On Wednesday, French President Emmanuel Macron announced plans for France to deliver AMX-10 RC light tanks to the Ukrainian military. This is the first time that Western-designed tanks will be sent to the Ukrainian armed forces. It marks a significant escalation of French involvement in the war.
France said Wednesday January 4, 2023 it will send French-made AMX-10 RC light tanks to Ukraine, the first tanks from a Western European country, following an afternoon phone call between French President Emmanuel Macron and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. [AP Photo/Jeremy Bessat/Armee de Terre]
In a tweet announcing the deal, Macron stated, “Until victory, until peace returns to Europe, our support for Ukraine will not weaken. I confirmed it to President Zelensky: France will provide light combat tanks.” The exact number of AMX-10 RCs to be delivered is unknown, but they will be transferred from the French military, which currently has 248. The vehicles sent to Ukraine will be replaced by EBRC Jaguar vehicles at a cost of €5 million apiece.
In discussions held with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Macron also pledged to deepen France’s air defence support to Ukraine. France has already supplied Crotale air defense batteries and pledged more Caesar artillery pieces, on top of the 18 delivered in 2022. According to Le Monde, Macron is also currently in talks with Italy to send Ukraine SAMP/T Mamba missile batteries to Ukraine, a more modern surface-to-air missile system with similar capabilities to the American-built Patriot missiles already used by the Ukrainian military.
The delivery of light tanks confirms that French imperialism has joined the NATO war on Russia, even though it risks a nuclear conflagration.
In 2019, Macron declared NATO “brain-dead” in an interview with the Economist. He added that US policy towards Russia was unhinged, adding: “When the United States is very harsh with Russia,” the president of France declared, “it is a form of governmental, political, and historical hysteria.”
As the NATO-Russia war began last year, Macron was somewhat reluctant to openly endorse NATO’s policy of provocations against Russia and unlimited expansion of the war in Ukraine. He claimed he aimed to negotiate a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine. On March 28, the New York Times wrote: “Nobody can accuse President Emmanuel Macron of stinting on efforts to avert, defuse or stop Russia’s war in Ukraine.” In February and March, he spoke to Zelensky and Putin and claimed his aim was “securing a cease-fire and then the total withdrawal of troops.”
In March, when then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson supported Zelensky’s call for NATO tanks to be delivered to Ukraine, Macron refused. He said this was a “red line” which, if crossed, would make the NATO powers “co-belligerents.” Now, at the beginning of 2023, Macron is attempting to position French imperialism as a European leader in arming Ukraine.
As recently as December, Macron said that he had two “red lines” on arms deliveries: that it did not affect France’s ability to defend itself, and did not make Paris a co-belligerent in the war.
By coordinating delivery of weaponry and ammunition with other NATO powers, France was in reality a co-belligerent state, according to international law. With the delivery of tanks, which are designed to perform offensive operations, Macron has only shattered what few illusions could have remained that Paris was not at war with a major nuclear-armed state.
This shift developed over the course of 2022 and intensified in particular after the bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline. This effectively ended any chance of renewed French natural gas imports from Russia and aligned French imperialist foreign policy with that of its NATO allies.
The French announcement that it would supply tanks was soon followed by German and US pledges of their own military vehicles. Behind the front of united support for Ukraine, however, are increasing inter-imperialist tensions. Macron’s decision to pioneer tank deliveries is seen by military and political analysts as an attempt to remove France from the military and geopolitical shadow of its rivals, in particular Germany.
Marc Chassillan, engineer and specialist in military land equipment, told Le Monde, “From a political point of view, this announcement is a marker. France will be the first to deliver what the military calls a melee vehicle, i.e., an armored vehicle for close combat.”
Significantly, this has intensified tensions between Paris and Berlin. Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, chairwoman of the Bundestag’s defence committee and a member of the Free Democratic Party, one of Germany’s ruling parties, told AFP: “Once again, France is taking on the role that was expected of Germany and is taking the lead itself. The ball is now in Berlin's court.”
It is no accident that the announcement of delivery of French tanks to Ukraine was announced a few days after Macron declared that 2023 would be the year of pension reform. As in all the NATO powers, the cost of sending billions of euros in French arms to the Ukrainian military while expanding the French military is to be borne by the working class.
France’s military budget for 2023 is €49.3 billion, the highest ever and the largest year-on-year increase in 15 years. This includes an extra €3 billion added in an amendment in October last year, as the French ruling class took the decision to more firmly align itself with NATO’s policy. The military budget is the government’s second-largest budgetary expense, only after education.
In Macron’s New Year’s Eve speech, he announced that 2023 would be the year of pension reform, which has been a central goal of his government in both his first and second terms. His last attempt to force through the reform led to mass public sector strikes in December 2019. By raising the retirement age and freezing pension increases, so that their real value is eaten away by inflation, Macron hopes to find the funds for a massive military expansion.
In 2023, French government spending overall will decrease by 1.5 percent, and 6 percent inflation means expenditure in real terms will be cut even further. Most of these savings come from drastic cuts to the health sector, already suffering from wave after wave of COVID-19 and staffing shortages, including the dismantling of COVID-19 testing infrastructure.
NATO’s embargo of Russian energy exports has primarily impacted the poorest households as energy prices have increased by 15 percent in France, as US natural gas exporters ramp up prices for the European market amid the embargo on Russia. The French population still faces the prospect of winter blackouts due to shortages. So far, however, due to unseasonably mild weather, demand has not exceeded France’s limited energy supply.
