The Most Dangerous Weapon Ever Rolls Off the Nuclear Assembly Line

James Carroll

Last month, the National Nuclear Security Administration (formerly the Atomic Energy Commission) announced that the first of a new generation of strategic nuclear weapons had rolled off the assembly line at its Pantex nuclear weapons plant in the panhandle of Texas. That warhead, the W76-2, is designed to be fitted to a submarine-launched Trident missile, a weapon with a range of more than 7,500 miles. By September, an undisclosed number of warheads will be delivered to the Navy for deployment.

What makes this particular nuke new is the fact that it carries a far smaller destructive payload than the thermonuclear monsters the Trident has been hosting for decades — not the equivalent of about 100 kilotons of TNT as previously, but of five kilotons. According to Stephen Young of the Union of Concerned Scientists, the W76-2 will yield “only” about one-third of the devastating power of the weapon that the Enola Gay, an American B-29 bomber, dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Yet that very shrinkage of the power to devastate is precisely what makes this nuclear weapon potentially the most dangerous ever manufactured. Fulfilling the Trump administration’s quest for nuclear-war-fighting “flexibility,” it isn’t designed as a deterrent against another country launching its nukes; it’s designed to be used.  This is the weapon that could make the previously “unthinkable” thinkable.

There have long been “low-yield” nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the nuclear powers, including ones on cruise missiles, “air-drop bombs” (carried by planes), and even nuclear artillery shells — weapons designated as “tactical” and intended to be used in the confines of a specific battlefield or in a regional theater of war. The vast majority of them were, however, eliminated in the nuclear arms reductions that followed the end of the Cold War, a scaling-down by both the United States and Russia that would be quietly greeted with relief by battlefield commanders, those actually responsible for the potential use of such ordnance who understood its self-destructive absurdity.

Ranking some weapons as “low-yield” based on their destructive energy always depended on a distinction that reality made meaningless (once damage from radioactivity and atmospheric fallout was taken into account along with the unlikelihood that only one such weapon would be used). In fact, the elimination of tactical nukes represented a hard-boiled confrontation with the iron law of escalation, another commander’s insight — that any use of such a weapon against a similarly armed adversary would likely ignite an inevitable chain of nuclear escalation whose end point was barely imaginable. One side was never going to take a hit without responding in kind, launching a process that could rapidly spiral toward an apocalyptic exchange. “Limited nuclear war,” in other words, was a fool’s fantasy and gradually came to be universally acknowledged as such. No longer, unfortunately.

Unlike tactical weapons, intercontinental strategic nukes were designed to directly target the far-off homeland of an enemy. Until now, their extreme destructive power (so many times greater than that inflicted on Hiroshima) made it impossible to imagine genuine scenarios for their use that would be practically, not to mention morally, acceptable. It was exactly to remove that practical inhibition — the moral one seemed not to count — that the Trump administration recently began the process of withdrawing from the Cold War-era Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, while rolling a new “limited” weapon off the assembly line and so altering the Trident system. With these acts, there can be little question that humanity is entering a perilous second nuclear age.

That peril lies in the way a 70-year-old inhibition that undoubtedly saved the planet is potentially being shelved in a new world of supposedly “usable” nukes. Of course, a weapon with one-third the destructive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, where as many as 150,000 died, might kill 50,000 people in a similar attack before escalation even began. Of such nukes, former Secretary of State George Shultz, who was at President Ronald Reagan’s elbow when Cold War-ending arms control negotiations climaxed, said, “A nuclear weapon is a nuclear weapon. You use a small one, then you go to a bigger one. I think nuclear weapons are nuclear weapons and we need to draw the line there.”

How Close to Midnight?

Until now, it’s been an anomaly of the nuclear age that some of the fiercest critics of such weaponry were drawn from among the very people who created it. The emblem of that is the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, a bimonthly journal founded after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by veteran scientists from the Manhattan Project, which created the first nuclear weapons. (Today, that magazine’s sponsors include 14 Nobel Laureates.) Beginning in 1947, the Bulletin’s cover has functioned annually as a kind of nuclear alarm, featuring a so-called Doomsday Clock, its minute hand always approaching “midnight” (defined as the moment of nuclear catastrophe).

In that first year, the hand was positioned at seven minutes to midnight. In 1949, after the Soviet Union acquired its first atomic bomb, it inched up to three minutes before midnight. Over the years, it has been reset every January to register waxing and waning levels of nuclear jeopardy. In 1991, after the end of the Cold War, it was set back to 17 minutes and then, for a few hope-filled years, the clock disappeared altogether.

It came back in 2005 at seven minutes to midnight. In 2007, the scientists began factoring climate degradation into the assessment and the hands moved inexorably forward. By 2018, after a year of Donald Trump, it clocked in at two minutes to midnight, a shrill alarm meant to signal a return to the greatest peril ever: the two-minute level reached only once before, 65 years earlier. Last month, within days of the announced manufacture of the first W76-2, the Bulletin’s cover for 2019 was unveiled, still at that desperate two-minute mark, aka the edge of doom.

To fully appreciate how precarious our situation is today, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists implicitly invites us to return to that other two-minutes-before-midnight moment. If the manufacture of a new low-yield nuclear weapon marks a decisive pivot back toward jeopardy, consider it an irony that the last such moment involved the manufacture of the extreme opposite sort of nuke: a “super” weapon, as it was then called, or a hydrogen bomb. That was in 1953 and what may have been the most fateful turn in the nuclear story until now had just occurred.

After the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb in 1949, the United States embarked on a crash program to build a far more powerful nuclear weapon. Having been decommissioned after World War II, the Pantex plant was reactivated and has been the main source of American nukes ever since.

The atomic bomb is a fission weapon, meaning the nuclei of atoms are split into parts whose sum total weighs less than the original atoms, the difference having been transformed into energy. A hydrogen bomb uses the intense heat generated by that “fission” (hence thermonuclear) as a trigger for a vastly more powerful “fusion,” or combining, of elements, which results in an even larger loss of mass being transformed into explosive energy of a previously unimagined sort. One H-bomb generates explosive force 100 to 1,000 times the destructive power of the Hiroshima bomb.

Given a kind of power that humans once only imagined in the hands of the gods, key former Manhattan Project scientists, including Enrico Fermi, James Conant, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, firmly opposed the development of such a new weapon as a potential threat to the human species. The Super Bomb would be, in Conant’s word, “genocidal.” Following the lead of those scientists, members of the Atomic Energy Commission recommended — by a vote of three to two — against developing such a fusion weapon, but President Truman ordered it done anyway.

