Australian government imposes phonics test on six-year-olds

David Cohen

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s federal Liberal-National government has unveiled a so-called expert panel tasked with imposing yet another standardised test, this time on Year 1 students.

On January 31, the first day of the new school year, Education Minister Simon Birmingham declared that new phonics and numeracy tests would comprise part of the government’s “back to basics education approach.” This approach is supposedly aimed at using “record and growing levels of investment in Australian schools as effectively as possible to turnaround areas of stagnating or worsening performance.”

The reality is that public schools and their students are grossly under-resourced. The government’s new testing regime is aimed at further undermining the public education system, by extending the impact of the former Labor government’s National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) testing regime. NAPLAN remains the pivotal mechanism for federal and state government moves to target working class schools for “reform” or closure, tie teachers’ job security and salaries to standardised test results, and narrow the curriculum, bringing back regressive teaching methods through “teaching to the test.”

While NAPLAN begins with Year 3 students, the government has now moved to target children two years earlier, with six-year-olds to be tested on their numeracy and literacy skills.

While details of the numeracy testing component remain unclear, the reactionary agenda behind the new literacy phonics screen becomes clear when one examines the “experts” appointed to the government panel. Not a single literacy expert or educational academic has been assigned to “inform the development and implementation of a national Year 1 check.”

Instead, four individuals have been appointed directly from a right-wing campaign group, led by the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) and backed by the Murdoch media.

The CIS is a “free market” think tank, financed by mining companies and other transnational corporations. In recent years it has focussed its remit on demanding austerity budget cuts that target the working class, totalling $60 billion a year, every year for a decade.

Last year the CIS established the “Five from Five” education campaign group, led by CIS staffer Jennifer Buckingham. Buckingham is one of the four literacy-based appointees to the phonics test panel, all of whom are “Five from Five” campaigners and supporters—Steven Capp, principal of Melbourne’s Bentleigh West Primary School; Pamela Snow, head of the La Trobe Rural Health School; and Mandy Nayton, CEO of the Dyslexia-SPELD Foundation.

The CIS’s “Five from Five” campaign is backed by Murdoch’s Australian newspaper and has been endorsed by multiple dyslexia campaign and advocacy organisations. It purports to be “a group of organisations and individuals who support the objective of promoting effective, evidence-based reading instruction.”

In fact, the CIS is using the literacy campaign as a cynical cover to advance its agenda of dismantling the public education system.

Jennifer Buckingham has authored numerous propaganda pieces, in the guise of “research reports” and op-ed pieces in the Murdoch and financial press, to attack public schools. In a 2014 CIS paper, “School Funding on a Budget,” she declared that education “cannot be quarantined from efforts to bring the [budget] back into balance,” adding that “measures to reduce future spending and improve productivity” could include “removing mandatory class sizes” and “making it easier for principals to dismiss ineffective teachers,” that is, to victimise targeted teachers and impose cost-cutting layoffs.

Buckingham also advocates so-called “vouchers,” the mechanism long advocated by proponents of a wholly privatised school system, in which families are annually allocated a set amount of public money for each school child that can be used to enrol them at either public or private schools. In addition, she has campaigned for charter schools, i.e., schools that are publicly funded but privately operated. In a 2015 CIS paper, “Free to Choose Charter Schools: How charter and for-profit schools can boost public education,” Buckingham insisted that a corporate takeover of “chronically-failing [public] schools” would provide “the positive disruptive reform Australian education needs.”

Backed by the government, this right-wing ideologue is now posturing as an expert on the teaching of reading.

The Year 1 testing panel will report to the government by the end of April. Education Minister Birmingham, however, has already outlined what will be in the new phonics test. The government is importing a British phonics test, first imposed on primary schools there in 2012 by the Conservative-led government. The test involves teachers assessing Year 1 students’ ability to read 20 words on flashcards, without the context of an authentic text or even a sentence, and 20 so-called pseudo- or nonsense-words. If students are deemed to have failed the test, they have to repeat it in Year 2.

The Australian government has ignored numerous critiques of this test issued by literacy experts.

One survey of teachers found that 91 percent had concluded that the expensive and time-consuming test had told them nothing that they did not already know about their students’ reading abilities. More fundamentally, the test’s extraction of separate words from any meaningful context and the demand that students read them (or, more accurately, pronounce them correctly) is contrary to the premise of all quality literacy instruction—namely, that reading is not simply saying words (“barking at print”) but generating meaning from print. Isolating individual words prevents young readers from utilising multiple strategies to read, including by predicting what comes next in a sentence through their knowledge of grammar and syntax, text conventions, and prior understanding of the text’s subject.

These issues emerge most sharply with the required testing of “pseudo-words.”

Children will be instructed to “read” computer-generated nonsense such as shan, flarm, and strom. This is supposedly being done in order to assess the students’ knowledge of letter-sound relationships. In practice, however, fluent readers (who have moved beyond inefficient sounding out, decoding strategies) know that reading should always make sense, and they approach the test on that basis. Reports have documented strong readers saying, for example, “storm” instead of strom, and “farm” instead of flarm, and therefore being ranked in the standardised test as less proficient than emergent readers, who laboriously sound out “f-l-ah-ar-mm” and “s-t-r-oh-mm.” (See: Howard Gibson and Jennifer England, “The inclusion of pseudo words within the year one phonics ‘screening check’ in English primary schools,” Cambridge Journal of Education, 2015.)

Such reports underscore the fact that the Australian government’s new testing measures have nothing to do with assisting either students or teachers.

The immediate agenda is to mandate regressive new teaching measures in public schools across the country. In Britain, the introduction of the phonics test was accompanied by the statutory imposition of a specific literacy teaching model, known as synthetic phonics. Well trained literacy educators will teach the complex relationship between the English alphabet’s 26 letters and the 42–44 sounds within spoken English, as it is developmentally required for each student—through an open and inquiring engagement with rich picture story books and other texts written by real authors, and through authentic writing experiences.

Synthetic phonics, on the other hand, is made up of a rigidly presented, one-size-fits-all, instruction in letter-sound relationships. There are countless commercially marketed synthetic phonics programs, such as Jolly Phonics and THRASS, for which the government’s agenda promises a profit bonanza. They typically present one letter-sound per day or per week instruction for the whole class, regardless of different students’ literacy development, and use commercially-produced phonics texts (“the fat cat sat on the mat”) instead of engaging books written by genuine authors to entertain and enlighten the children. In attempting to reduce the learning of reading to a mindless set of mechanical skills, the government is promoting synthetic phonics as another means of narrowing the school curriculum and suppressing creative and critical thought among young people in the public school system.

The CIS and its “Five from Five” campaign is also agitating for “direct instruction”—a deeply authoritarian, 1950s-style teaching method involving teachers clicking their fingers and students chanting rote-memorised responses. American-based companies selling direct instruction scripts for schools and teachers have already received millions of dollars, via government contracts, for use in Aboriginal schools in Queensland and the Northern Territory. One of these companies—Good to Great Schools Australia, which operates in Queensland’s Cape York indigenous communities—is part of the CIS “Five from Five” campaign.

Despite the documented disasters that direct instruction has wrought across Aboriginal communities, including plummeting school attendance rates and increased student disruption and violence, the government has indicated its intention to extend the direct instruction model to working class public schools across the country.

In the face of this onslaught, the teachers’ unions are once again demonstrating their complicity with the government. A statement issued by the Australian Education Union on January 31 raised nothing about the political agenda behind the phonics test, and instead urged the government to adopt the bogus “Gonski” school funding model, which is backed by the opposition Labor Party, the original sponsor of standardised testing.

