Six million in the US with no income but food stamps

Six million in the US with no income but food stamps
7 January 2010

Some six million Americans—one in 50 people in the US—are living on no income other than $100 or $200 a month in food stamps, according to an analysis of state data by the New York Times. The number of people who reported that they are unemployed and receive no cash aid—neither welfare, nor unemployment insurance, pension benefits, child support or disability pay—the newspaper reported, has jumped by 50 percent over the last two years, as the recession has taken hold.
According to the January 3 article, the number of people reporting no income tripled in Nevada over the past two years, doubled in Florida and New York, and increased nearly 90 percent in Minnesota and Utah. In Wayne County, Michigan—which includes Detroit, where half the population is unemployed or underemployed—one out of every 25 residents reports an income of only food stamps. In Yakima County, Washington, the figure is one out of every 17.
The figures reveal the vast scale of human suffering in the US as the new decade begins and puts the lie to talk of an economic “recovery.” The 6 million people in households reporting no income—which includes 1.2 million children—is equivalent to the entire population of Indiana or Massachusetts, or the combined populations of Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Boston.
Such a social catastrophe underscores the indifference of the Obama administration, which has done virtually nothing to provide relief to those who have lost their jobs, homes and livelihoods—even as it spares no expense to shore up the fortunes of the financial elite and fund its ongoing wars.
The number of people without an income has been on the rise since 1996, when Democratic President Bill Clinton and the Republican Congress ended welfare as a universal entitlement, a status the federal relief program had enjoyed since its inception in the 1930s. Pledging to “end the cycle of dependency,” the Democrats and Republicans imposed lifetime limits on benefits, drastically reduced the level of cash assistance, and imposed restrictive “workfare” and other requirements on further aid.
Despite the increased need for relief, Obama has opposed any additional funding for what remains of the welfare program, called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Since their peak in the 1990s, welfare rolls are down nearly 75 percent, the Times reported.
“Many of those who would have received cash assistance in past recessions are not getting it now,” Judy Putnam, a spokesperson for the Michigan League for Human Services, told the World Socialist Web Site. “Only a third of the state’s children living in poverty are getting cash assistance compared with two-thirds before ‘welfare reform’ in 1996. People in Michigan are heavily dependent on food stamps.”
With jobless benefits covering only half of the unemployed, food stamps—which provide an average of $1 per meal per person, or around $100 per person each month for individuals or families earning up to 130 percent of the official poverty level—have become the safety net of last resort. A record 36 million people—one in eight people and one in four children—now rely on the food stamp program. The joint federal-state Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is expanding by 20,000 people per day, but is still estimated to serve only two-thirds of those who qualify.
An earlier Times study showed there are more than 200 US counties where food stamp usage shot up by at least two-thirds, including Riverside County, California, most of greater Phoenix and Las Vegas, a ring of Atlanta suburbs, and a 150-mile stretch of southwest Florida from Bradenton to the Everglades. The study found there are over 800 counties where food stamps feed one third of all children.
Late last year, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis released a study showing that 50 percent of all children and 90 percent of African American children will receive food stamps at some point before their 20th birthday. “Rather than being a time of security and safety,” said Mark Rank, Ph.D., one of the authors of the report, “the childhood years for many American children are a time of economic turmoil, risk, and hardship.”
The January 3 Times report focused on Florida, where the number of people with no income beyond food stamps has doubled in two years and more than tripled along the southwest coast, where a housing boom turned into a bust of foreclosed and abandoned homes. According to state data, those without income were split evenly between families with children and individuals. Those affected were also racially mixed—about 42 percent white, 32 percent black, and 22 percent Latino—with whites making up the fastest growing segment during the recession.
This plunge into destitution has affected wide layers of the population. The Times article cites a middle-aged mother of two, Isabel Bermudez, who moved from a Bronx housing project to sell real estate in Florida. Once enjoying a six-figure income, a house with a pool and investment property, she lost her job and home and ran out of unemployment benefits. Ms. Bermudez’s sole income is now $320 a month in food stamps. “I went from making $180,000 to relying on food stamps,” she told the newspaper, adding that without the program she wouldn’t be able to feed her children.
The increasing reliance on meager food stamp allowances exposes the absence of anything that can properly be called a social safety net in the US. The situation will only get worse, as both the Democrats and Republicans prepare to slash what remains of publicly funded programs in order to pay for the multitrillion-dollar Wall Street bailout and expansion of US military action around the world.
The theme of Obama’s State of the Union address—expected early next month—will be long-term deficit reduction and a further demand that the American people reduce their consumption. The White House is backing a bipartisan commission to recommend major cuts in basic social programs along with regressive taxes on consumption, and Obama’s budget director, Peter Orszag, has said the administration will take measures to reduce the deficit in its next budget due out in February. Such actions will throw millions more into poverty.
The social crisis facing working people—depression levels of unemployment, home foreclosures, the growth of hunger, poverty and homelessness—is the most graphic expression of the failure of capitalism, an economic system that benefits the wealthy few at the expense of the vast majority.
In the midst of this worsening situation for the working population, it was reported last week that the top three banks—Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley—which received tens of billions in public funds under the Troubled Asset Relief Program—will hand out $49.5 billion in end-of-year cash bonuses and stock awards. All told, US banks will dispense an estimated $200 billion in total compensation.
The Obama administration is continuing and accelerating the transfer of wealth from working people to those who are responsible for precipitating the worst economic breakdown since the Great Depression.
Nearly a year after his inauguration, President Obama has demonstrated he is nothing but a tool of the financial oligarchy. The very future of the working class depends on the development of a mass socialist movement against this administration, both big business parties, and the profit system which they defend.
Jerry White