In 1952, as the first H-bomb test approached, still-concerned atomic scientists proposed that the test be indefinitely postponed to avert a catastrophic “super” competition with the Soviets. They suggested that an approach be made to Moscow to mutually limit thermonuclear development only to research on, not actual testing of, such weaponry, especially since none of this could truly be done in secret. A fusion bomb’s test explosion would be readily detectable by the other side, which could then proceed with its own testing program. The scientists urged Moscow and Washington to draw just the sort of arms control line that the two nations would indeed agree to many years later.

At the time, the United States had the initiative. An out-of-control arms race with the potential accumulation of thousands of such weapons on both sides had not yet really begun. In 1952, the United States numbered its atomic arsenal in the low hundreds; the Soviet Union in the dozens. (Even those numbers, of course, already offered a vision of an Armageddon-like global war.) President Truman considered the proposal to indefinitely postpone the test. It was then backed by figures like Vannevar Bush, who headed the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which had overseen the wartime Manhattan Protect. Scientists like him already grasped the lesson that would only slowly dawn on policymakers — that every advance in the atomic capability of one of the superpowers would inexorably lead the other to match it, ad infinitum. The title of the bestselling James Jones novel of that moment caught the feeling perfectly: From Here to Eternity.

In the last days of his presidency, however, Truman decided against such an indefinite postponement of the test — against, that is, a break in the nuke-accumulation momentum that might well have changed history. On November 1, 1952, the first H-bomb — “Mike” — was detonated on an island in the Pacific. It had 500 times more lethal force than the bomb that obliterated Hiroshima. With a fireball more than three miles wide, not only did it destroy the three-story structure built to house it but also the entire island of Elugelab, as well as parts of several nearby islands.

In this way, the thermonuclear age began and the assembly line at that same Pantex plant really started to purr.  Less than 10 years later, the United States had 20,000 nukes, mostly H-bombs; Moscow, fewer than 2,000. And three months after that first test, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved that hand on its still new clock to two minutes before midnight.

A Madman-Theory Version of the World

It may seem counterintuitive to compare the manufacture of what’s called a “mini-nuke” to the creation of the “super” almost six decades ago, but honestly, what meaning can “mini” really have when we’re talking about nuclear war? The point is that, as in 1952, so in 2019 another era-shaping threshold is being crossed at the very same weapons plant in the high plains country of the Texas Panhandle, where so many instruments of mayhem have been created. Ironically, because the H-bomb was eventually understood to be precisely what the dissenting scientists had claimed it was — a genocidal weapon — pressures against its use proved insurmountable during almost four decades of savage East-West hostility. Today, the Trident-mounted W76-2 could well have quite a different effect — its first act of destruction potentially being the obliteration of the long-standing, post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki taboo against nuclear use. In other words, so many years after the island of Elugelab was wiped from the face of the Earth, the “absolute weapon” is finally being normalized.

With President Trump expunging the theoretical from Richard Nixon’s “madman theory” — that former president’s conviction that an opponent should fear an American leader was so unstable he might actually push the nuclear button — what is to be done? Once again, nuke-skeptical scientists, who have grasped the essential problems in the nuclear conundrum with crystal clarity for three quarters of a century, are pointing the way. In 2017, the Union of Concerned Scientists, together with Physicians for Social Responsibility, launched Back from the Brink: The Call to Prevent Nuclear War, “a national grassroots initiative seeking to fundamentally change U.S. nuclear weapons policy and lead us away from the dangerous path we are on.”

Engaging a broad coalition of civic organizations, municipalities, religious groups, educators, and scientists, it aims to lobby government bodies at every level, to raise the nuclear issue in every forum, and to engage an ever-wider group of citizens in pressing for change in American nuclear policy. Back From the Brink makes five demands, much needed in a world in which the U.S. and Russia are withdrawing from a key Cold-War-era nuclear treaty with more potentially to come, including the New START pact that expires two years from now. The five demands are:

• No to first use of nukes. (Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Adam Smith only recently introduced a No First Use Act in both houses of Congress to stop Trump and future presidents from launching a nuclear war.)

• End the unchecked launch-authority of the president. (Last month, Senator Edward Markey and Representative Ted Lieu reintroduced a bill that would do just that.)

• No to nuclear hair-triggers.

• No to endlessly renewing and replacing the arsenal (as the U.S. is now doing to the tune of perhaps $1.6 trillion over three decades).

• Yes to an abolition agreement among nuclear-armed states.

These demands range from the near-term achievable to the long-term hoped for, but as a group they define what clear-eyed realism should be in Donald Trump’s new version of our never-ending nuclear age.

In the upcoming season of presidential politics, the nuclear question belongs at the top of every candidate’s agenda. It belongs at the center of every forum and at the heart of every voter’s decision. Action is needed before the W76-2 and its successors teach a post-Hiroshima planet what nuclear war is truly all about.

Begging – Social And Economic Problems

Sheshu Babu

 “They are but beggars that can count their worth ” .         William Shakespeare

(Romeo and Juliet)

Whenever  poorly- clad, dirty and expectant people gathering major road junctions, bus – stands, temples, mosques or churches, rail- stations, etc pleading for a coin or two are seen, they are either abused or evaded or some coins are thrust into their empty bowls helplessly. Little do people looking at these beggars realise that the later too are human beings with self- respect and desires for a better life. Very few care for their psychic state and reasons for their helplessness and stark poverty.

Beggars in numbers

As per the government data, there are about 3.7 lakh beggars in the country. Of these around 25% are Muslims. The data was based on religious orientation of those considered ‘non – workers ‘ in census 2011. The population of muslims is about 14.23% of India’s total but the number of beggars is comparatively high. (Interesting numbers on India’s beggar population out! How do Hindus and Muslims fare? , updated July 29, 2016, zeenews.india.com). As per the census 2011, ‘ non workers ‘ are people who are non – participants in any economic activity ( paid or unpaid) , household duties or cultivation.  The census (2011) categorised 72.89 crore individuals as non workers and of these 3.7 lakh as beggars. The census listed 92,760 Muslims as beggars. Hindus who make up 79.8% of total population had 2.68 lakh individuals listed as beggars .(72.22% of Indian total beggar population).

In a written reply to Rajya Sabha, Minister of Social Justice said that there were 4,13,670 beggars – 2.2 lakh male and 1.91 lakh female beggars.( Over 4 lakh beggars in India, West Bengal Tops the List, updated August 13, 2015,  ndtv.com). West Bengal, Assam and Manipur had more female beggar than males.

Thus, there are sizeable number of people who have almost no option but begging.