Australia, Indonesia discuss closer economic, security ties

John Roberts & James Cogan 

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull held talks in Jakarta with Indonesian President Joko Widodo on March 7. Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and Trade Minister Steve Ciobo, who accompanied Turnbull, held more extensive meetings with their Indonesian counterparts. The discussions followed a visit to Sydney by Widido on February 25–26, during which he held summits with Australian business leaders and a private dinner at Turnbull’s Sydney Harbour mansion.

The flurry of diplomatic activity between the two countries is in large part a response to the US Trump administration. Its unilateralist and protectionist “America First” agenda threatens to disrupt existing patterns of trade and investment, while its bellicose demands for economic concessions from China and other countries threaten to heighten already volatile strategic and military tensions in Asia.

The Australian capitalist class, one of the closest allies of the US and backers of the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia” against China, has been beset with uncertainty. Trump has repudiated any participation in the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), which was aimed at further forcing open Asian markets, and ultimately the Chinese market, to foreign competition and investment. Instead, Trump has asserted his administration will seek bilateral agreements with China, Japan, South Korea and other major economies that favour US interests, at the expense of other competitors, including Australian-based corporations.

To pressure China into granting the US preferential trade arrangements, the Trump administration has flagged everything from renouncing the “One China” policy regarding Taiwan to challenging Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea. It is dangerously escalating tensions on the Korean Peninsula. The US would expect Canberra, which is strategically bound to Washington by the ANZUS alliance and integrated with the American military through bases and joint deployments, to join any military conflict against China—Australia’s largest export market and trading partner.

An open discussion is taking place in Australian ruling circles as to whether, after relying on the United States to enforce their mutual imperialist interests in Asia for the entire post-World War II period, they can continue to do so. In that context, the Turnbull government has ordered the recall of 113 top Australian diplomats from around the world to discuss a “foreign policy reset” and has embarked on efforts to consolidate Australia’s strategic and economic relations in the region and internationally.

No Asian country is of greater strategic significance to Australian imperialism than Indonesia, a resource-rich archipelago directly to its north, with a population of over 260 million and a history of struggle by the working class and rural oppressed against colonial and neo-colonial domination.

Working with the US and the Indonesian military, Australia played a criminal role in the 1965–66 Indonesian military coup, in which up to one million members and supporters of the Indonesian Communist Party were murdered. In 1997–1998, Australia collaborated with Washington to ensure that a mass movement against the Suharto dictatorship was channeled behind the so-called democrats headed by Megawati Sukarnoputri, who guaranteed that Indonesia would remain subordinate to the imperialist powers.

In 2017, Australia is once again seeking to shore up its interests in Indonesia. The talks with the Widodo government involved further overtures by Canberra to overcome the lingering anger in the Indonesian ruling elite over the 2013 leak by Edward Snowden that Australian agencies were spying on top political and military figures, including then president and former Suharto-era general Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Relations deteriorated anew at the beginning of this year over revelations that Australian military officers had disparaged Indonesia and its military.

While a temporary Indonesian suspension on military exchanges had already been lifted before the diplomatic visits, pledges of closer ties were made. An agreement was signed for greater cooperation on combatting terrorism. Since 2001, that pretext, along with preventing “people smugglers” bringing refugees from Indonesia to Australia by boat, has been employed to justify significant activity across the archipelago by Australian intelligence and police agencies. Indonesian forces are expected to participate in the massive joint US-Australia Talisman Sabre military exercises in July.

In the only hint of possible tensions during the talks, Turnbull rejected an earlier suggestion from Widido that the Australian and Indonesian navies could undertake joint patrols in the South China Sea, where Indonesia controls the Natuna Islands. China infuriated Jakarta last year when it issued a statement asserting that it had overlapping claims with Indonesia to the waters around the islands.

The Natuna Islands are held by Indonesia, and China does not dispute its sovereignty but claims parts of the waters in the surrounding Exclusive Economic Zone. The Indonesian navy has already fired on and boarded Chinese fishing boats in the disputed area. Questioned by journalists about whether Australia would send naval forces to operate with Indonesia in the area, Turnbull replied: “We are not going to undertake any actions which would increase tensions in the South China Sea.”

Beyond security, the main issue in the Sydney and Jakarta discussions centred on a proposed free trade pact—named the Indonesia-Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (IA-CEPA). Talks were initiated in 2010, but little progress toward finalising a deal was made until 2016. A seventh round of negotiations is now scheduled in May.

Economic relations at present are dominated by exports of agricultural goods by Australia, and petroleum and other resources by Indonesia. Despite its close proximity, Australia’s total merchandise trade with Indonesia in 2015–2016 was just $11.23 billion—$5.5 billion in exports and $5.6 billion in imports. Australian cumulative investment in Indonesia is barely $8.5 billion.

The primary aim of the IA-CEPA, from the standpoint of Australian corporations, is to gain greater access to Indonesia’s proportionally tiny, but numerically significant, upper middle class for not only agricultural goods, but banks, insurance companies, educational institutions and other service sector providers.

While not mentioned in any official communique or press conference, the other overriding concern of Australian imperialism is Indonesia’s political stability. The vast economic restructuring that has taken place in the country since the 1997–1998 crisis has led to staggering levels of social inequality and immense class antagonisms. The top 1 percent of the population control over 50 percent of the country’s wealth. The wealthiest four individuals own more wealth than the bottom 100 million people. An estimated 80 percent of the population have gained nothing from economic growth, and 93 million, in both urban and rural areas, earn less than $3.10 per day—the World Bank’s definition of “moderate poverty.” Social tensions have been expressed in the growth of strikes, protests and unrest in the province of West Papua.

Australia’s ruling elite, no less than the Widido government and Indonesia’s military-security apparatus, is anxious to ensure that social tensions do not spiral out of control.

US-backed South Sudanese regime organizing genocidal crimes, UN report finds

Thomas Gaist 

The South Sudan civil war, which erupted in December 2013, is assuming an increasingly genocidal character, according to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR). In the course of the war, both the US-backed government led by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and President Salva Kiir, and SPLA opposition faction led by Vice President Riek Machar, have carried out atrocities against civilians.

On February 7, UN experts officially began registering “warning signs for ethnic cleansing” and “indicators for genocide.” The situation is characterized by “massive insecurity” and “large-scale polarization of communities,” the UN found.

The SPLA regime has organized a “scorched earth” campaign and is carrying out “population engineering” through forced relocation of ethnic minorities. Kiir and other top SPLA officials have directly ordered mass killing and property seizures against civilian communities. SPLA members frequently abuse civilians at military checkpoints and during warrantless searches of residential areas.

Barely six years after its secession from the Sudan, a development hailed by Western bourgeois public opinion as a victory for “democracy” and “the self-determination of nations,” South Sudan is experiencing levels of chaos and social breakdown which bring to mind the worst catastrophes of the 20th century.

Three years of civil war have produced widespread famine and a massive refugee crisis. Some 1.5 million South Sudanese have already become refugees, and 2 million have been displaced internally as a result of the war. Some 700,000 are in refugee camps across the border in Uganda. One million South Sudanese are at risk of starving in the coming year.

The crisis in South Sudan is an advanced manifestation of the unviability and breakdown of the nation-state system across Africa and worldwide. The pressure of world imperialism against the oppressed countries finds its sharpest expression in the weakest nations.