US-China rivalry intensifies

US-China rivalry intensifies
9 January 2010

Last year, it was fashionable to talk of an emerging “G2”. The US, the world’s largest economy, and China, its rising rival, would come together to resolve global problems—in particular, the international economic crisis wracking capitalism.
Those illusions have rapidly evaporated this year, as the Obama administration signals a far harder line toward China with a series of provocative moves, including the sale of advanced weapons to Taiwan and a planned meeting with the Dalai Lama. These significant symbolic steps follow the imposition of hefty US tariffs on a range of Chinese goods, from steel pipes and steel-grate to tyres.
Beijing has already protested over the Taiwan arms sale and will certainly do the same if Obama meets the Dalai Lama. US officials expect that Chinese President Hu Jintao will not attend Obama’s nuclear security summit in April and may end bilateral military dialogue with the US. Relations are likely to deteriorate further as the US pushes ahead with new sanctions against Iran over its nuclear programs—a move that Beijing has publicly opposed.
Washington is no doubt driven by a growing sense that its economic and strategic interests are being increasingly blocked by Beijing. Obama’s much-vaunted trip to China last November was widely regarded as a failure: his call for an appreciation of the yuan against the dollar was ignored and in return he received a lecture on the need for financial rectitude to ensure China’s continued purchase of US bonds. At the Copenhagen climate summit, the US was opposed by a bloc led by China that pointedly snubbed Obama when he arrived to pull together a deal.
These tensions are rooted in the rapidly changing relations between the major economic powers, driven by the globalisation of production. The US remains the world’s no. 1 economy but is confronted by a dynamic rival. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the US GDP was eight times that of China; a decade later the figure was down to four times. This year China is likely to overtake Japan to become the world’s second largest economy. In 2009 China passed the US as the world’s largest auto market and producer. Two decades ago, a car industry barely existed in China.
The global financial crisis that erupted in 2008 has only served to underscore the vulnerability of the US and the rise of Chinese capitalism. While the US and European economies contracted in 2009, China contributed more than 50 percent of global economic growth. Last year China overtook Germany to become the world’s largest exporter. While major Western banks had to be bailed out, the seven largest Asian economies now hold $US4.6 trillion in foreign currency reserves—greater than the rest of the world combined.
A free trade agreement between China and the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) came into effect on January 1—overnight creating the world’s third largest free trade zone after the EU and the North American Free Trade Association. Washington is not only excluded from this arrangement but has only a handful of bilateral deals of its own with countries in the region.
Driven by the need for raw materials, energy and markets, China is using its economic muscle to acquire assets, secure long-term contracts and boost its political standing through loans and aid in countries around the world. China’s outbound investment for mergers and acquisition in 2009 rose to $46 billion, five times the figure of $9.6 billion in 2005. In every region of the globe, from Central Asia to Africa and the Pacific, China’s economic expansion is challenging the US and European powers, and disrupting existing relations.
Barely hidden is the growing military rivalry. The US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, its proxy war in Pakistan and threats against Iran are driven by Washington’s determination to dominate the key strategic regions of the Middle East and Central Asia, to the exclusion of its rivals, especially China. More broadly, the US has sought to encircle China with a series of alliances and bases, stretching from Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Australia and India to Afghanistan and Central Asia. China is responding by building its own military capabilities, including a blue-water navy to secure shipping routes to the Middle East and Africa, and a de facto partnership with Russia to counter US influence in Central Asia.
In a December 23 article, the Financial Times’s chief economic commentator Martin Wolf warned of the far-reaching consequences of the rise of China and the “disastrous loss of authority” of the US due to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the global financial crisis. “The noughties of the 21st century,” he commented, “now have the same fin de regime feeling as those of a century ago.”
The decline of Britain as world hegemon and the rise of rivals in the early twentieth century—particularly Germany and the United States—led to three decades of upheaval, including two world wars and the Great Depression, before the US emerged as the new dominant power. “Now we have a possibly even more difficult transition of power to manage,” Wolf declared.
Wolf had no proposals to offer other than a general prescription for international cooperation. He ended rather gloomily with an appeal for all countries to recognise the value of Benjamin Franklin’s maxim: “We must all hang together or assuredly we shall hang separately.” Wolf concluded: “Will that happen? Alas, I rather doubt it.”
This pessimistic tone reflects a recognition among more astute bourgeois observers that international rivalries are intensifying, not lessening. In the midst of World War I, Lenin in his farsighted pamphlet “Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism” explained the impossibility of a permanent agreement between the major powers to stabilise global capitalism. Any arrangement made at one point in time was necessarily upset by uneven rates of development among competing capitalist economies. The competition between declining powers and rising rivals was decided by war.
Today’s tensions are compounded by the fact that no country is in a position to play the role that the US did in creating a new equilibrium after World War II. China is an economic giant with feet of clay, riven by economic and social contradictions. Its economy is dependent on Western investment, technology and markets. China’s great economic “strength”—its vast pool of cheap labour—inevitably produces deep-seated social tensions. While its GDP is set to become second in the world, its per capita GDP was just $3,259 in 2008, 104th in the world, behind Iraq, Georgia and the Republic of Congo. It has the second largest group of dollar billionaires in the world behind the US, yet 150 million people live on $US1 or less a day. The abiding fear of the tiny Chinese elite is that its police-state measures will not contain the immense social explosion that is building up.
Amid the continuing global economic crisis, the rivalries will sharpen sooner rather than later. The world has entered into a convulsive new period of political upheaval and war. The only social force capable of offering humanity a progressive solution is the international working class. The same global processes that are exacerbating international tensions and leading to conflict have enormously strengthened the proletariat, whose historic task is the revolutionary overthrow of the bankrupt capitalist system and its outmoded division of the world into nation states, which is the root cause of war and the social catastrophes afflicting mankind.
John Chan

