The Future of Indian Communism

Ramchandran Viswanathan

Saanje se utee woh dhun sabne suni hai,

Jo thar pe gujri woh kis dhil kho patha hai 

(None ever realize the travails of the strings

All have heard only the notes they bring)

– Sahir Ludhianvi, the Marxist poet

Vijay Prashad in his book, ‘No Free Left: The Futures of Indian Communism’, has brought not the strains but the travails of the communist heart strings to the public domain. This book, while delineating the historical roots and actual praxis the communist movement, explores the polity, state and society in India from the Marxist perspective; bringing into sharp focus what remains buried under deep layers of oblivion in the annals of official and mainstream history. What he refers to as the ‘the Left’ are the formations of Communism and its left allies. The book notes the ‘Left’s’ valuable contributions to India’s Independence, its nation building endeavor. It captures the growth, fragmentation and consolidation of the ‘Left’; goes on to affirm that ‘Left’ has a coherent alternative political philosophy, its strategy and tactics surely need to be deftly honed to render it more ‘easily comprehensible’ to people with added ability to draw attention across the country.

Vijay Prashad introduces the term ‘Gandhi moment’, drawing on the robust criticism of Gandhi by Marxists RP Dutt, EMS Namboodripad and SA Dange, in the course of the freedom struggle itself; taking off from his earlier remark, ‘Indian nationalism was far richer than Gandhi’s contribution and Gandhi was not sacrosanct’, in the review of Perry Anderson’s ‘Indian Ideology’. In the 1920s, India bristled with popular energy when ‘democracy and justice’ were becoming its irreducible values’. In this milieu, the Gandhian Bargain with its implicit promise that ‘India’s freedom from British rule would produce a dynamic toward the fullest democracy and equality, even within the constraints of a structure that set one class against the other’; could bring ‘all the people, with divergent class background and interests, into the widest embrace of the national movement’. He goes on to add that the magnates, claiming to ‘represent healthy capitalism’, recognized these merits of Gandhi, were swept in to his moment ‘to help Gandhiji as far as possible’ and work with their own common objectives. Gandhi came to personify the Congress (Indian National Congress) – the dominant organization in the national movement. Vijay Prashad shows how these industrialists were quick to manipulate industrial strikes to morph into communal riots, which they managed to do when faced with industrial action in Bombay (1929); or ‘collude with the British against the socialists and the communists’, if need arose, as they did later when Congress proclaimed the ‘Quit India’ campaign in 1942 and they felt it was crossing the Rubicon.

Alongside the communists, Bhagat Singh, Subashchandra Bose, Jawaharlal Nehru, MA Jinnah, BR Ambedkar, Jayaprakash Narayan, all ardent champions of the nationalist cause, were quick to perceive the contradictory role of Gandhi – his now ON and now OFF methods of launching and calling off mass civil disobedience – and his propensity to substitute ‘uncritical faith’ for ‘independent thinking’; and they formed the ensemble that contested ‘Gandhianism’, the dominant ethos of their period. Nehru succumbed to the inherent charms of Gandhianism sooner while his Socialist admirers joined the communists or remained immersed in their sterile anti-communism. Bhagat Singh was martyred and Subashchandra Bose exiled himself; while Jinnah, the secular democrat, Jayaprakash Narayan, the irrepressible socialist and Ambedkar, the eternal outspoken intellectual, all had to move along their own individual paths.

As Vijay Prashad, succinctly summed up in his article ‘Between Quam and Nation’, the anti-colonial freedom movement of the Subcontinent as ‘a river fed by powerful streams – some of them were revanchist and saturated in religious millenarianism, others came from indigenous socialist traditions that morphed with the entry of Marxism and the USSR into the currents of communism and socialism, and yet others drew from British liberalism (including the Fabian Society) and the worldview of the Indian capitalist class to forge the Nehruvian mainstream’. What united this stream of nationalism was its antipathy to colonial rule, although even this was only articulated in the mainstream as anti-colonialism at the end of the 1920s. The social effect of the Great Depression set off by the late 1920s, Gandhi’s compromises with Viceroy Irwin in 1931, and the hanging of Bhagat Singh by the British threatened the Congress hegemony and Gandhi’s sway over the national movement.

Why the Congress leadership and Gandhi, in particular, should move towards a truce when Bhagat Singh and his associates were being tried for sedition remains shrouded in mystery. Irfan Habib, in his ‘Studies in Ideology and History’, while pointing out Sumit Sarkar’s argument that Indian big business pressure was at work, concedes that Gandhi could not wholly ignore the opinion of this class, however much his own backers from amongst its ranks (like Ambalal Sarabhai and GD Birla) remained loyal and appeared unassertive. AG Noorani in his book ‘The Trial of Bhagat Singh’ brings to light the fact that Gandhi’s later claims of ‘having brought all the persuasion at his command to bear upon the Viceroy’ Irwin (for the release of Bhagat Singh) – while signing the infamous pact with him – ‘are belied by the record that came to light four decades later’. This was also the period when the British with their avowed zeal to crush the spreading ‘Bolshevik menace’ had launched a series of conspiracy cases against the communist agitators and activists, trying to set up its all-India centre and the mass organizations of peasants, workers and students. It was on March 5, 1930 that Gandhi signed his pact with the Viceroy Lord Irwin, wherein no demand was made for the release of these revolutionaries; Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev were surreptitiously sent to the gallows on March 23, 1931. The source of India’s descent to the present could be located in this moment.

The Congress regained its waning popular appeal, in the aftermath of Bhagat Singh’s martyrdom; by articulating the general aspirations of the people through the resolutions it gave shape to at its Karachi session in 1931. The resolutions of the Karachi Congress session condensed the broad socialist demands that had become common sense in India by 1931. The ‘social contract’ enshrined in the Karachi Congress resolutions helped the Congress to capture power in the provincial legislatures in 1937 elections, held under the Government of India Act 1935 which bestowed voting rights for only 3 percent Indians. The terms of this ‘social contract’ were the building blocks of India’s Republican Constitution and became an inalienable part of the post-1947 ‘Nehruvian’ consensus as part of the Gandhian Bargain. The manner of functioning of the 1937 Congress ministries helped to cement its role as the arbiter of propertied class interests as it took a more strident anti-Left line. From here there was no looking back for the Congress and the bonds strengthened further after the transfer of power. In the post-independence period, the Congress reneged on the issue of ‘economic freedom’; and by default all the other terms of the above social contract are under a veritable attack by the Sangh Parivar (the Saffron family – Hindu Right) – the cluster of organisations forming the backbone of the right wing BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) – ensconced in the seats of power now.

The Congress leadership, having failed – at the most decisive moment – in 1931 to launch any campaign for the release trial of Bhagat Singh and his comrades, sensed their moment had come in 1942, when the hordes of the Axis Powers were marching ahead in almost every continent in all directions. With great alacrity it issued the call to ‘Do or Die’, premised on the mistaken reading of the prevailing international situation that the British were on the losing side and this was the most opportune moment for giving the final push to end British rule. In the years 1945-46 immediately after the war, a great mass upsurge spanned across several countries around the globe – China, Burma, Malaya, Indo-China, Indonesia, Greater Arabia as also Greece, Italy and France – and India was no exception. In India ‘the subterranean people’s movement did not translate into a general and open revolutionary upsurge’. The Cabinet Mission’s Plan, of May 16, 1946, envisaged a federal India and offered the basis for a historic compromise that failed to materialize; as at this momentous juncture, the Congress and the Muslim League were in as much hurry to assume the reins of power, as the British were eager to transfer power and. This cleared the road to perdition – for the holocaust of partition – altering irretrievably the subsequent history of the subcontinent. The ‘disruption of advanced peasant movements in Punjab and in Bengal’ was the less known but significant fallout of 1947 partition. The supremacy of the bourgeoisie from the initial phase of the freedom struggle, their presence among the peasantry and the failure of the working class ideology to establish its hegemony over the national movement coupled with an absence of ‘peasant rebelliousness’ (in the classical sense) capable of bringing about regime change helped in ample measure to bring about this dénouement.