Alarming

The problem of begging is associated with the problem of poverty and unemployment and it is a social problem of great magnitude as well as concern. According to a survey of Delhi School of Social Work , there has been a phenomenal increase in beggars in India. In a decade since 1991, their number has gone up by a lakh. There were around 60, 000 beggars in Delhi, over 3,00,000 beggars in Mumbai according to a 2004 Action Aid Report: nearly 75,000 beggars in Kolkata according to Beggar Research Institute and in Hyderabad, one in 354 is engaged in begging according to Council of Human Welfare.( Beggery in India, www.azadindia.org/social-issues/beggery-in-india.html). The line separating beggars  and casual poor is getting slimmer where one in four goes to bed hungry every night and for more than 96% , the average daily earnings is more than daily wage earnings as many do not get proper daily wage.

Mental and physical illness

Although many think that beggars are very happy and do not face problems, studies reveal that they have number of difficulties in their lives. A study published in the International Journal of   Rehabilitation by Dr. Yogesh Thakker states that 39% of the 49 beggars surveyed in Gujarat’s Baroda District by a group of medicos suffer from one or the other psychiatric illness. Nearly 74% of them had a history of addiction, psychiatric illness in the family and poor attitude of family members towards them. Over 68% admitted to shame and losing self- esteem, 25% to guilt, 4% to suicidal tendencies and 8% to anti- social activities.

Also, there is no proper enumeration of beggars in the country. Number of women and children beggars is rising. The 1931 census showed 16% women as beggars which shot up to 49% in 2001. There about 10 million street children many of whom beg for livelihood.

Remedies

A research paper ( Socio- Economic causes of begging, January 2014, researchgate.net) in its analysis of  primary data collected  in the state of Utter Pradesh Aligarh district  carried out in 2009 listed the causes of begging and suggested some solutions. The research revealed major causes of begging are prevalence of poverty,illiteracy, by inheritanc of caste, handicapped, diseases, old age and death of parents, etc. Of these poverty was the most common cause found in half of the study population in the area. This study has clearly demonstrated that this section of people are the poorest of poor and their fore most aim is the traditional basic need- food. The other necessities ( shelter and clothing) are far away and new additive needs like health and education are a dream for them in their position.

Flawed approach

Many state governments have ‘ banned’ begging and the act of begging is seen as an undesirable unlawful act. Even the center is apathetic to the problem. Instead of taking positive steps towards rehabilitation and social reforms, prohibiting beggery may not yield results. ” It demands a meaningful resolution.  anti – begging laws is more a punitive action than remedial in nature ( Banning Beggars! by Sajad Bazaz, updated May 26, 2018, greaterkashmir.com). It needs to be tackled with both governmental and non- governmental organizations. The root of the problem should be analysed so as to arrive at appropriate solutions. Laws are not the solution to a perennial problem of grim poverty and destitution.

(In Indian society, specially hindu castes, the poor beggars belonging to brahminical caste are treated differently to those of dalit and lower caste beggars. While ‘Yachakas'( the brahmin people asking for alms) are given food and money to attain virtue (punya) , the dalits are often abused and sent away most of the times. This discrimination should also be addressed and such evil must be stopped. As dalits and lower castes comprise more than those belonging to upper castes, there is a need to address the problem from caste point of view. Annihilation of caste should go hand in hand with upliftment of beggars in the society ).

Worsening slump and inequality fuel social tensions in Australia

Mike Head

Australia’s central bank last week joined its much larger counterparts in the United States and Europe in signalling an abrupt about-face on monetary policy. After spending months foreshadowing an increase in official interest rates from their current record low of 1.5 percent, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) announced there was an equal chance that its next rate movement would be down.

As in the US and the European Union (EU), the reversal of mooted rate rises is driven by signs of a global downturn, exacerbated by mounting trade war and political tensions. In a speech last week RBA governor Philip Lowe warned of “the accumulation of downside risks” globally.

He stated: “Many of these risks are related to political developments: the trade tensions between the United States and China; the Brexit issue; the rise of populism globally; and the reduced support from the United States for the liberal order that has supported the international system and contributed to a broad-based rise in living standards. One could add to this list the adjustments in China as the authorities rein in shadow financing.”

Lowe said any miscue by China’s policy makers as its economy slowed could “hurt us a lot.” That is because over the past two decades, China has become by far Australian capitalism’s largest export market.

The switch back to what the financial media calls an “accommodating” monetary policy is also dictated by the insatiable demands of the financial elites. Amid the growing global volatility, they want a prolongation of the regime of cheap money and injection of billions of dollars that has kept money markets worldwide afloat since the 2008 financial meltdown.

“The spin across the central banking community has been incredibly dovish tilts, incredibly quickly,” Charlie Jamieson of $2 billion bond fund JCB told the Australian Financial Review. “There is a huge shift in that community because they foresee something that worries them.”

Domestically, the RBA’s quarterly statement of monetary policy revealed it was becoming increasingly worried about the impact of plunging house prices on already flagging consumer spending. “In the context of high household debt, currently weak income growth and falling house prices, the resilience of consumption growth is a key uncertainty for the overall outlook,” the bank said.

Some corporate analysts forecast that the cash rate would be slashed to a new all-time low of 1 percent by next year, while warning that this might not have the wanted effect of stimulating the economy.

That fear is connected to the fact that real estate prices have fallen by nearly 7 percent over the past year. They are widely predicted to drop by at least another 7 percent this year, spearheaded by bigger falls in Sydney and Melbourne, the two largest cities. This has ended a property bubble that propped up consumer spending and much of the economy, despite falling real wages, after the mining boom imploded in 2012.

House prices soared up to 60 to 70 percent between 2012 and 2017, allowing people to borrow extra money against their home values. As a result, household debt has risen to about 200 percent of annual household income, one of the highest rates in the world.

The RBA noted a sharp decline in building approvals. It said developers had told them that it had become difficult to finance apartment projects and attract sufficient pre-sales to proceed. “Dwelling investment could therefore tail off sooner and faster than earlier projected.”

UBS economists said that based on analysis of job advertisements and historical data, 50,000 construction jobs could be lost. “Given the recent collapse in building approvals, we believe there is still downside risk,” UBS noted.

The RBA cut its predictions of economic growth and wages growth over the next two years, effectively undercutting the Liberal-National Coalition government’s plans to announce a return to a budget surplus in a pre-election budget on April 2. The bank reduced its gross domestic product outlook for 2019 from 3.3 percent to 3 percent.

This week saw further indicators of an accelerating bust:

• Loans to housing investors dropped by 4.6 percent to a seven-year low of $4.9 billion in December, down 42 percent from the December 2016 peak of $8.5 billion. Owner-occupiers also felt the pressure, with their loans falling 6.4 percent month on month to $12.5 billion, the lowest level since early 2015.
  