Europe in crisis

Europe in crisis
11 January 2010

At the start of the last decade, in March 2000, the European Union heads of state announced the Lisbon Strategy. Its aim, by 2010, was to make Europe “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion.” This would create “the conditions for full employment and the strengthening of regional cohesion in the European Union.”
As the second decade of the 21st century begins, the aspirations set forth in the Portuguese capital have evaporated. Instead of full employment, Europe is gripped by mass unemployment; instead of economic growth, there is stagnation; in place of cohesion, there is discord. Even the common currency, the foundation of the lofty plans of Lisbon, is in acute danger.
The Lisbon Strategy was the expression of widespread illusions that Europe, by means of EU enlargement and deeper integration, could catch up with or even overtake the US as a major power. This would happen entirely as a result of a united Europe’s economic power, without the social tensions and political and military conflicts of an earlier period.
These illusions found their clearest expression in a speech by then-German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer (Green Party) in May 2000 at Berlin’s Humboldt University. Fischer called for the transformation of the European Union from a loose alliance of states into a federation.
Through the “close integration of their vital interests and the transfer of national sovereignty rights to supranational European institutions,” said Fischer, the European states would signal their rejection of the national conflicts that had torn apart the continent prior to 1945. Only in this way would Europe be able to “play its due role in the global economic and political competition.”
Since then, Fischer’s idea that Europe could be harmoniously organized on a capitalist basis has proven to be a pipe dream. In Paris, and especially in London, his proposal was interpreted as an attempt to subjugate Europe to the dictates of Berlin. The EU’s enlargement into Eastern Europe has turned out to be a double-edged sword. It has brought not only the expansion of the internal market, but also political strife and instability.
In 2003, the US attacked Iraq, dividing Europe. While the British and Polish governments fully supported the war, the German and French were opposed. The American administration used the conflict to drive a wedge between “old” and “new” Europe.
The European Constitution, what remained of Fischer’s concept, failed in 2005 at the hands of French and Dutch voters, who interpreted it correctly as an attempt to subordinate the people of Europe to the dictates of the most powerful financial and economic interests. After a diplomatic and political tug of war that lasted several years, the basic framework of the European Constitution came into being in the form of the Lisbon Treaty. But by then, Berlin and Paris had largely lost interest. This was demonstrated in the appointment to the two new key positions—the council president and the European foreign minister—of secondary figures without any authority.
With the coming to power of Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, France and Germany had turned again to a more independent foreign policy, with a stronger focus towards the US. In 2005, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (Social Democratic Party) had left office prematurely, amongst other things because his foreign policy orientation towards Russia had led to his increasing isolation. But the hope that Washington would respond with increasing concern for European interests has remained unfulfilled, even after the change from President George W. Bush to Barack Obama.
The international financial and economic crisis has now brought all the unresolved contradictions of European domestic and foreign policy to the surface. In the conflict between the US and China, which increasingly dominates the world stage, Europe is being pushed to the edge and torn apart.
The German and French governments are bitter that Washington decided on a massive expansion of the Afghan war without prior consultation with its NATO allies. On the one hand, they do not want to leave the strategically important region to the sole influence of the United States; on the other, they fear that in an ever escalating war they could become mere agents of the USA. The failure of the Copenhagen climate change summit, which Europe lays at the door of the American and Chinese governments, has caused further anger.
The economic crisis has laid bare the inherent weakness of the European economy. The huge budget deficits in Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain threaten to break the euro’s back. So far, the common currency has prevented a massive devaluation and accompanying surge in inflation, but the high value of the euro, coupled with rising interest rates, makes it impossible for the Eurozone countries to overcome the crisis on the basis of the free market. Brussels has responded by calling for draconian cuts in government spending, particularly in the social sector.
Britain, which is not a member of the Eurozone, is becoming the sick man of Europe. Its economy is heavily dependent on the financial sector. In the last ten years, the number of manufacturing jobs in the UK has declined by 30 percent. Over the same period in Germany and France, the decline was far less, 5 and 10 percent respectively. To rescue the financial sector from collapse, the British government has taken on debt on a vast scale. The value of the pound has fallen correspondingly. Another banking crisis would quickly raise the specter of a British default on its sovereign debt.
For Germany, and, to a lesser extent, France, their relative economic strength has proven to be their Achilles’ heel. Industrial production in Germany, as a percentage of gross domestic product, is more than twice the figure for the US. The relative strength of German industrial production is bound up with a massive increase in German exports. Over the past 20 years, Germany’s production for export has risen from about 20 percent to 47 percent of GDP. Even China’s exports account for only 36 percent of its GDP.
This large dependence on industrial exports has made Germany especially vulnerable to the impact of the international economic crisis. Last year, economic output declined by 5.3 percent. Engineering production is currently running at only 70 percent of capacity, and according to experts, the prospects for improvement are slim.
The German export industry is under massive pressure from both the US and China. The United States has exploited the low dollar and its low wage levels, established with brute force as part of the reorganization of the US auto industry, to gain a competitive advantage against its European competitors. Symbolic in this respect was the partial shift of production of the Mercedes S-Class from Germany to the United States. For its part, China is now pushing into market segments that were once the preserve of the Germans, due to their high quality standards.
The European and German elite are reacting to the growing problems and contradictions as they did at the start of the last century: with social and political attacks on the working class and with increasing militarism.
Many governments seem paralysed, given the growing foreign policy problems and internal conflicts. The Christian Democratic-Free Democratic government in Berlin has succumbed to internal squabbles since taking office in November. Chancellor Merkel has been accused on all sides of a lack of determination and weak leadership. But behind the scenes, there is an intensive search for new mechanisms of rule to facilitate the shifting of the consequences of the economic crisis onto the working class, the methods of social compromise having been largely exhausted.
It is in this context that the ongoing assault on democratic rights is being intensified, in part through the fomenting of terrorist scares and the stoking up of resentment against Muslims. Among those at the forefront of these reactionary efforts are the German Social Democrat Thilo Sarrazin and the former Socialist Party politician and current French Immigration Minister Eric Besson. The Swiss referendum against the construction of minarets has been followed attentively and sympathetically by these circles. Such measures represent an attempt to divert attention from class issues and mobilize right-wing layers of the middle class to be thrown at some point against the working class.
Working people must draw their own conclusions from the failure of the bourgeoisie’s European plans. European workers must unite in order to defend their own social and political interests. They must fight for a socialist Europe, under the banner of the United Socialist States of Europe.
Peter Schwarz

The United Mine Workers of America and the resurgence of black lung disease

The United Mine Workers of America and the resurgence of black lung disease
12 January 2010

According to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), the number of cases of black lung disease among US coal miners has more than doubled in recent years. This reverses a decades-long trend that saw a 90 percent decline in the incidence of black lung, or coal workers’ pneumoconiosis, which destroys lung tissue and slowly suffocates miners to death.
The resurgence of black lung demonstrates in a particularly tragic way the rolling back of all of the historical gains not only of miners, but the entire working class. Before the miners’ mass struggles to improve their working and living conditions in the 1960s and 1970s, the prevalence of black lung disease was associated with the oppression and poverty faced by wide sections of the population, particularly in the mining regions of Appalachia, as chronicled in Michael Harrington’s famous 1962 work, The Other America.
Despite a massive decline in the ranks of working miners—to only 98,000 today, compared with nearly 500,000 in 1950—the number of black lung cases and the rate of incidence are increasing, including among young miners. Health officials blame the increase on longer working hours—which have increased by more than 32 percent since 1978—and increased exposure to coal dust. These are largely the results of the drive of profit-mad companies to extract coal from locations previously considered to have been mined out.
The systematic weakening of health and safety standards, carried out under both Democratic and Republican administrations, has also contributed. Under the Bush administration, former coal executives were put in charge of the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) and coal companies were told to police themselves.
Since 1995, NIOSH has recommended cutting the limit of coal dust exposure in half, to 1 milligram per cubic meter, but MSHA has refused to set a stricter limit. The pandering to the industry has continued under President Obama, who has long had close connections to the coal interests of southern Illinois.
The return of high levels of black lung is, above all, a testament to the treacherous role of the United Mine Workers of America. Over the last three decades, the UMWA has systematically sabotaged the resistance of the miners and collaborated with the employers and the government to destroy the gains won by previous generations over more than a century of struggle.
The evolution of the UMWA—once known as the most militant and powerful union in America—is indicative of the transformation of the trade unions as a whole into corporatist adjuncts of big business. It is a historical verdict on the perspective of building a labor movement on the basis of support for the profit system, nationalism and an alliance with the capitalist parties, in particular, the Democratic Party.
Like the rest of the AFL-CIO trade union apparatus, the UMWA responded to the crisis of American capitalism in the late 1970s by repudiating the class struggle and working ever more closely with the employers to drive down labor costs and make US corporations more competitive against their international rivals.
A turning point in the degeneration of the UMWA was the election of Richard Trumka as union president in 1982. Trumka set out systematically to destroy the rich traditions of class conscious solidarity and militant struggle of the miners, which had been forged in the bitter “mine wars” of the first two decades of the last century.
Trumka overturned the miners’ long-standing principles of “no contract, no work” and the waging of national strikes to shut down both union and non-union production, and introduced the disastrous policy of “selective strikes.” This led to the isolation and defeat of bitter struggles at AT Massey (1984-85) and Pittston (1989-90). At the same time, the UMWA abandoned militant miners who were framed up, beaten and even murdered by the coal companies.
June 1989, rank-and-file miners sought to break Trumka’s isolation of the strike by 1,500 Pittston miners in Virginia and West Virginia by launching a wildcat strike involving 50,000 miners across 11 states. In an interview with the Charleston Gazette, Trumka pleaded with the coal bosses, saying Pittston’s intransigence was undermining the union’s efforts to bring “stability” to the coalfields.
If the coal operators and government were successful in smashing the UMWA, Trumka warned, this could result in a far more radical movement of the miners. “When it comes back, I think the form of union will be different,” Trumka said. “Its tolerance for injustice will be far less and its willingness to alibi for a system that we know doesn’t work will be nonexistent.”
Trumka all but acknowledged that the UMWA functioned as a policeman for the coal bosses, making excuses for and defending a political and economic order that was thoroughly hostile to the interests of the miners whom the organization claimed to represent.
The former UMWA president’s reward for collaborating in the destruction of his own union and virtual re-enslavement of the coal miners was his promotion to the leadership of the AFL-CIO. Here, of course, Trumka continues to alibi for the profit system and the Democratic Party, working ever more closely with the Obama administration, even as it ramps up its attack on the jobs, living standards, health care benefits and social conquests of the working class.
The issue of health and safety has always been at the center of the miners’ struggles. In 1968, mineworkers rebelled after 78 miners were killed in a mine explosion in Farmington, West Virginia and UMWA President Tony Boyle came out in defense of the mine owners. During this period, rank-and-file miners with the aid of sympathetic medical professionals organized the Black Lung Association to demand compensation for the condition, which at that time was not even recognized by the federal government as an occupational disease.
In February 1969, miners in West Virginia launched a 23-day wildcat strike and forced the passage of the first legislation related to black lung in the US. This was followed by the passage of the Mine Safety and Health Act, which, among other things, mandated safety inspections and set legal limits on the amount of coal dust.
This struggle preceded the massive strike wave of the 1970s, in which miners won significant improvements despite the cowardice and treachery of the UMWA bureaucracy. This included the 111-day strike in 1977-78, when miners defied the strike-breaking Taft-Hartley injunction imposed by Democratic President Jimmy Carter.
The substantial gains won between 1960 and 1980 have been reversed, with the full complicity of the UMWA. Once again, the hollows and mining towns of Appalachia are scarred by high rates of poverty and chronic unemployment, with the median family income in West Virginia consistently near or at the bottom of all US states. Young workers confront the dismal choice of taking their lives in their own hands to work in unsafe, dirty “dog-hole” mines, leave the state to search for a job elsewhere, or join the military.
It is telling that the sharpest increase in black lung disease has occurred in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, eastern Kentucky and western Virginia—the former strongholds of the UMWA. Today, less than 15 percent of working coal miners are members of the UMWA, down from 90 percent from its heyday in 1950. All told, the active membership of the UMWA has plummeted from over 120,000 in 1978 to 14,152 at present.
It is inevitable that miners and the entire working class will seek to build new organizations of struggle and find new means to defend themselves. The success of this depends on the development of a new political perspective, based not on the defense of American capitalism and the two-party system that upholds it, but on an irreconcilable struggle against the existing economic and political system. The working class must break with the outmoded and reactionary trade union organizations and create a mass political movement fighting on the basis of a socialist and internationalist strategy.
Jerry White