To borrow Aijaz Ahmad’s expression: In the case of India, in 1947, ‘a revolution against foreign rulers (turned into) an immeasurably powerful ‘restoration’ of the rule of the indigenous propertied classes’.

Vijay Prashad takes us through the post-Independence history of India and points out how the big bourgeoisie had been calling the shots all along from the first years of Independence to this day; and how the ingredients of the Gandhian Bargain, sustained the major political events of the entire twentieth century, certainly till the 1980s, when the Bargain began to fray. ‘Early in its career, it (the big bourgeoisie) made the most of the import-substitution and license raj and when these policies had run their course it remained unwilling to plough in the profits towards any investments for industrial growth; and turned against these supports with vehemence, making the case that they had always been against these policies’. With the declaration of Emergency (by Indira Gandhi in 1975), the socialists, namely Jayaprakash Narayan, welcomed the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh – established in 1925, drawing inspiration from Hitler and Mussolini’s fascist storm troopers) to the center of political life, giving it legitimacy and authority where it had none before. The socialists’ deep antipathy to Mrs. Gandhi and the Congress coupled with a deep seated animosity towards communism, their inability to draw a fine line between their national vision and that of the Indian Right allowed them to embrace the Hindu Right and turned them to being the enablers of the Hindu Right. The problem of the RSS tore through the Janata Party regime that took power after the revocation of Emergency in 1977. Indira Gandhi’s restoration in 1980 was made possible, in no small measure, by her transformation from a socialist into a defender of the Hindus and the dismantler of the system of state intervention in the economy, heralding the arrival of ‘political Hinduism’ and ‘liberalization’ – the shape of things to come.

The capitalist class’ political commitment to the Congress-run consensus withered as the party’s monopoly on power frayed. An earlier capitalist party – Swatantra Party (Freedom Party) – had failed to make a breakthrough between 1959 and 1974 because of Congress hegemony. By the 1980s, the BJP had absorbed sections of the Swatantra ethos, and the Congress itself had incubated elements eager to break with the Nehruvian paradigm national development path. In 1984 Indira Gandhi was assassinated and Rajiv Gandhi, who followed her, met the same fate in 1991. The Congress Party’s turn to liberalization in 1991 with the so-called ‘Rao-Manmohan reforms’, culminated a long process led by Rajiv Gandhi signaling the ‘onset of the neoliberal regime; and set in motion the ‘institutionalization of communalism in structures of the Indian state’ and kowtowing of imperialism as a subordinate ally. The BJP’s rise power, challenging the Congress hegemony, with the formation of ‘Vajpayee government in 1998 inaugurated a new phase in which a drastically reorganized power bloc, composed of all the non-Left parties, brought apparent stability to bourgeois rule in India; and heralded a new consensus in the Indian ruling class in favour of a closer alliance with imperialism externally and the imposition of neoliberal order domestically.’

Writing in general terms, on the ebbs and flows in the wave of communism that continues in India, Vijay Prashad says:

Over the course of history of the Indian republic from 1947 to 1991, the Left parties in governance – at the provincial level – provided the most significant land reform and agricultural worker tenancy programme, enacted deep local self-government schemes and provided a safe haven from the toxic social agenda of political religion. Outside the government, the Left participated in a wide range of struggles – for the rights of workers and peasants, for the defence of the good side of history against the bad. This was a period when the Left went through a series of major debates on its varied analysis of the role of imperialism, the class character of the Indian state, the nature of Indian democracy and the strength of the popular classes. Of the 29 provinces, Kerala, West Bengal, Tripura, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu are the main pockets of Left influence. Most other regions of the country, beyond these core regions of the ‘Left’, remain ‘no land for communists’. The Left’s attempt to ‘govern and mobilize within the domain of industry in both Kerala and West Bengal’ crashed hard upon what Frantz Fanon called ‘the old granite block upon which the nation rests’. One of the most fascinating elements of the Indian communist movement’s history has been its creative and dynamic rural policy and its inability to develop as imaginative an industrial policy. What is clear is that a cognate industrial strategy of the Left was quite simply blocked. It could not take place. It is what produces the conjunctural crisis for the Left Front’s defeat in the 2011 West Bengal elections. The electoral defeat of the ‘Left’ is neither an ideological collapse nor an organisational rupture; it cannot be measured simply in terms of its electoral slide, it is an ideological defeat that one has to recognize. But the harm seems all the greater because of the apparent ‘annihilation of the working class block to fight against the very powerful bloc of Property and Privilege’. It reaffirms the fact that, in this epoch of complete hegemony of international finance capital, ‘the task of carrying forward the dialectics of subversion of the logic of capital should remain the bedrock of Left praxis – its political formations, mass organisations as also the state governments run by them’.

Prashad sums up the present thus: “The Congress remains wedded to its drift rightwards, the former socialist parties seek alliance of power rather than ideology (and) such a barren landscape leaves the Left on a lonely track, to plot a strategy to arise as the only capable alternative to the entire political class. India, of course, requires such an alternative.” It is not just the case that ‘Neoliberal policies have created great new differences amongst the rural population: a new class of beneficiaries emerges out of the old privileged sections, and the working classes are more and more fragmented’. As Aijaz Ahmad observed: ‘The neoliberal order is not only a vast system of brutal exploitation, a low wage regime…also of social uprooting and social disorientation…the social decomposition caused by this extreme capitalism contaminates and poisons the consciousness of countless’ among all classes. In the words of Prabhat Patnaik, ‘The horizon of possibility in India has been set by neoliberal policy with ‘full integration between neoliberal authoritarianism of capital in the domain of political economy with communal authoritarianism in ideology and state power’. It is on this count that the Congress has forfeited the affections of propertied classes.

Vijay Prashad’s summary findings in regard to parliamentary democracy in India are pertinent: ‘Livelihood is a central problem for the vast majority, but it is rarely the case that an election is fought on the sociology of starvation. It is rather fought constituency by constituency, with factors of caste and gender, political tradition and political violence as the main vectors’; and speaking of the present, in most cases, fealty to any political tendency is conspicuous by its absence. In the world’s largest democracy, election are won, by money and force, by the forces of rotting fascism’; and electoral success buttresses extra-legal power. The 2014 parliamentary elections were no exception this trend. Vijay Prashad drives home the fact that, in these elections, the BJP earned only thirty one percent of the popular vote, unevenly spread across most regions of the nation, except the Hindi heartland, with low margins of victory in much fractured contests which means that a plurality of India’s voters did not bring it to power. This was also the case with the BJP’s predecessor, the Congress Party, but the sweep of the Congress was more evenly spread across the nation for many decades before its gradual atrophy began.

