un’identità. Speriamo di poterlo fare ancora per le centinaia di vittime senza nome che ancora oggi sono sepolte nei tanti cimiteri del nostro Paese».

▻https://www.agrigentonotizie.it/cronaca/naufragio-lampedusa-2013-identificata-vittima-dopo-11-anni-maggio-2

#3_octobre_2023 #identification #migrations #mourir_aux_frontières #morts_aux_frontières #11_ans_après... #naufrage #Lampedusa

Donne ton avis sur le 110 km/h ! | Framaforms.org
▻https://framaforms.org/donne-ton-avis-sur-le-110-kmh-1707408813
#assemblee_citoyenne #climat #110km/h

Donne ton avis sur le 110 km/h !

Bienvenu.e sur notre #questionnaire. Quelques minutes te suffiront pour y répondre.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Our country has lost its moral compass’ : #Arundhati_Roy

https://pixelfed.zoo-logique.org/storage/m/_v2/578583396227231930/bc40e5d2a-3c51e6/RzrAeZYfe6UP/pMmWLT1Ajk91wHawHrtLEQw8N4gZejroMfZNrwPQ.png

From Arundhati Roy’s acceptance speech at the P. Govinda Pillai award function held in Thiruvananthapuram on December 13.

Thank you for bestowing this honour on me in the name of P. Govinda Pillai, one of Kerala’s most outstanding scholars of Marxist theory. And thank you for asking N. Ram to be the person who graces this occasion. I know he won this prize last year, but he also in many ways shares the honour of this one with me. In 1998 he, as the editor of Frontline—along with Vinod Mehta, the editor of Outlook—published my first political essay, “The End of Imagination”, about India’s nuclear tests. For years after that he published my work, and the fact that there was an editor like him—precise, incisive, but fearless—gave me the confidence to become the writer that I am.

I am not going to speak about the demise of the free press in India. All of us gathered here know all about that. Nor am I going to speak of what has happened to all the institutions that are meant to act as checks and balances in the functioning of our democracy. I have been doing that for 20 years and I am sure all of you gathered here are familiar with my views.

Coming from north India to Kerala, or to almost any of the southern States, I feel by turns reassured and anxious about the fact that the dread that many of us up north live with every day seems far away when I am here. It is not as far away as we imagine. If the current regime returns to power next year, in 2026 the exercise of delimitation is likely to disempower all of South India by reducing the number of MPs we send to Parliament. Delimitation is not the only threat we face. Federalism, the lifeblood of our diverse country is under the hammer too. As the central government gives itself sweeping powers, we are witnessing the sorry sight of proudly elected chief ministers of opposition-ruled States having to literally beg for their States’ share of public funds. The latest blow to federalism is the recent Supreme Court judgment upholding the striking down of Section 370 which gave the State of Jammu and Kashmir semi-autonomous status. It isn’t the only State in India to have special status. It is a serious error to imagine that this judgment concerns Kashmir alone. It affects the fundamental structure of our polity.

But today I want to speak of something more urgent. Our country has lost its moral compass. The most heinous crimes, the most horrible declarations calling for genocide and ethnic cleansing are greeted with applause and political reward. While wealth is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, throwing crumbs to the poor manages to garner support to the very powers that are further impoverishing them.

The most bewildering conundrum of our times is that all over the world people seem to be voting to disempower themselves. They do this based on the information they receive. What that information is and who controls it—that is the modern world’s poisoned chalice. Who controls the technology controls the world. But eventually, I believe that people cannot and will not be controlled. I believe that a new generation will rise in revolt. There will be a revolution. Sorry, let me rephrase that. There will be revolutions. Plural.

I said we, as a country, have lost our moral compass. Across the world millions of people—Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Communist, Atheist, Agnostic—are marching, calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. But the streets of our country, which once was a true friend of colonised people, a true friend of Palestine, which once would have seen millions marching, too, are silent today. Most of our writers and public intellectuals, all but a few, are also silent. What a terrible shame. And what a sad display of a lack of foresight. As we watch the structures of our democracy being systematically dismantled, and our land of incredible diversity being shoe-horned into a spurious, narrow idea of one-size-fits-all nationalism, at least those who call themselves intellectuals should know that our country too, could explode.

If we say nothing about Israel’s brazen slaughter of Palestinians, even as it is livestreamed into the most private recesses of our personal lives, we are complicit in it. Something in our moral selves will be altered forever. Are we going to simply stand by and watch while homes, hospitals, refugee camps, schools, universities, archives are bombed, a million people displaced, and dead children pulled out from under the rubble? The borders of Gaza are sealed. People have nowhere to go. They have no shelter, no food, no water. The United Nations says more than half the population is starving. And still they are being bombed relentlessly. Are we going to once again watch a whole people being dehumanised to the point where their annihilation does not matter?

The project of dehumanising Palestinians did not begin with #Benyamin_Netanyahu and his crew—it began decades ago.

In 2002, on the first anniversary of September 11 2001, I delivered a lecture called “Come September” in the United States in which I spoke about other anniversaries of September 11—the 1973 CIA-backed coup against President Salvador Allende in Chile on that auspicious date, and then the speech on September 11, 1990, of George W. Bush, Sr., then US President, to a joint session of Congress, announcing his government’s decision to go to war against Iraq. And then I spoke about Palestine. I will read this section out and you will see that if I hadn’t told you it was written 21 years ago, you’d think it was about today.

