Tesla’s plant at Grünheide, Germany: After a two-week production halt, work set to continue at “hell’s pace”

Ludwig Weller

It is less than four months since Tesla’s new electric car factory was opened in Grünheide, in the federal state of Brandenburg, to general euphoria in the media and politics. Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Economics Minister Robert Habeck effusively celebrated Tesla founder Elon Musk for his “daring corporate culture.”

The Tesla Gigafactory near Berlin (as of October 2021) [Photo by Albrecht Köhler / Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 4.0] [Photo by Albrecht Köhler / Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 4.0]

On July 4, Tesla announced production would stop from July 11 for a fortnight. For the almost 5,000 auto workers, this means forced holidays and anxiety about what form production will take when it restarts. Tesla only said that such a calculated break was part of a “restructuring phase” to “optimise and readjust” processes.

In an interview at the end of May, Musk described the plants in Grünheide and Texas as “gigantic money-burning furnaces” that cost him billions. Output was far too low, costs too high and there were supply chain problems, he said. His concerns, he said, were to see the factories did not go out of business, and how to keep them running to pay the workers. With this clear threat to the workforce, the factories in Texas and Grünheide are currently being trimmed for maximum exploitation.

For the record: Musk, who by all appearances will soon be the world’s first trillionaire, and has bid $44 billion for Twitter, is now playing the poor man and complaining that his two new gigafactories are not turning a profit from day one.

The richest man in the world is only producing the outrageously expensive Tesla electric cars in the five gigafactories worldwide for one purpose: to maximise profits. And that can only be achieved through the maximum exploitation of the labour force. Musk also says this quite openly, describing the ramping up of production, as is currently happening in Grünheide, as “production hell.”

According to Musk’s plans, 500,000 Model Y cars should be produced annually in Grünheide. The current 1,000 cars per week are just one tenth of this plan. It also became known that many cars could not be delivered because of defects and had to be reworked at great expense.

Tesla is keeping quiet about how and what will be restructured in the two weeks of July. There are different reports about this, with talk that in the future, car bodies will only spend 30 seconds at each production station, where previously it was up to three minutes. This would correspond to a six-fold increase in the pace of work.

According to the company website “Teslamag,” the pace of work per production step is to be accelerated from currently 90 seconds to 45 seconds. Even though the workforce would grow by a few thousand by the end of the year, the workload per worker will thus be increased enormously. Musk himself told shareholders in June that he expected it to take nine to 12 months to increase weekly production to 5,000 cars initially.

Meanwhile, Tesla is rigorously continuing its reckless and environmentally damaging plans. The company is currently in the process of building a second “gigapress” plant. According to Tagesspiegel, this will involve driving 1,300 concrete foundation piles into the Brandenburg sand, in the middle of a drinking water protection area, like the entire car factory and the battery factory also under construction.

Strausberg-Erkner (WSE), the regional water board, filed another lawsuit against this, but lost to Tesla at the administrative court in Frankfurt/Oder recently.

Like many other auto manufacturers, Tesla is dependent on raw materials and supplies from China and Russia. The coronavirus pandemic, the Ukraine war, the sanctions against Russia and the resulting energy crisis and rampant inflation are increasingly shaking the global economy.

For example, Tesla's largest car factory, located in Shanghai, has also had to close temporarily for longer than Musk expected due to the Chinese government's zero-COVID strategy. In Grünheide, the motors and battery packs being installed are supplied from Shanghai. According to media reports, Grünheide's supply is limited because Giga Shanghai itself needs many of the components.

Tesla produces most of its cars in China, which is also the company’s most profitable market. According to the trade press, Tesla wants to double weekly production to more than 15,000 cars and build a second Gigafactory near Shanghai.

At the end of July, two-shift operations are also to be expanded to three shifts. Workers in Grünheide will then produce 24 hours a day, including Saturdays, with a 40-hour week and plenty of scheduled overtime. The motors and battery packs will soon be produced in Grünheide, with the necessary facilities and plants under construction.

The first reports of growing resentment over working conditions, low wages and unequal pay are already filtering out of the plant. According to these, production workers are to receive about 20 percent less than is customary in the industry and are covered by a regional collective agreement. Some workers are also said to have returned to their old employers out of dissatisfaction.

Although the Employment Agency and the Job Centre operate a team with its own office in the Tesla personnel department to provide the factory with cheap labour, Tesla seems to have problems finding enough workers.

The head of the Employment Agency in Frankfurt/Oder, Jochem Freyer, proudly told the press the other day, “Thanks to the short coordination channels, we have already been able to place over 600 unemployed people at Tesla and, what I am particularly pleased about: over half of them were previously long-term unemployed.” It was not disclosed on what terms they were hired and how many subsidies Tesla received for taking them on.

Apparently, Tesla has had to offer newly employed workers higher wages than those who were hired earlier to find enough staff. For these reasons, the management probably felt compelled to raise wages for production workers by 6 percent from August.

The state government and IG Metall union

The representatives of the Brandenburg state government, consisting of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Greens, as well as the IG Metall trade union, continue to prostrate themselves at the feet of the Tesla corporation and offer it their services. While behind the scenes they approved and supported the Gigafactory, which violates environmental regulations and was built semi-illegally, they now also accept the conditions of Musk's “production hell.”

Economics Minister Jörg Steinbach (SPD) succinctly announced last Tuesday that the ramp-up phase of the Gigafactory was a special time that required readjustments in places: “I assume, however, that Tesla will make the right decisions to set up the factory well.”

Heiner Klemp, Green Party spokesman for the economy, Europe and local affairs in his state parliamentary group, claimed Tesla had “pragmatic solutions” to secure the location.

The IG Metall also has no objection in principle to Musk’s brutal methods of exploitation. At the opening of the factory in March, Birgit Dietze, the IG Metall district leader for Berlin, Brandenburg and Saxony, sent Elon Musk a message of praise couched in purely nationalist or regionalist terms.

“In the future, anyone looking for the major automotive locations on a world map will come across the town of Grünheide in Brandenburg,” she wrote. “With the opening of the Tesla factory, eastern Germany is strengthening its international pioneering role in electromobility.” She did not say a word about Musk’s machinations or what will befall the thousands of newly hired workers at the new plant.