Again reverting to Aijaz Ahmad’s expression, the passive revolution of 1947 that ‘restored’ the rule of the indigenous propertied class has now morphed into ‘complete negation of all that has been progressive in our history’, with the cultural hegemony of the RSS in place. The resistance to Hindutva fascism ‘necessitates a transformation of the national-popular consciousness through refounding of the communist movement to become a ‘collective intellectual’ for the anti-fascist forces, a reconstitution of a nationalism from the Left and the defence of the most cherished aspects of our national compact’.

It has been appositely said that the choice before us is ‘Socialism or barbarism’ and that ‘fascism is the result of our failure to make revolution’. Fascism is also the outcome of corralling the revolution. The book reaffirms that only the Left is equipped to meet the challenges of our times head on; its ideology, strategy and tactics have to be become common sense of the people.

Ethiopian Brutality, British Apathy

Graham Peebles

On 23rd June 2014 Andergachew Tsige was illegally detained at Sana’a airport in Yemen whilst travelling from Dubai to Eritrea on his British passport. He was swiftly handed over to the Ethiopian authorities, who had for years posted his name at the top of the regime’s most wanted list. Since then he has been detained incommunicado in a secret location inside Ethiopia. His ‘crime’ is the same as hundreds, perhaps thousands of other’s, publicly criticising the ruling party of Ethiopia, and their brutal form of governance.

Born in Ethiopia in 1955, Andergachew arrived in Britain aged 24, as a political refugee. He is a British citizen, a black working class British citizen with a wife and three children. Despite repeated efforts by his family and the wider Ethiopian community – including demonstrations, petitions and a legal challenge – the British government (which is the third biggest donor to Ethiopia, giving around £376 million a year in aid), have done little or nothing to secure this innocent man’s release, or ensure his safe treatment whilst in detention.

A tale of neglect and indifference

After nine months of official indifference, trust and faith in the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) is giving way to cynicism and anger amongst his family and members of the diaspora. The elephant in the room – the unspoken question of racial discrimination – is surfacing. Is the FCO’s apathy and neglect due to Andergachew’s colour, his ‘type’ or ‘level’ of Britishness, is there a hierarchy of citizenship in Britain? If he had been born in England, to white, middle class parents, attended the right schools (educated privately as over half the British cabinet was) and forged the right social connections, would he be languishing in an Ethiopian prison, where he is almost certainly being tortured, abused and mistreated.

Andergachew is the Secretary General of Ginbot 7, a campaign group that fiercely opposes the policies of the Ethiopian government – the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF); highlights the regime’s many and varied human rights violations, and calls for the adherence to democratic principles of justice and freedom; liberal ideals, many of which are enshrined in the country’ constitution. A broadly democratic piece of fiction that is consistently ignored by the ruling party – even through they wrote it.

Political dissent inside Ethiopia has been criminalised in all but name by the EPRDF. Freedom of assembly, of expression, and of the media, are all denied, so too affiliation to opposition parties. Aid that flows through the government is distributed on a partisan basis, so too employment opportunities and university places. The media is almost exclusively state owned, Internet access (which at 2% of the population is the lowest in Sub-Saharan Africa), is monitored and restricted; the government would criminalise thought if they could.

The population lives under suffocating repression and fear and the vast majority, we understand, despise the government. Human rights are ignored and acts of state terrorism are commonplace, some of which, according to human rights groups, constitute crimes against humanity. Such is the reality of life inside the country for the vast majority. A stifling reality of daily suffering that animated the actions of Andergachew Tsige and the other members of Ginbot 7, and which has cost him his liberty.

For challenging the EPRDF, in 2009 and 2012, he was charged with terrorist offences (under the notorious, universally condemned Anti Terrorist Proclamation of 2009), tried in absentia and given the death penalty. The judiciary in Ethiopia is constitutionally and morally bound to independence, but in practice it operates as an unjust arm of the EPRDF. A conviction (unless for traffic violations, for example) handed down in a trial where the defendant is not present, is a violation of the second principle of ‘natural justice’, – Audi alter am partum (hear the other party) – and is therefore illegitimate. Such legal niceties, however, mean nothing to the EPRDF, who have dutifully signed up to all manner of international covenants, but ignore them all. They like trying their detractors (activists, journalists, political opponents) who live overseas, in absentia and handing out outrageous judgements; they are particularly fond of the death penalty and life imprisonment. It is hard to think of a more arrogant and paranoid regime. They rule, as all such groups do, by the cultivation of that ancient tool of control: fear.

British complicity

Given the nature of the EPRDF government, little in the way of justice, compassion and fairness can be expected, in relation to Andergarchew, or indeed anyone else in custody. Self-deluding and immune to criticism, the EPRDF distorts the truth and justifies violent acts of repression and false imprisonment as safeguarding their country from ‘terrorism’. Complete nonsense! The only form of terrorism rampaging through Ethiopia is State terrorism, perpetrated by the EPRDF and their uneducated vicious thugs, in and out of uniform.

Andergachew Tsige is a British citizen, and the British government has a constitutional and moral responsibility to act energetically and forcefully on his behalf; to their shame, so far the FCO and the coalition government more broadly, have been consistently woeful in their efforts. In February a British delegation led by Jeremy Corbyn, Mr Tsege’s constituency MP, was due to visit Ethiopia in an effort to secure his release. But, The Independent reports, “the trip was abandoned after a meeting with Ethiopian ambassador Berhanu Kebede [a more arrogant, duplicitous man, is it hard to imagine] in London.” A member of the team, Lord Dholakia, the vice-chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on Ethiopia, said, “it was made clear that they would not be welcome.” The Ethiopian ambassador apparently told the parliamentarians “that there was no need for them to go to Ethiopia as the case is being properly handled by the courts.” Again – nonsense: Andergachew is yet to be formally charged, has been denied contact with his British solicitors, as well as consular support, and has received only one brief visit from the British ambassador, in August; a meeting controlled fully by the Ethiopians. The FCO have said they “remain deeply concerned about Ethiopia’s refusal to allow regular consular visits to Mr. Tsege and his lack of access to a lawyer, and are concerned that others seeking to visit him have also been refused access.” So why are you not acting, using your ‘special’ position to secure this innocent man’s release: do something, is the cry of the family, the community and all right minded people.

At what point, does neglect in the face of injustice and abuse become complicity? If you allow illegal detention and the violation of international justice to take place and you say and act not, are you not guilty in aiding and abetting such actions? If you give funds to a government – the EPRDF – that is killing, raping, imprisoning and torturing its own citizens, and you do and say nothing – as the British, the American’s, and the European Union do, even though you know what’s happening – you are, it is clear, complicit, that is to say, party to the crimes being committed.

Thinking About My Own Death

Missy Beattie

During one of my frequent visits to Kentucky, my parents talked about their obituaries. I reached for paper and began to write. This was long before either had infirmities. Probably they were gauging time, measuring the future against the past with the realization that they’d lived much longer than they had left.

I listened, listed, and wrote paragraphs, the numerous activities defining meaningful lives, and then read it to them. Wait a minute. I still have this among memorabilia. Be right back.

This piece would be too lengthy if I included everything I wrote that day. But here’s some of it: During high school, Geraldine, known as Gigi, was a volunteer with the Red Cross, rolling bandages for the wounded. She studied music at the Boston Academy, was a charter member of the Junior Woman’s Club, chair of the Republican Party, chair of the Jessamine County Polio Foundation, scout leader, den mother, library board member, soloist in the church choir, was known for her baking and candy making. In later years, she denounced the Republican Party.