—> September 11th has a tragic resonance in the Middle East, too. On the 11th of September 1922, ignoring Arab outrage, the British government proclaimed a mandate in Palestine, a follow-up to the 1917 Balfour Declaration which imperial Britain issued, with its army massed outside the gates of Gaza. The Balfour Declaration promised European Zionists a national home for Jewish people. (At the time, the Empire on which the Sun Never Set was free to snatch and bequeath national homelands like a school bully distributes marbles.) How carelessly imperial power vivisected ancient civilisations. Palestine and Kashmir are imperial Britain’s festering, blood-drenched gifts to the modern world. Both are fault lines in the raging international conflicts of today.
–-> In 1937, Winston Churchill said of the Palestinians, I quote, “I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.” That set the trend for the Israeli State’s attitude towards the Palestinians. In 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said, “Palestinians do not exist.” Her successor, Prime Minister Levi Eschol said, “What are Palestinians? When I came here (to Palestine), there were 250,000 non-Jews, mainly Arabs and Bedouins. It was a desert, more than underdeveloped. Nothing.” Prime Minister Menachem Begin called Palestinians “two-legged beasts”. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir called them “grasshoppers” who could be crushed. This is the language of Heads of State, not the words of ordinary people.

Thus began that terrible myth about the Land without a People for a People without a Land.

–-> In 1947, the U.N. formally partitioned Palestine and allotted 55 per cent of Palestine’s land to the Zionists. Within a year, they had captured 76 per cent. On the 14th of May 1948 the State of Israel was declared. Minutes after the declaration, the United States recognized Israel. The West Bank was annexed by Jordan. The Gaza Strip came under Egyptian military control, and Palestine formally ceased to exist except in the minds and hearts of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian people who became refugees. In 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Over the decades there have been uprisings, wars, intifadas. Tens of thousands have lost their lives. Accords and treaties have been signed. Cease-fires declared and violated. But the bloodshed doesn’t end. Palestine still remains illegally occupied. Its people live in inhuman conditions, in virtual Bantustans, where they are subjected to collective punishments, 24-hour curfews, where they are humiliated and brutalized on a daily basis. They never know when their homes will be demolished, when their children will be shot, when their precious trees will be cut, when their roads will be closed, when they will be allowed to walk down to the market to buy food and medicine. And when they will not. They live with no semblance of dignity. With not much hope in sight. They have no control over their lands, their security, their movement, their communication, their water supply. So when accords are signed, and words like “autonomy” and even “statehood” bandied about, it’s always worth asking: What sort of autonomy? What sort of State? What sort of rights will its citizens have? Young Palestinians who cannot control their anger turn themselves into human bombs and haunt Israel’s streets and public places, blowing themselves up, killing ordinary people, injecting terror into daily life, and eventually hardening both societies’ suspicion and mutual hatred of each other. Each bombing invites merciless reprisal and even more hardship on Palestinian people. But then suicide bombing is an act of individual despair, not a revolutionary tactic. Although Palestinian attacks strike terror into Israeli citizens, they provide the perfect cover for the Israeli government’s daily incursions into Palestinian territory, the perfect excuse for old-fashioned, nineteenth-century colonialism, dressed up as a new-fashioned, 21st century “war”. Israel’s staunchest political and military ally is and always has been the US.
–-> The US government has blocked, along with Israel, almost every UN resolution that sought a peaceful, equitable solution to the conflict. It has supported almost every war that Israel has fought. When Israel attacks Palestine, it is American missiles that smash through Palestinian homes. And every year Israel receives several billion dollars from the United States—taxpayers’ money.

Today every bomb that is dropped by Israel on the civilian population, every tank, and every bullet has the United States’ name on it. None of this would happen if the US wasn’t backing it wholeheartedly. All of us saw what happened at the meeting of the UN Security Council on December 8 when 13 member states voted for a ceasefire and the US voted against it. The disturbing video of the US Deputy Ambassador, a Black American, raising his hand to veto the resolution is burned into our brains. Some bitter commentators on the social media have called it Intersectional Imperialism.

Reading through the bureaucratese, what the US seemed to be saying is: Finish the Job. But Do it Kindly.

—> What lessons should we draw from this tragic conflict? Is it really impossible for Jewish people who suffered so cruelly themselves—more cruelly perhaps than any other people in history—to understand the vulnerability and the yearning of those whom they have displaced? Does extreme suffering always kindle cruelty? What hope does this leave the human race with? What will happen to the Palestinian people in the event of a victory? When a nation without a state eventually proclaims a state, what kind of state will it be? What horrors will be perpetrated under its flag? Is it a separate state that we should be fighting for or, the rights to a life of liberty and dignity for everyone regardless of their ethnicity or religion? Palestine was once a secular bulwark in the Middle East. But now the weak, undemocratic, by all accounts corrupt but avowedly nonsectarian PLO, is losing ground to Hamas, which espouses an overtly sectarian ideology and fights in the name of Islam. To quote from their manifesto: “we will be its soldiers and the firewood of its fire, which will burn the enemies”. The world is called upon to condemn suicide bombers. But can we ignore the long road they have journeyed on before they have arrived at this destination? September 11, 1922 to September 11, 2002—80 years is a long time to have been waging war. Is there some advice the world can give the people of Palestine? Should they just take Golda Meir’s suggestion and make a real effort not to exist?”