• One of the country’s biggest housing developers, AVJennings, revealed a 90 percent plunge in profits for the six months to December, to $1.42 million from $15.48 million in the year-earlier period. The company, majority-owned by Singaporean developer SC Global, blamed “extreme media coverage” of the housing market slide, alongside a credit squeeze by the banks due to the fallout from a royal commission inquiry into their predatory practices.
  
• New car sales fell by 7.4 percent in January compared to the same month a year earlier, to 81,994, adding to a lengthening list of poor household spending indicators. Retail sales in December, usually a peak pre-Christmas period, fell by 0.4 percent on the previous month.

Household spending accounts for some 60 percent of the national economy, so these results are ominous. Falling consumer spending also points to the potentially explosive cumulative affect of declining real wages and household incomes since 2012.

According to calculations by the Guardian’s Greg Jericho, in real terms the average compensation per employee has declined since 2012 from just above $20,000 to under $19,500. That is primarily the product of the destruction of many thousands of full-time jobs, combined with harsher welfare laws, pushing workers into low-paid and insecure casual employment.

While joblessness officially is relatively low, at 5 percent, this masks the growth of under-employment and widening social inequality. Last year, corporate profits grew by around 20 percent, while the average compensation per employee rose by just 1.2 percent, well below the official inflation rate of 1.9 percent.

Another set of calculations, by former public servant David Plunkett, shows that tax and welfare changes have intensified the inequality since 2012, during the dying days of the last Labor government. Yet both Labor and the Coalition are going to the election committed to further cutting taxes for companies and high-income recipients.

During the lead-up to the election, which is expected to take place in May, the Labor Party opposition and its trade union partners are anxiously trying to keep a lid on the seething discontent in the working class. They are seeking to revive illusions that a Labor government would take some action to lessen the yawning income and wealth gap.

Globally, however, governments are being shaken by the resurgence of the class struggle after decades of suppression of workers’ struggles, particularly by the unions. Whether or not there is a social explosion in Australia before the election, the widening social divide makes immense conflicts inevitable.

Whichever party heads the next government, it will be intent on imposing the burden of the gathering slump on working class households via yet another wave of austerity measures and permanent job-shedding.

British government’s “Project After” plan for post-Brexit economic crisis

Steve James

The British government's preparations for a “no deal” Brexit are revealing the architecture of a dictatorship in rapid formation. Earlier this year, it was reported that up 50,000 regular and reserve troops were being mobilised to deal with multiple crises emerging out of fuel, medicine and food shortages. The government was also, according to the Times, “gaming a state of emergency and even the introduction of martial law in the event of disorder after a no-deal Brexit.”

Last week, the Financial Times reported the existence of a secret economic planning group in the British government, lead by the head of the civil service and Cabinet Secretary Mark Sedwill. Nicknamed “Project After,” the group includes leading personnel from the Cabinet Office, the Treasury, the departments handling business and international trade and works closely with the Bank of England.

The FT quoted a Whitehall insider describing the group as “basically a Doomsday list of economic levers we could pull if the economy is about to tank.” The source reported that Sedwill had been working on the plans since last summer, although the group had been operating for over two years.

Sedwill's previous roles include work as a United Nations weapons inspector, private secretary to two Labour Foreign Secretaries prior to the invasion of Iraq, and British ambassador to Afghanistan and to NATO. In 2013, he became Permanent Secretary at the Home Office and since 2017 has been the National Security Adviser in the Cabinet Office, a post he has retained while being Cabinet Secretary.

Sedwill's group is reported to be concentrating on concerns regarding the agricultural, automotive and pharmaceutical industries. His involvement indicates that Prime Minister Theresa May considers the work to be critical.

Leading business spokespeople have repeatedly warned that a no-deal Brexit risks wrecking the auto industry. In January, car parts supplier Unipart warned that leaving the EU without a trade deal risked a “cascade of failure” in the supply chain.

Measures reported to be under consideration by Sedwill include proposals to slash import tariffs and taxes, hand over subsidies to exporters and rip up environmental and labour laws. “If we wanted to become Singapore-on-Sea that's what we would have done,” commented an official.

The Singapore reference is to the Brexiteer aspiration that, freed from the EU with Britain's shift into a low tax, tariff free, export processing zone, the elimination of encumbrances to profit such as labour, environmental and health and safety regulations could be accelerated.

The Tories have gone some way towards achieving their aspirations to a Singapore model. They intend to now lower corporation tax to 17 percent by 2020, equivalent to Singapore’s, from its present level of just 19 percent. When Margaret Thatcher took office in 1979, it stood at 52 percent. But there is more to be done.

According to Carol Kopp of Investopedia.com, tax breaks are also available in Singapore for start-up companies, qualifying foreign banks, offshore funds, and global trading companies. Established global trading companies are eligible for concessionary tax rates of 5 percent to 10 percent for five to 10 years. Singapore levies a 20 percent tax on personal incomes in the highest tax bracket, above US$240,000, and does not tax capital gains.

Commentary on Project After noted that a “no deal” Brexit would drive down the value of the pound, causing inflation to soar at a point when the government is already implementing £1.5 billion benefit cuts for the most vulnerable in society. Offsetting inflation by further tax cuts would be far more likely than increased public spending, while the Bank of England could revert to quantitative easing in which the government buys its own bonds.

Other frantic and more immediate preparations were reported last week. The Guardian reported that the government is recruiting thousands of civilians to work in the EU Exit Emergencies Centre (EUXE) being set up and projected to run for up to two years. The Guardian speculated that EUXE would be have a “Gold Command” military type structure and operate out of offices close to Westminster.

Besides seeking external recruits on £300 to £400 a day, the civil service is also trawling the education and international development departments for volunteers for the new department. Recruitment notes call for “unflappable individuals” for three types of emergency centre officers. Officers should be able to provide notes for ministers “at pace” and “battle rhythm” for emerging calamities. Recruits should be able “see the emergency trends with little or no information and act appropriately at pace.”

In November it emerged that over 900 Environment Agency staff had been moved to the Department for Environmental, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) specifically for Brexit preparations.

EUXE had previously been reported as a 24/7 emergency centre attached to DEFRA. Managers being recruited in December were required to “be able to see through the fog” in an organisation intended to “manage any situations that arise if the UK leaves the European Union without a deal.” Vacancies were also coming up for 50 staff to liaise with the Civil Contingencies Secretariat, which deals with major emergencies, terrorist attacks and war.

In December, the Cabinet Office's John Manzoni told Westminster's public administration and constitutional affairs committee that £2 billion had already been allocated to hire, in all, 20,000 staff for “no deal” preparations. New “arms-length bodies,” i.e. semi-private, had been set up to take over powers repatriated from the EU.