Workers Struggles

Workers Struggles: The Americas

5 January 2010

Latin America

Chilean copper miners protest over wages and bonuses

The 5,500 miners employed at the Chuquicamata mine in northern Chile are poised to strike this week over wages and bonuses. CODELCO, Chile’s national copper company, owns this giant open pit mine. On December 28, miners voted to reject a government offer of a 3.8 percent wage hike and an extraordinary bonus of US $23,000. They are demanding an increase of more than 5 percent and a signing bonus of 15 to 18 million pesos (US$30,000-36,000). CODELCO’s proposed bonus was contingent on the miners’ approval of the offer by December 31. It has now been withdrawn.

The strike is expected to have a significant impact on world copper prices. Chuquicamata produces 550,000 tons yearly, 4 percent of the world’s copper.

Last week, Chilean President Michelle Bachelet asked the miners not to strike; no one would benefit, she argued, and the national wealth would be damaged.

Francisco Tomic, CODELCO’s corporate vice president, declared that the company’s offer is at the “ethical limit” of what the country can afford. Higher wages for the miners would require the government take away resources from the nation’s poor, declared Tomic.

The strike will take place less than two weeks before the runoff elections between presidential candidates Eduardo Frei and Sebastián Piñera.

Mexican government blacklists sacked electricians

Tens of thousands of fired Mexican electrical utility workers have been barred from finding work. Their jobs were terminated by the government of President Felipe Calderón on October 11 when it shut down Central Power and Light (LyFC), the electrical utility that provided Mexico City and central Mexico with power. LyFC was closed in a military operation when, at midnight October 11, over 6,000 Mexican troops surrounded the company’s headquarters and plants and expelled the workers.

An article published on December 28 in the Mexican daily La Jornada quoted Eduardo Cortés Carrasco, a sacked worker with 19 years seniority as a white-collar employee. “It is a veritable witch-hunt,” declared Cortés. “We are denied jobs wherever we go.” Initially, Cortés had accepted a government severance package and, up to now, had not participated in the conflict between the Electrical Utility Workers Union (SME) and the Mexican government. He has now joined the SME campaign to reopen LyFC.

Cortés’ experience has been confirmed by La Jornada and other Mexican newspapers. Workers who apply for jobs openings―in private and public companies alike―have been told that they cannot expect to be hired until the end of the Calderón presidency, a three-year blacklist. “We receive a treatment that is worse than what ex-convicts receive,” said Cortés.

When LyFC was liquidated government officials promised workers who voluntarily accepted the government severance package that they would be given jobs elsewhere, but that has not happened.

LyFC’s shutdown aggravated the country’s employment crisis. Since 2006, unemployment in Mexico has increased by 83 percent. A recent report by the government labor statistical agency INEGI indicates that nearly 20 million Mexicans are unemployed or underemployed, nearly one in three workers.

The INEGI report shows that only 30 percent of Mexican workers enjoy a stable, full-time job, with social security benefits and legally recognized labor rights.

United States

Talks to resume in Kentucky factory strike

Negotiations are scheduled to resume January 5 in the three-week-old strike at TruSeal Technologies in Barbourville, Kentucky. United Steelworkers Local 8411 struck the manufacturer of window components December 16 after workers voted by a 153-0 margin to reject the company’s demand for concessions on insurance premiums, attendance bonuses, 401(k) retirement benefits, overtime and work schedules.

“They are trying to use the recession to tear our contracts apart,” Local 8411 member Danny Sams told the Corbin, Kentucky Times-Tribune. Negotiations were suspended on December 19 while picketing continued through the holidays.

Local 8411 has charged TruSeal with unfair labor practices for interrogating employees about their union activities. According to the Times-Tribune,“TruSeal is a part of Quanex Corporation, a publicly held company whose one-year investor return is currently over 100 percent.” The Barbourville plant makes insulating glass sealant spacer systems for windows and solar panels.