The idea of the erasure, the annihilation, of Palestinians is being clearly articulated by Israeli political and military officials. A US lawyer who has brought a case against the Biden administration for its “failure to prevent genocide”—which is a crime, too—spoke of how rare it is for genocidal intent to be so clearly and publicly articulated. Once they have achieved that goal, perhaps the plan is to have museums showcasing Palestinian culture and handicrafts, restaurants serving ethnic Palestinian food, maybe a Sound and Light show of how lively Old Gaza used to be—in the new Gaza Harbour at the head of the Ben Gurion canal project, which is supposedly being planned to rival the Suez Canal. Allegedly contracts for offshore drilling are already being signed.

Twenty-one years ago, when I delivered “Come September” in New Mexico, there was a kind of omertà in the US around Palestine. Those who spoke about it paid a huge price for doing so. Today the young are on the streets, led from the front by Jews as well as Palestinians, raging about what their government, the US government, is doing. Universities, including the most elite campuses, are on the boil. Capitalism is moving fast to shut them down. Donors are threatening to withhold funds, thereby deciding what American students may or may not say, and how they may or may not think. A shot to the heart of the foundational principles of a so-called liberal education. Gone is any pretense of post-colonialism, multiculturalism, international law, the Geneva Conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Gone is any pretence of Free Speech or public morality. A “war” that lawyers and scholars of international law say meets all the legal criterion of a genocide is taking place in which the perpetrators have cast themselves as victims, the colonisers who run an apartheid state have cast themselves as the oppressed. In the US, to question this is to be charged with anti-Semitism, even if those questioning it are Jewish themselves. It’s mind-bending. Even Israel—where dissident Israeli citizens like Gideon Levy are the most knowledgeable and incisive critics of Israeli actions—does not police speech in the way the US does (although that is rapidly changing, too). In the US, to speak of Intifada—uprising, resistance—in this case against genocide, against your own erasure—is considered to be a call for the genocide of Jews. The only moral thing Palestinian civilians can do apparently is to die. The only legal thing the rest of us can do is to watch them die. And be silent. If not, we risk our scholarships, grants, lecture fees and livelihoods.

Post 9/11, the US War on Terror gave cover to regimes across the world to dismantle civil rights and to construct an elaborate, invasive surveillance apparatus in which our governments know everything about us and we know nothing about them. Similarly, under the umbrella of the US’ new McCarthyism, monstrous things will grow and flourish in countries all over the world. In our country, of course, it began years ago. But unless we speak out, it will gather momentum and sweep us all away. Yesterday’s news is that Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, once among India’s top universities, has issued new rules of conduct for students. A fine of Rs.20,000 for any student who stages a dharna or hunger strike. And Rs 10,000 for “anti-national slogans”. There is no list yet about what those slogans are—but we can be reasonably sure that calling for the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Muslims will not be on it. So, the battle in Palestine is ours, too.

What remains to be said must be said—repeated—clearly.

The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the siege of Gaza are crimes against humanity. The United States and other countries that bankroll the occupation are parties to the crime. The horror we are witnessing right now, the unconscionable slaughter of civilians by Hamas as well as by Israel, are a consequence of the siege and occupation.

No amount of commentary about the cruelty, no amount of condemnation of the excesses committed by either side—and no amount of false equivalence about the scale of these atrocities—will lead to a solution.

It is the occupation that is breeding this monstrosity. It is doing violence to both perpetrators and victims. The victims are dead. The perpetrators will have to live with what they have done. So will their children. For generations.

The solution cannot be a militaristic one. It can only be a political one in which both Israelis and Palestinians live together or side by side in dignity, with equal rights. The world must intervene. The occupation must end. Palestinians must have a viable homeland. And Palestinian refugees must have the right to return.

If not, then the moral architecture of Western liberalism will cease to exist. It was always hypocritical, we know. But even this provided some sort of shelter. That shelter is disappearing before our eyes.

So please—for the sake of Palestine and Israel, for the sake of the living and in the name of the dead, for the sake of the hostages being held by Hamas and the Palestinians in Israel’s prisons—for the sake of all of humanity—stop this slaughter.

Thank you once more for choosing me for this honour. Thank you too for the Rs 3 lakhs which comes with this prize. It will not remain with me. It will go towards helping activists and journalists who continue to stand up at huge cost to themselves.

▻https://frontline.thehindu.com/the-nation/india-has-lost-its-moral-compass-arundhati-roy-on-israel-palestian-gaza-war/article67639421.ece

#Gaza #à_lire #Palestine #Israel #boussole_morale #déshumanisation #11_septembre_1922 #responsabilité #occupation #Cisjordanie #USA #Etats-Unis #effacement #anéantissement #génocide #crime_contre_l'humanité #abattage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

La Question d’Israël, Olivier Tonneau
►https://blogs.mediapart.fr/olivier-tonneau/blog/161023/la-question-disrael

La violence qui s’abat sur Gaza appelle à une condamnation sans faille d’Israël. Elle suscite également pour l’Etat hébreu une haine qui exige, en revanche, d’être soumise à l’analyse.

