Inside Russia opponents of the war continue to find ways to express their opposition to the slaughter.
“I hear the voices of Russia” is the title of a series of artworks created by Alisa Gorshenina in Nizhny Tagil, a city in the Urals. One piece repeats the phrase, “We are against the war” in different languages.
“Russia is a multinational country, and I noticed that people had started to speak out against the war in their native languages,” she told the Moscow Times. A fifth of Russia’s population of 144 million are from over 160 ethnicities other than Russian. The Russian army’s foot soldiers come disproportionately from poorer regions like Buryatia and Dagestan and suffer high casualty rates in Ukraine. This spurs protests in these areas.
Hundreds have been dragged before Russian courts charged with the “crime” of spreading “fake news” about the war.
Dmitry Ivanov was sentenced to over eight years in prison March 7. He was accused of “political hatred” for posting online news about Moscow’s deadly attacks on Ukrainian civilians.
The day of the verdict, his supporters packed the courtroom. Ivanov expressed solidarity with fellow political prisoners and asked his supporters to write them letters and to attend their trials.
“Russia is not Putin. Tens of millions of Russians are against this criminal war,” he said. He noted that many have relatives in Ukraine. “This is a dark moment of our history, but the darkest moment always comes before dawn.”
Photo: Cape on artist Alisa Gorshenina in the Urals region of Russia says “No to war” in more than a dozen of the languages spoken across the huge country. “Russia is a multinational country, and I noticed that people had started to speak out against the war in their native languages,” she said.
Knocking on doors a few blocks from the derailment site March 15, members of the Socialist Workers Party found a wide range of opinions. Some told us they “trust what the government is doing,” but that seemed to be a minority view.
Lon Berresford, a carpenter who lives just south of the tracks, said he and his wife weren’t sickened by the chemical release, but heard there were more complaints on the other side of the tracks. Like several neighbors, they said they have no plans to leave. “If you’re afraid, you’re afraid,” he said, “but a lot of people are speculating on this.” So far 22 lawsuits have been filed against Norfolk Southern by area residents, and all but one are being consolidated into one big class-action suit.
Berresford had no doubt the railroad cut corners on safety. “All businesses try to make money, so it’s no surprise. That’s big business.” Like several other people we spoke to, he remembered when trains used to have a caboose, with crew members on the end who could respond to problems, like the overheating axle bearing that caused the derailment here.
Just north of the tracks, Kathy Smyth and Mark Thompkins said they and their 10-year-old daughter have all had symptoms since the derailment, including rashes, nose bleeds and severe eye irritation. SWP member David Rosenfeld said, “You can’t trust Norfolk Southern, the government regulators and politicians, or the wave of lawyers who’ve descended on this town.”
“That’s right,” said Smyth, who works two jobs, at a grocery store and a nursing home. “The only people we can trust are each other.”
Candace Wagner, a rail worker and member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, pointed to the victory residents won in forcing Norfolk Southern bosses to rip up the tracks and remove contaminated soil, ballast and trackage from the area of the derailment. Their initial move was to get the trains rolling as quickly as possible, to start profits rolling again, and minimize the cleanup.
That was a victory, Smyth said, but the railroad-organized project is also kicking up toxic dust. She has visited clinics twice with severe eye irritation since it began. The town government has responded with street sweepers that can be seen on local streets.
Smyth and Thompkins, who work at a nearby factory, were interested in the issues rail workers face. “One of the main issues rail workers were ready to strike over last fall was schedules that make it hard for workers to build their union or have family time,” Wagner said. “But the Biden administration and Congress intervened to ban any strike and impose a contract on us.”
We discussed the fight needed by rail workers and our unions to control the conditions we work under with Sue Libert, who works as a church secretary. “They need to take better care of the rail workers,” Libert said. “I can’t believe how they work on call and don’t have sick days. And the trains are way too long.”
From the Dominican Republic and on behalf of the Sugarcane Workers Union UTC, we send our appreciation for the writings by George Novack in Labor, Nature, and the Evolution of Humanity. We were pleased to read George Novack’s biography (1905-92) and about his joining the Socialist Workers Party in the United States.
His writings about how humanity rose to civilization — as well as his analysis of the fundamental course of U.S. history — is of great importance, and in our view, essential to understand the present and future development of humanity, of the working class, and its future socialist system. It’s a pleasure to read and study his works because they make clear our political responsibility and provide a genuine understanding of the past, present, and future struggles of the working class and its vanguard, which is the party.
....By the early 1980s, however, the bourgeoisie and Islamic Republic were employing increasingly brutal repression to turn back and defeat struggles by working people and the oppressed, consolidating the rulers’ counterrevolutionary clutch at home.
After Iranian military forces pushed Saddam Hussein’s invading army back across the border in mid-1982, Tehran sent its own troops into Iraq in large numbers. Whatever defensive purpose this initially served, the Tehran regime over the next several years sent wave after wave of teenage and other young Iranian working people to needless slaughter as it assaulted population centers in Iraq. …
By the end of 1982, a combination of official and government-sponsored thug terror made it impossible for communists to any longer carry out political activity in Iran. The record of the proletarian internationalist course and unbroken continuity of that communist party, however, exists to be studied by new generations and put into practice as conditions permit. A good starting point can be found in issue no. 7 of New International.