The government is also preparing for major supply failures.

The Derry Journal reported that civil servants in Northern Ireland have also been asked to volunteer to staff petrol stations, to “facilitate the oil industry in fuel contingency planning in the unlikely event of a supply disruption”--in other words fuel rationing. The Northern Ireland Department of the Economy told staff that emergency coverage would involve postings at 75 petrol stations across Northern Ireland.

The volunteers would liaise with “organisations and individuals providing key functions, such as hospitals and healthcare workers” to ensure they “continue to receive fuel until normal supply is resumed.” They would be “directed to a network of strategically located filling stations spread across [Northern Ireland] and identified as a priority for supply from reduced stocks.”

“Volunteers would check the validity of fuel permits... record details of the amount and type of fuel purchased so HQ staff can track demand patterns.” Two staff would be placed at each petrol station.

Similar measures are undoubtedly under consideration across Britain.

The Guardian reported a memo from Dr David Rosser of University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust warning that he could not envisage any “no deal” Brexit that did not imperil patient safety. Rosser warned, “In terms of the potential for major operational impact and severe and widespread risks to patient safety, by far the greatest concern is the availability of medicines, devices and clinical supplies.”

Rosser said that the Department of Health and Social Care had identified supply problems but had not made any findings available to hospital trusts.

According to the Evening Standard, a leaked Department for Transport document warned of transport problems growing “exponentially” in the event of a “no deal.” The papers were part of Operation Yellowhammer, the government's code name for all its no deal emergency preparations.

The document warned, “If there is no deal, the impacts could be felt and could fall across every transport mode [and possibly each sector within wider government] and could grow exponentially as the capabilities of responders at all levels decrease or become overwhelmed.”

The author warned of multiple unknown unknowns. “Critically, it has to be understood that there will be issues of unanticipated impacts that arise or impacts which had not been fully understood.” Presently the department would not even be able to cope with two emergencies at once, the document stated.

Germany: Social Democrats modernise austerity

Peter Schwarz 

Fourteen years ago, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) passed the so-called Hartz IV laws, implementing welfare “reforms” and laying the foundations for a huge low-pay sector and widespread poverty. Now, it has developed and tightened up the conceptions underlying the Hartz laws.

On Sunday, the SPD party executive unanimously passed a 17-page paper at a retreat in Berlin, with the pleasant-sounding name “A new welfare state for a new era.” Party leader Andrea Nahles then announced, “We are leaving Hartz IV behind us.” The Süddeutsche Zeitung headline read, “SPD breaks with Hartz IV.” Christian Democratic Union (CDU) vice chair Volker Bouffier and Christian Social Union (CSU) boss Markus Söder even warned that the SPD was taking a “strict left-wing course.”

This is all utter nonsense. Bouffier and Söder know that very well. Their parties have governed for 10 years in an alliance with the SPD and have carried out all the attacks against the unemployed, pensioners and workers. The attempt to portray the new course as a turn to the left is meant to improve the reputation of the SPD, which is hated among workers because of its right-wing politics and which has stagnated in the polls for weeks at 15 percent, running head to head with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

The parties represented in the Bundestag (parliament), and the mainstream media, fear that the outrage over poverty, work speedups and low wages will gain traction, regardless of the SPD and its affiliated unions, if the decline of the social democrats continues—as is already the case in France with the “yellow vests,” in Mexico with Matamoros car parts workers and in the United States with teachers. For this reason, Left Party parliamentary leader Dietmar Bartsch has also praised the SPD’s concept as a step in the right direction.

In fact, the SPD concept is a mixture of false labels, false promises and new social attacks, all cooked up in a sticky sauce of hollow phrases about “solidarity,” “humanity” and “opportunities,” which cause nausea even in those with the strongest stomach.

The SPD’s “future concept” pursues the goal of adapting the instruments of austerity that were developed with the Hartz “reforms”—temporary work, bogus self-employment, subcontracting, one-euro jobs, compulsion to accept any work, etc.—to a situation in which regular jobs are increasingly displaced by computers and artificial intelligence, and human labour is only sporadically employed, under conditions of extreme exploitation.

The SPD is aiming to create a legal and institutional corset that enables the state to control and discipline workers on this unbearable treadmill. “We have to adapt the system and the apparatus to the flexible, ever-changing conditions of the working world,” it says right at the beginning of the document.

The paper describes at length the new forms of exploitation that are taking place and strives to idealize them as “opportunities,” “work-life balance” and “answering the desire for more flexibility for family, caring, but also for training and social commitments.”

It says: “The change in the world of work promotes new forms of employment and makes individual careers more diverse. This opens up new perspectives, new opportunities and new design options.” For example, “in the field of the highly qualified ... flexible temporary project work could not be counted out, as well as mixed teams of internal and external employees, independent experts, such as in start-ups and/or in the field of innovation and ICT [Information and Communications Technology].”

The so-called “internet platform economy” is also welcomed by the SPD, as long as the business models aim for “sustainable economic success.” They could be “understood as a harbinger of new economic structures,” says the paper.

In the platform economy, workers are often connected to the employer only through their computer, need to be available around the clock, and are paid only for the work they do, which is billed by the minute, or paid so poorly that the hourly rate is only cents.

The SPD paper states, “New self-employment, contract work, temporary work or fixed-term employment are increasingly gaining ground in the platform industry. At the same time, we are experiencing the increasing merging of work and life, creating new burdens in the workplace. As a result, the protective function of labour law no longer functions in these highly flexible company and work organizations.”

However, the SPD does not want to prevent this form of exploitation, but seeks rather to promote it. Under the slogan of “work-life balance” it advocates an expansion of home working, which forms the basis of the platform economy. This concerns “more freedom for workers to combine life and work,” says the paper. According to DIW, 40 percent of employees in Germany could theoretically work from home, but only 12 percent can fulfil their wish for flexible work. The SPD would therefore “legally anchor a right to mobile work and home office so that more workers can benefit from the digital benefits.”

What that means could be recounted by hundreds of thousands of those affected: no finishing time, no weekend, no security, no social benefits, no social security. To protect these modern slaves, the SPD promises only to implement some legal guardrails and to ensure that they do not have to be reachable by the employer by phone for a few hours a week.

The SPD explicitly opposes an “unconditional basic income” that would give those affected some protection against the constant pressure to work. It counterposes this to the “right to work,” which on closer inspection turns out to be rather work-related.

For example, the “community of solidarity”—i.e., the contributing workers—will in the future finance “work instead of unemployment.” By this, the SPD understands an extension of the “social labour market,” where unemployed people have to do work at starvation wages subsidized by the Employment Agency, and additional training measures that reduce the training costs of companies.