IG Metall and its officials, who have been desperately trying to gain a foothold in the factory for months, are only concerned with one thing: How can Elon Musk best be convinced that cooperation with IG Metall will only bring advantages?

Dietze had already offered the union’s services after the works council election in February, in which IG Metall came away empty handed. “Nevertheless, this first works council election at Tesla in Grünheide was a successful premiere,” it said. Now, “the first step towards a culture of co-determination must be followed by others.” IG Metall had “every interest in seeing this plant flourish and enjoy lasting success.”

The initial resentment that arose among the workforce because of the unequal pay prompted IG Metall to become Tesla’s adviser and offer its tried and tested services in regulating workers’ grievances. Dietze explained, “In the long run, this will damage industrial peace. We have already received many complaints about it.”

IG Metall said it had analysed work contracts and job descriptions in cooperation with several employees from the Tesla plant. The result was clear, Dietze said. At almost 20 percent, the pay differences compared to other automotive companies in the region were “particularly large in the middle of the pay scale, i.e., among skilled workers.”

With the targeted wage increases that IG Metall wants to push through in the coming collective bargaining rounds for the metal and electrical industries (and which do not even compensate for inflation), these differences would be even greater. Tesla management will have to respond to this.

The union’s message to Tesla management is clear: Only if you conclude a collective agreement with IG Metall can we ensure order, and a calm and flourishing factory. To do this, you must let us into the factory and provide us with well-paid supervisory board and works council positions.

At the same time, IG Metall is trying to make Tesla workers believe that they can only achieve higher wages with the union and should therefore join it.

All experiences of the last decades and especially of the most recent years prove the opposite. IG Metall has agreed to reductions in real wages over the years, sacrificed existing social standards and helped to wind up countless jobs, including the closure of entire plants, such as at Opel in Bochum and most recently at Ford in Saarlouis.

Large Hadron Collider resumes collecting data at new record energy

Bryan Dyne

Physicists operating the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are once again circulating beams of high-energy protons along the 27-kilometer-long circular particle accelerator. The LHC was shut down in 2018 for scheduled maintenance and numerous upgrades, all of which have borne fruit over the past four years, the most notable being the new record collision energy of the accelerator of 13.6 TeV (teraelectronvolts, a unit of mass/energy in particle physics).

The upgrades include improvements to the hardware which detects and records collisions, as well as new computers to process the vast quantity of data derived from these expected to be collected in the coming years. The two main detectors, ATLAS and CMS, are expected to record more data than the previous two runs combined. Of two additional detectors, work on the LHCb is predicted to increase its ability to gather data by a factor of 10 and ALICE will likely record more than 50 times the number of collisions than in previous runs.

Two brand new detectors were also installed for the current run, FASER and SND@LHC, both of which are designed to explore the physics of neutrinos.

The ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider as it was being assembled. The entire device is 46 meters long and 25 meters in diameter.

The LHC is an international physics collaboration located at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) and straddles the border between Switzerland and France. It is operated and used by tens of thousands of researchers from hundreds of universities and institutions from more than 100 countries across all six inhabited continents. It has operated since 2009 and stands as a monumental achievement as both a scientific and social endeavor.

The collider operates by injecting protons, hydrogen atoms each stripped of its electron, into two counter-rotating beams and then accelerating them to just under the speed of light. The beams are then focused by a series of powerful superconducting magnets into four points around the ring and forced to ram into each other, producing conditions that mimic the high energy conditions theorized to have existed in the first moments of the Universe. Each of the four main experiments—ATLAS, ALICE, LHCb and CMS—are located at one of the four focusing points and are used by particle physicists to study in different ways the physical properties of the particles that are produced by these extraordinarily energetic collisions.

The most famous result produced by the LHC is the confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson during the first run of the collider from 2009 to 2013. During that time, collisions were carried out at then-record energies of 7 TeV and 20 petabytes (20 million gigabytes) of data were recorded. Hints of the Higgs boson emerged in 2011 and CERN announced a discovery of a new fundamental particle in 2012. To confirm the results, the LHC delayed its initial scheduled shutdown into early 2013 to allow enough data to be collected to confirm the Higgs discovery. The second run of the collider gathered 10 times as much data, and the current one starting will multiply this by yet another factor of at least 10.

The search for the Higgs ultimately comes from the search for the “atom” (that which cannot be cut smaller), first postulated by the ancient Greek philosopher/scientist Democritus. The atoms of the periodic table were given that name when the Russian chemist Dimitri Mendeleev first formulated the periodic table of the elements in 1869. Mendeleev classified each pure chemical into “families” with similar properties. In doing so he simultaneously gave order to the chemicals that were known and predicted the existence and properties of many that were yet to be discovered. Several of the as-yet-undiscovered element germanium’s physical properties, for example, were well predicted in advance of its 1886 discovery, to the astonishment of chemists.

Atoms are, however, not the smallest particles of matter. That atoms can transmute themselves was discovered by Henri Becquerel in 1896 as the phenomenon of radioactivity, and that much lighter constituents could be separated from them was proven by J.J. Thomson in 1897 when he used a cathode ray tube to produce a beam of particles with negative charge, what we now call electrons. Several experiments followed in the ensuing decades probing the internal structure of the atom, which led to the discovery of the proton and the neutron, a more complete understanding of radioactive decay and a whole host of discoveries about matter at its smallest scales.

The search for the Higgs boson, however, was a sticking point in the search for a complete model of subatomic particles for decades and was in many ways the impetus for the development of the LHC. It was first theorized in 1964 by Peter Higgs, François Englert and Robert Brout to describe why some particles, like the photon, have no mass, but others, like the W and Z bosons, are quite massive. At the time, the existing physical models predicted that those particles should also have zero mass and were contradicted quite sharply by well-studied experimental data.

Brout, Englert and Higgs developed a mechanism (the BEH mechanism) to explain this discrepancy. The photon and the W and Z bosons were all supposed to have zero mass as a result of a “symmetry” in particle physics between the electromagnetic force, governed by the photon, and the weak force, which describes radioactivity and is governed by the two types of W bosons and the Z boson. The three proposed a “symmetry breaking” mechanism to explain the discrepancies in masses.