South Sudan’s political structure, controlled by a coalition of generals and aspiring dictators cobbled together with US cash and weapons, ruled for only two years before breaking in two. Between 2012-2013, the Kiir leadership pursued policies aimed at driving the Machar faction out of the government. In an effort to tighten his grip over the South Sudanese government, President Kiir ordered the firing of hundreds of military and political officials and reorganized the top committees of the state so as to entrench his own supporters in power. In December 2013, gunfire broke out during meetings of the SPLM’s National Liberation Council amid circumstances that remain unclear. President Kiir seized on the clashes to accuse Machar of planning a coup, and expel him and his supporters from the government.

The state of war between the SPLA factions has since served, to a large extent, as a pretext for the expropriation and murder of ethnic minorities and civilians generally. The UN found that: “Civilians have been deliberately and systematically targeted on the basis of their ethnicity by armed forces and groups, including SPLA and SPLM/A in Opposition, and also by groups aligned with them. Individuals have been targeted for killing, arbitrary arrest and detention, sexual violence, sexual slavery and forced marriage. Communities have been subjected to scorched-earth policies that result in the destruction of their homes and means of livelihood. Many of the attacks have been carried out by SPLA soldiers and the militias affiliated with them. Armed groups attack villages, burn homes, kill and rape.”

“Tens of thousands of civilians have been killed in horrific attacks, often targeted on the basis of their ethnicity or perceived allegiances,” the UN found.

For all this savagery, the SPLA is merely a local enforcer of the policies and economic interests of the American ruling class. The men organizing the killing from Juba were placed in power as part of a geopolitical operation aimed at opening Sudan’s oil resources to exploitation by American firms. Washington has sought for decades to exploit long-standing conflicts between the Sudan’s northern and southern elites as a means of projecting power against the central Sudanese government in Khartoum, whose ties to China and the Soviet Union threatened to block American companies from accessing Sudan’s oil fields.

Founded in 1983, the SPLA became a favored proxy army of US imperialism, developing close ties with the US political elite and rising, during the 2005-2011 transition process, to assume control of the newly-formed South Sudanese state. The signature black cowboy hat of President Salva Kiir, without which he never appears in public, was a gift from none other than US President George W. Bush, given to Kiir at the White House in July 2006.

While in power, the Kiir and the SPLA have employed ethno-nationalism as an ideological cover for its self-serving collaboration with imperialism. Advertising themselves as leaders of a “liberation” movement, the SPLA’s cadres could be more accurately described as networks of US-backed warlords. They view the South Sudanese state as nothing more than a means of expanding their property and privileges. Despite being expelled from the Juba government, Machar’s opposition forces continue to manage significant business interests and maintain ties to foreign government and corporations. Machar’s militias remain armed and continue to occupy territory and move about the country largely at will. In a telling detail reported by the Sentry, the families of Kiir and Machar, who pose as mortal enemies in public view, live just miles apart in luxurious mansions near Nairobi.

New Kiirs and Machars are being cultivated by American imperialism in countless countries. The historic processes that pushed the United States to support the break-up of the Sudan are active on every continent. They are essentially the same tendencies of development that have defined world politics for 100 years: the domination of finance capital and the economic rivalry between the major nations produces an endless chain of regional wars, military dictators and ethnic slaughters.

The removal of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) from the geopolitical landscape has, since 1991, cleared the way for 25 years of relentless economic and military warfare against the former colonial countries. A quarter century of unobstructed capitalist world-rule has produced nothing less then the liquidation of entire sections of world society. Tens of millions are living as homeless refugees, with no social or political rights, as a consequences of the wars and counterrevolutionary economic policies of the world’s capitalist governments.

Last Friday, UN humanitarian leader Stephen O’Brien described the international humanitarian situation as “worse then any time since 1945.” Spreading famine and disease are threatening the lives of 20 million people living in Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia and Nigeria, O’Brien said.

More South Sudans are being prepared. In every part of the world, the economic and political objectives of the US ruling elite demand not peaceful development and the raising of living standards, but ever greater levels of destruction and robbery. During the epoch of imperialism, as Leon Trotsky wrote, the capitalist organization of world economy becomes its opposite, that is, “barbarous disorganization and chaos.” In lines that could easily have been written yesterday, as an explanation of the broader historical process that has led to the catastrophe in South Sudan, Trotsky wrote:

“The future development of world economy on the capitalistic basis means a ceaseless struggle for new and ever new fields of capitalist exploitation, which must be obtained from one and the same source, the earth. The economic rivalry under the banner of militarism is accompanied by robbery and destruction which violate the elementary principles of human economy.”

The fate of South Sudan, like that of Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia, shows the future that capitalism and imperialist war have in store for humanity unless stopped by the mobilization of the African and international working class in revolutionary struggle.

BJP gains in Indian state elections leave opposition Congress reeling

Deepal Jayasekera 

India’s ruling party, the Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has won a major electoral victory, winning a majority in the state assembly of Uttar Pradesh, the north Indian state that is home to one-sixth of India’s population.

The BJP is also likely to lead the government in three of the four other states where state assembly elections were held in February and early March—Uttarakhand, Goa, and Manipur. Only in Punjab, where the BJP had been the junior partner in a decade-old coalition government, did it suffer a serious reversal.

By contrast, the five state elections whose results were tabulated last Saturday constituted a debacle for the Congress Party. The Congress, which until only recently was the Indian bourgeoisie’s preferred party of government, is no longer a significant force in wide swathes of India, including Uttar Pradesh. Depending on the outcome of the post-election maneuvering in Manipur, it will hold office in only 5 or 6 of India’s 29 states. The BJP, meanwhile, will hold power in at least 15 states, representing about 60 percent of the country’s total population, as well as forming India’s national government.

The BJP has been quick to proclaim the state election results a ringing endorsement of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rightwing agenda of accelerated pro-investor “reform” (that is privatization and austerity) and a more assertive foreign policy (integration into Washington’s military-strategic offensive against China and increased belligerence against Pakistan.)

In reality, the BJP was the utterly undeserving beneficiary of popular anger and disaffection with the Congress and various caste-based and regional parties that have themselves implemented neo-liberal reforms, presiding over mass poverty, intensifying economic insecurity and ever-widening social inequality. For their part, the twin Stalinist parliamentary parties, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Communist Party of India, have responded to the BJP’s rise and the intensification of class conflict by redoubling their efforts to subordinate the working class to the Indian state, the Congress and other rightwing opposition parties. This has only helped further boost the BJP.

There is no question Modi and his BJP will use their strengthened political hand to attack the working class. Already government sources have told the Times of India that changes will soon be made to facilitate and grow foreign direct investment in the multi-brand retail sector, thereby opening the door for the likes of Walmart and Carrefour to aggressively expand into India.

Modi was himself the “star” BJP campaigner in the just concluded state elections, especially in Uttar Pradesh (UP), where the party did not even project a chief minister candidate.

If Modi and the national BJP leadership invested so heavily in the state elections, it is not only because control of the UP government is a major political prize. The party strength in the various state legislatures will directly impact on the election of India’s president in July and will, over time, result in changes in the composition of the upper house of the national parliament, the Rajya Sabha. Because the BJP currently lacks a working majority in the Rajya Sabha, it has been unable to push through some of the “reforms” most eagerly sought by its big business backers. These include changes to labour laws to make it easier to lay off workers and close plants in the so-called organized sector and the gutting of restrictions on the expropriation of agricultural land for big business projects.