Daddy’s accomplishments were vast—his education, military service and discharge as a captain after 38 months overseas, his career, membership on many boards at both the city and county levels, his church involvement as adult men’s Sunday school teacher, elder, deacon, trustee, and then an active retirement during which he was city commissioner, Jessamine Arts Council member and, well, on and on and on.

After entering the names of their children, their children’s spouses, and the grandchildren, I called it a wrap.

Years later when Mother and Daddy moved in with Laura and Erma because they couldn’t take care of themselves without help, we talked again about the obits. Neither wanted any more than a mention of their love for each other, their children, and grandchildren.

All week, I’ve thought of Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz’s desperate need for attention—to be immortalized for a self-orchestrated act of violence. “One day I’ll do something that will change the system, and then everyone will know my name and remember it,” he’d said to his girlfriend.

And I’ve questioned the meaning of this. What’s the significance of having one’s name remembered by everyone and especially for causing immense anguish? Really, what motivates craving remembrance for any action, period?

I think about my own death. I’m not as old as my parents were when they asked me to compose their obituaries. But I clearly see what they wanted then and what they later shed. As death neared, love was all that mattered.

Right now, I might say I want to be remembered for my sense of humor and compassion—but only by my children, my grandson, Laura, Erma, my brothers, and my closest friends. Maybe that they’d mourn for me a little while, just a little while, and then carry on, living fully. But when death is waiting close by, I know what will be substantive, love only, and I won’t care if they remember anything after I die, except that I loved them with all my heart.

The New Face of the American Class Struggle

Louis Proyect

A 1954 film titled “Salt of the Earth” told the story of a courageous strike by the mostly Mexican-American zinc miners against a ruthless corporation that was based on a 1951 strike in New Mexico. Produced by Paul Jarrico and directed by Herbert Biberman, two Hollywood blacklistees, it was remarkable for both its power as film and for its fearless radicalism in a time when the left was being hounded out of existence. It derived much of its strength from the casting of New Mexican miners in leading roles, such as Juan Chacon, the president of a miner’s union, as a strike leader. And of critical importance in a time when reaction was running full throttle, the film depicted a victory of workers against insurmountable odds, just as had taken place in 1951.

I could not help but think about the 1954 classic when watching a screening of “The Hand that Feeds”, a documentary that opens today at Cinema Village in New York. If “Salt of the Earth” was a fictional film based on the facts of a real life strike, “The Hand that Feeds” is by contrast a factual film with all of the heartrending drama of a fictional film blessed with a “star” who led a struggle of twenty workers at Hot and Crusty, a bagel shop that was a stone’s throw from Bloomingdales in New York. In a panel on storytelling I chaired at this year’s Socially Relevant Film Festival, a documentary filmmaker explained that casting is as important for the documentary as it is for narrative films. One cannot imagine better casting for this documentary than the mostly undocumented Mexican workforce at Hot and Crusty, starting with Mahoma López, the 2014 counterpart to the Juan Chacon of sixty years ago.

At the very beginning of the film Mahoma López is heard saying: “Immigrants make this city run. You get settled in, and see the reality of how dollars are earned. I’m not so into being the victim. We basically started a war.”

If you live in New York, you will very likely be familiar with someone like Mahoma López who you will run into behind the counter when you are picking up a bagel in the morning on your way to work. There will be small talk about the weather and a smile from him but that is about the extent of it. “The Hand that Feeds” puts you on the other side of the counter as you learn the realities of life for such workers. They work sixty hours a week but without any sick or vacation pay. They lack health insurance. They can be fired at the drop of a hat if they have an “attitude”. The boss can get away with this because the worker is afraid of being reported to la migra and because he or she has family members in New York or Mexico who face certain disaster if the breadwinner loses a job. In many ways, it is just a small step above slavery.

The workers at Hot and Crusty finally said ¡Basta Ya! In 2012 and approached the Laundry Workers Center in New York for help in winning the wages that had been stolen from them. Originally intended to fight for the rights of laundromat workers who were also super-exploited, the Laundry Workers Center saw no reason not to get involved with delicatessen workers—a far cry from the narrow jurisdictional limitations of the official trade union movement today.

The culture of the Workers Centers that have come into existence in metropolitan areas around the United States is much more akin to the labor movement of Debs era when the IWW oriented to the most exploited and frequently immigrant layers of the working class. That is a culture that Ben Dictor, the Laundry Workers Center attorney and adviser to the Hot and Crusty workers, identifies with as should be obvious from his membership in the IWW at the University of Florida at Gainesville when an undergrad. As part of the resurgence of anarcho-syndicalism, the revivified IWW is a reminder that American trade union militancy is ready to break through once again.

In his introduction to Why Unions Matter, Michael Yates writes:“A fundamental goal of a union is to change the relationship between labor and management. Again and again, when workers are asked why they support the union or what the union has meant to them, they say that their fight for a union was a fight for dignity and respect.” That phrase rings through in every scene in “The Hand that Feeds”. Nothing can be more inspiring than to see a 2014 version of salt of the earth type people not only demanding their place in the sun but winning it through struggle.

After the last public space had been cleared of Occupy protesters, a mood of despair sank in among the left. How could we ever defeat such a powerful and determined “one percent”? That, of course, was the same question that zinc miners faced in 1951 at a time when resistance to the corporate behemoth seemed just as futile.

In a conversation I had with Ben Dictor, he explained that the left and the labor movement (with the emphasis on movement) have to join forces with the most oppressed workers to move forward. With workers becoming more and more part of a “precariat”, the role of a union is not just to fight for material gains but to give people a feeling that they are fully realized human beings. When twenty workers form a union at a bagel shop, they will continue to get not much more than a minimum wage but at least they will not be at the mercy of a boss who treats them as if they are on a plantation.

It was probably inevitable that the Hot and Crusty workers would hook up with Occupy activists since they seemed like natural allies. If it were too risky for someone working behind a counter to raise a ruckus, the risk of an arrest would not intimidate the young activists who had camped out in Zuccotti Park. The activism in ”The Hand that Feeds” is a heady cocktail with equal parts of the Latino workers and the Occupy movement that took their cause as their own. If the New Mexico strike of 1951 brought together local workers and the radical movement of that day (the union representing the zinc workers had a longstanding CP leadership), the Hot and Crusty strike of today is a marriage of the typical worker of today in the rapidly expanding service sector and the Occupy type activist who is likely to have read Noam Chomsky rather than Gus Hall.

There are other differences between the 1950s and today in terms of trade union organizing strategy. When the old left was involved with organizing efforts, it was always with the understanding that certain industries were more critical than others when it came to the vulnerability of the “one percent”. The CP organized dockworkers and the Trotskyists organized teamsters because a strike could shut down the transportation of critical goods that were essential to the economy as a whole.

But could the same be said about a bagel shop?

A shortsighted and dogmatic approach to such struggles misses their greatest potential, which is to invigorate a trade union movement that is slowly dying because of its refusal to conduct a social struggle of the sort that the IWW conducted in its day or that the CIO conducted in the 1930s. When rallies were being held outside the bagel shop, representatives from the transit workers union and the postal workers union showed up to offer solidarity. Trust me when I say that a subway strike or a postal strike can shake the system to its foundations. As the struggle of service workers at places like Hot and Crusty or McDonalds deepens, we can expect the more traditional unions to follow their example as the lesson sinks in that the boss seeks to eliminate all unions, even those who leaderships seek to “play ball”.