Macrons’s delivery of tanks to the Ukrainian military sets the tone for his policy in 2023, that is, for a massive intensification of war with Russia, irrespective of the threat of escalation to all-out nuclear war, and massive austerity meted out to workers.
Since Wednesday, mass protests and roadblocks have taken place daily across Peru. Beyond the initial demands for the resignation of the Dina Boluarte administration, the shutdown of Congress and general elections, protesters are increasingly advancing social demands over the high cost of living and staggering social inequality.
Demonstrators block the Pan-American highway to protest against President Dina Boluarte's government and Congress in Ica, Peru, Friday, Janaury 6, 2023. [AP Photo/Martin Mejia]
The latest upsurge follows a holiday lull in the nationwide demonstrations triggered by the December 7 impeachment and arrest of president Pedro Castillo. On the same day, his vice president, Boluarte, was installed as part of a parliamentary coup orchestrated by the far-right parties in control of Congress, the US embassy, and the Peruvian military leadership.
The unrest increased dramatically after the suspension of democratic rights and the deployment of troops under a national state of emergency since December 14. The repression by the military and police has resulted in at least 28 demonstrators killed and hundreds injured, including many from live ammunition. Mock coffins have become one of the most common props carried by demonstrators.
In the context of a “national strike” since Wednesday, thousands have marched in the capital Lima, Arequipa, Ayacucho, Huancayo, Cusco, and Puno, while roadblocks were set up across the country, primarily in the south. The southern Pan-American highway remains blocked. The police and military have harassed marchers, blocked the entry to the locations frequented by protesters and used tear gas, rubber bullets, batons, fists, and boots to disperse them.
On Friday, 46 roadblocks were still reported, primarily in the southern departments of Cusco and Puno. As commercial activities grind increasingly to a halt due to the roadblocks and the participation of many workers and small shopkeepers in the protests, several trade unions in the service sector have been compelled to join the strike.
While Castillo’s 16 months in power were marked by concessions to the far right and foreign capital, including the suppression of protests over inflation and mining practices, the coup is widely recognized as a preemptive move by US imperialism and the Peruvian oligarchy. Their aim is to clamp down on the years of social protests and political instability in order to secure the operations of the transnational mining corporations and as a means of further imposing the burden of the deepening economic crisis on the backs of workers and the rural poor.
In an interview with La República, Maritza Paredes, head sociology professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, explained that demonstrators don’t express support for Castillo and that recent polls showed that most Peruvians believed that “if Castillo goes, they should all go.”
“The demonstrators are responding quite viscerally since, when they place rocks, block the highways, and kidnap police officials, they don’t know what to do next. There is no coordination or major social organizations,” she indicated.
At the same time, there are indications of a growing self-awareness that the struggles are being driven by opposition to social inequality and capitalism.
A young protester at a roadblock in Ica told La Lupa, “It’s because the poor people are rising up sweating that they have deployed the military, to oppress us, to beat us, to shoot at us. This is the march of the poor—the agricultural, mining, and rural workers. They don’t care if they kill 100, 200, 300 … We are all agricultural workers here.”
A small farmer at a roadblock in Asillo, Puno, told a local reporter who asked if he was a terrorist, “I feel the hunger, the need, the misery that we all carry here in Peru and other nations. Our needs compel us. We are nothing. On the contrary, Dina Boluarte is a terrorist. The congresspeople are terrorists. We are fighting because of our needs and we must fight until the last consequences to achieve our objective because they are looting the resources of our Peru.”
A demonstrator in Andahuaylas said that the government “doesn’t represent them.” He added: “We struggle every day. Look at how much a potato costs. What we make is not enough for anything. If Peru has silver, why are we poor? That is why people are fighting here.”
There is no institution or organization in Peru that retains any political credibility, which hinders the efforts of the ruling elite to contain and channel the incipient uprising into safe channels. However, the spontaneous and leaderless character of the protests also makes them vulnerable to a further crackdown that is consciously being prepared.
The Peruvian corporate media has been filled with mentions of “terrorist groups,” in some cases citing extinct guerrilla groups. The narrative is systematically being fabricated that the massacres of disarmed youth with live ammunition, the brutal beatings and volleys of tear gas canisters are somehow justified by this nonexistent threat. Throughout the 1990s, such language was used to promote the authoritarian regime of Alberto Fujimori, who is now jailed for corruption and organizing death squads.
After naming several teenagers killed in the protests, whose impoverished rural background was reported by the local press, the host of the ATV evening news, Juliana Oxenford, ranted: “It must be investigated whether any of them belonged to terrorist bands, teams of genocidal killers. Of course, we need to rest assured that the police and military had to use the tool of firearms.”
The reactionary detention of Castillo and the persecution of his former prime minister Aníbal Torres on trumped up charges of “rebellion” is also being exploited to evoke the threat of armed insurrection by “terrorists.” Even their lawyer Wilfredo Robles was smeared as a “terrorist” on live television for his ties as a youth to the Maoist guerrilla group Sendero Luminoso.
The corporate media and police promoted rallies on Tuesday demanding the suppression of the protests under the Orwellian slogan of “Peace and Democracy.” The affluent attendees took over the San Martin Plaza in downtown Lima, which is blocked to demonstrators.
“These are the basic lines of the national government headed by me: The Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop settlement in all parts of the Land of Israel – in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan, Judea and Samaria.”