The SPD paper attaches great importance to strengthening the trade unions, which it needs as a factory police force to suppress the class struggle. The paper states that social partnership is a public good, that strengthens “social cohesion and economic stability.” The SPD expressly welcomes “the clarifying ruling of the Federal Labour Court that union members are basically better off as a result of collective bargaining.” This is an incentive to join a union. “Social partnership is in the economic and social interests of our country.”

The rest of the paper is a pure fraud. For example, the hated term “Hartz IV” should be replaced by “citizenship money,” without anything changing, except for a few cosmetic details. The new term stands for “a new understanding of an empathic, supportive and citizen-friendly welfare state,” says the paper.

Hartz IV recipients will still be subjected to the same social pressures as before, only the language would change. “Of course, we need obligations to cooperate,” says the paper, “because rights and responsibilities in a community of solidarity are two sides of the same coin.” Even the infamous sanctions remain—unless they are “foul and unworthy,” whatever that means.

The increase of the minimum wage to €12, which is constantly cited in the media as evidence of the alleged “left-wing turn” of the SPD, is only a “perspective,” i.e., to be implemented over a longer period in which the minimum wage would rise anyway to this level. This sum, which amounts to just under €2,000 a month for someone employed full-time, is insufficient to live on in German cities, with their horrendous rents today, not to mention those on part-time work and the pre-programmed poverty of those who retire.

It is significant that Finance Minister Olaf Scholz, who insists on a balanced budget, has agreed to the SPD paper. Additional social spending is obviously not to be provided for. There is no mention of taxing the rich at a higher rate. When the SPD introduced the Hartz laws in 2005, it also cut taxes massively for the wealthy. The top tax rate fell from 53 to 42 percent. Two years later, the grand coalition increased VAT (sales tax), which is mainly paid by the poor, from 16 to 19 percent.

Since then, the gulf between rich and poor has widened at a rapid pace. The SPD does not want to change that. On the contrary, its “welfare state” concept is the prelude to a new round of social attacks, which also serves to finance the huge costs of arming the military and the state security apparatus.

Five killed, 22 feared trapped in South African mine explosion

Samuel Davidson

Five people were killed last Wednesday, and 22 others are trapped and feared dead after an explosion in a coal mine that has been closed in the South African province of Mpumalanga.

Since the explosion, mine rescue workers, who have not been paid since last October, have been unable to enter the mine because of high levels of methane and carbon monoxide gas.

The ventilation system has not been working, and the company has not yet repaired it. Those trapped are believed to be so far in the mine, that rescue workers could not reach them wearing portable oxygen tanks. Management has alleged that the rescue workers are refusing to enter in protest over having gone for months without wages.

Twenty people were able to escape the mine and reported that others were still trapped. One person who was injured was arrested for trespassing after he was released from the hospital.

The Gloria Coal Mine is run by a company owned by the Gupta brothers, South African capitalists with close ties to the ruling African National Congress, who are facing extensive corruption charges. The company has been in bankruptcy since early last year and was placed into receivership. Since then the mine has fallen into disrepair and production was stopped.

The business rescue representative for the mine, Mike Elliot, said that the ventilation system is down because thieves stole the wires supplying the large fans with power. But he has not said when that took place, why they weren’t repaired or why they aren’t being repaired now.

Elliot, the authorities and the media are in fact seeking to blame the victims for this disaster, referring to those who were killed and those still trapped as thieves who were in the mine to steal copper wiring. Since the initial explosion, the English language media has almost stopped reporting on the disaster and the lack of any rescue attempts.

Elliot, and other company and government officials have not announced any plans for how they will rescue the trapped workers. No doubt the company and authorities see this as a deterrent to others who might try to enter the company’s other abandoned mines in the area.

Miners who worked at the mine have not been paid since September 2018, and many report that they are not able to feed their families and themselves. Local residents have taken up food collections, including providing lunch once a week, but that is not enough.

Miners say that Elliot and the company are seeking to sell off mine assets to benefit the owners and creditors while leaving the workers with nothing.

It is not clear from media reports if the people trapped in the mine had also been miners who used to work there, but now without work, were forced to scavenge for scrap to feed their families. It is unlikely that anyone who had not worked there would have been able to find their way around so far underground, but many in the impoverished province are desperate.

In 2015, 55 percent of South Africa’s population, or 30.4 million people, lived in poverty, and the number of people living in extreme poverty increased to 13.8 million from 11 million in 2011. Extreme poverty affects people living below the food poverty line, that is, those lacking the amount of money needed to buy only enough food to live on.

The food poverty line is set at just 441 South African rand per month per person. That amounts to less than $32.00 a month at today’s exchange rate. In 2012, Mpumalanga province recorded 1.5 million people living below the official poverty level of just 795 rand for a family of four.

The Gupta mine disaster also further exposes the corrupt intersection between the ruling African National Congress (ANC), the unions and business magnates.

The Gupta brothers bought the Optimum Coal assets, which include the Gloria mine, in 2016. They are now in self-imposed exile, living in Dubai, facing arrest in South Africa for corruption. Charges against them involve many leaders of the ruling ANC, up to and including former President Jacob Zuma, who was forced to resign on February 14, 2018.

The Gupta brothers’ ANC corruption scheme involved massive bribes and kickbacks to divert government funds and contracts to the Gupta family’s businesses, much of it siphoned out of funds meant for South Africa’s poor.

The corruption dates back to the very beginnings of the ANC’s rule, as many of its leaders rushed to enrich themselves after the end of Apartheid. Prosecutors charge that the brothers would even pick candidates to be senators, who would in turn pass laws and regulations in their favor.

The Gupta businesses profited from vast exploitation of the workers, who were paid low wages and forced to work in unsafe conditions, while government and union officials looked the other way.

In 2012, the National Union of Mineworkers and police shot and killed over 40 striking platinum miners at the Lonmin mine in the town of Marikana in South Africa’s North West province. Thirty-four miners were massacred by police firing assault rifles on August 16, 2012. Just days before, the strikers were fired upon by officials of the National Union of Mineworkers, when they marched to the local NUM headquarters to demand official support for their strike, which was overwhelmingly backed by the miners.

Then president Jacob Zuma and other ANC leaders approved of the murderous actions taken by the NUM leaders and the police. At the time of the massacre, Cyril Ramaphosa, the former general secretary of the NUM, was a director of Lonmin and used his state connections to press the government for a crackdown against the strikers. Ramaphosa, who became one of South Africa’s richest men, succeeded Zuma as the country’s president last year.

The killing of the Marikana miners marked a turning point and an escalation in the attack against workers throughout the entire country.