If “The Hand that Feeds” was not much more than the typical documentary with a heavy quotient of academic experts on low-paid undocumented workers and stock footage drawn from television news, it would still be worth seeing. But what makes it exciting is the impressive cinematic skill of husband-and-wife director team Rachel Lears and Robin Blotnick who are Brooklynites with a sure feel for city life as well as a flair for the dramatic. Indeed, it was their work with the Occupy Wall Street media project that put them in touch with the Hot and Crusty workers to begin with.

Like the directors I ran into at the Socially Relevant storytelling panel, they have a keen understanding of what makes a documentary work. Unless you see the need for drama, you will be losing the chance for drawing an audience in closer to the matter at hand.

In “The Hand that Feeds”, one of the central dramas involves Mahoma López’s wife who is a member of a Pentecostal church whose pastor preaches that we are in “end times”. As such, there are groups—as she says on camera—that say good things but might be doing the work of Satan. There is every indication that she sees Mahoma’s newfound activism as vulnerable to the Dark Side, even though the loss of his income might ultimately explain her worries just as much.

Another key drama involves a co-leader of the strike who is suspected of selling out to the boss who has promised a management job in exchange for abandoning the union organizing drive. By gaining the trust of all the workers, including him, Lears and Blotnick allow them to open up on camera about the doubts they have about each other and about themselves as well.

Like other important documentaries that start at the inception of a powerful social struggle, the essential drama is about whether or not it will succeed. Would the struggle for a union end happily in this case or would the film end like Barbara Kopple’s 1990 “American Dream”, a documentary about the crushing of a strike at Hormel.

I do not think it is a spoiler to reveal that the workers win in “The Hand that Feeds”. My strongest possible recommendation is to see this film at the Cinema Village to be reminded of how good a victory can feel. This film is a shot in the arm to a movement that can sometimes forget what power we have, even in the darkest of times. We may not have the cops or army or courts on our side but we have the vast majority of humanity as allies even if not all of it presently understands their class interests. It is best for us to think of ourselves as the future vanguard of a mass movement that cannot only give workers a sense of their “dignity and respect” as Michael Yates puts it, but everybody in the 99 percent.

Within that emerging vanguard, people such as Ben Dicktor, Rachel Lears, Robin Blotnick, and the Hot and Crusty workers are among the leading forces. Despite the mood of gloom that affects some on the left, their example is a ray of light that illuminates the way forward.

I invite you to see the film and to bookmark its website for information on the changing face of the American class struggle.

Treating Child Refugees as National Security Threats

Laura Carlsen

When the crisis of unaccompanied minors migrating to the United States burst onto the front pages last summer, it seemed at last the U.S. government would come to grips with its legacy of disaster amid the current havoc in Central America.

The United Nations documented that most of the children were fleeing violence — violence caused in part by the failure to restore constitutional order following the Honduran coup of 2009 and the unfinished peace processes after the dirty wars in El Salvador and Guatemala, where Washington propped up right-wing dictatorships for years.

The governments of those three countries — known as the Northern Triangle — certainly share some of the blame for the mass exodus, which is not as new or unprecedented as the press made out when it sounded the alarm.

But in the end, the problem isn’t one of assigning blame, but rather helping children in conditions of extreme vulnerability, right?

Apparently not.

Less than a year later, Washington has come up with its policy response to the children’s plight. Unfortunately, while purporting to address the root causes of migration, it mirrors — and in many ways intensifies — the causes that forced so many to flee.

Tucked into the administration’s 2016 budget requestthe plan has been christened “Biden’s Billion” for its major promoter and the amount he expects U.S. taxpayers to put up to support it. It divides aid into three “lines of action”: security, economic development, and governance.

Yet in every one of these areas, the response repeats errors of the past. Rather than focusing on a response to the humanitarian crisis of child refugees, it serves as a vehicle for deepening the drug war and “free-trade” agendas that have contributed to the crisis.

Rewarding Human Rights Violators

The plan requests $300 million for security assistance, a considerable increase over previous regional collaborations like the Merida Initiative and the Central American Regional Security Initiative. The increase goes mainly to the region’s police forces.

This essentially rewards known human rights violators.

In an op-ed published in The Hill, Alex Main of the Center for Economic and Policy Research explains: “Funding for International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement (INCLE) aid to Central America would double from $100 million in fiscal year 2014 to $205 million in fiscal year 2016,” he writes. “This assistance, rooted primarily in the U.S. ‘war on drugs,’ includes extensive support for the region’s police and military forces despite abundant reports of their involvement in extrajudicial killings and other serious human rights violations.”

Although fighting drug traffickers is purposely underplayed in the proposal, INCLE nonetheless expands the failed drug war model of militarizing local security forces. Experience shows that placing weapons and training in the hands of abusive police ensures that they can be — and are — used against civilians not associated with cartels, or against suspected criminals denied a right to trial.

The foreign military funding — or FMF, in bureaucratese — included in the plan, while comparable to prior levels, has a particularly ominous note to it this time around. “FMF in the Western Hemisphere,” declares the budget request, “supports our partners’ efforts to control national territory, modernize defense forces, and secure the southern approaches to the United States.”

Given that the region has no invading armies, to “control territory” means to control undefined internal populations — presumably criminals, but potentially including opposition or indigenous communities fighting for land rights against state-supported designs. “Modernizing defense forces” in the absence of external threats, means a dangerous re-militarization of nations barely emerging from military dictatorships.

And “securing southern approaches to the United States” marks a clear imposition of U.S. priorities to the detriment of the host nations. Even more outrageous is the implication that the U.S. southern border has to be protected from child migrants by creating an allied buffer some 2,000 miles deep.

Proponents of the plan note that some funding goes to human rights training. The contradiction of funneling money to human rights abusers to compel them to cease their abuse is one that they no doubt relish. It sends a mixed message by supporting corrupt and violent police at the same time it deigns to improve them.

The plan bolsters Honduran security forces even as human rights groups document uncontrolled abuses, to the extent that 94 U.S. members of Congress have called for a complete cut-off of aid to Honduran security forces. The plan apparently also funds the provision of training from Colombian security forces — the nation famous for the “false positives” scandal, a human bounty hunt in which soldiers dressed peasant farmers up as guerrillas, assassinated them, and received a government bonus.

The U.S. government has been shoveling out money to U.S. agencies and private sector firms for dubious police and judicial reform programs in Mexico and Central America for years. The result is horrors like Ayotzinapa and an increase rather than decrease in violations throughout the region. The police forces are being equipped and trained as they continue to victimize their own populations with impunity.

As the recent murders of unarmed youth in U.S. cities have shown, the United States urgently needs to reform its own police before it spends millions purporting to teach others. As in all other areas of this plan, the money would be better spent at home.

Border Punishment

The billion-dollar plan does highlight a few of the root causes of migration — namely physical and economic insecurity. But its emphasis on border security reveals its Janus-faced attitude toward migrants as threats as well as victims.

In part, this comes at the urging of immigration hawks in Congress.

Last December, John Lindsay-Poland explains, “Congress required the State Department to submit a strategy within three months that would ‘address the need for greater border security for the countries in Central America and for Mexico, particularly the southern border of Mexico.’ The strategy must also ‘support repatriation facilities for the processing of undocumented migrants returning from the United States’ as well as ‘combat human trafficking in Central America.’”