– Benjamin Netanyahu, December 30, 2023
Anyone with but half eye open during the last several decades should by now realize that undisclosed Zionist Long Game preceded the establishment of Israel in 1948, and aims at extending Israeli sovereignty over the whole of Occupied Palestine, with the possible exception of Gaza. The significance of Netanyahu’s public affirmation of this previously secretive long game is that it may be reaching its final phase and the far right governing coalition is poised to pursue closure.
Netanyahu claim of exclusive Israel’s supremacy on behalf of the Jewish people over the whole of the promised land is in direct defiance of international law. Additionally, Netanyahu’s statement is at direct odds with Biden’s stubborn insistence, however farfetched, on reaffirming support for two-state solution. This zombie approach to resolving the Israel/Palestine struggle has dominated international diplomacy for years, usefully allowing the UN and its Western members to maintain their embrace of Israel without seeming to throw the Palestinian people under the bus.
Netanyahu’s brazen avowal of Israeli unilateral expansionism foregoes earlier diplomatic charades. It challenges the UN, Palestinian Authority, governments around the world, and transnational civil society to open finally both eyes and finally admit that the two-state solution is dead.
In fairness, it is true that this Zionist Long Game has only recently become apparent to all but the closest observers of the struggle. Throughout the 20thcentury this process of progressive expansionism was hidden from public view by a combination of Israeli domination of the public narrative and U.S. complicity, which deceived especially diaspora Zionists by assuming that Israel was open to a political compromise and that it was the Palestinians who were resisting a diplomatic outcome. Such an interpretation of the stalemate was always misleading. The Zionist Project from its very beginnings, more than a century ago, proceeded by stages to accept whatever was politically attainable at any given time, and then moving on to the next stage in its fuller colonization plan.
This pattern of expansionist priorities became especially evident in the periods following the Balfour Declaration of 2017 and after World War II. The infamous colonial Declaration had pledged British support for ‘a national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine, made credible by accommodating ballooning Jewish immigration during the period of British mandatory administration that lasted from 1923 until 1948. Then came the UN partition resolution UNGA Res. 181), which not only ignored Palestinian rights of self-determination by partitioning their country without a prior referendum, changing the status of the Jewish presence from ‘national home’ within the state of Palestine to a sovereign Jewish state on fully half of Palestine. Such impositions were greeted positively by Zionist, but rejected by representatives of the Palestinian people and by neighboring Arab governments, leading directly to the 1948 War, which resulted in the catastrophic dispossession of an estimated 750,000 Palestinians, known to its victims as the nakba, ending with a ceasefire that increased Israel’s share of Palestine from 55% to 78%.
Then came the 1967 War, which drove Jordan out of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, dispossessed another wave of indigenous Palestinians, known among Palestinian as the naksa. It also resulted in Israel’s prolonger occupation, supposedly temporary but the establishment of many unlawful Jewish settlements encroaching on what had been projected as a coexisting Palestinian state in the West Bank and East Jerusalem strongly suggested that all along Israel’s leadership envisioned permanent arrangements with an end game in mind that did not include viable Palestinian statehood. Another strong straw in the wind back in 1967 was Israel immediate declaration and enactment of a sovereign claim over the whole of an enlarged Jerusalem as the ‘eternal capital’ of the Jewish state. This incorporation of Jerusalem was repeatedly rejected by overwhelming votes in the General Assembly, duly ignored by the Israeli government.
There were many lesser displays of virtuoso salami slicing of Palestinian rights and expectations in the subsequent 55 years. The Oslo diplomatic charade that lingered for 20 years after the hyped handshake between Rabin and Arafat on the White House lawn was the most notable stunt along these lines. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems clear that in the Israeli strategic imaginary ‘peace’ was never what Oslo was about. The real Israeli justification for Oslo, besides satisfying international pressure for some semblance of negotiations was to gain the needed time to make the settlement movement large and diffuse enough as to become irreversible. Such an obvious assault on the two-state mantra should then have been the death knell of two-state duplicity, but it wasn’t because its continuing international avowal, until now, was mutually convenient for both the Israeli leadership and to friendly foreign governments, and even to a UN too weak to insist on israeli compliance with international law. Israel’s 2018 Basic Law proclaiming the supremacy of Jews in ‘the promised land of Israel,’ including the whole of the West Bank, came a giant step closer to revealing the integral goals of the Zionist Progrect endorsed by Netanyahu to coincide with the swearing in of his fourth go at being the Prime Minister.
Yet, despite these manifest successes of this Zionist Long Game is from some perspectives more in doubt than it has ever been, strange as that might seem from a purely materialist view of politics. The Palestinian people have held firm in their commitment to self-determination throughout the century of being tested by this series of Israeli settler encroachments, including representation by the quasi-collaborative leadership offered by the Palestinian Authority. The spirit of resistance and struggle has been sustained by a Palestinian deep culture of steadfastness of sumud. Resistance while sporadic never disappeared.
Additionally, the weight of evolving historical circumstances has enabled the Palestinians to achieve important victories in The Legitimacy War being waged by the two peoples for the control of symbolic and normative spaces in the wider struggle. Over the course of the last decade the international political discourse increasingly accepted the Palestinian narrative of Israel as ‘a settler colonial state,’ a damaging assessment in an era where colonialism elsewhere was being dismantled by the weaker side militarily, suggesting the unrecognized leverage of law, morality, and nationalist mobilization in out maneuvering a militarily superior adversary.