Boston airport cleaners launch wildcat strike

Some one hundred workers who clean planes at Boston’s Logan International Airport launched a 24-hour wildcat strike December 30 to protest low wages and lack of benefits from the service company Aramark Corporation. Roxanna Rivera, a negotiator for Service Employees International Union Local 615, told the Boston Herald, “We’re saying this is worth more than $9 an hour, with no benefits.” Rivera charged that Aramark “refused to offer or even counter any of our proposals.”

The janitors, who clean toilets and remove trash from Delta and United Airlines planes, are paid between $8 and $9 an hour. They have gone years without a pay raise and joined the SEIU last year after learning that cleaners employed by a competitor, Massport, receive $14 an hour.

Canada

Union folds Vancouver bus strike

A strike by 500 workers at HandyDART in Vancouver, BC, which began October 29, is over after their union agreed to binding arbitration. Last week, workers voted to reject a proposed contract recommended by negotiators for the Amalgamated Transit Union.

HandyDART provides transportation service to people with disabilities. Workers had already rejected two earlier offers, the latest just before Christmas. Central issues in the dispute were pensions, treatment of casual workers and health benefits.

Although workers have begun to return to work, it is unclear when full service will resume.

What were the 1960s about?

What were the 1960s about?: An Education and Pirate Radio

By David Walsh
2 December 2009

The decade of the 1960s receives a good deal of attention in English-language films and television. There are movies and series that focus on the early part of the decade, ‘on the eve,’ so to speak, of the great tumult, and those that concentrate on the upheavals of the late 1960s. In either case, the latter events are seen as a turning point, perhaps even as a barrier between ourselves and people who lived before then.

Various generations recognize themselves in or take as their point of departure the world that emerged after the middle of the 1960s; a distinct minority at this point probably identifies favorably with the reality of the 1950s and early 1960s, even if they are the appropriate age to do so. The gap is not simply a matter of age, but one of culture and sensibility.

Rightly or wrongly, the earlier decade in the US—and Britain as well to a certain extent—is associated with conformism in every sphere, the Cold War and its paranoia, sexual repression and enforced female submissiveness, continued racial apartheid in America, and cultural blandness, while the late 1960s and beyond conjure up images of protest, the ‘counterculture,’ flexibility, openness, and so forth.

As the years have passed, the ‘liberated’ 1960s (extending into the early to mid-1970s), like a prominent sandbar in the middle of a river caused by waters receding on both sides of it, are now seen not only as separated from the years that preceded, but by those that came after them. The 1980s and 1990s have now become virtually synonymous in much of popular culture with greed, individualism and selfishness.

There is some truth to this general sense of the course of things, but also a good deal of superficiality and over-simplification. Almost no artist ventures, in any event, to explain why a particular social mood transforms into another, quite different one.

For too many, the 1960s are surrounded with a golden halo; the decade is seen as a utopian moment, an era of promise that inexplicably turned into its opposite. (For example, filmmaker Roman Polanski, no less, told an interviewer not long before his most recent legal troubles that the decade “was a time of great aspirations and hopes and joy in general.” “You don’t see any of that in the world now?” Polanski: “I see the contrary, really.”)

It may be unreasonable to expect filmmakers and other artists to develop a thorough grasp of the postwar economic conditions, the Cold War political settlement, as well as the complex processes that undermined all that and led to the crisis and radicalization of masses of people in the late 1960s. It is no easy matter either to come to an understanding of the historical and ideological difficulties that helped produce the stagnant, reactionary climate prevailing for the past 30 years, along with its definite limits. However, without a greater degree of insight, most of the works about the 1960s will continue to fall short.

An Education

An Education, directed by Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig, with a script by Nick Hornby, is an appealing work in some ways. It has a talented cast, an attractive and convincing period look, and unfolds carefully. It is spoiled, however, by a rather predictable script and a conventional denouement, and the narrow outlook to which it seems to subscribe.

Sixteen-year-old Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is living in a London suburb in 1961. She listens to French music and longs for something more than her cramped, dull family life. She meets the older David (Peter Sarsgaard), Jewish, a bon vivant, something of a mystery man as to the source of his income (which turns out to be quasi-criminal). She goes to concerts and clubs with him and his friends, eventually on a weekend trip to Oxford and even an excursion to Paris. “You have no idea how boring my life was before I met you,” she tells him. David seduces and fools her parents into permitting her all these adventures. In the end, he proves to have one secret too many.

The intelligence of the actors and the subdued quality of the goings-on can’t conceal the essentially stereotyped and self-centered nature of the piece, based on a memoir by journalist Lynn Barber. Fine British acting here, unfortunately, primarily serves the purposes of making clichés quite appealing and ‘lifelike.’ Alfred Molina as Jenny’s impossibly penny-pinching and conservative father, Emma Thompson as her prim, anti-Semitic headmistress, and Olivia Williams as an apparently sexless, spinsterish teacher nearlyperform charmingly enough to make one forget that their characters are not genuine human beings, but static, stock figures whose essential purpose is to show off the subtler, more fluid personalities of Jenny and David. (Here, in individual human form, we are presented with an opposition between characters who belong to the previously staid epoch and those who point toward the more culturally and sexually adventurous days to come). We are encouraged to snicker along with Jenny and David at the expense of nearly everyone else, a notoriously bad sign.

Barber, who writes for the Observer, sees the early 1960s and her adolescence from the following point of view (in a 2008 article): “Feminism came too late for me. By the time The Female Eunuch was published in 1970, I was 26 and had already gone through all the conflicts and double-binds that made being a girl, and especially a clever girl, so difficult in the Fifties and Sixties.”

Via Hornby’s script, this take on the period finds its way into the film, which is all about Jenny’s development, her choices, her future, her inner anguish … This is the latest in a series of recent ‘coming-of-age’ films in which the protagonist finds his or her way at the end, leaving everybody else in the lurch. ‘As long as I’m all right, well, then …’ It’s distasteful. Why should we care terribly much, whether ‘clever’ Jenny goes to Oxford—first choice—or ends up marrying a successful man—second and least favored choice?

In London at the time, there were still bombed out buildings from World War II. A more enlightened filmmaker, Terence Davies, noted in his recent Of Time and the City that the British population in the 1950s “survived in some of the worst slums in Europe!” But the critical question to some was whether they could get into the right university and make a proper career for themselves. Unhappily, all the considerable acting (and technical and design and cinematographic) talent on display in An Education can’t make that particular sow’s ear into a silk purse.

Pirate Radio

Pirate Radio (known as The Boat That Rocked in Britain) is a much sillier, less ambitious film from Richard Curtis (writer of The Black Adder for television, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary, writer-director of Love Actually). Set in 1966, the movie purports to deal with the phenomenon of “pirate radio,” i.e., stations that set up operations off the southern English coast on ships and broadcast pop music at a time when the BBC hardly played any at all. The British government eventually cracked down on the operations and managed to halt most of them, before the BBC itself began programming rock and roll in earnest in 1967.

This is also a coming-of-age story. This time the adolescent in question is Carl (Tom Sturridge), who comes aboard one of the radio-broadcasting ships to stay with his ‘godfather,’ Quentin (Bill Nighy). We see the quirky collection of disc jockeys through his eyes, as he navigates his way, somewhat tortuously, toward his first sexual experience.