Mexico, once again, is responsible for doing the real dirty work here. Some 23,000 children have been deported at Washington’s urging from Mexico’s southern border over the past year.

The crackdown along Mexico’s southern boundary breaks with the country’s traditionally permissive attitude toward millennial migration patterns in the region. But it has not significantly decreased migration. Reports from the border describe a continued flow of migrants amid an increased presence of police, armed forces, and immigration agents. The result is more extortion and abuse.

Whose Development?

The economic development section of the plan would support the “Alliance for Prosperity,” an initiative developed with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and Northern Triangle governments. The IDB has a history of supporting large infrastructure projects that too often displace populations from their places of origin rather than rooting them through sustainable livelihoods.

This “line of action” intensifies policies that have been imposed for the last 20 years in the region: international trade facilitation, market integration, transnational investment, and export-oriented infrastructure and megaprojects.

Civil society organizations have long criticized this strategy. In a letter to heads of state in 2013, a coalition of 160 organizations stated, “Large-scale ‘development’ projects are imposed on the region’s most vulnerable populations with little or no regard for their lives or livelihoods. This results in forced displacement, especially of indigenous, peasant, and Afro-descendant communities; bloody conflicts over resources; environmental destruction and impoverishment.”

Here too, the details of the new Central America plan relate more to U.S. goals than to Central American needs. For example, the Trade and Development Agency notes that its part of the funding “prioritizes activities where there is a high likelihood for the export of U.S. goods and services.” While there’s nothing inherently wrong with opening up business opportunities for U.S. companies abroad, it’s a crass abuse of the goal of securing the safety of children in Central America.

Moreover, many of those investments include export promotion that puts local producers out of business (recall the 2 million Mexican farmers driven out under NAFTA) and infrastructure projects that serve the transnational movement of goods while destroying internal market linkages.

This creates a vicious but lucrative circle of investment-displacement-repression, as populations are forced from their lands and then criminalized as migrants, justifying enormous security contracts.

This combination of hardening borders for human mobility while opening them for goods and money is nothing new, as two decades of NAFTA have shown. We’ve seen the tragic results in Mexico.

Children and Youth at Risk

The United Nations concluded that 58 percent of the child refugees it interviewed had international protection needs, including a staggering 72 percent of Salvadoran children.

Yet for all its fanfare, the Biden plan makes no attempt to respond to this urgent need to keep children safe. In fact, through its border security measures and the likelihood of increased deportations from the United States and Mexico, it exacerbates their plight. The plan actually transfers millions of dollars out of child and maternal health to fund the new security measures.

The policies to deport migrants from Mexico are creating greater perils for them en route and back home. Father Alejandro Solalinde, who runs a migrant shelter in southern Mexico, worries that “They’re sending them right into the arms of the cartels.” That’s just what the plan does.

In a New York Times op-ed penned to promote it, Vice President Joe Biden demonizes the migrants from the very first paragraph, where he calls the child migrant crisis a reminder that “the security and prosperity of Central America are inextricably linked with our own.” Later on, he laments a “dangerous surge in migration.”

What kind of nation have we become when we treat desperate children as a national security threat?

The good news is that the plan faces a rocky road in Congress. “We’ve spent billions of dollars there over two decades,” observed Senator Patrick Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations foreign operations subcommittee. “And we’ve seen conditions get worse in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador.” Other members have also balked at the huge spike in security funding to governments where impunity and abuse is rampant.

There are undoubtedly some worthwhile projects within the proposed billion-dollar package, for example funding for domestic violence shelters. Washington promoters urge critics not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

But to avoid doing that, first you have to separate the two. This plan does precisely the opposite, by lumping together repressive measures that continue drug war militarization and punitive measures against youth with educational and jobs programs. It criminalizes migrants at the borders even while attempting to address root causes of migration. So, for example, the mother who has the courage to flee an abusive husband and take her children to safety will be more likely to be stopped and returned to her tormenter.

It’s laudable to turn our attention to the root causes of the refugee crisis out of Central America. But if the aid package intensifies the same policies that contributed to the crisis — as Biden’s clearly does — then we’re moving in the wrong direction. American taxpayers have no reason to throw more hard-earned money at the Washington NGOs, corrupt foreign governments, abusive security forces, and avaricious security industry that have perpetuated the failed drug war far beyond any justifiable error.

Despite the seriousness of the current situation, this is a classic case of where doing the wrong thing can be far worse than not doing anything.

Six months since the disappearance of the 43 Mexican students

Rafael Azul

On March 26, thousands rallied at Mexico City’s iconic Angel of Independence statue to mark six months since the kidnapping of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa rural normal school. The demonstration included students, teachers, workers and members of the middle class. Many carried signs demanding the ouster of Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and charging the federal government with the students’ disappearance.

Six months have passed since 43 normalistas, as the rural teaching college students are known in Mexico, were kidnapped in the city of Iguala in the southern state of Guerrero, after suffering a savage armed assault. To this day, the students are still missing, and many questions remain about the role of the government, the armed forces and the police.

The bare facts are that uniformed police, accompanied by at least three gangsters, attacked five buses transporting students from the Ayotzinapa teaching college, killing six people, wounding more than 20 and disappearing 43. The Iguala police took the 43 students to the nearby city of Cocula, handed them over to its police, who in turn allegedly delivered them into the hands of a local narcotics gang, Guerreros Unidos.

Out of those facts, the government of president Enrique Peña Nieto has constructed a self-serving narrative of damage control. According to his version of events, the police acted under orders from Iguala’s corrupt mayor and his wife, who has family connections with Guerreros Unidos—end of story.

Federal authorities continue to insist that the case involves a criminal act, like many others, and reject that this crime against humanity involves anyone else—the federal police or the military. They deny that the massacre occurred as part of a war against the rural education system and the Mexican working class.

However, an investigation by the Mexico City newsweekly Proceso, with the support of UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program, exposed the role of the federal police and the military in the abduction and massacre of the students. Documentation has been uncovered that the normalistas were being watched by federal and state police from the time they left Ayotzinapa at 6:00 pm on the day of the massacre. The federal police command in Guerrero’s capital city, Chipancingo, was kept fully informed, including about the news that a massacre was taking place.

The one-sided and murderous attack took place less than three kilometers (1.8miles) from an army base—within earshot. The soldiers of the 27th infantry regiment stationed there are charged with combating organized crime; yet they did not intervene until two hours after the massacre. The armed forces so far refuse to release information or reports of their activity that night.

The crime and the kidnapping of the students led to a frantic search by relatives and volunteers. This soon turned to anger, as the magnitude of the crime became evident. Since then, the massacre in Iguala and the disappearance of the 43 normalistas have acquired global significance, triggering angry mass demonstrations month after month in Mexico, as well as protests throughout the world.

It took 10 days for the government of President Enrique Peña Nieto to abandon its attitude of studied indifference to the killings and become involved in the investigation, which it now claims is one of the most exhaustive in Mexican history. Hundreds are in custody, including police officers, drug gang members and Iguala’s former mayor and his wife.

It would take another two months before the authorities came to the conclusion that the students had been executed, then incinerated and dumped in a river. The government based its findings on testimony from some of those arrested. The Guerrero Unidos killers allegedly confessed to forming a human pyre in a ravine next to a Colula garbage dump and setting the bodies on fire at a very high temperature for over 12 hours in an attempt to hide any evidence of their crime. The killers then chopped up the remains and dumped them in garbage bags in the San Juan River.