Ce texte mûrit depuis des années. J’aurais préféré ne pas l’écrire en des temps de fureur et de sang mais sans l’effroi de ces derniers jours, je ne m’y serais peut-être jamais décidé.
Effroi devant les crimes du #Hamas : j’ai repris contact avec Noam, mon témoin de mariage perdu de vue depuis des années qui vit à Tel Aviv, pour m’assurer qu’il allait bien ainsi que ses proches. Effroi devant les cris de joie poussés par tout ce que mon fil Facebook compte d’ « #antisionistes », puis par le communiqué du #NPA accordant son soutien à la résistance palestinienne quelques moyens qu’elle choisisse – comme si la #guerre justifiait tout et qu’il n’existait pas de #crimes_de_guerre.
Effroi, ensuite, face aux réactions des #médias français qui, refusant absolument toute contextualisation de ces crimes, préparaient idéologiquement l’acceptation de la répression qui s’annonçait. Effroi face à cette répression même, à la dévastation de #Gaza. Effroi d’entendre Netanyahou se vanter d’initier une opération punitive visant à marquer les esprits et les corps pour des décennies, puis son ministre qualifier les #Gazaouis d’animaux. Ainsi les crimes commis par le Hamas, que seule une mauvaise foi éhontée peut séparer des violences infligées par le gouvernement d’extrême-droite israélien aux #Palestiniens, servent de prétexte au durcissement de l’oppression qui les a engendrés. Effroi, enfin, face au concert d’approbation des puissances occidentales unanimes : les acteurs qui seuls auraient le pouvoir de ramener #Israël à la raison, qui d’ailleurs en ont la responsabilité morale pour avoir porté l’Etat Hébreu sur les fonts baptismaux, l’encouragent au contraire dans sa démence suicidaire.

Je veux dans ce texte dire trois choses. Les deux premières tiennent en peu de mots. D’abord, ceux qui hurlent de joie face au #meurtre_de_civils ont perdu l’esprit. Je n’ose imaginer ce qui se passe dans celui de victimes d’une oppression soutenue ; quant aux #militants regardant tout cela de France, ils ont en revanche perdu toute mon estime. Cependant – c’est la deuxième chose – si la qualification des actes du #Hamas ne fait aucun doute, un crime s’analyse, même en droit, dans son contexte. Or si la responsabilité des agents est toujours engagée, elle ne délie nullement Israël de sa responsabilité écrasante dans la mise en œuvre d’occupations, de répressions, de violences propres à susciter la haine et la folie meurtrière. Qui plus est, Israël étant dans l’affaire la puissance dominante a seule les moyens de transformer son environnement. Le gouvernement Israélien est cause première de la folie meurtrière et premier responsable de l’accélération du cycle infernal. Qu’il y eût une troisième chose à dire, c’est ce qui m’est apparu en lisant dans un tweet de Louis Boyard : 
« Il est hors de question que je me penche sur la question d’Israël (…). L’Etat d’Israël est une terre « volée » à la Palestine qu’ils le veuillent ou non ».

Ce sont là propos parfaitement banals de la part des antisionistes d’aujourd’hui. Ils ont le mérite de dire crûment que la critique d’Israël, au-delà des actes barbares commis par son gouvernement, porte sur le fondement même de l’Etat hébreu dont on aurait tout dit une fois rappelé qu’il s’est fondé sur le « vol » d’une terre. Cette attitude est à mes yeux irresponsable et même choquante. Comment ne pas entendre l’écho assourdissant de la vieille « question juive » dans la formule « question d’Israël » ? Aussi l’enjeu principal de ce texte, qui exige un développement d’une certaine longueur, est cette question même.

... « la #colonisation travaille à déciviliser le #colonisateur, à l’abrutir au sens propre du mot, à le dégrader, à le réveiller aux instincts enfouis, à la convoitise, à la violence, à la #haine_raciale, au relativisme moral » (Aimé Césaire)

... « La référence permanente au génocide des Juifs d’Europe et l’omniprésence de ces terribles images fait que, si la réalité du rapport de forces rend impossible l’adoption des comportements des victimes juives, alors on adopte, inconsciemment ou en général, les comportements des massacreurs du peuple juif : on marque les Palestiniens sur les bras, on les fait courir nus, on les parque derrière des barbelés et des miradors, on s’est même servi pendant un cours moment de Bergers Allemands. » #Michel_Warschawski

... le gouvernement israélien ne fonde pas sa sécurité sur le désarmement du Hamas mais sur le traumatisme des Palestiniens dans leur ensemble, ces « animaux » auxquels on promet un châtiment qui rentrera dans l’histoire – comme s’il était temps de leur offrir, à eux aussi, l’impérissable souvenir d’un holocauste....

... « Encore une victoire comme celle-là et nous sommes perdus » (Ahron Bregman)

... si deux millions de pieds-noirs ont pu retraverser la Méditerranée, deux cent cinquante mille colons peuvent repasser la ligne verte : c’est une question de volonté politique.

#toctoc #nationalisme #génocide #déshumanisation_de_l’autre #juifs #israéliens #Intifada #11_septembre_2001 #Patriot_Act #histoire #utopie #paix #Henry_Laurens #Edward_Saïd #Maxime_Rodinson #Ahron_Bregman #Henryk_Erlich #Emmanuel_Szerer #Bund #POSDR #URSS #fascisme #nazisme #Vladimir_Jabotinsky #sionisme #Etats-Unis #Grande-Bretagne #ONU #Nakba #Arthur_Koestler #Albert_Memmi #libération_nationale #Shlomo_Sand #Ilan_Pappe #apartheid #loi_militaire #antisémitisme #diaspora_juive #disapora #religion #fascisme_ethniciste