Curtis deals with the various characters and disjointed episodes in a cartoonish manner, by and large. Especially caricatured are a villainous cabinet minister, played by Kenneth Branagh, and his assistant (Jack Davenport). The film portrays them as diehard “family values” Tory reactionaries, appalled by rock and roll’s ‘filth’ and ‘pornography,’ when, in fact, Labour was in power at the time and the persecutor of the pirates was none other than “left” Labourite, Anthony Wedgwood Benn. From the attention to detail that Curtis pays in this regard, one can adduce the general historical truthfulness of the film as a whole.

Nonetheless, despite their naïve, sentimental, and formulaic propensities, none of the New Zealand-born writer-director’s films are without their charms and amusements. He has a way with words and a decided soft spot (all too softheaded at times) for foolish, scheming, lecherous humanity. Nighy is, as always, a comic delight, even though Pirate Radio does not give him much to do. The single word “languor” in his mouth, for example, accompanied by the right body movement, becomes an entire personality study.

In Curtis’s somewhat primitive view of things, the 1960s prove to have been about sleeping with whomever you liked, vaguely anarchic attitudes, and listening to loud music. Curtis evinces a nostalgia for the decade. He has the star American disc jockey, “The Count” (Philip Seymour Hoffman), tell young Carl, when the film slows down for one of its few reflective moments, “These are the best days of our lives.” But at least the heady days, now long since past, were not without their life-altering consequences: we are told by a closing title, in all apparent seriousness, that half a million radio stations now play pop music all day and night.

The writers and directors of both these limited films thus have this much in common: they tend to reduce the rebelliousness of the 1960s to the desire of sections of the middle class, with whom they identify, for a more comfortable, more expansive existence. Small change indeed.

Thirty years since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan

Thirty years since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan

30 December 2009

In the press coverage of President Barack Obama’s recent decision to deploy more US troops to Afghanistan, a historical milestone has gone curiously unmentioned—the 30th anniversary of the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan, which began on December 27, 1979.

An examination of the circumstances of this event undermines Obama’s claims that American policy in Afghanistan is motivated by a “war on terror,” revealing instead the imperialist aims behind US policy.

At the time, President Jimmy Carter seized on the Soviet intervention—which aimed to suppress mujahadeen rebels fighting the Soviet-backed regime of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA)—to undo a decade of détente and escalate tensions with the USSR. This critical decision unleashed a conflict that would ultimately devastate Afghan society.

It emerged only years later that the Soviet invasion was itself a response to a deliberate US attempt to set up a new military front against the USSR in Afghanistan. Even before the Soviet invasion, Washington was secretly assisting the mujahadeen, with the aim of provoking a Soviet intervention and trapping the USSR in a bloody quagmire. The US foreign policy establishment’s ultimate goal in pursuing this policy was to destroy the USSR and promote an expansion of US power in strategically located, oil-rich Central Asia.

In his 1996 memoir From the Shadows, Robert Gates, the current US secretary of defense, recalls US deliberations in the winter and spring of 1979. He describes a March 30, 1979 meeting: “Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs David Newsom stated that it was US policy to [demonstrate] to the Pakistanis, Saudis and others our resolve to stop the extension of Soviet influence in the Third World… Walt Slocombe, representing Defense, asked if there was value in keeping the Afghan insurgency going, ‘sucking the Soviets into a Vietnamese quagmire?’”

On July 3, 1979, President Carter authorized the CIA to fund and carry out propaganda for the Afghan rebels. The CIA reportedly sent its first shipments to the mujahadeen that summer.

The Kremlin Stalinists, guided by purely military and nationalist calculations, fell squarely into the trap set by Washington. The Soviet leadership thought that Afghan President Hafizullah Amin, from the PDPA’s Khalq faction, was negotiating a separate deal with Washington to halt US aid to the mujahadeen. Moscow feared that a pro-US regime in Kabul might let the US deploy Pershing missiles to Afghanistan, where they would be aimed at the USSR.

It also feared that the US would use Afghan Uzbeks and Tajiks for national-separatist propaganda aimed at Soviet Central Asia. Carter administration National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski (now one of the main mentors of Barack Obama) publicly advocated an ethnic carve-up of the USSR.

As Soviet forces invaded, KGB commandos assassinated Amin. In his place, Moscow installed Babrak Karmal, leader of the conservative Parcham wing of the PDPA, as president. This was a signal to the ruling classes that the PDPA would abandon its partial land redistribution and other reform measures. The Kremlin’s strategy was to arrange a deal with Afghanistan’s tribal elites, while crushing resistance to the PDPA regime with mass bombing raids.

Washington’s policy towards the Soviet-Afghan war was marked by unsurpassed cynicism. It unleashed a barrage of sanctimonious protests against an invasion it had helped promote, including organizing a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. As it sent billions of dollars in weaponry to the mujahadeen, it publicly denied that it was giving the rebels any assistance.

Though Washington proclaimed that its Afghan proxies were “freedom fighters,” the mujahadeen and their international backers were social reactionaries. With the assistance of right-wing Muslim regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the US promoted Islamic fundamentalist warlords within the resistance. Washington turned a blind eye as they exterminated competing mujahadeen factions and funded themselves through large-scale opium sales.

When the mujahadeen proved incapable of organizing attacks on Kabul and strategic roadways, the CIA armed and trained international Muslim recruits to launch terrorist attacks and suicide bombings. The young Saudi billionaire Osama bin Laden oversaw these global recruitment networks, which later formed the core of Al Qaeda.

These networks gathered together recruits from the Muslim Brotherhood, those influenced by extremist Saudi Islam, and all the forces in the Muslim world that had historically been mobilized against the powerful socialist traditions of the Middle Eastern workers and intellectuals, including in Afghanistan.

Rising losses and popular discontent in the USSR prompted Moscow to withdraw its forces in 1989. This was followed by the Soviet collapse in 1991 and the 1992 collapse of the PDPA regime, as leading PDPA officials passed into the service of competing mujahadeen warlords. Afghanistan descended into civil war.

The architects of US policy in Afghanistan have recorded their callous indifference to the consequences of their policies. Asked in 1998 if he felt remorse about the Afghan tragedy, Brzezinski replied bluntly: “What’s more important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”

The world still faces the consequences of this eruption of US imperialist influence into Central Asia. Great power competition—unleashed by the Afghan civil war—for dominant influence over Afghanistan, strategically located at the center of the Eurasian land mass, initially saw an attempt by the US, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to unify Afghanistan under the fundamentalist Taliban militia in the mid-1990s. It culminated in 2001 in the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan—carried out under the fraudulent banner of a “war on terror”—against the same forces Washington had supported in the 1980s and 1990s.

As it seeks to use its position in Afghanistan to enforce its hegemony over an unstable Asian continent, Washington faces the toxic political results of its policy in 1979: Afghan narco-warlords, international terrorist networks, ex-Soviet republics socially devastated by the collapse of the USSR, and the general poverty of the region.