Beyond this, and more formally, the once radical accusation of apartheid directed at the Israeli state became validated over the course of the last six years by carefully documented reports of the UN (ESCWA), Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and even the fiercely independent Israeli NGO, B’Tselem. As memories of the Holocaust faded and wrongdoing toward Palestinian rights became harder to shove under the rug, world public opinion especially in the West, became somewhat more sympathetic to and convinced by the Palestinian narrative, and as significantly, the relevance of the South African precedent became harder to ignore.
Further symbolic Palestinian victories included widespread diplomatic recognition of Palestinian statehood by many governments in the Global South, non-voting membership in the UN, access to the International Criminal Court and its 2021 judgment authorizing the investigation of Palestinian allegations of international crimes in Occupied Palestine after 2014, and at the end of 2022 of the approval by a wide margin of a General Assembly Resolution requesting an Advisory Opinion from the World Court in The Hague on the prolonged unlawful occupation of Palestinian territories. The 2022 HRC appointment of a high-level Commission of Inquiry with a broad mandate to investigate Israel wrongdoing occurred after the frustrations associated with decades of israeli non-compliance with international humanitarian law in the OPT.
Israeli and its puppet NGOs, UN Watch and NGO Monitor, recognized the gravity of these developments, as did the Israeli government, being intelligently sensitive to the precedent set. by the collapse of the apartheid regime in South Africa as a result of a blend of resistance, symbolic delegitimation, and global solidarity initiatives. Israel and its militants fought back, with unwavering support of the U.S. Government, but not substantively, recognizing the risks of bringing any further attention to the substance of Israel’s policies, practices, and racist ideology. Instead, it attacked the critics and their institutional venues, including even the UN, as antisemitic, smearing conscientious legal experts and even international civil servants and the institutions themselves. This has created a sufficient diversionary smokescreen to enable Biden and top EU bureaucrats to keep faith with the ever more hollow prospect of ‘two states for two peoples’ when they must know by this time that such a policy has is moribund even as a public relations tactic. Especially now that an apparently cocky Netanyahu has told them so to their faces.
Given this line of interpretation, contrary to media commentary, Netanyahu is likely pleased that his governing coalition includes the Religious Zionism (RZ) and Jewish Powerbloc. RZ, led by Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvar seem useful, if not natural allies of Likud in launching this culminating phase of the Zionist Project, which involves territorial consolidation over the whole of the promised land and likely moves to inflict further dispossession of Palestinians—a second Nakba—from their native lands. Seen in this way, the Netanyahu declaration above amounts to a virtual road map, hopefully with RZ taking most of the blame for its inflammatory and likely violent implementation.
Given this background, the present context should be understood differently than the prevailing mode of reporting on the most right-wing and extremist government in the history of Israel and the awkwardness of relying on a coalition that gives dangerous influence to RZ. It is instructive to notice that most of the regrets expressed in the U.S. about the outcome in the 2022 Israeli elections is its possibly negative impact on support for Israel in the liberal democracies, especially, among predominantly secular dominant communities in the Jewish diaspora. Little empathy or concern is expressed by the probability of intensifying suffering endured by the Palestinians, whose plight has been subject to Orientalist erasures throughout the struggle.
In Biden’s indoubtedly unconscious display of such Orientalist insensitivity to Palestinian rights, much less their legitimate aspirations, the wording of an official statement congratulating Netanyahu, Biden warrants scrutiny: “I look forward to working with Prime Minister Netanyahu, who has been my friend for decades, to jointly address the many challenges and opportunities facing Israel and the Middle East region, including threats from Iran.” In the same text, the American president asserts that “the United States will continue to support the two state solution and to oppose policies that endanger its viability or contradict our mutual interests and values.”
Most pro-Israeli commentary on the shift to the right on the part of the Israeli voting public attributes the extremist outcome in the November elections to either the absence of ‘a partner’ in the search for peace, a response to Palestinian ‘terrorism’ or the rising influence of the religious right within Israel, and the emboldening effects of the normalization agreements (so-call Abraham Accords) reached in 2020 during the last months of the Trump presidency. Undoubtedly, these contextual factors were influential in persuading a larger segment of Israeli voters to swallow their dislike of a governing coalition that gave strong influence to RZ, seemingly the foretaste of a now plausible Jewish theocratic fascism, preferring their hopes of a unilaterally imposed Israeli ‘victory’ scenario to the hypocritical uncertainties of the diplomatic status quo that is disinterested in negotiating a political compromise with its Palestinian counterpart.
My own encounters with liberal Zionist in America emphasized that Israeli good will with respect to a political deal with the Palestinian had run into a brick wall of Palestinian hard line opposition, an indirect validation of the ‘no partner’ excuse, or at best, the false symmetry of blaming both sides in a situation where one side was the oppressor and the other the oppressed, a situation accentuated by the insistence that Israeli’s closest ally and geopolitical source of security serve as intermediary. Nothing exhibited Palestinian weakness more dramatically than their willingness to rely on such a flawed diplomatic process for the realization of their prospect of such basic rights as self-determination.
While these factors have been endlessly analyzed in piecing together in composing an exoteric or public narrative, the real story—the deep roots of these developments—is yet to be told. It is bound up with an esoteric or secret narrative that antedates the establishment of Israel in 1948, and whose slow unfolding involved the pragmatic adaptation of the utopian character of Zionist Project of recovering Palestine during a period when these ultimate goals seemed hopelessly out of reach.
The UK government is proceeding with its authoritarian crackdown on workers’ right to strike. Ministers intend to use the legislation to ram through pay cuts, job losses and speed-ups, amid the biggest fall in living standards in generations, to fund increased corporate profits and a surge in military spending.