As in the 2014 national election, the BJP cast itself as the party of economic “development,” promising growth and modernization and pointing to the manifest failure of its opponents to raise the mass of the population out of poverty and squalor. It also played up Modi’s humble origins, contrasting them with the pedigree of Rahul Gandhi, the principal Congress Party spokesman, who is the son, grandson, and great-grandson of Congress prime ministers.

At the same time, the BJP made unmistakable anti-Muslim communal appeals. BJP President Amit Shah touted the Hindu right’s demands for the building of a Hindu temple on the site of the razed Babri Majsid mosque in Ayodhya and the banning of cow-slaughter. In the first weeks of the campaign, the BJP also made much of the illegal and reckless Special Forces’ raids it had ordered inside Pakistan, claiming that under Modi and the BJP India is a rising military and great power.

But the focus of its appeal in UP was to mass anger over the failure of the incumbent, caste-based Samajwadi Party government to create jobs, provide electricity, and reduce poverty.

The Samajwadi Party responded by forming an alliance with the Congress Party. The Congress postures as the protagonist of “inclusive growth,” but in fact has done much of the heavy-lifting over the past quarter-century in pushing through socially regressive, pro-investor reforms and forging a strategic partnership between India and US imperialism.

Socio-economic conditions in UP are among the worst in India, a country blighted by mass hunger and social degradation. According to World Bank estimates, 70 percent of UP’s population lives on less than US $1 a day. A recent report from the National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) estimated more than ten million young people in UP (those in the 15-35 age-group) are unemployed.

Repeating its success in UP in the 2014 national elections, the BJP captured 312 of UP’s 403 assembly seats with just under 40 percent of the popular vote. The Samajwadi Party (SP) saw its assembly representation slashed from 224 to 47, while the Congress’ seat tally fell from 28 to just 7.

Another significant development was the poor showing of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which postures as the representative of the Dalits (former Untouchables) and other disproportionately impoverished lower-caste groups. The BSP and SP have dominated state politics in UP since 2002, but the BSP won just 19 seats, down from 80 in the previous election.

To undercut both the SP and BSP, the BJP exploited caste divisions, nominating as candidates local notables who claimed to represent lower caste groups that had not received their “fair share” of electoral nominations and government patronage from SP and BSP governments in Lucknow.

In neighboring Uttarakhand, the Congress was ousted from power by the BJP. With 46 percent of the vote, the BJP won 57 seats, up from 26 in the previous states election. The Congress saw its seat tally, plunge by 21 to just 11. Even the sitting Congress Chief Minister, Harish Rawat, failed to win re-election.

In the small northeastern seat of Manipur, the Congress seat tally was slashed by 19 to 28. The BJP, which won no seats in the previous Manipur state election, captured 21 and now claims to have rallied sufficient support from other parties, including a Congress defector, to wield a parliamentary majority.

In the small former Portuguese colony of Goa, the Congress was able to emerge as the largest single party. Capitalizing on disaffection with the five year-old BJP state government, it won 17 seats in the 40-member state assembly, almost double its 2012 tally. But the BJP quickly filled the breach, no doubt using the ample patronage powers of the central government and its own war-chest. The BJP rallied support from smaller parties and told Manohar Parrikar to give up his post as Defense Minister and take back the Chief Ministership of Goa, a position he held from 2000 to 2005 and from March 2012 to November 2014.

Only in Punjab, which, with a population of some 30 million was the second largest of the five states to go the polls, was the Congress able to upend the BJP. The Congress won 77 seats in the 117-member state assembly, ending ten years of rule by a coalition government of the Sikh communalist Shrimonai Akali Dal (SAD) and the BJP. The SAD lost 41 seats, leaving it with 15, while the BJP won just 3 seats and only 5.4 percent of the popular vote.

Despite the employment crisis and the economic dislocation caused by the Modi government’s demonetization measure, the Stalinist Left Front failed to win a single seat in any of the five states, repeating its miserable 2012 performance.

The Stalinists were once a significant political force in the industrial cities of UP and in the Punjab. But as elsewhere in India their support has hemorrhaged as a result of their promotion of caste-based politics, including alliances with various rightwing caste-ist and regional parties, and their role in implementing big business’ “reform” agenda. Since 1991, the Stalinists have supported a succession of central Indian governments, most of them Congress-led, that have pursued the ruling elite’s agenda of making India a cheap-labour haven for global capital. Moreover, in those states where the Left has formed the government it has implemented what the Stalinists themselves describe as “pro-investor” policies.

US Senate passes resolution calling on Trump to escalate regime-change in Venezuela

Alexander Fangmann 

On March 1, the United States Senate passed a resolution calling on President Donald Trump to escalate measures against the government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. These moves are part of a concerted effort by American imperialism to oust the ruling chavistas and replace them with a right-wing regime more aligned with American interests.

While cast as a call for the restoration of democratic governance, with some clauses of the resolution calling for the release of jailed right-wing politicians such as Leopoldo López and Antonio Ledezma, and others calling on the Maduro government to respect freedom of assembly and expression, and the constitutional separation of powers, the essential content of the resolution’s demands is that Maduro hand over the reins of government to the opposition or face more overt efforts at regime change from Washington.

This is all the more obvious given the resolution’s expression of support for the efforts of the Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS), Luis Almagro, to invoke the so-called Inter-American Democratic Charter of the OAS, which could lead to a suspension of Venezuela from that organization on the basis of a breakdown of constitutional norms.

The resolution also urges Trump to “instruct appropriate Federal agencies to hold officials of the Government of Venezuela accountable for violations of United States law and abuses of internationally recognized human rights,” code for an expansion of sanctions and other penalties against Venezuela, which is already reeling from an economic crisis brought on by the dramatic fall in oil prices since 2014.

Truly a bipartisan effort, the resolution’s lead sponsor was Democrat Ben Cardin of Maryland, the ranking member of the Senate’s foreign relations committee. Other co-sponsors for the resolution were Republicans Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, Roy Blunt, Cory Gardner and David Perdue. Co-sponsors from the Democrats were Dick Durbin, Bob Menendez, Bill Nelson and Tim Kaine. Underscoring both parties’ unity of purpose when it comes to Venezuela, the resolution was passed by unanimous consent.

Indeed, one of Barack Obama’s last acts as president was the early renewal of an executive order declaring a national emergency due to the “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States” posed by Venezuela. The executive order allows sanctions to be applied against Venezuelan officials, which Trump has since done to Vice President Tareck El Aissami and one of his close associates, businessman Samark López, on the basis of alleged narcotics trafficking.

No doubt a significant basis for the ratcheting up of US hostility toward Venezuela has been the latter’s increasing trade relationship with China, second now only to its commercial ties to the US. With US imperialism setting itself on a collision course with Beijing, it is looking to close China out of a strategic foothold in Latin America and to bring the entire region in line with the drive to war, an effort that has been helped by the dramatic decline in the price of oil and other commodities caused by the decline in China’s economic growth.

Approximately 95 percent of the Venezuela’s export earnings come from the oil industry. With prices dropping from over $100 per barrel in 2014 to around $50, the country’s revenues have fallen accordingly. On top of that, production has also decreased, estimated at 2.25 million barrels per day, down from 2.4 million in 2015 and 3 million in 2009, though still higher than a recently agreed OPEC target of 1.972 million barrels per day.

According to documents obtained by Reuters, Venezuela is even behind on oil shipments to China, having missed 27 shipments—nearly 9 million barrels—by the end of January. The country is also past due on 18 shipments to Russia totaling 4 million barrels. Due to the collapse in output by Venezuelan oil producer PDVSA, Fitch now rates a default at the state-owned company as “probable.”