The catastrophes of the present emerge from crimes committed in the past. The history of US imperialism’s first major push into Central Asia must be understood in order to assess the consequences the current US escalation will have for the region and the world.

Alex Lantier

SEP manifesto for the 2010 Sri Lankan presidential election

SEP manifesto for the 2010 Sri Lankan presidential election

A socialist program to fight for social equality and democratic rights

By the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka)
4 January 2010

The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) calls on workers and youth to support our candidate Wije Dias and participate in our campaign for the January 26, 2010 presidential election in Sri Lanka. Dias, 68, is SEP general secretary and a member of the World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board. He has devoted his entire adult life to fighting for revolutionary Marxism.

There is one overriding question facing working people in this election: what is there to show for 26 years of civil war between the government and the Tamil-separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)? There are 70,000 dead, hundreds of thousands more displaced or imprisoned in concentration camps, millions remain in poverty, and bitter tensions persist between the Sinhalese and Tamil communities. This is the terrible price of the irresponsible communalist politics of the Sri Lankan ruling class.

The leading presidential candidates, President Mahinda Rajapakse and General Sarath Fonseka, have presided over war crimes and gross abuses of democratic rights. Rajapakse restarted the conflict in July 2006, and General Fonseka prosecuted it. The military killed thousands of civilians in its indiscriminate bombardments and, after the LTTE’s collapse, incarcerated 280,000 men, women and children. Hundreds have been abducted or killed by death squads that have operated throughout the island with the complicity of the security forces.

Rajapakse has mortgaged the island to the hilt to pay for the war. As soon as the election is over, the government will be compelled to make huge cuts to public spending to meet the terms of the country’s International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan. It will use the police-state methods developed during the civil war to suppress the inevitable growth of political opposition.

The SEP is campaigning to mobilise the working class, in opposition to all the representatives and apologists for the bourgeoisie. We fight for a workers’ and farmers’ government in the form of a socialist republic of Sri Lanka and Eelam, as part of a socialist federation of South Asia and the entire globe.

The bankruptcy of communalism

Nothing will be solved by a temporary peace that has been achieved through war crimes and the oppression of national minorities. The government’s brutality in prosecuting the civil war only ensures that communal tensions and conflicts will erupt in new forms.

An entire generation has grown up knowing nothing but war and police state repression. All attempts at securing peace through power-sharing arrangements have foundered on the communal politics that has formed the basis of bourgeois rule in Sri Lanka since independence 60 years ago. The “solution” offered by Rajapakse and Fonseka entails the permanent military occupation of the North and East, and police-state measures throughout the island.

Likewise, the end of the war delivers a crushing verdict on the LTTE’s perspective of building a separate Tamil capitalist state in northern Sri Lanka. Its ethnic-based program left it unable to appeal to the Sinhalese workers—let alone the workers of Tamil Nadu or other areas of India—and underlay its bloody terrorist attacks on Sinhalese civilians. The LTTE’s anti-democratic character, which was expressed in its ruthless suppression of all political opposition, only alienated the Tamil masses and ultimately led to the loss of their support.

The LTTE’s politics left it exposed to shifts in the political winds, especially the bogus US declaration of a “war on terror” after the attacks of September 11, 2001. As India and the US became increasingly concerned by rising Chinese influence in Sri Lanka and the Indian Ocean, the major powers concluded that the Sri Lankan war was no longer in their interests. They all assisted as Rajapakse seized upon the LTTE’s terrorist attacks to justify his own ruthless “war on terror” against the LTTE.

Great power rivalry in South Asia

The end of the Sri Lankan civil war will not bring peace. Rather, it constitutes a warning of the enormity of the crisis in world politics, which will only bring further conflicts throughout the region and the world. International relations have been profoundly destabilised by the irresolvable contradictions of the capitalist system, which found their expression in the global financial crisis that erupted in September 2008.

The US response is typified by the Obama administration’s recent announcement of a surge of troops in Afghanistan, and its pressure on Pakistan to escalate attacks against Islamic insurgents. Behind the bogus façade of a “war on terror,” the US is seeking to establish a strategic position in the energy-rich regions of Central Asia and the Middle East to maintain its role as arbiter of world politics against its chief rivals—especially China. Its aggressive militarism, unpopular at home and abroad, is destabilising the entire Indian subcontinent, already torn by religious and ethnic antagonisms.

The Sri Lankan civil war was concluded in this context. Rajapakse played off the major powers against one another. He relied heavily on Chinese arms, financial support and diplomatic assistance against US and European calls for war crimes investigations. In return, he has given preferential treatment to Chinese investment, including in a key port facility in Hambantota. Fears of rising Chinese influence in Sri Lanka played an important role in the decision by India and the US to back Rajapakse in his renewed war.

Rajapakse’s manoeuvres have only drawn Sri Lanka further into the bitter international conflicts tearing at the capitalist world order. A recent US Senate Foreign Relations Committee report emphasised Sri Lanka’s strategic importance, situated at the “nexus” of Indian Ocean sea lanes—between Asia and Europe, the Middle East and Africa. It expressed Washington’s determination not to “lose Sri Lanka” to its rivals. Significantly the report called for the shelving of Washington’s previous humanitarian pretences in favour of “a robust approach” that recognised US geo-strategic realities.

The resurgence of the class struggle

Like their class brothers and sisters worldwide, Sri Lankan workers face a capitalist onslaught on their living standards and rights. In Sri Lanka, the global financial crisis is pounding an economy devastated by the civil war. State debt now stands at 4.1 trillion rupees, over 90 percent of GDP, mainly due to military expenditure.

Growing discontent and anger among workers has led to renewed struggles in the plantations, the ports and the petroleum, electricity and water sectors. In every case the unions, pro-government and pro-opposition alike, have suppressed any independent struggle by their members. They have adamantly opposed any political fight against the Rajapakse government, bowed to its threats and sold out their members.

Rajapakse has deployed troops against striking workers, used his emergency powers to ban industrial action and encouraged repeated attacks on media critics. His post-war “nation building” has accelerated pro-market restructuring and privatisation, aimed at transforming the island into a new cheap labour platform for foreign investors. The next government will seek to slash wage levels and public spending to make the island “internationally competitive”. Such attacks will be particularly fierce, as Asian countries compete for access to Western export markets that have already been devastated by the impoverishment of the working class due to the global economic crisis.

The SEP insists that workers can only defend themselves against poverty and the danger of world war with a socialist strategy for the entire international working class, directed against the profit motive and the outmoded nation-state system.

In the midst of their pay campaign, plantation workers at the Balmoral estate in Agarapathana formed their own action committee, with the SEP’s political assistance and independently of the trade unions, and appealed to other sections of the working class to take the same stand. Their action represents an important first step by the working class in breaking from the unions and mobilising for a political struggle against the profit system and its defenders.