Piketty or Marx? Capital in the Twenty-first century: a fundamental criticism Part 5 (last)
James Miller
Piketty does not mention the growth of credit, except in one instance, where he says,
"Broadly speaking, the 1970s and 1980s witnessed an extensive "financialization" of the global economy, which altered the structure of wealth in the sense that the total amount of financial assets and liabilities held by various sectors (households, corporations, government agencies) increased more rapidly than net wealth. In most countries, the total amount of financial assets and liabilities in the early 1970s did not exceed four to five years of national income. ... I should also point out that these international positions are in substantial part the result of fictitious financial flows associated not with the needs of the real economy but rather with tax optimization strategies and regulatory arbitrage (using screen corporations set up in countries where the tax structure and/ or regulatory environment is particularly attractive)."
Marx explained that the source of bourgeois wealth was the ability of capital to capture and retain a portion of the value created by workers in the production process. This portion is called surplus value (which can be broken down principally into profits, interest and rent). The workers subsist on a limited wage, usually sufficient to maintain their living conditions and raise children. The value of the products pouring out of the process of production, on average, exceeds the value that the capitalist has advanced for their production. When the products are sold in the market, the part in excess of the capitalists' expenses of production is pocketed by the owner of the means of production as surplus value (a portion of which might be paid to the banker as interest, and to the landlord as rent). The surplus value is the portion of value that the capitalist collects without having had to pay any equivalent….
This statement was released March 1 by Henry Dennison, a rail worker, member of SMART-TD union, and member of the Socialist Workers Party in Seattle.
The disastrous train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, and the ongoing damage it is doing to the lives, health, and livelihoods of workers, farmers and small-business owners throughout the area is a clear demonstration of why workers must use our unions to fight for control over safety and all aspects of the operation of the railroads.
For many years I worked in the coal mines. On the job I learned from my brothers and sisters in the United Mine Workers of America how miners organized and fought for a measure of control over how we mined coal. Why we had to stand together every day to enforce safety questions, and how we could stand with other workers in other unions to strengthen each other. For a short time the union won the right to shut down production whenever it determined we faced unsafe conditions.
Politicians of both the Democratic and Republican parties are using the disaster for their own advantage. The Biden administration claims that they will introduce new regulations they say will give the government the power to prevent more catastrophes like has been visited on East Palestine. But this is a trap. History shows regulations only strengthen the hand of the government, as opposed to the workers themselves. The capitalist rulers’ political parties and government protect the profits and power of the boss class. This was demonstrated yet again when the Biden administration led a bipartisan Congress to ban rail workers right to strike and imposed a contract we had voted down last fall.
Instead of turning regulation of the railroad over to the bosses’ government, we need to use our unions to take control over the conditions we work under. This is the only way we can protect ourselves and all those who live along the tracks.
We need shorter trains. Fifty-car trains with a crew of two on the head end and two in a caboose or engine on the rear would allow workers to keep eyes on the entire train. In East Palestine, this would have enabled us to see the hot axle on train 32N and bring it to a halt, preventing the disaster that took place.
We need to demand the rail bosses stop cutting jobs to boost profits and immediately hire more car inspectors and repairmen, engine mechanics, operating crew members and track workers, and restore engine and car repair facilities that have been shuttered or reduced in size.
The rail bosses’ drive to use longer and longer trains, fewer workers, just-in-time scheduling, and cut back even further on maintenance to boost profits reflects their class priorities — profits over all other concerns. This will lead to more East Palestines, more Lac-Mégantics. Our interest is the protection of the entire working class.
“As long as it is more profitable to clean up a disaster than to prevent one,” Jeremy Ferguson, president of the SMART-TD union, said after the derailment, “these Wall Street-driven rail corporations will continue to hold communities like East Palestine hostage.”
We need to demand that those in East Palestine whose livelihoods and living conditions have been so callously upended by Norfolk Southern bosses and government officials at all levels be compensated. We should demand they receive lifetime medical coverage paid by the railroad because the chemicals that leaked and others produced in the “controlled” fire may take years before they cause disease.
Laws like the Railway Labor Act — passed to strengthen the hands of the rail bosses — and regulations that always favor the bosses don’t exist because the working class is weak. They exist because the capitalist rulers fear our numbers and our potential strength.
We need to step up our use of our unions to fight for our interests and the interests of our class. To do so, we need to build our own party, a labor party, based on our unions, to fight to take political power into our own hands.
[....] Anti-Jewish attacks have increased in California and the U.S. in recent years.
Socialist Workers Party member Carole Lesnick delivered a letter of solidarity on behalf of the party to the Schneerson Center. She also sent letters urging unionists and others to speak out against antisemitism that were printed in the East Bay Times,Mercury News/San Jose, Jewish News of Northern California and San Leandro Times.