Au MuCEM, l’odyssée du retour au bled racontée par Mohamed El Khatib
▻https://www.lemonde.fr/culture/article/2023/10/19/au-mucem-l-odyssee-du-retour-au-bled-racontee-par-mohamed-el-khatib_6195397_

https://img.lemde.fr/2023/10/19/0/0/3543/2362/1440/960/60/0/16a0cda_1697707042292-3-mucem-renault-12-mohamed-el-khatiba-yohanne-lamoulere-tendance-floue.jpg

Au MuCEM, l’odyssée du retour au bled racontée par Mohamed El Khatib
Le metteur en scène dévoile, dans les salles du musée marseillais, « Renault 12 », une exposition évoquant la transhumance annuelle des familles de l’immigration maghrébine et de leurs voitures cathédrales.
Par Gilles Rof(Marseille, correspondant)
Publié le 19 octobre 2023 à 12h00, modifié le 19 octobre 2023 à 15h45
Combien sont-elles les Renault 12, Peugeot 504 et autre Renault 21 Nevada à être passées sur le port de Marseille, pour rejoindre le Maghreb ou en revenir, chargées jusqu’aux cieux ? Des dizaines de milliers, sûrement. Et Mohamed El Khatib, auteur, metteur en scène et réalisateur, ne pouvait rêver meilleur site que le Musée des civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée (MuCEM), avec vue sur les quais de départ et d’arrivée vers l’Algérie et la Tunisie, pour faire entrer la saga de ces voitures cathédrales et de leurs passagers dans un musée national.
« Le retour au bled fait partie de l’histoire de France. Ces familles, ces chibanis [les “anciens”] qui ont sillonné la route au volant constituent un patrimoine immatériel de la Méditerranée qui, jusqu’à maintenant, n’était pas documenté. Pendant des années, ils ont été le lien entre les deux rives », rappelle l’artiste, qui, avec sa double installation dans les espaces gratuits du musée, inaugure la carte blanche offerte par l’ancien président du MuCEM Jean-François Chougnet.Ce voyage, Mohamed El Khatib l’a vécu lui-même, chaque été, de 1981 à 1998. Version Maroc : trois jours de descente via l’Espagne, la traversée Algésiras-Tanger et les retrouvailles avec la famille restée au pays. « C’était une odyssée, le retour d’Ulysse à Ithaque, se souvient-il. On partait de nuit. Mon père rentrait de l’usine, dormait une heure et se mettait au volant. Il n’était pas question de perdre une journée. » L’artiste, 43 ans aujourd’hui, a mis beaucoup de lui dans cette exposition. Sur le parvis du fort Saint-Jean qui surplombe la mer, six voitures s’alignent, Renault 12 et Peugeot 504, break ou berline, bleue, jaune, orange et blanche. L’une d’elles, la R12 autel, comme l’a appelée Mohamed El Khatib, est dédiée à sa mère, décédée, et dont le corps a été rapatrié au Maroc.
Mais c’est surtout un hommage aux pères que l’artiste rend. Le sien, bien sûr, âgé de 80 ans, objet d’un texte très émouvant. Mais aussi tous ces Algériens, Marocains ou Tunisiens venus travailler en France, pour qui la voiture était souvent le seul bien, et, comme en témoigne la journaliste Louisa Yousfi dans le catalogue d’exposition, l’espace d’une dignité retrouvée : « C’est le lieu du père. Ce qui le rend utile dans un pays où on lui retire tout pouvoir et où il est considéré comme un parasite. »
« Renault 12 » trace sa route entre la nostalgie heureuse et les réalités pesantes d’une immigration qui cherche sa place. L’accident, fréquent sur les routes du retour au bled, y percute le visiteur avec l’épave d’une R12 broyée, traitée comme une pierre tombale. Une boussole qui indique la direction de La Mecque et un tapis de prière que l’on sortait du coffre rappellent, eux, ce temps, où, pour Mohamed El Khatib, « la présence de l’islam ne provoquait pas de réactions crispées ».
Pour nourrir ses évocations, l’artiste a réuni à Marseille, avec l’aide de la photographe Yohanne Lamoulère, sa complice régulière, les souvenirs de ceux qui ont vécu l’été au bled, dans un film de vingt-sept minutes. « La 504, c’est papa, c’est maman, c’est ma vie », assure, avec cette punchline parmi d’autres, l’un des témoins.Le duo a également roulé jusqu’à Chichaoua, au Maroc, pour y traquer les « chameaux mécaniques », R12 et autres voitures increvables capables d’empiler, selon leur légende africaine, jusqu’à un million de kilomètres. Des véhicules à l’esthétique flamboyante, « ready-made ambulants » selon El Khatib, dont il importe la beauté clinquante au MuCEM. Comme cette Renault cassettothèque avec housses en tapis oriental, plafond en tissu léopard, boule à facette et chicha, dans laquelle on s’installe pour écouter la bande-son du voyage. Un mix de variétés françaises, de grands artistes arabes ou des « chebs » (« jeunes ») du raï. Symbole d’une culture de l’immigration qui vit entre deux terres.
Dans cette exposition, qui a déjà attiré l’attention de plusieurs autres musées, Mohamed El Khatib soigne les détails. Son catalogue d’exposition a la forme d’un étui de carte grise géant… A côté des splendides photos de Yohanne Lamoulère, on y trouve des porte-clés à main de Fatma, une carte Michelin et un parfum d’intérieur à accrocher au rétroviseur. La clé d’une – vraie – Renault 12 a même été glissée dans un exemplaire. L’heureux gagnant partira du MuCEM à son volant.