The SEP’s demands

* For an end to the military occupation of the North and East

The SEP demands an immediate end to the military occupation of the North and East, and the freeing of all detainees, to unify Tamil, Sinhala and Muslim workers in a common struggle against capitalist rule. To create the basis for a genuine democratic settlement, the SEP calls for the convening of a Constituent Assembly to draw up a new constitution that will settle all outstanding democratic issues. Such an Assembly must be organised and elected by ordinary working people, and must put an end to all discriminatory laws to ensure genuine, democratic rights.

* Secure and well-paid jobs for all

Billions of rupees must be provided for public works, to create hundreds of thousands of well-paid jobs and build public housing, schools, hospitals, cultural and sporting facilities, roads and irrigation schemes. The SEP proposes a vast expansion of jobs by reducing the working week to 30 hours, with no loss of pay and with wages indexed to the cost of living. We advocate an end to child labour and the use of women and youth on night shift work. To obtain the necessary resources, we call for the nationalisation of all large banks and financial institutions, and the transformation of all major industrial corporations—including those in the Free Trade Zones—into publicly owned and democratically controlled utilities.

* Free, high-quality education

At present the education system is riven by inequality—children in working-class and rural areas face badly-equipped, understaffed public schools, while the sons and daughters of the wealthy enjoy modern resources, methods and technology in private schools. The SEP advocates a vast expansion of the public school system to provide free, high-quality education, through to university level, to all who wish to pursue their studies. Existing institutions must be upgraded to provide access to scientific laboratories, computer facilities and the latest audio-visual equipment, as well as to sporting and arts facilities.

* For universal health care

Thousands die every year of preventable diseases—dengue, malaria, mumps, and tuberculosis—as new diseases like H1N1 and bird flu spread. Increasingly, those with means use private doctors and clinics, while the masses rely on an underfunded public health system. The SEP calls for the development of well-equipped, properly-staffed public hospitals and clinics to provide free, universal, high-quality health care.

* Decent housing for all

Many families live in substandard houses without basic amenities such as running water, electricity and proper toilet facilities, and face rising rents and eviction campaigns by landlords. The SEP advocates the construction of affordable, rent-controlled public housing, including all essential utilities, to provide decent accommodation for all.

* End the oppression of women workers

Women workers are condemned by poverty to bear a double burden of poorly-paid work and domestic drudgery. They carry out the most onerous labour—in garment factories, tea-plucking, rubber-tapping and other agricultural work. The global economic crisis has provoked layoffs of tens of thousands of women garment workers, and the loss of jobs or income as housemaids or menial workers abroad, as the downturn hits the Middle East.

The SEP defends equal pay and conditions for women workers, including free, high-quality childcare and maternity leave on full pay. We call for the outlawing of gender discrimination, including within marriage laws. Abortion must be legalised and made freely available to all. The SEP strives to promote an enlightened cultural climate, in which men and women alike can fully develop their talents and personalities.

* Help small farmers

Landlessness afflicts most small farmers, and this problem has played a significant role in provoking the civil war. Successive governments deliberately settled the landless Sinhala poor in colonies in majority-Tamil areas, in the northern Wanni area and in the East—exacerbating racial tensions. With the end of the war, these policies are being revived. The SEP calls for the distribution of state land to all landless farmers, regardless of ethnicity. All past debts amassed by poor farmers and fishermen must be cancelled, while loans, farm equipment, fertilisers and chemicals, and fishing gear must be provided on affordable terms.

For the political independence of the working class

A quarter century of civil war in Sri Lanka confirms a basic tenet of Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution: the organic inability of the bourgeoisie in countries of a belated capitalist development to carry out basic democratic tasks. Only the working class, rallying around it the oppressed masses in the struggle for the socialist reorganisation of society, can guarantee peace and genuine democratic rights for all. This is possible only on the basis of a fundamental break from all political forces that tie the masses to the bourgeoisie.

Never has the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie stood so politically exposed, as the bourgeois parties line up behind Rajapakse or Fonseka. The ex-left parties—the LSSP and Stalinist Communist Party—are firmly behind Rajapakse, while the JVP’s Sinhala chauvinism finds its consummate expression in that party’s support, along with the right-wing United National Party, for Fonseka. The Tamil National Alliance (TNA)—the LTTE’s mouthpiece until May—is engaged in grotesque backroom negotiations to see which of the two war criminals will offer the best deal in return for its support.

The most pernicious role, however, falls to the Nava Sama Samaja Party (NSSP) and the United Socialist Party (USP), who are standing Wickramabahu Karunaratne and Siritunga Jayasuriya, respectively. They posture as opponents of the war and supporters of socialism. However, as shown by their long and sordid history of opportunist manoeuvres with the main bourgeois parties, they are organically hostile to independent, working-class politics.

After joining the UNP’s bogus “Platform of Freedom” earlier this year, the NSSP and USP now declare that their aim in standing is to prevent Fonseka or Rajapakse from winning in the first round. As they have done in every previous poll, they are preparing to endorse one or other bourgeois candidate as “the lesser evil” if the election should go to a second round. These proponents of electoral cretinism, fully integrated into the political establishment, serve the bourgeoisie as a crucial safety valve for popular discontent.

The struggle for socialism in South Asia

The SEP is grounded on the great principles of international socialism embodied today in the International Committee of the Fourth International.

The ICFI defends the program on which Lenin and Trotsky led the 1917 Russian revolution: the world socialist revolution to liberate mankind from capitalism and class oppression. The Fourth International was founded by Trotsky in 1938 to fight the betrayals of the Stalinist bureaucracy, which usurped political power in the Soviet Union and advanced the anti-Marxist perspective of “socialism in one country,” in order to defend its interests as an emerging conservative ruling caste. The final vindication of the Trotskyist movement’s opposition to Stalinism came in 1991, when the Stalinists renounced socialism, broke up the Soviet Union, and restored capitalism.

The SEP bases itself on the legacy of the most far-sighted representatives of the proletariat, who continued the struggle for socialist internationalism. In the 1940s, the Trotskyists of the Bolshevik Leninist Party of India (BLPI) struck deep roots in the working class of South Asia, developing a democratic and socialist perspective for the working class and oppressed masses of the Indian subcontinent. The subsequent entry of the LSSP into a bourgeois coalition government in 1964 was a major blow against socialism and the unity of the Sri Lankan proletariat.

The RCL, the SEP’s forerunner, was founded in 1968 as the Sri Lankan section of the ICFI in a direct political struggle against the LSSP’s betrayal. Over more than four decades, the RCL and SEP have intransigently opposed bourgeois communalism—the institution of Sinhala as the national language and Buddhism as a state religion, the pseudo-populist Sinhala chauvinism of the JVP, and the LTTE’s separatism. It was the only party that consistently opposed the civil war and demanded withdrawal of troops from the North and East. As the class struggle revives throughout South Asia and internationally, the lessons of these struggles will provide essential political guideposts for the working class.

We urge all those who support our program and perspective to actively participate in our election campaign. This means helping to publicise our candidate and meetings, distributing and discussing our election material and encouraging the widest audience for the World Socialist Web Site, the internet publication of the ICFI. Above all, we call on you to join and build the Socialist Equality Party as the mass party of the working class.