In order to make its debt payments and finance imports, Venezuela has also been burning through its foreign reserves, and now only has about $10.5 billion remaining, according to a recent report from the Central Bank of Venezuela. This is down from $30 billion in reserves in 2011 and $20 billion in 2015. Of the remaining reserves, $7.7 billion are in the form of gold. The country has $7.2 billion in debt payments to make over the rest of the year.

As oil revenue has declined, so have the dollars necessary to finance imports, which in 2016 totaled approximately $18 billion, down from $66 billion in 2012. The result has been shortages of food and other basic goods, including medicine and parts and equipment needed for the oil industry, further fueling the production declines.

Living conditions for Venezuelan workers have become increasingly dire. IMF reports have the country’s inflation set to hit 1,660 percent this year and 2,880 percent next year, meaning that many goods are now completely out of reach for the vast majority.

Hunger has become endemic among wide layers of the population, with a Living Conditions Survey produced by three Venezuelan universities finding that 75 percent of Venezuelans lost an average of 19 pounds in 2016. Venezuelans categorized as “extremely poor” reported having lost more than 20 pounds on average.

School attendance has also decreased, with more than 1 million school-age children no longer attending classes. While hunger has played a part in the decrease in school attendance, other contributing factors have been a lack of basic public utilities like water and electricity, as well as strikes.

The hospital system relied upon by workers is in almost total disarray, with basic supplies such as antibiotics and surgical supplies scarce. Diseases are also overwhelming public health authorities. Diphtheria, eradicated over 70 years ago, has returned, with several suspected deaths in Bolivar state reported by public health sources.

The National Union of Workers (UNETE) issued a report this week recording 1,500 strikes and walkouts across Venezuela in 2016, the majority of them in response to layoffs, attacks on working conditions and the failure of public and private sector employers to renew existing contracts. According to the union federation, some 600,000 Venezuelan lost their jobs last year.

The Venezuelan working class is being driven into bitter struggles by the impact of the country’s protracted economic crisis, the increase in social inequality and the rapacious policies of both international capital and the native Venezuelan capitalists. These conflicts point increasingly toward a head-on confrontation with the chavista government, which has proven itself to be an utterly corrupt tool of Venezuelan capitalism.

US Customs and Border Protection searched nearly 25,000 phones in 2016

Niles Niemuth

Border agents with US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) carried out searches of nearly 25,000 cell phones in 2016, a fivefold increase over the 5,000 devices that were searched the previous year. The agency is on track to more than double its 2016 total this year, having searched 5,000 devices in February alone.

The ability of CBP agents to arbitrarily search and seize travelers’ electronic devices, such as smartphones and laptop computers, applies to anyone crossing the US border, including citizens and legal residents. The policy was first implemented under the administration of George W. Bush in July 2008 and continued through the Obama years, resulting in the search of tens of thousands of electronic devices.

If travelers refuse to unlock their phones, CBP agents can impound a traveler’s electronic devices in order to carry out data sweeps and hold them for weeks before giving them back.

While travelers are not legally required to give up their passwords or unlock their devices, agents have used threats, physical force and indefinite detention in order to compel travelers to give agents unlimited access to their personal information. While they cannot be criminally charged, noncitizens can be refused entry to the US for refusing to comply with a CBP agent’s orders.

The Department of Homeland Security has deployed more than a dozen software programs that allow agents to search and extract data from most Apple and Android devices regardless of password protection.

Programs such as Device Seizure, Black Light, Lantern and Oxygen Forensics allow agents to access and download deleted call logs, e-mails, videos, photos and other files as well as access social media accounts through apps for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

The data which is collected without a warrant or suspicion by the CBP can be shared with a host of other federal agencies including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Treasury Department and the National Counterterrorism Center.

The US Constitution’s prohibition against warrantless searches and seizures contained in the Fourth Amendment, which applies to most domestic police agencies, does not apply at the US border or international airports, where travelers can be searched and have their personal items taken from them by federal agents without any probable cause.

In addition to their largely unrestricted operations at the border, the CBP can set up immigration checkpoints as far away as 100 miles inland from the US borders where they are, however, legally required to have a warrant or probable cause to search a person or their possessions. Nearly two thirds of the US population, 200 million people, live within this zone.

An investigation by NBC News examined the cases of 25 US citizens who were recently forced by federal agents at an airport or border crossing, under the threat of detention or physical force, to hand over their phones and passwords for examination. A majority of those subjected to the invasive search, 23 out of 25, were Muslim.

In one case reported by NBC News, a couple from Buffalo, New York, Akram Shibly and Kelly McCormick, were stopped twice in a four-day period entering the US from Canada in January and on the second occasion had their phones forcibly seized.

On January 1, Shibly and McCormick were detained for two hours and were compelled to give up their phones and passwords. Three days later, they were again asked to hand over their phones and passwords as they entered the US. When Shibly refused, having just had all his data seized by the CBP a few days prior, he was quickly surrounded by three agents, placed in a chokehold and his phone was pulled from his pocket. Seeing the assault on her boyfriend, McCormick also gave up her phone.

“It just felt like a gross violation of our rights,” Shibly told NBC News. While Shibly was born in New York state, both of his parents were originally from Syria, one of the countries included in Trump’s travel ban.

Other recent cases impacting those traveling to and from the US:

· Sidd Bikkannavar, a US citizen and NASA scientist, was detained at George Bush Intercontinental airport in Houston, Texas, at the end of January after returning to the US from Chile. He was compelled by CBP agents to give up his NASA work phone and access PIN, possible compromising sensitive data contained on it, before he was allowed back into the country.

· Haisam Elsharkawi, an American citizen and electronics salesman, was detained on February 9 by CBP agents as he was trying to fly from Los Angeles to Saudi Arabia. He was handcuffed and pressured into unlocking his cell phone so that it could be searched. Elsharkawi was eventually released after agents found nothing suspicious, but he had missed his flight and was not given a refund.

· Celestine Omin, a 28-year-old software engineer from Nigeria, was forced by CBP agents at New York’s JFK Airport to complete a written test to prove his computer knowledge before he was allowed into the country last month.

· In late February, passengers on a domestic flight from San Francisco to New York were compelled to show identification documents to CBP agents before being allowed off the plane. CBP officials claimed they were looking for someone on the flight with a deportation order. That individual was not found on the plane.

The growing number of high-profile cases at the border since January indicates that agents and officers of the CBP, the largest law enforcement agency operating under the aegis of the Department of Homeland Security, have been emboldened by executive orders signed by President Donald Trump targeting immigrant workers already in the county as well as those traveling to the US from predominantly Muslim countries.

“The shackles are off,” Hugh Handeyside, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project told NBC News. “We see individual officers and perhaps supervisors as well pushing those limits, exceeding their authority and violating people’s rights.”

Socialist Party advocates nationalist and xenophobic programme in Dutch elections

Martin Kreickenbaum 

The Socialist Party (SP) is one of the 28 parties competing for the 150 seats in parliament in today’s Dutch elections. With 10 percent support in the polls, the SP is only just behind the right-wing Liberal Party (VVD) of Prime Minister Mark Rutte, but ahead of the governing social democratic PvdA, which at 7.4 percent is expected to suffer an historic defeat.

The SP’s explicit nationalism demonstrates that, contrary to its name, the party has nothing to do with socialism. The SP uncritically supports the anti-Turkish campaign with which Rutte has sought to outdo the vehemently xenophobic PVV of Geert Wilders from the right on the eve of the elections. Rutte issued a ban on Turkey’s Foreign Minister entering the country and deported the Families Minister to prevent her from campaigning for the upcoming constitutional referendum at a meeting of Turkish citizens at the Turkish consulate.