Symmetry breaking can be likened to looking into a mirror and raising one’s right hand. Imagine that instead of seeing the mirror image of the right hand being raised, you see the mirror image of the left hand being raised. This represents the symmetry being broken, and is possible in the realm of particle physics. The concept has been successfully used to explain a variety of other strange processes that occur in particle physics.

Further research also revealed that the BEH mechanism could explain the masses of the other particles described and at the time predicted by the Standard Model, the “periodic table” of particle physics. The Higgs boson was realized to be critical to understanding the mechanism and the underlying theory as a whole.

The discovery of the Higgs, however, was not the end of the investigation of mass, but a major milestone. One of the main tasks of the second run of the LHC, which went from 2015 to 2018, was to more fully characterize the Higgs boson, the many ways the particle decays and to check that its properties do not change at higher energies. Those measurements, particularly the rate of decay by the Higgs into a pair of subatomic particles called bottom quarks, provided several key measurements that demonstrated in multiple ways how the particle is connected to the mass of other fundamental constituents of matter.

There have been several other major discoveries over the past decade. LHCb, for example, recently announced three brand new particles, one composed of five quarks and two composed of four quarks (protons and neutrons are each composed of three). Quarks are elementary particles that come in six “flavors”—up, down, charm, strange, top, bottom—and are the building blocks for numerous types of matter. They are also key in understanding how matter binds together to form many of particles produced by particle accelerators.

More such studies are expected in the coming months and years. There will be more papers published on the nature of the Higgs boson at even higher energies, as well as other properties of the Standard Model. There are also plans to look for physics beyond the Standard Model, both through observed properties of particles that don’t agree with the current theory and by signatures of wholly new particles. The contradictions with what is known and unknown will slowly emerge, leading to the development of models that integrate old and new physics into an even greater whole.

Ryanair on strike in Spain as airline strikes spread across Europe

Alejandro López

European airline workers are continuing strikes, defying state threats to ban strikes using reactionary “minimum service” laws against which unions are organizing no opposition.

Spain’s USO (Unión Sindical Obrera) and SITCPLA (Sindicato Independiente de Tripulantes de Cabina de Pasajeros de Líneas Aéreas) unions have called twelve 24-hour stoppages for 1,900 Ryanair cabin crew members at the company’s ten airports in Spain in July. Workers are striking over pay and working conditions. The six-day Ryanair crew strike will reportedly affect almost 2,650 operations and nearly 400,000 passengers.

Workers are striking in defiance of the Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos government’s demand that workers provide “minimum service” of between 57 and 82 percent of flights, depending on the airport and route. Confident of government complicity, Ryanair last month threatened to sack all strikers.

USO and SITCPLA are pathetically appealing to the PSOE-Podemos government, especially Podemos Deputy Prime Minister and Labour Minister Yolanda Díaz. In a joint statement, they implored Díaz: “Do not allow Ryanair to violate labor legislation and constitutional rights such as the right to strike and act against a company that does not abide by court rulings, does not comply with the law and uses fear, coercion and threats with its employees.”

Unsurprisingly, Díaz refused to reply. Her anti-worker record is notorious: she spearheaded the back-to-work campaign with the trade unions during the pandemic that led to millions of infections in workplaces and the deaths of thousands of workers and their family members. She also passed a reactionary labour reform extending the widely-hated one approved by the right-wing Popular Party (PP) in 2012.

Díaz belongs to a government that has repeatedly attacked strikes. In November, it deployed armoured vehicles and riot police against striking metalworkers in Cadiz; in April, it mobilised 23,000 police to crush a truckers strike against rising fuel prices amid NATO’s war against Russia in Ukraine. Two weeks ago, Díaz cynically gave her condolences after Spanish and Moroccan police ran riot, killing at least 37 refugees on the border between Morocco and the Spanish enclave of Melilla.

Initially, the unions at Ryanair only planned 24-hour stoppages in June. However, under rising pressure from workers, USO extended the strikes, which it blamed on the “indifference of the company.” Trying to split up the action and minimize its impact, the unions have called for 24-hour stoppages that will start today and continue intermittently on 13-15, 18-21, and 25-28 July.

Setting out to divide its members, USO called for separate strike days for its EasyJet members, who are fighting for similar demands. At EasyJet, Europe’s second budget airline after Ryanair, USO has called for six new strikes on July 15-17 and 29-31 to demand a 40 percent increase in their basic salary.

On only one day, July 15, will Ryanair and Easyjet strikes coincide, even though workers are defending the same demands: improved working conditions, higher salaries to offset inflation levels of 10 percent, remuneration for training hours and supplements for seniority.

The combined strength of airline workers at Ryanair and Easyjet was demonstrated last month. The strikes at both companies left at least 241 flights canceled and 1,440 delayed: 26 cancellations and 185 delays at Ryanair, and 215 and 1,255 at EasyJet. Most EasyJet cancellations were to or from Malaga-Costa del Sol airport, but operations at Barcelona-El Prat and Palma de Mallorca-Son Sant Joan airports were also affected.

Ryanair pilots in Frankfurt

The critical question for workers is breaking the obstacles posed by the airline unions and building rank-and-file committees to coordinate their struggles across national borders. A powerful, Europe-wide mobilisation of airline workers is already underway. Over the past month, Ryanair workers in Belgium, Italy and Portugal have mounted strikes. Strikes have hit Air France, Transavia and Brussels Airlines, and there were demonstrations by US pilots at Southwest Airlines.

In addition, ground crew at airports across Europe—baggage handlers, security guards and check-in staff—also struck last month, leading to thousands of cancelled flights, hours-long waits at airports, and capacity curbs at Europe’s biggest hubs.

Terrified of the emerging international mobilisation of the workers, USO is whipping up nationalism to try to divide the workers and strangle the strike.

USO said that crew members in Spain earn a salary base of €950, or €850 less than their French or German co-workers. “The conclusion is clear: at EasyJet there is money for everything, except for Spain,” said USO general secretary Miguel Galán.

Galán has begged Ryanair to grant token concessions to avoid strikes. A new meeting has been scheduled tomorrow, after which USO hopes to call off the strike.