#Covid-19#migration#migrant#france#MUCEN#art#immigration#maroc#bled#retour#culturemigration#economie#transfert

Maudite soit la guerre
▻http://anarlivres.free.fr/pages/nouveau.html#maudite

Pour le centenaire (1923-2023) de l’édification du monument aux morts pacifiste de Gentioux (23), la municipalité organise trois jours de commémoration avec une série de spectacles, de conférences, d’expositions et de rencontres, les 3, 4 et 5 novembre. Programme complet...

#guerre #pacifisme #Gentoux #MonumentMorts #anarchisme #libertaire #11novembre

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This time, we do not have to stop.

🛑 Dans les hôtels du 115, des femmes victimes de chantages sexuels se heurtent à la loi du silence... - Bondy Blog

Sans argent et souvent sans papiers, les femmes mises à l’abri dans les hôtels d’hébergement d’urgence se retrouvent parfois à la merci des propriétaires hôteliers. Leur vulnérabilité empêche nombre d’entre elles de déposer plainte (...)

#115 #femmes #hébergement #hôtels #chantages #agressionssexuelles...

▻https://www.bondyblog.fr/enquete/dans-les-hotels-du-115-des-femmes-victimes-de-chantages-sexuels-se-heurten

https://www.bondyblog.fr/app/uploads/2023/10/Bondy-banner-v4-green-2-1.jpg

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

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

Chaotic Weather, Chaotic Capitalist System — The Spark #1184
▻https://the-spark.net/np11841201.html

Flash floods rushed onto casino floors in the Las Vegas desert. Wildfires burnt up the tropical isle of Maui. Tornadoes ripped a path running from Oklahoma to Iowa to New Jersey and Delaware. Heat waves in Texas and Colorado brought daily temperatures in the 100s, even as high as 115. Rising oceans crumbled the foundations of houses from Florida to Maine. A wild summer storm turned the Detroit airport into an island, completely surrounded by water.

Different disasters, some more deadly than others, but behind them all is the same reality: average global temperatures are rising, causing weather patterns to become more chaotic and storms more intense.

It may be worse today, but it’s not a new problem. Average temperatures around the globe have been going up for more than a century. The causes for this increase have been known and documented for decades: the pollution that modern industry spews has become a blanket wrapping the earth in its own heat, forcing up temperatures.

Some people say, scale back industry. Some people call for regulation to limit pollution. Some people close their eyes, trying to ignore the problem.

None of these provides an answer. We don’t have to blindly keep suffering. We don’t have to get rid of the advantages that modern industrial production could provide for humanity.

But this must be done: the working class has to transform the way that industry is organized.

The main industries that produce pollution are today owned and controlled by a small number of capitalist groups, most of them located in a very few countries. Those capitalist groups are the ones that decide how industry will be organized. They decide to use the oldest, most polluting forms of energy because they require no new investment. They decide not to invest in systems to alleviate pollution. They decide to ignore regulations.

Regulation? Yes, governments can regulate. They’ve been doing it for decades. But no matter what they did, they never took away the capitalists’ right to decide how to run their industries.

Even when governments began to impose changes to alleviate pollution, they did it in ways that made the population, and not the capitalists, pay for it. For example, the electrification of motor vehicles. Last year’s “Inflation Reduction Act” offers enormous subsidies for electrification in a range of industries. The price for those subsidies will be paid for by the population in increased taxes, as well as in cuts to social programs, public services, and public education.

Another example: the shift away from coal and oil to so-called “renewable” sources of energy. The price for this shift is being paid in lost jobs—paid for by coal miners and oil-industry workers.

A government that serves the capitalists deals with the climate catastrophe by adding to the social catastrophe—that is, to the loss of jobs and to a spiraling fall in the workers’ standard of living.

The answer to both catastrophes is the same because the cause of both catastrophes is the same: the capitalists’ right to decide. The capitalists organize production in anarchic ways that create unemployment and rapid inflation. The capitalists organize industry in ways that make earth increasingly uninhabitable.

To save the planet, means that workers must use their position in industry to control what happens there. The people who carry out the work day-to-day are the ones best placed to know what really goes on in any workplace. They know what regulations are being violated. They can put their knowledge derived on the job to discover ways to overcome the problem of pollution.

Today, if workers reveal their boss violates pollution rules or worker safety, they can be fired for violating “trade secrets.” Thus, the capitalists’ right to decide has to be taken away from them.

To save the planet lies with those who labor on it—and in their hands alone. They are the only ones who, in dealing with their own immediate problems, can at the same time serve the long-term needs and interests of all humanity.

Capitalism Leading the World to War — The Spark #1184
▻https://the-spark.net/np1184801.html

The following is a speech given by Gary Walkowicz in August at the SPARK summer festival.

I want to start by talking about this ongoing war in Ukraine. In recent days, the media and the Biden administration have been admitting what has been obvious for a while, that the counteroffensive by Ukrainian troops has not gone very well and the Russian forces and Ukrainian forces are in a kind of a stalemate.

This war has now gone on for over a year and a half. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers on each side have been wounded and maimed. Tens of thousands have been killed. Civilians of both countries have been killed. Millions of Ukrainians have been displaced from their homes and much of the infrastructure in Ukraine has been destroyed. Now we are seeing attacks by Ukraine against Russian civilians. This war has been a human catastrophe. And for what purpose? Why did this war even happen?