Before Christmas, the ruling Conservative Party announced plans to introduce minimum service levels (MSLs) on the railways, requiring a certain number of employees to stay on the job during a strike. On Thursday, the government announced this frontal assault on democratic rights will be extended to workers in eight sectors, including teachers and nurses.
Train drivers on the picket line in Bournemouth, January 5, 2023 [Photo: WSWS]
Fire, ambulance and rail services will have a minimum safety level enforced by the government, after a meaningless “consultation”. Other health and transport services, plus the education, border security and nuclear decommissioning sectors, will have minimum staffing levels enforced if a “voluntary” agreement cannot be reached with trade unions. This is a round-about way of saying minimum service levels will be compulsory here also.
The legislation is expected to be moved in parliament “in the coming weeks.” It directly targets those sections of workers engaged in or planning large national strikes.
In the same statement, the government invited the public sector unions to direct talks on pay deals for 2023-24—pointedly moving on from the massively below inflation 2022-23 deals being fought in the current disputes. It attacks “inflation-matching pay awards”.
According to the statement, “Trade unions will be bound to follow this legislation and will risk the employer bringing an injunction to prevent the strike from taking place or seeking damages afterwards if they do not comply with their obligations.” The Tories have already quadrupled the damages for failing to comply that can be levied against the largest unions to £1 million.
A front-page report in the Times, published the day the statement was released and in clear coordination with the government, revealed, “Employers would be able to sue unions, and union members who were told to work under the minimum service requirement but refused to do so could be dismissed.”
A source told the paper, “This legislation will remove the legal immunity for strikes where unions fail to implement a minimum level of service. The strikes will be illegal. Ultimately people could be fired for breach of contract.”
The Times reported that previously raised plans to increase the ballot threshold for industrial action could be “dropped in an attempt to streamline the legislation and speed up its passage through the Lords,” but a final decision has not been made. Other measures including “doubling the minimum notice period for industrial action from 14 days and reducing the six-month limit for industrial action after a successful ballot” have also been floated.
Whatever its final form, the legislation is a major escalation in the class war being waged by the Tory government. This has global significance. Its statement specifically highlights “countries across the world such as France and Spain that already have minimum service agreements in place, to prevent large swathes of their economies being ground to a halt by industrial action.”
Last October, striking French oil refinery workers were requisitioned on pain of a six-month jail sentence or £10,000 fine. The month before, Spanish Ryanair staff faced disciplinary action for walking out in defiance of minimum service laws in the airline industry.
Striking workers gather at the entrance of the TotalEnergies oil depot, October 13, 2022 outside Dunkirk, northern France. [AP Photo/Michel Spingler]
Millions of workers will demand a mass, coordinated response to stop these plans in their tracks. But such a movement is precisely what the trade union bureaucracy wants to avoid at all costs. Aware they are sitting on a social powder keg they have tried to defuse through the sabotage and sellout of the last six months of strikes—including already ending a national strike by 40,000 telecoms workers—the union leaders’ fear is that the government’s announcement will set things ablaze.
Their determination to avoid a confrontation was paraded earlier this week in a series of interviews given by new head of the Trades Union Congress Paul Novak. He told the Financial Times that the only response to be mounted would be a “legal challenge”. Nowak dismissed calls to repeal bans on sympathy strikes imposed by Margaret Thatcher, telling the Mirror, “It’s not about going back to the 80s.”
The closer the government comes to enacting its plans, the more desperately the union bureaucracy reaches out. Nowak chose the word “unworkable” to describe the new legislation, then repeated his invitation to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to “take up my offer to get around the table to improve this year’s pay and end the current disputes.”
Unite General Secretary Sharon Graham called on Sunak to “step up to the plate, act as a leader and start negotiating.” The GMB union declared itself “always ready to discuss”. The Royal College of Nursing’s Pat Cullen promised to “meet with ministers,” pleading, “only negotiations on our dispute can avert the planned action this month.” She and Unison Assistant General Secretary Jon Richards pledged to “look closely at what the government releases next week” and to be “examining these proposals and considering how to respond, including any appropriate legal challenge.”
The Enough is Enough campaign, fronted by the Rail, Maritime and Transport union, Communication Workers Union and University and College Union revealed Thursday that a petition launched to protest the proposed minimum services legislation has been backed by more than 100,000 people. But despite the groundswell of opposition to the legislation and to a widely hated government enforcing it, Enough is Enough proposes no mass mobilisation of the working class—including calling immediate strikes—to fight it. It issued a press release declaring only, “Enough is Enough is planning to follow the petition with local meetings, rallies and protests across Britain in the coming weeks.”
The union leaders’ main appeal is for the Tories to rely on them to police and suppress the working class, rather than rely on state repression that will meet determined opposition. What they want is a corporatist arrangement, where sellout deals for workers are struck between employers, the government, and the unions in behind-closed-doors negotiations—with just enough fig leaves proffered to smooth their passage.
This is the policy advocated to the ruling class by Labour. Leader Sir Keir Starmer and Deputy Leader Angela Rayner were as one with the TUC’s Nowak, with Rayner calling the government’s proposals “unworkable and unserious.”
Her comments followed Starmer’s, “I don’t think this legislation is going to work. I am pretty sure they have had an assessment that tells them that it is likely to make a bad situation worse.”
In a speech Thursday setting out Labour’s own right-wing plans for government, Starmer stated the common objective uniting Labour, the unions and the Tories, questioning whether the new laws would “bring an end to industrial disputes.”