National 24-hour strike goes forward in Belgium

Will Morrow

Tens of thousands of workers are slated to take strike action in Belgium today, amid mounting anger at low wages enforced by state-run talks involving business groups and the trade unions. The strike, called for workers in both the public and private sectors, is part of a broad, international upsurge of strikes and workers protests taking place across Europe and internationally.

Strike action in Belgium began at 10 p.m. last night. In the run-up to the strike, the press announced that the national tram and bus network would be completely or almost completely stopped. In line with a legal minimum, half the regular number of trains are scheduled to run.

Both Antwerp Port and the Port of Ghent expect to be heavily impacted by the strike.

Large numbers of public school teachers are expected to strike, even though the education unions have refused to issue official notice of strike action. Rubbish collection is reported to be cancelled, as are parts of the postal service. Administrative employees in hospitals and fire brigades are also striking.

Skeyes, the national air traffic control agency, announced yesterday that it would not authorize air traffic between 10 p.m. Tuesday and 10 p.m. Wednesday because “there is no certitude as to the number of employees to occupy a limited number of crucial posts.” Brussels South Charleroi airport is to be closed. TUI Fly airlines has announced it will be forced to divert all flights to nearby international airports in France, Germany and the Netherlands.

The mounting anger against low wages and poor working conditions in Belgium comes amid growing opposition in the working class internationally after more than 10 years of intensified attacks on wages, jobs and social conditions.

In Berlin, approximately 70,000 teachers, child care and social workers and other public sector employees are expected to take part in a one-day strike today. In Rome, local media reported that up to 200,000 people participated in a demonstration on Saturday, reflecting broad anger over unemployment and austerity cuts enforced by the European Union and the Italian government.

Across the border in France, tens of thousands of workers have taken part in weekly “Yellow Vest” protests since November against President Macron’s austerity policies and growing social inequality. They have recently been joined by “Red Pen” teachers opposing attacks on public education.

Meanwhile the strike by auto parts workers in Matamoros, Mexico, is expanding along the US border, while teachers strikes are taking place in the United States and in multiple countries across Africa.

The working class has overwhelming social power when it acts collectively. However, the organizers of the Belgian strike—the three national trade union federations—have not called the action to mobilize the strength of the working class against wage and social cuts. Rather, they are seeking to maintain control over the deep anger in the working class and let off steam through the limited one-day action, in order to allow the government’s attacks to proceed.

The unions felt compelled to call the strike action in January, after negotiations between the unions and employer associations broke down over the 2019–2020 national wage increases.

Under the reactionary and pro-business system set up by all the major Belgian parties and trade unions in 1996, national wage rises are capped at a level set by the National Economic Council. The latter publishes a calculation of what wage rises are acceptable in order not to lose “competitiveness” with Belgium’s neighbors—explicitly, France and Germany. In December, the council set a maximum of 0.8 percent, while the unions claim they want an increase of 1.5 percent.

The unions fully support the nationalist and anti-working-class framework of reducing workers’ wages in a race to the bottom with their brothers and sisters in France, Germany and internationally. They have permanent seats on the employer-union “Group of 10” which decides on what limit to place on wage increases.

The fact that they have been forced to call today’s strike is an expression of their acute consciousness of the growing opposition in the working class, which they are seeking to prevent from emerging independently and outside of their control and from linking up with workers internationally—which is the only basis upon which a successful struggle can be waged.

Indicative of the impact of the rising cost of living and inequality, a retiree who participated in “yellow vest” protests last month in Brussels told RTBF news that he received 1,350 euros a month from his pension. “I get it on the 23rd of every month. It’s now the 8th and after I’ve paid insurance, rent, energy and bills—which cost 150 euros—I only have 200 euros left for living expenses.”

A number of wildcat strikes have been undertaken in the past year by rail workers, including one last June in Welkenraedt. At the time, union official Laurent Brock told RTBF that the strike could spread but “it’s very difficult to say… This could take place anywhere, at any moment. The drivers are not happy at all.”

Inequality has been further exacerbated by brutal austerity measures imposed by the right-wing Belgian government headed by Charles Michel in 2016–2017, continuing the attacks by his Socialist Party predecessor Elio Di Rupo.

The Michel government’s measures included ending the 38-hour standard work week, by changing the method of counting hours worked from a fortnightly to a yearly total; and cutting the maximum possible wage increase that can be negotiated each year. The government has also tied pensions more directly to the number of hours worked in a lifetime, in order to prepare the way for raising the retirement age from 65 to 67.

These cuts have proceeded with the complicity of the trade unions. They have previously called national one-day strikes like today’s strike in response to social cuts, including in 2011 and 2014, but afterwards they promptly continued in planning and negotiating the cuts with the government.

While the opposition Socialist Party has declared its support for today’s strike, it carried out similarly brutal austerity measures when it was in office under Di Rupo from 2011–2014. Di Rupo demanded the raising of the retirement age, noting that when Belgium’s pension system was established in the 20th century, the life expectancy was only 62 years old. “Every year the life expectancy rises by two months,” he complained.

In Belgium as in every country, the critical question facing workers in struggle is to take the struggle out of the hands of the unions. Workers need independent rank-and-file committees to wage their struggles and unify them with similar strikes and protests waged by their class brothers and sisters in other countries.

The international upsurge of working class struggle in 2019

Niles Niemuth

The first weeks of 2019 have been marked by a dramatic upsurge in the international class struggle. Workers’ strikes and protests have broken out in virtually every region of the world. After decades in which the class struggle has been suppressed by the trade unions, the working class, the stirring giant of world politics, is beginning to find its feet.

North America

• On Monday, 5,600 teachers in Denver, Colorado struck for the first time in a quarter-century. The primary concern of teachers is winning significant salary increases so they can afford to live and work in one of the most expensive cities in the United States.
• Oakland, California teachers, who have been working without a contract for two years, have voted overwhelmingly to strike as soon as next week. West Virginia teachers, who sparked the ongoing wave of teachers’ strikes by rebelling against their union and engaging in wildcat action, have authorized a strike or work action against pro-privatization legislation making its way through the state legislature.
• The strike movement of maquiladora workers which began in Matamoros, Mexico last month, when tens of thousands of workers walked off the job in defiance of their unions, is spreading along the US-Mexico border. Approximately 8,000 workers at 45 factories in neighboring Reynosa are demanding the same 20 percent pay increase and $1,700 bonus won by their brothers and sisters in Matamoros.