Emile Roemer, the lead candidate for the SP, declared in a press statement that there was “no place in the Netherlands for the propaganda circus of sultan Erdogan.” He called on the Rutte government to suspend further talks on Turkey joining the European Union (EU).

Roemer continued, “Recent days have shown that it is not possible to reach reliable agreements with the Turkish government. The Turkish government should not be allowed to intervene in our domestic affairs. The current situation reveals what the SP has been saying for years, that we have to fully and completely oppose the influencing of Dutch citizens by Ankara.”

The SP thereby joined the chorus of anti-Muslim agitation which is legitimising the attack on democratic rights. Roemer’s declarations are virtually indistinguishable from the tirades of Wilders, who raged against the Turkish ministers, “Go away, this is our country!” and added, “I say to all Turks in the Netherlands who agree with Erdogan: go to Turkey and don’t come back again!”

The closeness to Wilders illustrates just how right-wing the SP’s programme in fact is. While it attempts to confuse young people and workers with “left” rhetoric and activism, and spreads illusions in the reformability of capitalism, the SP at the same time promotes a strong state and the sealing of the borders against immigrants and refugees. With its right-wing, xenophobic demagogy, the SP is jointly responsible for the rise of Wilders.

The SP was founded in 1972 as a Maoist group, but quickly gave up its “flirtation with Maoism,” as the party itself describes its founding phase, and focused exclusively on “practical” campaigns within the environs of the trade unions and building local alliances. When Jan Marijnessen became SP leader in 1986, he excised all references of Lenin and Marx from the party programme and initiated a “breakthrough in parliament.”

In the 1990s, the SP managed to secure two deputies in the second chamber. The party profited from the catastrophic social consequences of the Polder model, which established the framework within which the trade unions and business organisations have cooperated closely with governments since the early 1980s to drastically cut wages and social spending.

Under the social democratic government of Wim Kok (PvdA), the Polder model was accelerated in the mid 1990s. As a result, social inequality rose dramatically. Poverty increased, minorities were excluded and rent prices in the cities exploded.

The constant redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top ultimately destabilised the political system. The social democrats and trade unions were discredited. Right-wing populist organisations benefited from the sharp social tensions in the formerly relatively egalitarian Netherlands. Meanwhile the SP rose to be the third largest party in terms of members. They spent considerable time leading the polls ahead of the 2012 election, but ultimately wound up only in fourth place.

The SP’s official programme is hardly distinguishable from those of right-wing, social democratic parties. Since 2006, the party has abandoned any demands it deemed “too radical.” Since then, they neither call for leaving NATO, nor the abolition of the monarchy. The SP has encouraged prejudices against immigrants and defends Dutch membership in the EU. Its social criticism is limited to a few cosmetic changes in social welfare benefits.

The SP’s “socialism” restricts itself to paying lip service to “respect for human dignity, equality and solidarity.” These “values,” according to the SP’s charter, have “proven to be essential elements of human civilisation and progress over centuries.”

In its current election programme, the SP represents openly nationalist standpoints. The party calls for the ending of the free movement of labour within the EU. At the beginning of the election campaign, lead candidate Roemer demanded a halt to “unregulated mass migration” adding, “There must once again be a system of work permits by which people are permitted to come here to look for work. This would put the Netherlands in a position to win back control over who comes here to work and to determine the economic sectors in which we require people.”

In 1983, the party published a xenophobic pamphlet entitled “Foreign labour and capital,” which demanded that foreign workers had to either adapt to the language and values of the country or leave.

The SP demands that Dutch workers be given preferential treatment over immigrants and calls for limits on the entry of migrants into the EU. It advocates the concentration of refugees in detention centres close to the border, and the creation of registration centres outside the EU.

The SP also calls for a vast expansion of the domestic repressive powers of the state and backs military interventions. A visible police presence is necessary “to make our neighbourhoods safe, strengthen social obligations and identify early signs of radicalisation. This is why we want more police officers,” declared the SP.

The SP would participate in UN-mandated interventions without reservation, if they “are effective and appropriate and do not come into conflict with international law.” Cooperation with military allies is always possible for the SP, as long as the Dutch government retains control over its own soldiers.

In 2005, the SP campaigned against the EU constitution, which was subsequently defeated by a wide margin in a referendum. It now no longer questions the Netherlands’ EU membership and criticises the EU from the right by urging a stronger role for nation-states.

Even a governing coalition with the right-wing liberal VVD appears possible, despite the fact that Roemer excluded it in the lead-up to the elections. In six of the 12 provincial governments, the SP has cooperated for years with all other parties, with the exception of Wilders’ PVV. In Amsterdam and Brabent, they share government with the VVD and the left liberal D66.

The SP is offering itself to the ruling class under conditions of general social and political instability as a force capable of saving Dutch capitalism. But the party is stagnating in the polls. The SP is only expected to secure between 12 and 14 seats in parliament, at the last election it won 15 seats.

The support of pseudo-left organisations, which justify every shift to the right by the SP, has failed to benefit the latter. As Socialistisch Alternatief, the Dutch section of the Committee for a Workers International (CWI), wrote, “Since there is no mass workers party, which represents the independent political interests of the working class in the election, the Socialist Party can be seen as the best voting option for many workers.”

The SP and its pseudo-left satellites base themselves on members of the privileged middle class, academics and trade union officials. To defend the interests of these well-heeled sections of the middle class, the SP is moving ever further to the right.

UK government to trigger Brexit amid calls for second Scottish independence vote

Chris Marsden

Prime Minister Theresa May cleared the final hurdle to triggering Article 50 beginning Britain’s exit from the European Union (EU) Monday. But she did so amid the crisis generated by Scottish National Party (SNP) leader Nicola Sturgeon demanding a second referendum on Scotland’s independence from the UK.

The intervention by Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, was the most dramatic expression of broader divisions within ruling circles over Brexit and focused on the primary issue that unites the nationalists with the City of London—continued access to the European Single Market.

Monday evening’s debate had to deal with two amendments proposed by Britain’s unelected House of Lords. The government’s EU Withdrawal Bill was passed after the government had comfortably won votes on two Lords’ amendments. MPs voted by 335 votes to 287 to overturn the Lords amendment on inserting a guarantee of the status of EU citizens resident in the UK, with six hard-line pro-Brexit Labour MPs joining with the Conservatives. A second amendment on holding a final “meaningful vote” on any deal after the conclusion of Brexit talks was voted down by 331 to 286 with only two Tories rebelling. Labour MPs were then whipped by party leader Jeremy Corbyn to vote in favour of the Brexit bill.

Peers later accepted the decision on EU citizens by 274 to 135 and voted by 274 votes to 118 not to challenge the Commons again over a parliamentary veto on the deal struck on Brexit. On the rights of EU citizens to live and work in the UK, just 25 Labour peers sided with the Liberal Democrats, with Labour’s spokeswoman Baroness Hayter attacking the Lib Dems for “falsely raising” people’s hopes.

The government’s two-line bill stating that ministers will trigger article 50 and start the formal Brexit process now goes forward for Royal Assent to become law.

There was speculation that May would announce the beginning of Brexit yesterday, in order to pre-empt today’s general election in the Netherlands and the EU celebrations March 25-28 on the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, which established the EU’s forerunner, the European Economic Community (EEC). The intention was to avoid further inflaming opposition, in Europe and domestically, especially given that the election in the Netherlands is dominated by efforts to limit the impact of the anti-EU position of Geert Wilders’ Party For Freedom.