The Tories, however, feel they cannot rely on the union bureaucracy to act with sufficient determination against their members without cracking the whip. They intend to make the most of the bureaucracy’s sabotage of the strike wave it currently leads, hoping to demoralise workers by sporadic, ineffectual, and uncoordinated action while galvanising sections of the middle class they hope will become frustrated with the disruption caused by industrial action with no clear plan for victory. This was the strategy pursued by their ideological mentor in the 1980s. They hope that defeats inflicted on the working class in this way will first bring an end to the strike wave and enable them to fight the next general election on a ticket of bringing “order” and stability.
The technology monopoly Amazon officially confirmed on Wednesday the layoff of 18,000 employees, significantly intensifying the impact of the US government-instigated recession on tech workers.
In this Thursday April 16, 2020 file photo, The Amazon logo is seen in Douai, northern France. [AP Photo/Michel Spingler]
In an update published on the company news site, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote that, including the layoffs announced in November, “we plan to eliminate just over 18,000 roles.” Jassy said that the “majority of the role eliminations are in our Amazon Stores and PXT organizations.”
Last March, Amazon announced it was closing all 68 of its physical retail store locations without specifying how many jobs would be impacted. The layoffs in Amazon’s PXT—which stands for People Experience Team—are essentially what are called human resource department employees at most companies.
Jassy wrote that one of the company’s employees had leaked the information about the total number of Amazon layoffs and management decided “to share this news earlier so you can hear the details directly from me.” The employees who are about to lose their jobs will begin to find out from Amazon officially, “starting on January 18,” Jassy added.
In late November and early December, tech media outlets began reporting that Amazon was planning to lay off as many as 20,000 employees, after leaks about the extent of the global e-commerce company’s cost-cutting plans began to emerge. At that time, Jassy confirmed layoffs were in the works but declined to specify the number.
Jassy, who took over as CEO of the world’s second largest corporate employer from billionaire founder Jeff Bezos in July 2021, went on to claim that the mass layoffs were a good thing. He wrote, in corporate-speak that serves to obscure the meaning of what is happening, “These changes will help us pursue our long-term opportunities with a stronger cost structure,” and, “I’m also optimistic that we’ll be inventive, resourceful, and scrappy in this time when we’re not hiring expansively and eliminating some roles.”
On the same day of the Amazon announcement, the cloud-based business software company Salesforce announced it would lay off 10 percent of its staff. In a letter to employees, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said, after “thinking a lot about how we came to this moment,” that he had hired too many “leading into this economic downturn we’re now facing, and I take responsibility for that.”
Also on Wednesday, Anjali Sud, the CEO of the video platform Vimeo, said 11 percent of the staff would be laid off in the new year, citing an “uncertain economic environment.” Sud wrote that Vimeo is “entering 2023 with a more focused strategy” and the job cuts enable the company to “achieve our growth and profitability goals in a way that is far less dependent on the broader market.” The video hosting and sharing company with 260 million users went public in May 2021 and its stock market value has fallen steadily ever since, going from $57 a share down to $3.72 today.
The layoffs at Amazon, Salesforce and Vimeo are added to the 238,000 tech workers who lost their jobs in 2022. According to TrueUp’s tech layoff tracker, so far there have been 25 company layoffs impacting 17,815 workers in 2023. On January 5 alone, there were 11 companies that announced layoffs of a total of 1,320 workers.
What none of the corporate statements have acknowledged is the fact that the primary cause of the economic slowdown behind the layoffs is the shift in US Federal Reserve monetary policy, with a series of sharp interest rate increases aimed at driving up unemployment.
The primary objective of this strategy—which is modeled on the policy implemented in the late 1970s and early 1980s during the era of Fed Chairman Paul Volcker—is to use unemployment as a weapon to suppress the growing demand of workers for increases in wages and benefits under conditions of skyrocketing price inflation.
The sharp edge of the Fed’s recession policy is being felt among tech workers because the internet, social media, software and computer technology industries are dependent on investment capital and highly susceptible to changes in interest rates. The transition away from near-zero to 4.25-4.5 percent interest rates, which have increased borrowing costs to the highest levels since 2007, is having a dramatic and immediate impact on tech jobs.
Meanwhile, tech stocks on Wall Street have seen the most dramatic declines over the past year and the financial oligarchy is demanding dramatic cost-cutting measures. In the case of Amazon, for example, the stock value on January 7, 2022 was $162.55 and today it was $83.12, or a decline of nearly 50 percent in the past year, for a drop in the company’s value of $856 billion.
On Monday, pymnts.com reported that the top ten tech stocks—including Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Apple, Microsoft and Meta (Facebook and Instagram)—lost a total of $4.6 trillion in 2020.
The Biden administration, backed to the hilt by its European imperialist allies, has opened up a new front in its campaign of aggression and intrigue against Iran, focusing on Tehran’s increasing economic and military ties with Russia.
Washington is vilifying Iran as an accomplice of Russian “aggression,” even “genocide,” so as to further isolate Iran’s beleaguered Shia clergy-led bourgeois nationalist regime, and bully the Gulf States and Israel, which have hitherto sought to balance between Ukraine and Russia, into giving their unconditional support to the US/NATO-instigated war in Ukraine.
This development underscores the degree to which US imperialism’s brutal and reckless war in Ukraine, alongside its broader preparations for war with China, are exacerbating explosive conflicts across the Middle East, even as living standards plummet.