USO has also complained that Ryanair is bringing in crews to operate from Spain to break the strike, which once again demonstrates the impotence of the USO’s national one-day strikes. According to reports, some are Portuguese, but others are non-EU, from the United Kingdom. USO has said it will file corresponding complaints with the Labour Inspectorate in each city where Ryanair has Spanish bases.

The same nationalist perspective is shared by trade unions across Europe. Last week, French and Belgian pilots unions called strike actions on days not called by the Spanish unions, for 23-24 July.

In Northern Europe, the SAS Pilot Group (SPG) union at Scandinavian Airline Systems (SAS), the Scandinavian airline giant established in 1946 by the governments of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, has been delaying strike action for a month. On June 9, they submitted their notice to strike on June 29, which they ultimately postponed to July 4.

Since last week, nearly 1,000 SAS pilots have been on strike. SAS is operating at around 50 percent capacity due to the pilot strike, affecting 30,000 passengers daily. Thousands of flights have been cancelled. According to Norwegian broadcaster NRK, the strike is costing SAS $8 to $10 million daily. In solidarity, 200 SAS aeroplane mechanics in Denmark are to join the strike on Thursday, refusing to service any planes.

With this immense power, the SPG agreed to break its own strike, flying some charter flights to help stranded passenger return home. It then had to call off its strike-breaking when pilots realised that they were being deployed to “popular and well-trafficked holiday destinations, such as Rhodes, Crete, Larnaca, and Split, from where there are already alternative travel options,” SPG admitted.

The anger of pilots is the culmination of a number of betrayals with SPG complicity. Pilots were forced to accept a two-tier system whereby new pilots came in on lower salaries and benefits in the SAS Link and SAS Connect subsidiaries. After the COVID-19 pandemic began, the union agreed to a “temporary” wage cut for its members. Last week, negotiations over a new collective bargaining agreement broke down, resulting in the strike.

How Biden’s “forever war” in Ukraine was prepared: Billions of dollars for weapons and military training since 2014

Jason Melanovski

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed last week that the billions in military weapons sent to Ukraine since the beginning of Russia’s invasion on February 24 have “finally” started working, despite staggering losses in both casualties and territory. 

Ukrainian soldiers fire at Russian positions from a U.S.-supplied M777 howitzer in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region Saturday, June 18, 2022. [AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky]

“Finally it is felt that the Western artillery—the weapons we received from our partners— started working very powerfully,” Zelensky said in a video address posted to the Office of the President’s website. “The losses of the occupiers will only increase every week, as will the difficulty of supplying them.”

As the Ukrainian forces have continued to lose territory in the eastern Donbass region, including the entire Lugansk province, and reportedly suffer record casualties of over 500 per day, Zelensky and his entourage have implored the United States and its NATO allies to rapidly send even more powerful weaponry in an attempt to continue the war for as long as possible. 

While Zelensky and his advisers are attempting to portray themselves as scrappy underdogs taking on a treacherous bully, in reality, billions in military aid have already been sent to the country in order to provoke and exacerbate a war, which in its current form would never have occurred without massive training and funding from Western sources.

According to the Department of Defense, amid rapid worldwide inflation the US has contributed approximately $7.6 billion in military aid to Ukraine since the Russian invasion began on February 24, including an additional $820 million authorized on July 1. The Biden administration has pledged over $50 billion in military and economic aid since coming into office.

The supplies include anti-aircraft systems, tactical drones, rocket systems, howitzers and artillery rounds. Recently, Ukraine has claimed success in hitting Russian ammo depots after the arrival of the first four American-made High-Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) with four more on the way. In addition, Ukraine is also receiving 18 tracked Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS) from the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Norway.

While the United States and NATO have moved to rapidly arm Ukraine since February, the history of NATO involvement and funding reveals that the current war was both planned for and provoked by the imperialist powers for years. 

The ties by NATO to Ukraine go back to the Stalinist destruction of the Soviet Union and restoration of capitalism. In the 1990s, Ukraine’s Yaroviv Combat Training Center in the Lviv region of western Ukraine became the center of NATO operations and training. In March, the base, which had housed as many as 1,000 foreign fighters being training as part of the Ukrainian Foreign Legion, was hit by a Russian missile strike. 

Since 1997 Ukraine has also cooperated with the United States and NATO forces annually in the “Sea Breeze” multinational military exercises on the northwestern Black Sea coast. Russia participated only once in 1998 and since then has openly opposed the presence of NATO and US warships so close to its Black Sea fleet as the exercises were obviously intended to displace Russia as the predominant naval power in the region.

However, prior to 2014, previous Ukrainian administrations had attempted to maintain historical economic and political relations with Russia while simultaneously increasing ties with Western imperialism and NATO. In 2006 as prime minister and later in 2010 as president, Viktor Yanukovych had effectively stopped Ukraine’s path towards NATO membership leading the NATO Review Journal to condemn what it called a “significant slow-down” in the country’s NATO integration. 

In 2014 in a US-and EU-backed coup, the Yanukovych government was overthrown. The coup triggered not only the Russian annexation of Crimea, a peninsula in the Black Sea, which hosts Russia’s Black Sea fleet, and an eight-year-long civil war in East Ukraine. Above all, it marked the beginning of the systematic, multi-billion dollar transformation of Ukraine’s military into what is essentially a proxy army of the NATO alliance, in order to prepare for all-out war with Russia. 

Building up and restructuring the Ukrainian army

Following the 2014 coup, NATO pushed Ukraine to conduct a major restructuring and buildup, providing billions in funding for military training and equipment. 

The Ukrainian army, which had over 800,000 personnel in 1991, had shrunk to just 130,000 in 2014. Out of these, it was estimated in 2014 that only between 6,000 and 7,000 Ukrainian troops were combat-ready in terms of training, equipment and personnel when hostilities in the Donbass first began. Mass desertions quickly crippled the war effort of Kiev against pro-Russian separatists in the civil war in East Ukraine that raged for eight years before Russia’s invasion in February 2022. 

Thanks to massive funding from NATO and an increase of Ukraine’s military spending to a massive 6 percent of GDP, the armed forces roughly doubled in size between 2014 and 2022, reaching 246,445 in 2021 (with over 195,000 military personnel). Thus, within just a few years, Ukraine’s army became one of the largest armies in the region, second only to Russia’s armed forces.