The government has denied that this was ever May’s intention, but if it was, then Sturgeon’s demand for a second independence referendum blew such plans out of the water. In September 2014, the SNP “Yes” to independence campaign was defeated by a 55 percent vote. But polls now suggest a 50-50 split on the issue, largely because Scotland favoured remaining in the UK but also within the EU. In last June’s Brexit referendum, Scotland voted by 62 percent to remain in the EU.

The SNP intends to capitalise on this sentiment to push its separatist agenda.

Sturgeon announced that she intends to hold a second referendum between autumn 2018 and spring 2019, at a time when Brexit negotiations are expected to be reaching a conclusion. This plan will be put to the Scottish parliament today. But the Brexit process is set to take at least two years from when May invokes Article 50 and could take much longer.

In a speech Monday, Sturgeon stressed that a vote for independence before the end of March 2019 would make it easier for Scotland to remain in the EU—even though the UK would still be a member and the EU has made clear that an independent Scotland would have to negotiate entry. “If the UK leaves the EU without Scotland indicating beforehand—or at least within a short time after it—that we want a different relationship with Europe, we could face a lengthy period outside not just the EU but also the single market,” she declared.

There is little possibility of May accepting a second referendum at such a point in time, even if she is forced to concede one after Brexit is completed. The Times has reported, “The Scottish National Party needs Westminster’s approval for a legally binding vote and last night Mrs May’s allies made clear that she would not allow a referendum during exit negotiations with the EU.

A government source explained, “The prime minister has said this would mean a vote while she was negotiating Brexit and I think that can be taken pretty clearly as a message that this timing is completely unacceptable.”

The broader implications of Sturgeon’s move are underscored by events in Northern Ireland, which voted 56 percent to 44 percent to Remain and where the pro-Remain Irish nationalists of Sinn Fein came within a hair’s breadth of supplanting the Democratic Unionist Party as the largest party in the Assembly in the May 2 elections. The Republic of Ireland’s Taoiseach, Enda Kenny of Fine Gael, has demanded that any Brexit deal includes an explicit clause that allows Northern Ireland to rejoin the EU as part of a future united Ireland. The main opposition Fianna Fáil is to bring forward a white paper on a united Ireland.

Under these dangerous circumstances of rising national tensions, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn offers no alternative to working people. Having first abandoned his past opposition to the EU and backed a Remain vote, he now dutifully whips his party behind the Brexit agenda of the Tories.

He utilises “left” phrases to justify alternative but essentially pro-capitalist positions—First, the “little Englander” nationalism of the Labour “left” and the Stalinists, with which he has long been allied, then a capitulation to the pro-EU line of the City of London as demanded by the Blairites within the Labour Party, and finally, acquiescence before the nationalist agenda that dictates Brexit. His essential concerns were made apparent by yesterday’s reply to May that the UK “must have tariff-free access to the Single Market.”

His loyalty to the requirements of business is barely concealed by his pledge that “Labour, at every stage, will challenge the government’s plans for a bargain-basement Brexit with Labour’s alternative of a Brexit that puts jobs, living standards and rights first.”

The crisis confronting Britain’s ruling class is acute. Indeed, the Tory MPs who “triumphed” in forcing through their Brexit plans did so under a Union flag that could soon be as defunct as that of the EU’s that presently flies alongside it over Westminster.

The Socialist Equality Party in its statement on the Brexit referendum urged an active boycott, explaining that a Remain vote meant endorsing the reactionary institutions of the EU, which is a mechanism for the subjugation of the continent to the dictates of the financial markets and imposing an agenda of austerity, militarism and war. We warned that a Leave vote led by arch-Tories and the xenophobes of the UK Independence Party would be seized on as an endorsement of British nationalism and give strength to far right tendencies across Europe.

In this context we explained, “The biggest political danger in this situation is the mixing of class banners on the basis of the espousal of a supposedly ‘left nationalism’. It was on the basis of opposition to such a policy that the SEP rejected support for Scottish separatism in the 2014 referendum, characterising it as a retrograde step that cut across the unity of the working class in England and Scotland.”

This warning has been amply confirmed, as has our fundamental insistence that “Against the national chauvinism and xenophobia promoted by both sides in the referendum campaign, the working class must advance its own internationalist programme to unify the struggles of workers throughout Europe in defence of living standards and democratic rights. The alternative for workers to the Europe of the transnational corporations is the struggle for the United Socialist States of Europe.”

Japan expands military operations in Asia

Peter Symonds 

As the Trump administration ramps up its confrontation with North Korea and heightens tensions, especially with China, throughout the region, the Japanese government is significantly extending the activities of its military. While operating under the umbrella of its strategic alliance with the US, Tokyo is exploiting the opportunity to rearm militarily so as to pursue its own imperialist ambitions.

In another menacing warning to Pyongyang, a Japanese guided-missile destroyer yesterday began two days of joint exercises with similar vessels from South Korea and the US. The warships, all equipped with Aegis anti-ballistic missile systems, are operating in the area where four North Korean test missiles landed last week.

The Trump administration is reviewing US strategy toward North Korea and, according to media leaks, considering “regime change” and military strikes to deal with the Pyongyang regime. South Korea and the US are currently engaged in huge annual war games that include the rehearsal of “decapitation raids” by special forces units to assassinate the North Korean leadership.

The joint naval exercises by Japan, the US and South Korea are part of preparations for war, not only with North Korea, but also China. Beijing condemned the Pentagon’s decision last week to begin the deployment of a Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) anti-ballistic missile battery in South Korea. The THAAD installation is part of a broader anti-missile network, including the Aegis system, for fighting war with nuclear-armed powers.

The US has been pressing for closer military collaboration between Japan and South Korea, particularly on anti-missile systems. Hostility in South Korea toward Japan, its former colonial ruler, resulted in a 2012 intelligence-sharing agreement between Tokyo and Seoul being postponed until 2014. The US navy noted that the current exercises would “employ tactical data link systems to trade communications, intelligence and other data among the ships.”

The Chinese foreign ministry called on all sides to end “a vicious cycle that could spiral out of control,” adding: “North Korea has violated UN Security Council resolutions banning its ballistic missile launches; on the other hand, South Korea, the US—and now Japan—insist on conducting super-large-scale military drills.”

Pyongyang accused the US of preparing a “preemptive strike” and threatened “merciless ultra-precision strikes from the ground, air, sea and underwater” if its territory were attacked. Such reckless rhetoric, along with the expansion of its nuclear arsenal and missile capabilities, only plays directly into the hands of the US and its allies and provides a pretext for war.

As well as collaborating with the US and South Korean navies, the Japanese military plans to dispatch its largest warship, the JS Izumo, for three months of operations, including in another dangerous flashpoint—the disputed waters of the South China Sea, where it will engage in joint exercises with the US navy.

The presence of a Japanese warship in the South China Sea is certain to heighten tensions with China. The two countries are already involved in a dangerous stand-off in the East China Sea over the disputed Senkaku islets, known as Diaoyu in China. US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who is due to arrive in Japan today, has threatened to block China’s access to its islets in the South China Sea—a reckless act that could provoke war.

The Izumo, which is nominally termed a helicopter carrier and designed for anti-submarine warfare, is also capable of carrying the American Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft. Thus, in reality, it is an aircraft carrier, larger than those operated by many other countries. Tokyo has deliberately not termed the warship an aircraft carrier. To acknowledge the carrier as an offensive weapon would further breach Article 9 of the Japanese constitution, which “renounces war” as a means of settling international disputes and vows never to maintain military forces.