“Working people in this country face a grinding economic crisis,” Lesnick wrote. “History teaches us that as this crisis deepens, and as workers fight back, the capitalist rulers will turn to Jew-hatred, seeking to blame Jewish people for the economic and social problems workers face.”
Party members have also reached out to Jewish students at the University of California at Berkeley who are being targeted, not by ultrarightists, but by liberals and students who consider themselves part of the left.
As many as 14 clubs at its law school, including Women of Berkeley Law, the Queer Caucus and Law Students of African Descent, have put into their bylaws a ban on speakers holding views “in support of Zionism, the apartheid state of Israel, and the occupation of Palestine.” Since over 80% of Jews believe Israel has a right to exist, it’s a ban on Jews. A ban not on speaking about Israel, but on any topic....
[....] Rail workers — who have more than enough familiarity with the disdain for the conditions they labor under and the effects that has on working people who live by the tracks — are discussing the need for union control over rail operations.
Militant worker-correspondents met Tish McDevitt, who lives in Negley, just south of East Palestine, Feb. 25. She was told to evacuate when the railroad was going to drain and burn toxic vinyl chloride from derailed tank cars that threatened to explode. “But now we’re told we’re not eligible for any aid for the evacuation or the aftermath of the fire,” she said. Leslie Run Creek, which carried spilled chemicals down to the Ohio River, runs through Negley. “And we are worried sick about the safety of our well water. Maybe it tests ‘safe’ today. What about after the chemicals have time to seep into the ground?”
Diana Elzer, a co-owner of Sutherin greenhouse where McDevitt works, said, “No one blames the crew of that train. It was the greed of the company that caused it. Why couldn’t the company say what the train was carrying? It was days before the Environmental Protection Agency released the information on the other chemicals that were spilled.”
In fact, the first responders on the scene after the derailment and fire broke out — who weren’t issued hazmat suits or respirators to protect themselves — knew nothing about what was burning or being released into the air. Days later it became clear that hazardous chemical placards on dangerous tank cars melted in the fire....
Piketty or Marx? Capital in the Twenty-first Century: a fundamental criticism
Part 3 Transition to capitalist production
For his part, Piketty doesn't mention the transition from feudalism to capitalism, which was a very slow process until the late 18th century, impeded by the persistent strength of medieval traditions, protected by the monarchy and the aristocracy. He does, however, provide statistical evidence of a passage from a more-or-less economically stagnant world to a world of accelerated national growth, although he doesn't recognize capitalism as fundamentally different from feudalism. Nor does he consider "capital" something uniquely associated with capitalism. Marx and Engels, on the other hand, did explain the historical transition to capitalism.
The underlying assumption in Piketty's analysis is that "capital" has existed since ancient times; indeed he has a chart showing the ratio of the rate of return on capital to the growth rate of the economy starting at the year zero. He explains in Chapter 10 (p. 446): "In order to illustrate this point as clearly as possible, I have shown in Figure 10.9 the evolution of the global rate of return on capital and the growth rate from antiquity to the twenty-first century." But this ignores the basic facts of the evolution of social systems since the birth of civilization. In previous forms of society (barbarism, slavery, feudalism) capital either did not exist, or existed only in primitive forms (merchant's and usurer's capital). In these earlier stages of social development, the basic needs of the population were met by traditional practices of production and distribution that did not involve money. In slave societies production was carried out by slaves, and a portion of the product was given to them as survival rations. In feudal society, the work was done by serfs who provided labor services or a share of the product to the aristocratic landowners….
[....] Yola Kipcak writes, "In critiquing one crude philosophy, Queer Theory goes to the other extreme and adopts its mirror image. No phenomenon coincides directly with the general categories by which we know them. No man or woman fits perfectly with the universal category that we know them by. Nevertheless, men and women exist. Nature expresses itself in patterns that we as humans can learn to recognize. Our ideas of a man or a woman, stripped away from all the accidental and inessential attributes, are crucial for our understanding of any individual man or woman. Queer Theorists, like their postmodern brethren, however, deny the existence of any form of category or patterns in nature. Instead of understanding the dialectical relationship between the individual and the universal, they renounce the universal and raise the individual and accidental to the level of principle."
A concept of gender with no material basis is not just cause for philosophical skepticism regarding the category of "women," it dissolves it entirely.
From the dawn of class-divided society, at the point when humankind began to produce surplus goods, the oppression of women commenced, including monogamy for the purpose of securing property rights through inheritance. That women's oppression is rooted in control of the reproduction of humanity is completely thrown overboard by the idealists. This is gross historical revisionism, and is a denial of the material reality of cause for women's oppression today, i.e., their immutable biological reality.
This denial of women's existence is a denial also of women's oppression. The dictatorship of capital sustains itself on the reproduction of exploited labor. The labor that goes into rearing children, in producing laborers, has been performed exclusively by the female sex, working women who are doubly exploited, both by the capitalist class through wage slavery and by society at large by being responsible for the rearing of children and caring for the elderly. The system depends on the latter as much as the former.
And how convenient for the bourgeoisie that gender ideology changes nothing for women in terms of the labor they must provide, while at the same time denying that such laborers and exploitation exist! [....]
.png)