Ukraine felt that it had no choice but to defend itself when Putin ordered Russian forces to invade Ukraine. Russia felt that it had no choice when, year after year, the U.S. and NATO were stationing troops and setting up military bases right on the very border of Russia, threatening Russia.

War in Ukraine Is a U.S. War

But standing behind the scenes, orchestrating everything, was the government of the United States. On the one hand, the U.S. has been training and supplying and helping build up the Ukrainian military forces for years. On the other hand, the U.S. government has been directing the expansion of NATO forces to surround and threaten Russia. Since the war started, the U.S. has kept sending more and more weapons to Ukraine. This allowed the Ukrainians to hold off the Russian forces and keep the war going. The U.S. has also largely been directing the Ukrainian forces. They do battlefield planning with the Ukrainian generals and provide them with intelligence from the U.S. spying apparatus. In very real ways, this war in Ukraine has been a U.S. war waged against Russia, with the Ukrainians being the proxies, the pawns in this war; the Ukrainians are the ones doing the dying.

And what has been accomplished in this war? It has meant only death and destruction for the people of Ukraine and Russia, two peoples who have lived intermingled for decades. But for those people running things in the U.S., the war has accomplished a lot. The U.S. government has used this war to weaken Russia, which seems like it might have been the goal of the U.S. government all along. Meanwhile, U.S. military contractors who are producing the weapons have gotten much richer and more profitable by supplying the war. The U.S. has also been able to use Ukraine as a testing ground to see how all those weapons would work in a future war.

Preparing for a Bigger War

But more than that, the U.S. has been using this war as a cover to increase and build up its own military forces and weaponry. The money spent on the U.S. military budget was already more than the next 9 countries in the world spend, COMBINED. But now the U.S. military budget is growing even bigger. The U.S. government is using the war in Ukraine to prepare for a bigger war.

And it’s not just the U.S. government that is preparing for war. The NATO countries have also been increasing their military budgets. Other countries outside NATO, like Japan and South Korea and Australia, are doing the same thing. The major countries of the world, led by the U.S., are preparing for the next war, a bigger war.

Maybe the U.S. government will use the fact that Ukraine can’t push back the Russian forces as an excuse to send in U.S. troops, and that bigger war will start soon.

Maybe the war in Ukraine will have a ceasefire and there will be a negotiated settlement, for the time being. But even if that happens, it would not change the fact that this military buildup is going on; it would not change the fact that the capitalist world is moving toward a bigger war.

World Wars Produced by Capitalism

Capitalism is going down a road that the world has seen before. Since the early 1900s, the capitalists of the major economic powers of the world have been butting heads against each other. The capitalists of each country are competing for profits against the capitalists of the other major powers. This competition between capitalists is intensified when their economic system goes through another crisis. The capitalists of each country see that their only way out of these crises is to take from the other capitalist states. They want to take from each other—take access to more natural resources, take access to more markets to sell their products; take access to exploit the labor of more workers and farmers, all in the name of making more profits.

This competition between the major capitalist states was exactly what led to World War One. Tens of millions of people died in that war.

And just over 20 years later, it happened again. The capitalist system was facing another economic crisis, the great worldwide depression of the 1930s. Once again, the capitalist national states began to build up their military forces before the war even started because they were preparing for another world war. World War Two was the capitalists’ way of getting out of their economic crisis.

World War Two was even more destructive than World War One. It is estimated that as many as 85 million people, soldiers and civilians, died in World War Two. Three percent of the entire world’s population died. Much of Europe, Russia and Japan was destroyed, but the American ruling class profited from the war as the U.S. came out of it as the world’s dominant economic and military power.

Today the ruling class of this country and the capitalist rulers of the world are preparing for another big war, a global war. When there is a war, the U.S. will likely be in the middle of it, and they will not let the other capitalist countries stand on the sideline. That’s what they are building all these weapons for.

Preparing the Population for War

And there is also another clear indication today that the capitalists are moving toward war. Because they are preparing the population here to accept it.

How are they preparing us? Every day on the news, day in and day out, we are being told something about China being a threat to the U.S. You hear it, don’t you? Now the U.S. has soldiers and bases and warships and planes stationed all around China, right up to China’s border. China does not have any troops or any bases or any weapons in Mexico or in Canada or off the Pacific Coast, but somehow, they want us to believe that China is a threat to the people of the U.S. We are told similar things about Russia.

Why do they want us to believe that China and Russia are a threat, why do they prepare us for a possible war against one or the other or both countries? Well, China and Russia are two large countries with many natural resources and large working classes. But the American capitalists have only limited opportunities to exploit those two countries, because the governments of China and Russia control much of their economies and these governments limit access for capitalists from other countries to get in and make profits. China and Russia also stand as an alternative pole of attraction for poorer countries who want to take some distance from U.S. imperialism. Are the American capitalists preparing us for a war against China and/or Russia so they can get in there and make bigger profits? Certainly, this is a very real possibility.

Now maybe the sides in a coming world war will line up differently than that. Before World War Two started, it was thought that the U.S. was going to go to war against England; that was before they lined up together against Germany.

We don’t yet know how the countries will line up, who will be allies with who, and against who. But the history of capitalism tells us that another world war is coming. It might be this year, it might be 5 or 10 years from now, but war is coming.