Beginning in late 2014, the Ukrainian army was also rapidly transformed to operate according to NATO standards. At the same time, the Ukrainian government authorized the formation of far-right militias, such as the Azov Battalion, who could now count on government assistance and training both foreign and domestic. 

Such forces would be used to continue the civil war against Russian-backed Donbass separatists while Ukraine collaborated with the US and NATO to transform its moribund and corrupt military. By 2020, Reuters estimated that such militia forces, largely consisting of and run by far-right extremists, constituted 40 percent of Ukrainian forces and numbered 102,000. 

The internal transformation of Ukraine’s Army to NATO standards was achieved with significant training from both NATO and the US, focusing on changes to command structure and the building of non-commissioned officers (NCOs), who were given permission to quickly make their own decisions in contrast to a more hierarchical Soviet command structure. Interoperability with other NATO forces was a major goal, recognizing that any “winning” of a war with Russia would require fighting alongside NATO forces. Officers suspected of being Russian sympathizers were arrested, discharged or chose to flee to Russia or the Donbass. 

In 2016, the Poroshenko government, which came to power after the 2014 coup, signed the first Strategic Defense Bulletin of Ukraine, outlining the goals and priorities of Ukraine’s NATO-led defense reform. Notably, the first “strategic objective” stated “joint command of defense forces conducted in compliance with principles and standards accepted by the NATO states.” 

A central aim of NATO’s efforts to transform Ukraine into a launching pad of war against Russia was, in its own words, to increase “its presence in the Black Sea” through “stepped up maritime cooperation with Ukraine and Georgia.” The UK, in particular, has invested heavily in “modernizing” the Ukrainian navy. As of February 2022, NATO had 18 warships stationed in the Black Sea.

Ukraine’s National Security Strategy of 2015 already adopted as its first main goal “to create conditions for the restoration of the territorial integrity of Ukraine within the internationally recognized state border.” The two goals combined make clear that the “retaking” of Crimea with the assistance from NATO forces was a major part of Ukraine’s military planning during both the Poroshenko and Zelensky presidencies. By spring 2021, the “retaking” of Crimea and the Donbass by military means was proclaimed Ukraine’s official military strategy.

NATO also initiated a series of programs, including the Comprehensive Assistance Program, in 2016 to “support Ukraine’s goal to implement security and defense sector program reforms according to NATO standards.” In June 2020, under recently elected President Volodymyr Zelensky, NATO granted Ukraine an upgraded status as an “Enhanced Opportunities Partner,” signaling that despite the popular vote for Zelensky, who had run on a platform promising a peaceful resolution of the conflict, Ukraine would remain on the path towards war with NATO’s help. In fact, Zelensky made the joining of NATO a major priority of his administration. 

The Ukraine crisis also became the central pretext for a massive rearmament of NATO. According to NATO’s own data, aggregate member defense expenditures increased significantly after 2014. Between 2015 and 2022, NATO member defense expenditures increased by an average of 3.5 percent, passing from $910 billion in 2014 to an astounding $1.051 trillion so far in 2022. 

In April it was reported that world military expenditures passed $2 trillion for the first time ever, making it clear that the world capitalist ruling class is arming itself to the teeth. Confirming that Ukraine has been central to planning World War III,  the data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute stated world military expenditures “have increased for 7 consecutive years” following “declining military spending between 2011 and 2014.”

Preparing for war: Weapons and training by the imperialist powers before 2022

Leading the push towards war, the US passed the Ukraine Freedom Support Act in December 2014 with support from both Republicans and Democrats, pledging $350 million in military assistance to Ukraine. Although the Obama administration at the time publicly demurred from sending lethal weapons to Ukraine, it did not limit the private export of US-made lethal weapons to Ukraine.

Moreover, the State Department worked with the Department of Defense to allow direct commercial sales of lethal arms to Ukraine, permitting $27 million of commercial defense articles and services to Ukraine in 2016 and about $68 million in 2015, portions of which included lethal weaponry, according to the right-wing think tank the Atlantic Council. Through this program, lethal weapons such as rocket-propelled grenade launchers made their way into the hands of the notorious neo-Nazi Azov Battalion who were pictured using the weapons in training in the summer of 2017 in Mariupol.

Despite the at least public limitation on lethal weapons to Ukraine, between 2014 and 2016 the United States sent the country more than $600 million in military assistance, including body armor, night-vision goggles, vehicles and training, according to the Washington Post.

In regards to Ukraine, former US President Donald Trump is regularly labeled a “Russian asset” by the Democratic Party, but he in fact went even further than his predecessor Barack Obama in arming Ukraine. In 2017, Trump approved the largest US commercial sale of lethal defensive weapons, most notably anti-tank Javelin missiles publicly reversing Obama’s policy. 

The sale marked a significant escalation by the United States as it prepared for a proxy war with Russia. As one unnamed “senior congressional official” told the Washington Post at the time, “We have crossed the Rubicon, this is lethal weapons and I predict more will be coming.”

The first sale of 210 Javelin missiles and 37 launch units was completed in March 2018. 

Despite the Trump administration becoming embroiled in scandals over Trump personally holding up $400 million in assistance to Ukraine, the weapons deliveries continued nonetheless with the approval of another 150 missiles with 10 launchers for $39 million by the State Department in October 2019.

In addition to the United States, the United Kingdom, the Baltic states, the Czech Republic and Poland all delivered weapons and ammunition to Kiev free of charge following 2014. The major arms suppliers to Ukraine from 2016 to 2021 were the Czech Republic, France, Lithuania, Poland and Turkey, according to the Forum on the Arms Trade.

As much of Europe held back from openly sending their own lethal weapons to Ukraine following the 2014 coup, Lithuania quickly emerged as the most brazen conduit for funneling lethal weapons to Ukraine. In 2016 Lithuania sent the country 150 tons of ammunition among other items, and in November 2017 a plan was unveiled to send more than 7,000 Kalashnikov rifles, almost 2 million cartridges, more than 80 machine guns, several mortars, anti-tank weapons and other military equipment to Ukraine. 

While total weapons sent by Lithuania from 2014-2022 amounted to just over $6 million, the policy had its intended effect of antagonizing Russia and escalating tensions in the region. Russia would lodge a formal diplomatic complaint with Lithuania over weapons deliveries to Ukraine in 2015, which Lithuania ignored.  