Relatives of the disappeared normalistas reject this official version of events.

Meanwhile, hundreds of federal police plus local forces and volunteers searched for the missing. Unmarked graves were found in the region containing dozens of bodies, presumed victims of the narcotics gangs and their police associates. Most of those found have yet to be identified.

The remains fished out of the river have left no forensic evidence of any value other than part of a finger and a molar, which a DNA test proved belonged to one of the disappeared youth. Despite that, forensic experts have declared that there is no good evidence linking the finger and molar with the Colula ravine.

In Guerrero last week, a group of parents of the missing called on the National Electoral Institute (that regulates the electoral process) to cancel upcoming state elections in protest and on the grounds that all the potential candidates have links to the drug gangs and cover up for the waves of killings that have taken place. Despite intervention by the Peña Nieto administration and the federal police, killings and drug terror has not stopped, neither in Guerrero, nor in neighboring Michoacán, Oaxaca or in the State of Mexico. An atmosphere of impunity protects the police and armed forces.

Despite government protestations that the investigation into the disappearance of the student youths has been exhaustive and that many of those involved are in custody, neither the students nor their remains have been found. Relatives and supporters believe that there is no justice for them, as the government increasingly loses legitimacy.

In particular, many questions have been raised about the role of the Mexican Army. The 27th infantry regiment stationed in Iguala was fully aware of the police attack on the students as it was occurring, and may have helped with their abduction. There have been demonstrations and clashes with the military at the army base by parents demanding that their children be returned.

Defense Secretary General Salvador Cienfuegos has arrogantly refused to divulge to the public or to the legislature information in his possession on the Ayotzinapa massacre or on the execution-style killing last June, by the army’s 102nd regiment, of 22 people who had already surrendered in Tlatlaya, in the State of Mexico. The National Defense Secretariat (SEDENA) only “speaks to the President,” said Cienfuegos.

Relatives of the missing point out that when the army did arrive at the scene of the Iguala massacre, in the early hours of September 27, Omar García, one of the wounded students, was told by one of the arriving soldiers, “you guys asked for it; this is what you get for doing what you do.” García also recounted that as the assault began that night, students tried to contact the media and were told that they had been told to stay away. When federal authorities took his testimony, García said that they tried to link him to organized crime.

The Proceso report points to a possible motive for targeting the students: opposition within the teachers college and among teachers and students to the education policies of the government.

Rural teaching colleges have been particularly targeted because they are considered centers of left-wing political activism.

The teaching college in Ayotzinapa was founded in 1926 as part of a commitment by the governments that followed the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917) to expand rural literacy and rural education. By the mid-thirties, there were 36 rural teaching colleges. Typically, they take in impoverished peasant youth (140 each year at Ayotzinapa) and train them to become rural educators.

Six months after the forced disappearance of the 43 normalistas, social tensions continue to rise, while all of the major parties, from the ruling PRI and the right-wing PAN to the bourgeois “left” PRD and the Morena Party of Andres Lopez Obrador, are implicated in this historic crime.

The conditions are emerging for a revolutionary explosion against Mexico’s corrupt and criminal government. What is needed is a workers’ party, independent of all the factions of the bourgeoisie, and armed with a revolutionary socialist program based on the unity of the working class throughout the Americas in a common struggle to put an end to capitalism. Only through the building of a Mexican section of the International Committee of the Fourth International can this historic task be realized.

Brazil’s government vows “huge cuts” as economic crisis intensifies

Bill Van Auken

Brazil’s embattled Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores—PT) President Dilma Rousseff this week promised US financial news agency Bloomberg that her government “will carry out a huge cut” in spending this year in an effort to placate the financial markets and credit rating agencies.

Rousseff is embroiled in a massive kickback and bribery scandal surrounding the state-run Petrobras energy conglomerate and has faced right-wing demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of people, predominantly from the country’s middle class, calling for her impeachment and even a military coup. The latest polling has shown her approval rating falling to just 13 percent.

As Rousseff’s interview with Bloomberg makes clear, her response is to turn even further to the right, implementing austerity measures that will deepen the country’s economic slump and have the harshest impact upon workers and the poor, whom the PT fraudulently purports to represent.

“I will do everything to meet” the government’s fiscal target for a primary surplus (amount of revenue exceeding total spending, excluding interest payments on debt), Rousseff said.

That target has been set at 1.2 percent of Gross Domestic Product, equivalent to roughly $20.8 billion.

Brazil reported a primary budget deficit of 2.3 billion reais (US$721 million) in February despite tax hikes on imports, fuel and financial transactions as well as budget cuts implemented just the month before. With interest payments on the country’s debt included, the budget deficit has ballooned to 7.34 percent of GDP, the highest rate since at least 2002.

Brazil’s total public debt as a percentage of its GDP is expected to rise to 62 percent by the end of 2015. By comparison, US total public debt stands at over 102 percent of US GDP.

According to the Brazilian daily Folha de S. Paulo, an unnamed presidential advisor predicted that the government could be compelled to slash $25 billion in spending—substantially more than the $18 billion initially projected—as well as raise taxes in order to meet the surplus target.

One of the first actions taken by Rousseff’s predecessor and mentor, the former metalworkers union leader and first PT president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, when he came to power in 2003 was to set the primary budget surplus above the rate demanded by the International Monetary Fund. Rousseff has essentially continued these policies in a bid to satisfy world financial markets and foreign capitalist INVESTORS.

Following her narrow election victory last October, she brought on board as FINANCE minister Joaquim Levy, the same free market advocate who set Lula’s financial policy.

Levy is a product of the University of Chicago, the bastion of neoliberal policies that produced the economic advisers who set policies for the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. He did a stint at the International Monetary Fund and, before being tapped for Rousseff’s second administration, he was chief of asset management at Banco Bradesco SA, Brazil’s second-largest private banking group, overseeing a portfolio of more than $130 billion. In other words, Rousseff brought in a representative of the IMF and Wall Street to dictate her government’s financial policies.

Remarks made by Levy to a group of University of Chicago alumni and reported by Folha de S. Paulo last weekend stirred a brief political controversy. The newspaper reported that Levy told the private audience that, while Rousseff has a “genuine desire to get things right,” her methods are not the most effective. He also reportedly referred to already implemented austerity measures as a “joke.”

Levy claimed his remarks had been taken “out of context,” adding that “there is mutual, very solid trust” between himself and Rousseff. The PT president, meanwhile, dismissed the report as a “storm in a tea cup” and suggested that the media was trying to “create an intrigue.” She added, “Levy is very important for Brazil today and he stands very firm.” If anything, the incident served to prove that it is Levy who is in charge.

The next round of austerity measures are to be implemented as unemployment is rising and the economy is shrinking, conditions that these policies will only worsen. The latest jobs report showed that Brazil’s official unemployment rate rose to 5.9 percent in February, the steepest increase in almost two years. Meanwhile, the country’s central bank estimates a 0.1 percent decline in GDP in 2014, and projects a deeper contraction of 0.5 percent this year.

Hardest hit are the manufacturing and construction sectors. There are also growing fears that the Petrobras scandal will have a ripple effect throughout the economy as the energy firm, Latin America’s largest corporation, is responsible for roughly 10 percent of all business INVESTMENT in Brazil. Revelations about companies paying kickbacks to the ruling PT in exchange for inflated contracts have already led to two major industrial construction firms, OAS and Galvao Engenharia SA, filing for bankruptcy.