Japan’s military is designated as Self-Defence Forces to maintain the illusion that its operations are not in breach of the constitution. The current right-wing government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, however, is determined to rearm Japan and remove all legal and constitutional restraints on its military. He wants to make Japan a “normal” nation with a strong military, to ensure that Japanese imperialism can use military might in pursuit of its economic and strategic interests.

In 2015, defying mass protests, the Abe government rammed through legislation to allow the Japanese military to engage in “collective self-defence”—in other words, US-led wars of aggression. Now, senior government figures are exploiting the alleged threat posed by Pyongyang to argue that the Japanese military must be able to conduct “pre-emptive” strikes against North Korea—that is, to have offensive weapons such as ballistic missiles and/or long-range bombers.

Speaking last week after the North Korean missile tests, Japanese Defence Minister Tomomi refused to rule out acquiring the capacity for pre-emptive military strikes. “I do not rule out any method and we will consider various options, consistent with international law and the constitution of our country.”

Her comments are part of a broader discussion taking place in the Japanese political establishment. The Nikkei Asian Weekly reported last month that the “national security panel of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) planned to recommend that the country acquire the ability to strike enemy bases in the case of an imminent threat.” LDP vice president Masahiko Komura claimed such a capacity “would not violate the constitution.” In fact, the LDP is pushing for a complete revision of the constitution that would substantially modify Article 9 or remove it altogether.

The dispatch of the Izumo is fully in line with US strategic planning for war with China—to strengthen military ties and collaboration between allies and strategic partners in Asia, as well as with the US. The Japanese warship will make port calls in Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines and Sri Lanka before joining the Malabar joint naval exercise with Indian and US naval vessels in the Indian Ocean in July.

While falling into line with US plans at present, the Abe government is intent on extending Japanese influence and interests in Asia and overcoming the memories of the crimes of Japanese militarism during the 1930s and 1940s.

Amid a worsening global economic crisis and rising geo-political tensions, a confrontation between the US and Japan could also emerge as the two imperialist powers compete for dominance in Asia—as occurred in the 1930s and led to a horrific war in the Pacific in which millions died.

The Dutch elections and the danger of fascism

Peter Schwarz

The Dutch national elections, which are being held today, have been dominated by an outpouring of xenophobia, nationalism and racism on a scale unseen since the days when Adolf Hitler railed against the “Jewish conspiracy” in Berlin’s Sportpalast and Benito Mussolini whipped up crowds from the balcony of Rome’s Piazza Venezia.

Geert Wilders and his fascistic Party for Freedom have called for a ban on immigration from Muslim countries, the closure of mosques and a ban on the Koran. But Wilders, far from being the exception, has set the tone for the entire spectrum of Dutch politics, from the conservative government of Prime Minister Mark Rutte to the ex-Maoist Socialist Party.

“If you don’t like it here, you can leave,” Rutte told immigrants earlier this month. The Wall Street Journal commented that, coming from a “multilingual classical-music lover, long known for pro-globalization and socially liberal policies,” this rhetoric “epitomizes a European establishment” that is ever more openly embracing the right-wing populism embodied by Wilders.

The Journal noted, “In France, the presidential candidate for conservative party Les Républicains, François Fillon, has heavily focused on defending French cultural identity,” while “German Chancellor Angela Merkel, seeking a fourth term in September, has stepped back from her open-door immigration policy.” The newspaper added, “In the U.K., Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May has made stronger immigration controls a priority for the country’s future relations with the EU.”

The seemingly magnetic appeal of Wilders’ right-wing populism to bourgeois politicians on both sides of the Atlantic was expressed in an outburst by US Congressman Steve King, a representative from Iowa, who this week proclaimed, “Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”

For decades, bourgeois historians have asserted that the rise of fascism in the 1930s, contrary to the analysis of Marxists such as Leon Trotsky, was some sort of terrible accident, the result of the actions of “madmen” like Hitler and Mussolini who took power despite the best efforts of capitalist politicians to preserve democracy.

By contrast, Trotsky explained that fascism was the expression of the basic tendencies of capitalism, which in periods of relative prosperity can afford the outward trappings of democracy, but in periods of crisis reverts to its basic inherent tendency: militarism and dictatorship, which capitalist politicians seek to provide with a “populist” cover through xenophobic and nationalist demagogy.

The emergence of fascism in 20th century Europe and the coming to power of the Nazis amid the Great Depression in 1933 were not an isolated historical catastrophe never to be repeated, but the product of capitalism and its deep decay. In the 21st century, amid the deepest capitalist crisis since the 1930s, fascistic forces increasingly dominate European bourgeois politics.

Just three days before the election, Rutte sought to prove his right-wing credentials by provoking a major diplomatic incident with Turkey. His government banned the Turkish Foreign Minister from entering the Netherlands, barricaded the Turkish Consulate in Rotterdam, and expelled the Turkish Minister of Family Affairs with a police escort to the country’s border.

The other parties applauded, including the social democratic Labour Party (PvdA) and the pseudo-left Socialist Party. Parties throughout Europe followed suit. In Germany, the Left Party enthusiastically greeted Rutte’s right-wing provocation and urged the German government to follow the example of the “consistent approach” of the Dutch government.

This shift far to the right is the response of the bourgeois parties to a profound crisis of capitalist society in the Netherlands and across Europe. Decades of welfare cuts, the enrichment of a tiny minority at the expense of the majority and the spread of war have generated economic and social tensions that cannot be resolved by democratic methods.

“Under the impact of class and international contradictions that are too highly charged, the safety switches of democracy either burn out or explode,” wrote Leon Trotsky in 1929, more than three years before the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany. “That is what the short circuit of dictatorship represents.”

Then, as now, the bourgeoisie responds to the crisis of the capitalist system with militarism, war and dictatorship. The methods of social conciliation, on which bourgeois rule was based in the post-war period, have long ceased to function. The social democratic parties and trade unions are discredited and have lost any support in the working class.

In the Netherlands, the PvdA, once one of the most influential European social democratic parties, stands on the brink of collapse. In opinion polls, it is in seventh place. In the early 1980s, the PvdA launched the attack on the Dutch social security system and has since played a leading role in destroying it. Since 2012, there have been six PvdA ministers in Rutte’s right-wing government. Its best-known representative, the head of the Euro Group, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, came to prominence agitating for austerity against Greece.

Now the Dutch ruling class is trying to avert the threat of a social explosion by drawing on the methods of fascism, mobilizing the dregs of society against the working class.

Wilders, himself a former parliamentary deputy of Rutte’s People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), appeals to the middle class, faced with the threat of being thrown into the mass of the working poor, and to the frustration of impoverished workers by blaming immigrants for this social misery. In the first half of the 20th century, fascism used the Jews as scapegoats; today, a bankrupt political system scapegoats immigrants and Muslims.

The adoption of Wilders’ right-wing policies by the establishment parties must be taken as a warning. The ruling elites are preparing to break with democratic methods, to suppress any opposition to social cuts and militarism.

This is true not only in the Netherlands. After the Brexit referendum in the UK and the election of Trump as president of the United States, the Dutch election is setting the tone for the French presidential election in April, where far-right candidate Marine Le Pen leads in the polls, and for the German elections in September, where the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) is garnering similar poll numbers to Wilders’ PVV.

The fact that it is the far-right forces that profit from the deepest crisis of world capitalism since the 1930s is an unanswerable indictment of the capitalist political establishment.