Huge amounts of money have also been invested in sending “trainers” from various NATO member countries to train Ukrainian soldiers, including members of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. NATO and US trainers increased their presence following 2014, and according to Army Brig. Gen. Joseph Hilbert, the 7th Army Training Command alone had trained a total of 23,000 Ukrainians in Yavoriv up to January 2022. According to British Foreign Minister Ben Wallace, the UK had also trained some 20,000 Ukrainian troops after 2015.

Just prior to the invasion, clearly leaked reports from Yahoo News revealing that a “secret intensive training program” for a CIA-trained insurgency post-invasion also made clear that the United States had placed its bets on the outbreak of a full-scale war with Russia for years.

Ukrainian troops have also received systems training from Canadian, Lithuanian and Polish military instructors. 

Fueling and prolonging the war: The imperialist powers flood Ukraine with weapons 

With the beginning of the full-scale war in February, the supply of weapons to Ukraine became a massive global operation, costing supplier countries huge amounts in both resources and logistics.  

Reporting on the logistical operation being staged by the US, NPR wrote that from the Dover Air Base in Delaware: “They all work 12-hour shifts round the clock. Pallets come in and quickly go out on a waiting aircraft. There are three flights each day bound for an air base in eastern Poland. There’s an address sticker on the pallet, a military district in western Ukraine, right down to the street address. The Ukrainian military has been desperate for the Howitzers and the shells to help push back the Russian forces.”

In May, Mark Cancian, a former Marine colonel and expert on military procurement, revealed to NPR that the United States had already sent a third of its Javelin missiles to Ukraine and that “The stocks are getting low. There’s some risk on certain US war plans that may not be enough for our own purposes.”

As the war continues, the historically unprecedented pace and scale of pledges for military assistance to Ukraine is becoming almost impossible to track. US aid alone to Ukraine would make it 14th in the world’s annual military budgets. In relative terms, Ukraine has already received one-third of total US military aid to the entire world in 2020, and the year is only half over. 

While NATO and US trainers were reportedly pulled from the country following the invasion after President Biden promised to not involve American soldiers, this obscures the reality that US and NATO forces are still on the ground in Ukraine. According to recent reports from the New York Times, NATO, CIA and US Special Operations Forces are all currently operating a “commando network” within Ukraine charged with both bringing in weapons and training Ukrainian forces in their use.  

According to the Times report, training of Ukrainian forces is currently taking place at military bases on Germany, France and Britain. In addition, despite the risks of a full-scale war with a nuclear-armed Russia, CIA officers continue to operate within Ukraine along with a “few dozen commandos” from NATO member countries. The US Army’s 10th Special Forces Group, which had been training Ukrainian commandos prior to the war, also “quietly established a coalition planning cell in Germany to coordinate military assistance to Ukrainian commandos and other Ukrainian troops.”

The article concedes that such an operation is of considerable size and scope and could not have taken place without substantial prior planning by American forces. 

As House Representative Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat on the House Armed Services and Intelligence Committees, acknowledged, “It’s been critical knowing who to deal with during chaotic battlefield situations, and who to get weapons to. Without these relationships, this would have taken much longer.” 

The UK, too, is continuing its training of Ukrainian troops. UK special forces have been revealed to train Ukrainian soldiers in the war zone, and thousands of Ukrainian troops are receiving military training at a special camp in Manchester. While the current program by the British Ministry of Defense envisages the training of 10,000 troops within the next few months, Britain’s Ministry of Defense said in an interview, “If the Ukrainians ask for more, we’ll be open to more.” Asked how many, he said, “We could do thousands and thousands.”

The billions that are being spent on continuing and escalating the war with weapons and training have had devastating consequences for the working class of both the imperialist countries, which is being made to pay for the war, and, more immediately, the population of Ukraine. Less than five months into the war, 12.1 million out of 40 million Ukrainians have become refugees and an estimated 10,000 to 30,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed. The casualties among Russian troops are also estimated in the many thousands. 

Such carnage has had no effect on the war plans of the ruling class. On the contrary, at every step of the way in the past months, the imperialist powers have done everything they could to escalate and prolong the war, that is ultimately only the opening stage of a new struggle for the imperialist redivision of the world. Speaking at the close of the recent NATO Summit in Madrid when asked how long the war could continue, US President Biden replied, “As long as it takes.”

Anti-government protests shake Uzbekistan

Andrea Peters

The Uzbek government is continuing to crack down on anti-government protesters who took to the streets in early July to oppose central authorities’ plans to strip the region of Karakalpakstan of its right to autonomy. Last Friday, the country’s state prosecutor announced it is charging well-known opposition journalist Dauletmurat Tazhimuratov with “conspiracy to overthrow constitutional order.” He is facing a prison sentence of up to 20 years. Hundreds more are still in detention, and another reporter critical of the government has allegedly disappeared.

The largest protests in Uzbekistan in 17 years erupted a week-and-a-half ago in the cities of Nukus, Chimbay, Muynak and elsewhere after the federal government announced that a forthcoming referendum on changes to the constitution would include proposals to end the formal sovereignty and right to secede of Karakalpakstan, a 64,200 square mile autonomous region in the country’s northwest that is home to about 2 million people.

Tens of thousands took to the streets, where they were met with stun grenades, smoke bombs, baton charges and live fire by police dispatched from Tashkent. According to official accounts, 500 were arrested, 18 killed and 243 injured, including 18 on the government’s side. President Shavkat Mirziyoyev has declared a state of emergency until August 2, which includes a nighttime curfew.

Authorities denounced the protests as the product of “criminal groups” and “outside interference” led by those intending to destabilize Uzbekistan through fomenting inter-ethnic strife. But in a concession signifying deep concern over their ability to control the situation, they also said they would remove the proposed change to the region’s status from the constitutional reforms.

Karkalpakstan is a deeply impoverished ecological disaster zone where social discontent over poverty, joblessness, forced child labor and government indifference to the debilitating health effects of being among the most polluted places on earth runs deep. The multi-ethnic autonomous republic, in which Karkalpaks, Uzbeks and Kazakhs each make up about 30 percent of the population, is home to the now-dead Aral Sea.