The US has supplied Ukraine with advanced missiles and other high-tech weapons, including the High-Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS ) pictured above. [AP Photo/Roman Koksarov]
Washington has denounced Iran for selling Moscow hundreds of its “kamikaze” Shahid 136 self-detonating drones, also known as swarming drones, that have been used to target Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure and leave millions of Ukrainians in freezing conditions without power, heat, mobile phone service and even water.
The cynicism and hypocrisy of the imperialist powers has no limits. These drones pale in comparison with the air firepower, including advanced missiles and drones, some of which have been used to strike deep inside Russia, that the US has supplied Ukraine—to say nothing of the tens of billions of dollars of other advanced weaponry it and the NATO powers have showered on Kiev.
As its $5,000-$20,000 cost indicates, the Shahed 136 has quite limited capabilities. With a maximum speed of 185 kilometres (115 miles) per hour and a range of 2,200 kilometres, it can carry a warhead of up to 40 kilograms (88 pounds). It is not very good at evading air defence systems. Hundreds have reportedly been shot down over Ukraine in recent weeks. But being cheap, they can be deployed in swarms so that even if most are intercepted, a few will reach their targets to devastating effect.
In recent weeks, numerous articles have appeared in the US, European and Israeli media citing unnamed intelligence and other government officials charging Iran with stepping up drone deliveries to Russia and planning shipments of more sophisticated weaponry. Kiev has claimed that Russia has ordered 2,600 or more Shahed 136 drones from Teheran, while the Washington Post reported in November that intelligence officials told it Iran is building a drone-manufacturing facility in Russia. Iran has also been accused of planning to provide Moscow with short-range ballistic missiles, including the Fateh-110 and Zolfaghar. They can strike at distances of 300 and 700 kilometres (186 and 435 miles), but would be significantly harder to shoot down.
In addition to these claims, US and British officials have publicly charged that military-strategic cooperation between Russia and Iran has reached an “unprecedented level.” “In return for having supplied more than 300 kamikaze drones, Russia now intends to provide Iran with advanced military components, undermining both Middle East and international security,” British Defence Minister Ben Wallace declared last month. Wallace declined to provide any details. But it has been suggested that Moscow is considering selling Tehran everything from its S-400 missile defence system to Sukhoi-35 fighter jets.
For his part, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has labelled Iran Russia’s main defence partner and accused Tehran of actively considering providing Moscow with ballistic missiles that could target West European cities.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky repeated and amplified these claims in his Dec. 21 speech, which was carefully crafted to dovetail with Washington’s line, to a joint session of the US Congress. He denounced Iran as Russia’s “ally” in its “genocidal” use of missiles to destroy Ukrainian cities: “That is how one terrorist has found the other. It is just a matter of time when they will strike against your other allies if we do not stop them now. We must do it.”
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken followed up Zelensky’s plea for a massive injection of aid and weaponry, including advanced systems capable of shooting down ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and Russian warplanes, with an announcement that the US would send Kiev at least one battery of Patriot surface-to-air missiles.
Israel’s spy chief David Barnea simultaneously warned that Iran “intends” to 'expand and deepen its supply of advanced weaponry to Russia,' presaging “attacks on Muslim countries in the region.”
Ties between Russia and Iran have become closer over the past year. In July, just days after Biden had visited Saudi Arabia and Israel as part of a Mideast tour focused on forging a US-led alliance against Iran, Russian President Vladimir Putin travelled to Tehran for a summit meeting with Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. Following that meeting, Khamenei, according to Reuters, wrote on his website that if Russia had not invaded Ukraine, “the other side would have taken the initiative and caused the war.”
However, the partnership between the Islamic Republic and the Putin regime is purely one of convenience, with each pursuing its own interests and ambitions.
Whatever the truth in the claims Iran continues to supply Russia with drones or plans to build a drone factory there—claims both have denied—there is no evidence that either country is providing or plans to provide advanced weaponry to the other. Such cooperation would threaten key tenets of current Russian policy in the Middle East.
In Syria, where both countries have intervened to prop up President Bashar al-Assad’s regime against the Islamist proxies backed by the CIA, the Gulf petro-states and Turkey, Moscow has allowed Israel—whose prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has close relations with Putin—to launch hundreds if not thousands of aerial strikes on facilities and personnel belonging to Iran, Hezbollah and other allies, as well as on Syria’s civilian airports. Similarly, supplying Tehran, which is desperate to replace its aging air fleet, with advanced weaponry would jeopardise Putin’s burgeoning relations with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Israel, all of which are virulently hostile to Iran.
None of this excludes the possibility that as the US-NATO war on Russia escalates during 2023 and Washington intensifies pressure on Iran, Moscow and Tehran will be forced into a tighter embrace, adding a further explosive dimension to their respective conflicts with the Western imperialist powers.
Indeed, there is a growing danger that the US-NATO drive to militarily defeat and subjugate Russia will, whether directly or indirectly, help trigger a major Mideast war, or the expansion of the current war, as it assumes the form of an ever more direct confrontation between Russia and US imperialism, to the Middle East.
The US counter-offensive against Iran’s drones
In an article co-written by the veteran CIA conduit David Sanger and published by the New York Times on Dec. 28, Washington announced it has launched a major campaign to thwart Iran’s ability to manufacture drones and deliver them to Russia. According to the Times, this is “an endeavor that has echoes of its years-long program to cut off Tehran’s access to nuclear technology.”
National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson described the wide-ranging actions the US has initiated, saying, “We are looking at ways to target Iranian U.A.V. (unmanned aerial vehicle) production through sanctions, export controls, and talking to private companies whose parts have been used in the production.” The US, the article explained, will also step up its efforts to provide Ukraine with the ability to shoot down Iranian “kamikaze” drones.