Europe

• A 24-hour nationwide strike is set to begin at 10 p.m. tonight in Belgium. The strike will include postal workers, teachers, trash collection workers and hospital employees. Airport workers will also be on strike. The Charleroi-south Brussels airport will be completely closed. Brussels Airlines has cancelled 200 flights and diverted planes for 16,000 passengers to other airports, including Lille in the north of France. The national rail network will be running a minimum of trains.
• Yellow vest protesters held their 13th weekly mass protest against social inequality across France on Saturday in defiance of the Macron government’s “anti-hooligan” law recently passed by the National Assembly, which allows the police to unilaterally outlaw protests. Organizers estimate that 116,000 people marched throughout the country.

Asia and Oceania

• Over 200,000 government employees in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh walked off the job last Wednesday to demand the restoration of their old pension plan. The union group coordinating the strike has announced that today will be the final day of the walkout. This follows a two-day general strike against the policies of the Modi government involving tens of millions of workers across India and a mass walkout of teachers and public employees in Tamil Nadu state.
• Approximately 700 China Airlines pilots based in Taiwan have been on strike since Friday, resulting in the cancellation of at least 60 flights, including scheduled flights from Taipei to Hong Kong, Bangkok, Los Angeles, Manila and Tokyo. Among other demands, the pilots are seeking the addition of backup pilots on flights lasting longer than eight hours and the payment of a year-end bonus.
• Approximately 1,700 junior doctors in New Zealand began their third 48-hour strike in a month on Tuesday to oppose continued attacks on their working conditions. These attacks include demands to increase the number of consecutive days they can be forced to work to 12, while extending shifts beyond 16 hours. The doctors were joined by 1,000 midwives, who took part in a 12-hour protest strike to push for a wage increase above the rate of inflation.

Africa

• Fifteen thousand Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union members at the Sibanye-Stillwater gold mine in South Africa have been on strike since November over demands for a $72 increase in monthly pay. The gold miners were joined by their fellow workers at Sibanye-Stillwater’s platinum mines after 11 weeks on strike.
• Some 80,000 Zimbabwean teachers have been on strike for the last week. Their struggle was called off Monday by the Zimbabwe Teachers Union and the Progressive Teachers’ Union of Zimbabwe despite the government refusing to grant any of the teachers’ demands, including pay increases that keep pace with inflation.

These opening shots of the year are a powerful verification of internationalism. Workers in one or another country are beginning to understand that their struggles are intimately interlinked. There is a growing commonality in the demands and struggles of workers motivated by ever growing levels of social inequality.

Last month, Matamoros workers marched to the US border and called on their American brothers and sisters to “wake up.” Many of them work for the same auto parts companies that exploit workers in the US, Canada and around the world. They produce parts that are assembled by workers in the US, Canada, Europe and other regions.

The wave of teachers’ strikes in the US shows that American workers are, indeed, beginning to wake up. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this month that the number of workers participating in strike action in 2018 reached a 32-year high.

As Leon Trotsky noted in 1930 at an earlier stage in the crisis of the world capitalist system, the completion of the socialist revolution on a national stage is impossible. “The socialist revolution begins on the national arena, it unfolds on the international arena, and is completed on the world arena,” Trotsky explained.

As the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) explained as early as 1988, the class struggle today is international not just in content, but also in form.

The ICFI stressed as well that the resurgence of the class struggle would take the form of a rebellion against the old, bureaucratic and nationalist labor organizations. This is also being confirmed in the growing number of struggles—including teachers’ walkouts in the US and the explosive struggle of the maquiladora workers in Mexico—that take the form of rank-and-file rebellions carried out independently of and against the trade unions.

These objective process found conscious expression in the demonstration on February 9 in Detroit against GM plant closings and layoffs in the US and Canada, which was organized by the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter and the Steering Committee of the Coalition of Rank-and-File Committees.

The demonstration received greetings from representatives of auto parts workers in Matamoros, Mexico, tea plantation workers in Sri Lanka, framed-up Maruti Suzuki autoworkers in India, and metal workers in Turkey.

In a video addressed to the rally, striking workers in Matamoros, Mexico, declared, “Solidarity with our friends in Detroit, Michigan in their struggle against mass layoffs! The workers of Matamoros are united with the workers of Michigan!”

Matamoros workers support SEP demonstration against auto layoffs

These workers from different parts of the world recognize the common interests they share with American and Canadian workers and the importance for workers everywhere of developing the class struggle in the center of world capitalism—the United States.  

However, workers still confront the brutal reality that there does not exist in any country a mass organization or mass party that responds to their organic striving for international unity. The unions and social democratic parties in every country are thoroughly rotten, basing themselves on a nationalist program and subordinating workers’ needs to the demands of their “own” corporate elites and their bribed government officials.

In contrast to the nationalism pushed by the unions, Saturday’s protest—which called on workers to establish rank-and-file factory and neighborhood committees independent of the unions to fight in defense of jobs and living standards—was based on the international unity of the working class and a revolutionary socialist program.

The only organization that gives conscious expression and fights to develop the international struggle of the working class is the ICFI and its national sections, the Socialist Equality Parties around the world.

Saturday’s event was a confirmation the analysis made by the WSWS at the beginning of 2019, which stated that “the theoretical and political work of the International Committee is intersecting with the objective movement of the working class. Its critical-practical revolutionary activity is becoming an essential factor in the development and outcome of the revolutionary class struggle.”

The central task in the unification and liberation of the working class is the building of the ICFI as the world party of socialist revolution. This is the task to which class-conscious workers and youth must dedicate themselves.

FUNAGIB Scholarship for African Students Working on Cassava (Fully-funded to Brazil) 2019

Application Deadline: 31st May 2019

Eligible Countries: African countries


To Be Taken At (Country): Brazil

About the Award: The foundation FUNAGIB was established in 2015 by its founder Nagib Nassar thanks to Kuwait KFAS (Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Science) Prize received by him in the same year.

Type: Research

Eligibility: 

• Candidates for this scholarship should have completed their course credits and should be in phase of preparing their thesis.
• Major field of his (her) study should be on cassava plant breeding.

Value of Award: R$ 20,000 (twenty thousand reais – US$ 1.00 = R$ 3.5 more or less according to real fluctuation), including air ticket.

Duration of Program: 5 months. Study should begin at Brasilia by 1st August 2018.

How to Apply: Applicants must send by e-mail the following documents:

• A recommendation letter from faculty or supervisor
• Curriculum Vitae
• Academic history
• Statement by candidate endorsed by his supervisor declaring commitment of the student to five months of the research on cassava periclinal chimera to improve the crop to be conducted at Brasília, Brazil. This subject should be a part of the final thesis.

Contact: Prof. Nagib Nassar (E-mail: nagibnassar@geneconserve.pro.br )

Visit the Program Webpage for Details