The completely empty former body of water, drained through decades of misuse by Soviet bureaucrats, is a toxic dump whose dried-out bottom—filled with salts, fertilizers and pesticides—is picked up by the winds and spread across the region. Residents suffer from extremely high rates of anemia, respiratory diseases and cancers, the latter also fueled by elevated levels of uranium in over half of Karakalpakstan’s water sources. A defunct biological weapons lab stationed on one of the Aral Sea’s islands has led to high levels of anthrax in the area’s soil. The central government in Tashkent has done nothing to address these problems.

Speaking to Lenta.ru, political scientist Rafuel Sattarov noted that while the protests took the form of a defense of separatist principles, the real issues fueling the demonstrations are socioeconomic. The population’s “discontent is concentrated around three words—unemployment, the lack of water, and the growth of prices,” he observed.

Uzbekistan as a whole is currently being crushed by inflation, with the United Nations Human Development program recently listing the country as one of 20 in the world hardest hit by rising prices. Essential commodities like sugar, for instance, which is widely used to make jams and preserve fruits to get households through the winter, is disappearing from shelves and only available at a high cost. In Karakalpakstan, even before the present crisis, stores generally did not even bother to carry meat, as it was unaffordable for most.

Highly dependent on foreign remittances—in April 2020, for instance, Uzbek workers sent home more than $1 billion—the combined effect of the COVID-19 pandemic and anti-Russian sanctions is hammering living standards in Uzbekistan and across Central Asia. While the World Bank, an ardent supporter of Tashkent’s recent right-wing economic reforms, hails the fact that only 4.5 million people out of 35 million total live below the poverty index of $1.90 a day, the tens of millions of Uzbek citizens surviving on less than $5 a day are no doubt unaware of their comfortable reality.

In 2019, President Mirziyoyev unveiled a privatization program that whet foreign appetites. Full or partial stakes in over 620 highly profitable companies are being put up for sale, including major financial, energy and infrastructure firms, such as Uzbekneftegaz, Navoi Mining and Metallurgical Combine, Uzbekistan Airways, Uzbekistan Railways and car manufacturer Uzavtosanoat. Gas giant Uzbekneftegaz accounts for 15 percent of the country’s GDP. There are plans to completely privatize the chemical, tourism, manufacturing, food and beverage and finance sectors.

The government’s economic decrees also included the creation of “special economic zones” that allow overseas corporations to set up tax- and regulation-free enterprises, as well as the establishment of various investment advisory boards and implementation of procedural changes aimed at smoothing the process of bringing in foreign capital. In 2019 alone, foreign direct investment grew by 266 percent. With financing from London-based bank Deloitte, the International Finance Corporation, part of the World Bank, just signed a deal in February to assist in the privatization of JSC Ferganazoot, one of Uzbekistan’s largest chemical and fertilizer corporations.

All of the measures undertaken to bring about such results involve wage cuts, gutting workers’ rights and jacking up the cost of basic goods and services. A recent report by the International Energy Agency (IEA) insists, for instance, that Uzbekistan’s “energy market reform” be accompanied by the “withdrawal of subsidies”—i.e., the ending of government spending that holds down the price of gas for ordinary people so that they have a chance of being able to heat their homes and turn on their stoves. According to the IEA, 40 percent of the country’s natural gas goes to this “residential sector.”

In other words, from the standpoint of the world’s investors, too much of Uzbekistan’s gas is ending up in the hands of the population at too low prices, and it ought to be put on a competitive market where the wealthy can profit from it. The vultures are circling.

UK Trade Minister Mike Freer visited Tashkent in early June with a delegation of top business executives from London Stock Exchange, Standard Chartered bank, Arup and TheCityUK “keen to support Uzbekistan’s ambitious privatisation programme,” noted an official statement from London. Freer held discussions with the heads of Uzbekistan’s Airports and Almalyk Mining, which in addition to being the country’s only copper producer also extracts 90 percent of its silver and 20 percent of its gold. Turkey sent a delegation to the capital in March in pursuit of trade, finance and security deals. India is also showing increased interest in securing economic agreements with the country to its northwest.

Uzbekistan is an economically and geopolitically strategic country, whose money-making potentials and significance in the raging conflict between the West and Russia are growing. The country’s working masses are caught in the middle of this both in terms of the miserable social conditions they face and the grand political games being played all around them.

The country sits on 5.5 billion tons of known oil, gas and coal reserves. It is home to one of the world’s largest open-pit gold mines. It is an important energy transit route for China, which for several years has competed with Russia as Uzbekistan’s biggest outside investor. As noted in a July 7 article in Al Jazeera, the US openly “speaks of using counterterrorism and security cooperation [in the region] to counterbalance Russia,” with a delegation of American representatives dispatched to Central Asia in June for the purpose of pursuing these aims.

In response to the unrest in Uzbekistan’s northwest, the Kremlin issued a statement saying that Putin spoke with the country’s president and “expressed support for the efforts of the leadership of Uzbekistan to stabilize the situation in Karakalpakstan.” Moscow is deeply concerned that the United States will draw Tashkent ever more into its orbit.

Its worries are not misplaced. In response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Uzbekistan’s foreign minister demanded of Moscow, “The military actions and violence must be stopped right away.” He declared, “The Republic of Uzbekistan recognizes Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity. We do not recognize the Luhansk and Donetsk republics.”

For its part, in response to the state-directed violence in Karakalpakstan, the United States issued a mealy-mouthed statement in which it signaled that it cared not in the slightest about the dead, injured and arrested. It urged “all sides” to seek a “peaceful resolution” and called on “authorities to pursue a full, credible and transparent investigation into the violence, consistent with international norms and best practices,” in the words of State Department spokesman Ned Price. In short, it told Uzbekistan’s president, “Go right ahead and shoot, but make a gesture at a cover up after the fact.”

In explaining Washington’s response, Maximilian Hess, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, observed, “Mirziyoyev may not be a democrat, but he has … proven to be someone the world, including the West, can do business with.”