However, the article also cited warnings from officials and analysts that such approaches are likely to have a limited impact. Without stating it explicitly, the article hinted that the US, in conjunction with its attack dog in Tel Aviv, will undertake a new campaign of sabotage against Iran, paralleling the cyberattacks, assassinations of key personnel, and other covert actions it has used to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program.
Washington’s targeting of Tehran’s supplying of drones to Russia marks an escalation and new front in its confrontation with Iran. Through crippling economic sanctions, military provocations and threats of war, successive US administrations, under Republican and Democrats alike, have sought to engineer a pro-US political realignment in Tehran, if not full-scale regime change.
In August of last year, it appeared that the Biden administration was on the brink of signing off on an agreement with Tehran to revive the 2015 nuclear accord, having extracted further concessions from Iran by continuing the campaign of “maximum pressure” aimed at crashing Iran’s economy that the Trump administration had launched when it unilaterally withdrew the US from the accord in 2018.
However, Washington suddenly changed course and, backed by its European allies, has now indicated that reviving the nuclear accord is no longer a “priority.” The intensification of the Ukraine war is the principal cause of this shift. It came after Ukrainian military forces, armed with ever more powerful and expensive US weapons systems and assisted by American intelligence and logistical support, began to inflict a series of humiliating defeats on Russian forces. In response, Moscow has attacked Ukrainian infrastructure—attacks that have become more frequent in recent months and in which Iranian-made drones have apparently come to play a major role.
Washington and its allies are clearly determined to make Iran pay for interfering, however modestly, in their plans to subjugate Russia and plunder its resources. Tehran continues to insist it is ready to make a deal with Washington and that back-channel talks continue. Insofar as the latter is true, it can be certain Washington, London, Paris and Berlin are demanding iron-clad guarantees from the Iranian regime that any and all military aid for Moscow will cease.
The imperialist attempt to leverage the mass anti-government protests in Iran
The imperialist powers have also sought to intensify pressure on the Iranian regime by intervening in the mass anti-government protests that erupted last September against the political privileges, social control and endemic corruption of the Islamic Republic’s Shia clerical elite, as well as soaring prices and mass joblessness. The protests were triggered by the September police detention death of Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested for wearing her hijab improperly.
The likes of Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron have publicly called for the regime’s overthrow, and the Western media and political establishment are relentlessly promoting a plethora of pro-imperialist émigré leaders and groups, from Reza Pahlavi, the Shah’s son and would-be successor to the Peacock Throne, to US-allied Kurdish nationalist militia.
Shedding crocodile tears, the Western powers have seized on the regime’s bloody suppression of the anti-government protests to rail against the “mullahs’ regime,” announce new rounds of sanctions and engineer a vote at the UN’s Human Rights Council to mount an investigation into human rights abuses in Iran.
Now the US, along with Britain and France, are mendaciously trying to argue that Iran’s export of drones to Russia is in breach of UN Security Council Resolution 2231—the resolution endorsing the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, under which Tehran accepted unprecedented limits on its civilian nuclear program in exchange for the promised withdrawal of punishing economic sanctions.
They were furious when UN Secretary General Antonio Gutteres, at a meeting of the Security Council on December 19, rejected their proposal to send officials to Kiev to investigate this supposed violation of Resolution 2231. US Deputy UN Ambassador Robert Wood accused Guterres of “apparently yielding to Russian threats.”
Iran’s UN ambassador Amir Saeid Iravani reiterated Iran’s claim that the drones were supplied before the war started in February, saying they “have not been transferred for use in the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.” He likewise rejected the argument that the Council had banned the export of Iranian drones, pointing out that all restrictions on Iran’s arms trade under resolution 2231 ended in 2020, paving the way for Iran to resume arms exports. Thus, the Western claim that Tehran needed prior approval “has no legal merit”
Guterres said UN officials were examining “if and when” to send officials to Kiev “in the broader picture of everything we are doing in the context of the war.” His top priority, his aides said, was to ensure that a deal with Russia allowing the export of Ukrainian grain to alleviate worldwide grain shortages is not jeopardized.
The New York Times has also reported that the Biden administration is working closely with Israel on the drone issue, drawing attention to a recent video meeting that Jake Sullivan, the US National Security Advisor, held with Israel’s senior security, military and intelligence officials. At this quarterly meeting, normally devoted to discussing plans to disrupt Iran’s nuclear capabilities, they “discussed Iran’s growing military relationship with Russia, including the transfer of weapons the Kremlin is deploying against Ukraine, targeting its civilian infrastructure and Russia’s provision of military technology to Iran in return.”
Tel Aviv has long worked as Washington’s subcontractor, carrying out its dirty work in the region—including cyberattacks on Iran’s nuclear centrifuges and infrastructure, assassinations, and attacks by land, sea and air on Iran’s facilities and allies in the region—while giving its paymaster deniability.
The meeting took place as Benjamin Netanyahu, who has long sought to incite war against Iran, was in the process of forming a coalition government with far right and fascistic forces. On formally taking office, Netanyahu declared that his top priorities were “Stopping Iran” and “Dramatically expanding the circle of peace,” by which he meant Israel’s “normalization” deals with Arab countries aimed at forging an anti-Iran alliance, crucially with Saudi Arabia. Riyadh still has no overt diplomatic relations with Israel but was believed to be moving closer to normalisation, at least until Jewish Power leader Itamar ben-Gvir’s provocation at the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City earlier this week.