Rousseff, who chaired Petrobras from 2003 to 2010, told Bloomberg that neither she nor other board members “even saw a sign” of corruption. She added that the Petrobras board “was made up of quite qualified entrepreneurs—it wasn’t just me.”

Prominent among recent layoffs have been those in Brazil’s auto industry, which have provoked strikes and protests by auto workers. Some 13,000 jobs have been wiped out in the industry over the past year. Auto sales in Brazil fell 7 percent in 2014, and projections that they would stabilize this year are being called into question by the deepening slump.

Workers at the Ford engine plant in Taubaté, about 140 kilometers northeast of São Paulo, walked out on strike April 1 after the company announced the permanent layoffs of 137 workers. The workers were told that they had lost their jobs after they returned from a temporary furlough. They initiated a protest at the factory gates beginning on Tuesday, March 31, and by Wednesday the rest of the workforce joined them.

The action follows a February strike by 5,000 General Motors workers in São Paulo’s ABC industrial belt against the threatened layoff of 800 workers. Some 13,000 Volkswagen workers carried out a similar action in January, and 11,000 Mercedes Benz workers staged a 24-hour strike and protests blocking a highway after 250 layoffs were announced during the same period.

While in the past, the PT government had warned against layoffs and indicated that tax cuts and other favorable economic policies could be curtailed if the foreign automakers continued putting workers in the street, there has been no such threat during the latest, and deepest, round of job cuts.

The Brazilian central bank has also projected an increase in the inflation rate to 7.9 percent, ravaging the living standards of the working class, which has already borne the brunt of tax, utility and transit hikes as well as steadily rising food and housing costs.

In her desperate bid to placate her critics on the right and secure the approval of Wall Street, Rousseff is putting into motion policies that must inevitably lead to an explosive development of the class struggle in Brazil.

US auto executives handed multimillion-dollar pay packages

Shannon Jones

US auto manufacturers have revealed multimillion-dollar executive pay packages as they prepare for contract talks this summer with the United Auto Workers. 139,000 Ford, GM and Chrysler workers face a September 15 contract deadline with sentiments running high for the abolition of the two-tier wage system that pays new hires about one half of standard wages along with inferior benefits.

The Obama administration’s forced restructuring of the auto industry in 2009, which was carried out at the expense of the wages and benefits of auto workers and retirees, has led to a profit surge, with the Detroit automakers making $76 billion over the last six years and $10 billion in 2014 alone.

Auto companies are rewarding their top executives with massive salaries and stock awards.

Ford Motor reported that CEO Mark Fields took in $18.6 million in 2014. Other Ford executives also received hefty salaries, including Chief Financial Officer Bob Shanks, who raked in $6.3 million, and Executive Vice President of the Americas Joe Hinrichs, who got $6.1 million. Ford’s head of operations in Europe, Jim Farley, got $4.5 million.

Overall, Ford took in $3.2 billion in profits in 2014, including $52 million in the fourth quarter, the 22nd consecutive profitable quarter.

Earlier Fiat-Chrysler announced that CEO Sergio Marchionne was set to receive $72 million in total pay for 2014. Most of his pay package comes from bonuses and a stock award connected to Fiat’s takeover of Chrysler that led to a 61 percent surge in its share price.

Marchionne’s pay package when broken down to an average hourly rate comes to around $35,000 per hour. That compares to the $28 average hourly wage paid senior Chrysler workers. Forty-two percent of Chrysler workers earn the second-tier wage, which currently pays around $15 per hour. Last year, Marchionne said he was “violently opposed” to any conception that workers are “entitled” to pay increases.

Meanwhile, General Motors CEO Mary Barra is expected to receive a 2014 pay package of $14.4 million. The automaker recorded $2.8 billion profit last year despite recalls and lawsuits related to a deadly ignition defect. GM, which is sitting on a cash hoard of some $25 billion, recently announced a $5 billion stock buyback program and raised its stock dividend by 20 percent. Both moves benefit big investors, including the UAW, which hailed the buyback.

GM executives recently received restricted shares of stock under a new incentive plan. Barra just got 79,639 restricted shares, up from the 69,214 she got in 2014. The award is worth around $3 million at current share prices. GM President Dan Ammann got 29,685 restricted shares and Chief Financial Officer Chuck Stevens got 19,081.

The announcement of multimillion-dollar payouts to auto executives takes place in the context of stagnating and declining compensation for US auto workers. Workers at the US-based car companies hired before 2007 have not had a pay increase in over ten years.

Currently nonunion workers at the Mercedes plant in Vance, Alabama have the highest total hourly compensation among US auto workers at $65 per hour. That ranks ahead of Ford workers at $57 per hour and GM workers at $58. The corresponding figure for Chrysler is $48 per hour, which ranks behind Honda at $49 per hour and is tied with Toyota.

Chrysler employs a far higher percentage of lower-paid tier two workers than the other US carmakers. According to the Center for Automotive Research, real wages for US auto workers have fallen a massive 24 percent since November 2002. According to a report in Bloomberg, management pay has risen about 50 percent faster then the wages of unionized workers since 2009.

Markus, a young second-tier worker at Chrysler Warren Truck outside of Detroit remarked on Marchionne’s salary. “It’s amazing. They came up with $72 million, and where does that come from? It comes from us.

“It doesn’t seem like there is anything we can do about it. I see the upcoming contract will be a mess. If they give us some money, it won’t be what we expect. It is so unfair. I make $15 an hour and have a wife and four children to support.”

Dominique, another young Warren Truck worker added, “$72 million is a lot of money and our profit sharing was basically crap. I support a family. It is hard.

“They don’t even want to give you a day off. If you don’t have a PA day (Paid Absence Allowance) you are screwed. They don’t care what the reason is. A loved one could be sick; they don’t care.”

Despite these sentiments, at the recently held United Auto Workers bargaining convention the union only spoke vaguely about “bridging the gap” between first- and second-tier workers. Since 2007, the UAW has sanctioned a 30 percent reduction in hourly labor costs—through lower-tier wages, ending employer-paid retiree health care, replacing defined pension plans for new hires with 401(K)s, and abolishing overtime after eight hours.

At a post-convention press conference, UAW President Dennis Williams held open the possibility of a third-tier wage comprising lower skilled auto workers. In reality there are already a multitude of tiers in the auto factories comprised of contract workers, some of whom make barely more than the US minimum wage.

Some workers at the GM Lake Orion Assembly plant outside of Detroit already make less than the two-tier wage under terms of a special agreement signed by the UAW. The workers are employed at General Motors Subsystems Manufacturing LLC and do tasks such as arranging batches of parts in order for assembly.

Other global carmakers also reported hefty pay packages for their top executives. Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn pocketed some 17.5 million euros in 2014, about $18.8 million dollars. Outgoing Honda CEO Takanobu Ito received $1.4 million in salary and bonus in the most recent fiscal year.

Renault, meanwhile, proposed to raise the salary of CEO Carlos Ghosn to $7.85 million in 2014. The French carmaker is preparing to axe 7,500 jobs in a drive to cut costs. The most recent labor agreement froze workers’ salaries. Ghosn also received $8.34 million in salary for his role in Renault’s partnership with Nissan.