Whether the United States will continue in this vein, however, depends on Tashkent’s willingness to break with Moscow. As one commentator writing in Foreign Policy magazine noted on July 6, “Uzbekistan is at a vital crossroads, both in terms of its geography and its policy choices. If the country decides to confront what has happened [in Karakalpakstan] head on and maintain openness that it has developed, it is well positioned to reap benefits.” The “openness” being spoken of is not the democratic rights of Uzbekistan’s people, but Tashkent’s “openness” to Washington. If President Mirziyoyev fails to pursue this, he may discover that the White House has suddenly become a most ardent defender of the Karakalpak people.

Following president’s resignation, political turmoil in Sri Lanka intensifies

Peter Symonds

The acute political crisis in Sri Lanka continues unabated, following huge anti-government protests in central Colombo on Saturday that led to the announcements that President Gotabhaya Rajapakse and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe will both step down. This follows three months of continuous and extensive protests demanding the president’s resignation and relief from the severe social crisis caused by rampaging inflation and dire shortages of essentials including fuel, basic food items and medicines.

Protesters shout slogans at the protest site in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Monday, July 11, 2022. [AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool]

Protesters are still occupying the official residences of both the president and prime minister, as well as the offices of the presidential secretariat. The country’s political and media establishment, along with corporate chiefs and religious leaders are warning of “anarchy” as they engage in desperate manoeuvring to install an interim, all-party government to buy time and maintain bourgeois rule.

President Rajapakse is due to step down tomorrow. The parliamentary speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardhane announced yesterday that he will convene parliament on Friday to declare the post of president vacant. “Nominations for the presidency will be called for on July 19 and a vote will be taken [in parliament] on July 20 to elect a new president,” he said.

According to Abeywardhane, parliamentary party leaders also decided to form an all-party government under the new president and take steps to continue the supply of essential services. Who will take over as president and prime minister and the composition of the interim government are all the subject of intense wrangling behind closed doors.

Even who will function as acting president was the subject of bitter dispute at an all-party meeting convened last weekend. Constitutionally, the prime minister takes on the role in the event of the president’s resignation, with the speaker next in line. As prime minister, Wickremesinghe proposed that he take over but was vehemently opposed by all other party leaders.

Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) leader Maithripala Sirisena, told the meeting that both the president and prime minister had to go, so as to provide at least the appearance of genuine change. The SLFP and other opposition parties, including the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB), the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) and the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), have all been pushing for an interim government and are engaged in frantic jockeying to determine who will lead it.

Whatever the composition of any interim government, when and if it is formed, it will be inherently unstable from the very outset. Of the 225 parliamentary seats, Rajapakse’s party, the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), while deeply divided and split, still holds the most seats.The SJB has 54, the TNA 10 and the JVP 3, while the SLFP and Wickremesinghe’s United National Party (UNP) along with various communally-based Tamil and Muslim parties hold just one seat each. The SJB is a recent breakaway from the right-wing UNP and the SLPP from the equally reactionary SLFP.

The parliamentary line-up is a measure of the decay and disintegration of the political establishment under the impact of the deepening crisis of Sri Lankan and global capitalism. For decades after formal independence in 1948, political life in Colombo was dominated by two parties—the UNP and the SLFP, both of which have now been reduced to rumps. The bourgeoisie confronts its greatest political crisis in more than 70 years with its longstanding political props in tatters.

Behind the scenes, intense diplomatic activity is taking place, with the US playing a very active role in a bid to stabilise bourgeois rule. The fear in Washington and capitals around the world is that the revolutionary upheavals in Sri Lanka will give an impetus to the opposition in the working class internationally amid the continuing COVID-19 pandemic and the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine that is fueling rampant inflation.

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Significantly, the US ambassador to Colombo, Julie Chung, was glowing in her praise of the JVP after a meeting with its leaders last Thursday. She declared that it was “a significant party,” with “a growing presence” that “resonate[s] with the public during recent times.” While acknowledging there had been “a lot of rhetoric in the past,” she found the meeting “really refreshing and honest,” and concluded, “I think we have a good understanding.”

The JVP, a petty-bourgeois radical party, was formed in 1966 on the basis of the “armed struggle” and an ideological mixture of Sinhala communalism, Maoism and Castroism. It has long since exchanged its jungle fatigues and automatic weapons for a comfortable place in the political establishment. The US no doubt calculates that its empty radical posturing will be useful, for a time, under conditions where all of the parties are viewed with deep suspicion and hostility. JVP leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake yesterday threw his hat into the ring, declaring that he was prepared to lead an interim government.

Any interim government will rapidly face intense popular opposition. Far from addressing the pressing social needs of the working class and rural masses, it will be compelled to implement the severe austerity dictates of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in an effort to secure an emergency loan. The country is effectively bankrupt, lacking the foreign reserves to purchases fuel, food, medicines and other essentials.

Yet the IMF is insisting on behalf of international finance capital and the country’s creditors on drastic measures that will only further the suffering of ordinary people under conditions where starvation is becoming widespread, the health system is on the brink of collapse, and those with jobs do not have the means to get to work due to the lack of fuel. Last month, annualised inflation hit 54.6 percent and food inflation spiraled to 80.1 percent. However, all of the parliamentary parties, including the SJB and JVP, declare that there is no alternative but to go begging to the IMF and to implement its agenda.

Parliament itself is already regarded with intense suspicion and hostility. The popular slogans of the past three months not only include “Gota go home”—that is, Rajapakse resign—but also “225 go home”—in other words, all of the parliamentarians should resign. In the midst of this intense political crisis, a particularly pernicious role is being played by various pseudo-left organisations, notably the Frontline Socialist Party that has been prominent in the protests. All of them, in one way or another, foster the dangerous illusion that an interim government will bow to popular pressure and end the suffering of the masses.

The IMF agenda, to which all of the establishment parties are committed, cannot be imposed democratically or peacefully. Without the independent political intervention of the working class, any interim government will be used to buy time, confuse and demoralise the masses, sow poisonous communalism and pave the way for police-state repression and dictatorial forms of rule.

The country’s executive presidency has sweeping powers to install and dismiss governments, assume cabinet posts, call out the military and impose emergency rule. Gotabhaya Rajapakse could use any or all of those powers until, as announced at least, he steps down tomorrow. Significantly, his first action, after taking refuge on a naval vessel last weekend, was to meet yesterday with the country’s military chiefs. Any replacement as president would assume these autocratic powers.