And this war will be a war waged against us, against the working class in every country. The working class will be ones expected to fight and die and kill workers from other countries. The working class will be the ones expected to sacrifice for the capitalists’ war production.
Workers’ Real Enemy Is Our Own Bosses

But we do not have to accept this future. While the capitalists and their government are preparing for their war, the working class can prepare, too. We can prepare for our own war. Not a war against the working people of another country. We can prepare for a war against our exploiters. Those rulers who want us to go to war for them, they are the very same people who exploit us here at home every single day. These same bosses take away our jobs and reduce our standard of living; these same bosses take away from health care and take away from schools, they take away our children’s future, so that millionaires can become billionaires.

These bosses, this ruling class, these capitalists, these are our real enemy and our only true enemy. The only war that makes any sense for working people is a war against those people who exploit us.

Migrants Dying in the English Channel: The French Government Is Guilty — The Spark #1183
▻https://the-spark.net/np_1183602.html

This article is translated from the August 18 issue #2872 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.

Migrants drown every day trying to reach Europe on makeshift boats. Those who die off the shores of Tunisia, Greece, Italy, and Spain join those who perish in French waters, under the watch of the French government and by its fault.

Six Afghans died this way on August 13 when a boat sank carrying 65 migrants trying to reach England. Six deaths following hundreds of others resulting from the criminal policy pursued for years by French and British governments on both sides of the English Channel.

Thousands of people try to cross every year in rubber dinghies on waters loaded with tankers and giant container ships. French authorities systematically closed all the other ways across.

Millions of migrants have been swallowed up by patrols in and around Calais in France. Its walls bristle with barbed wire, infrared cameras, drones, carbon dioxide detectors, and so on. Monitoring of trucks in the port of Calais alone costs eight million dollars per year, above and beyond the manhunt at the Channel Tunnel. Authorities have done everything possible to make life impossible for migrants. They even put fences under bridges in downtown Calais to prevent migrants from sheltering there.

But nothing deters these thousands of refugees who have already risked their lives several times over travelling thousands of miles from places like Afghanistan, Syria, or Sudan. The only effect this war on migrants has is to push them back to sea. Networks of smugglers are ready to offer attempts at extremely dangerous crossings.

Now again the French and British governments pass the buck and focus their rhetoric on these networks of smugglers which they themselves foster. These governments show no lack of cynicism. No matter what they claim, their policy turns the English Channel into a graveyard.

New Contract, Worn-Out History — The Spark #1183
▻https://the-spark.net/np_11831001.html

What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters, during the week of August 13, 2023.

“Teamsters win historic UPS contract.” Those were the words Teamster President Sean O’Brien used, when he announced his union had negotiated a new contract—and without a strike.

Before negotiations started, the union said it would strike if the company didn’t answer three demands. First, wages should catch up with what had been lost to inflation. Second, workers who want full-time jobs should not have to work part-time. Third, there should be no two-tier pay scales.

The new contract fell short, way short. The wage increase doesn’t catch up with what workers lost to inflation in the five years since the last contract. It will not protect against inflation during the next five years. Part-time workers still will be over half the workforce. They still will earn less than 65% of a full-time hourly wage.

So, what happened? Was the talk about strike just a bluff?

Those problems are not unique to UPS. They run through the whole capitalist system. Every company, big and little, pays wages that don’t keep up with inflation. That’s how companies make their profits go up faster than the rate of inflation. Almost every big company has lowered its wage bill by bringing in new hires at lower wages—two-tier or part-time or temp or contract workers. It’s another way companies increase profit. And each company increases the speed of work, worsening conditions, trying to dig still more profit from the workers’ hide.

Problems like these are not going to be overcome in one contract, affecting workers at only one company, even as big a company as UPS—or at one industry, even one as important as auto.

This is the heart of the problem. To take on these problems requires a different perspective—a revolutionary perspective, completely different than the one union bureaucrats have fastened on the working class for the better part of a century.

The problems are system wide—the fight against them has to be based on that fact. Simply “reforming” the system—as some union leaders claim they want to do—isn’t enough. Aiming to get a “fair share” for the workers is a pipe dream.

This system isn’t “fair.” It is built on exploitation of the working class, for the great benefit of the capitalist class.

So, if the problems are system wide, what does that mean? What can any group of workers in one workplace—or even one company or one industry do? How does one part of the working class take on the whole system?

For decades, unions have threatened strikes, sometimes called them, but those strikes always stayed within the boundaries of what the system allows. Workers fought company by company, fought at different times, isolated from each other.

One part of the working class won’t solve the problem. Workers at one industry can’t overcome the whole system. That’s a fact.

But workers at even one company could start a fight that will. And that’s also a fact! They can be the spearhead of the fight that spreads to other parts of the work force—if their fight, starting in their company, aims to bring in workers from other companies and workers from other industries.

For that to happen, there have to be at least small groups of fighters within a number of companies who understand that the system can’t be reformed. There have to be workers whose goal is revolution—the fight only the working class can carry on. There have to be workers whose goal is a new society that only the working class can build.

So, what happens next? UPS workers themselves haven’t finished voting on the contract. Maybe they will vote it down—there seemed to be a lot of complaints about the new contract. But even if workers vote a contract down, nothing will change—not so long as workers wait on a union bureaucrat to negotiate something for them.

The working class holds the future in its own hands. But for that future to be realized there at least have to be small groups of workers in a number of workplaces with a revolutionary perspective. And that’s true, even for workers just to defend themselves within this system today.