Strikes erupt across French economy after March 7 protest against pension cuts

Samuel Tissot & Anthony Torres

After millions of French workers and youth took to the streets Tuesday for the sixth time against President Emmanuel Macron’s widely despised pension cuts, strikes are breaking out across the French economy. With refineries, energy facilities and mass transit on strike, the prospect of a total cutoff of fuel supplies that would shut down the economy is looming.

Striking dockers occupy a road leading to the port of Bayonne with a banner reading "Dockers striking, dead port" in Tarnos, southwestern France, Wednesday, March 8, 2023. [AP Photo/Bob Edme]

In the energy sector, workers had already decided on longer term walkouts last week. Three of the country’s four liquefied natural gas terminals (two at Fos-sur-Mer and one at Saint-Nazaire) have announced weeklong strikes. Refinery workers, whose strikes were isolated by the union bureaucracy and then forcibly requisitioned by the state to make them accept below-inflation pay raises, went on strike on Monday. With strikes underway at all TotalEnergies’ sites, currently no fuel deliveries are being made in France.

Workers in other parts of the energy sector also mobilized en masse. Beginning last Friday, strikes across nuclear, hydroelectric and thermal power plants cut electricity production by 5,000 megawatts, the equivalent of five nuclear reactors. Strikers turned off the electricity supply to Labor Minister Olivier Dussopt’s neighborhood in the city of Annonay to protest his support for the cuts.

Air traffic will remain heavily disrupted throughout the rest of the week by an air traffic controllers strike. The General Directorate of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has warned that it will cancel 20 to 30 percent of flights for the rest of the week. On Tuesday, 20 percent of flights in Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport and 30 percent in Paris Orly, Beauvais, Bordeaux, Lille, Lyon, Nantes, Marseille, Montpellier, Nice and Toulouse airports were cancelled. 

Strikes are continuing in mass transit in Paris and other major cities. Railway workers at Paris-Gare du Nord station in Le Havre and Toulouse, as well as staff at Paris-Le Bourget Airport, are all on strike.

On Tuesday, striking transport workers slowed and in some cases completely shut down transport networks across France. Across the country, 76 percent of all train drivers were on strike and 55 percent of controllers. Strikes by lorry drivers and the blockage of multiple motorways on the night of Monday to Tuesday also halted goods deliveries across the country.

Eighty percent of TGVs (high-speed interregional trains) were cancelled, impacting service from France to Germany and Spain. In the Île-de-France capital region, more than 80 percent of regional trains did not function, and there was major disruption to the Paris metro service. In Lille, the majority of buses were cancelled. In Marseille the two metro lines and one in three tram lines were closed, with 85 percent of the buses affected by the strike. Tram lines in Nice were shut down. 

Significant sections of private sector manufacturing workers remained on strike yesterday after striking Tuesday. These included workers at automakers Stellantis and Renault and parts supplier Valeo, aerospace firm Airbus, engine maker Safran and naval dockyards at Saint-Nazaire. 

Other critical sections of workers are also walking out. Meatpackers, who are also in the midst of contract negotiations, are also striking across the country for the entire week. Paris garbage collectors and sewer cleaners have also begun a strike since Monday. Four of Paris’ 20 districts have already had waste collections impacted, and 70 staff at the incinerator at Ivry-sur-Seine just outside Paris have walked out, preventing refuse from being burned. 

The onrush of workers’ struggles follows the mass protests against Macron’s cuts on Tuesday, which were the largest since protests began. The one-day action was called by an alliance of all major unions, including the Stalinist General Confederation of Labor (CGT), the social democratic French Democratic Labor Confederation (CDFT), and Workers Force (FO). Ultimately 3.5 million people attended the protests they had called. Over 400 high schools and 40 universities spread across all of the country’s major cities were also occupied by students or forced to close.

In Paris, 700,000 marched, according to CGT figures. In other major cities, the turnout rose dramatically from previous protest marches. Marseille saw 245,000 march, according to the unions, up from 150,000 on January 31. In Nantes 100,000 marched (compared to 65,000 on January 31); in Bordeaux 100,000 marched (compared to 75,000 on January 31) and in Toulouse 120,000 marched (compared to 80,000 on January 31). 

Protesters were met, once again, with brutal police repression. According to Paris Chief of Police Laurent Nuñez, 43 people were arrested in the capital. The cops also fired volleys of tear gas at protesters in Rennes and Marseille. Violence was also meted out against students occupying schools in solidarity with the strike against Macron’s reform. Three high school students occupying the Thiers High School in Marseille were arrested. Later, clashes in the old port saw multiple police officers injured and one person arrested. 

Tuesday’s demonstration and the wave of ongoing strikes show that the working class has the strength to undertake a revolutionary policy: to bring down Macron, stop the ruling class attacks on living standards and halt the reckless escalation of the US-NATO war on Russia in Ukraine.

Despite attempts by the Macron government and capitalist press to demonize all opposition to cuts, the strike enjoys overwhelming public support. The latest Elabe poll found 74 percent oppose Macron’s cuts, 64 percent support strikes against them, and 60 percent support “blocking the country” to halt them.

The French union bureaucracies have responded to this eruption of the class struggle by yet again impotently begging Macron to withdraw his reforms to try to defuse public anger. The spokesperson for the all-trade union alliance appealed to Macron, stating, “The president’s silence is a serious democratic problem” and asked to be “received urgently” by Macron. 

The “democratic problem” is not Macron’s refusal to talk to union bureaucracies, who in fact coordinate their policy with top officials like Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne. Rather, it is that Macron and the banks are trampling democracy underfoot: They are implementing a concerted policy of impoverishment of the working population and trying to deal with overwhelming popular opposition this creates by sending the cops to assault anyone who protests.

As long as workers remain subordinated to the national union bureaucracies, their struggles will be gradually isolated and repressed by the French state. Indeed, since the union bureaucracies never pay any strike pay, devoting their billion-euro budgets entirely to their own expenses, workers rapidly face enormous financial pressures if they strike longer than a week. Moreover, the union bureaucracies have systematically refused to mobilize workers more broadly to defend strikers whom the state is requisitioning to force them to work.

This reflects the reactionary politics of the union bureaucracies. The CGT apparatus has not only signed statements of support for multitrillion-euro bank bailouts adopted after the 2020 financial crash at the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic but also its support for US-NATO in the war with Russia, even as Macron finances a €90 billion increase in the military budget by slashing pensions. However, committed to a perspective of cutting deals with Macron, the bureaucrats seek to strangle opposition in the working class to these right-wing policies.

Be Obi-dient?

Nick Pemberton

Peter Obi, a candidate for Nigeria’s Presidential election, is by no definition a radical. Bernie Sanders, who was a candidate for the United States Presidency, was only a radical by his own definition. The issue I always had with Bernie was that he wasn’t radical enough (what does this even mean?) but more so that he never tried to win and therefore was not a relevant force in politics.

There is an argument that American politics are higher stakes than Nigerian politics. Marxists have attempted to make the argument that socialism must start in the most developed bourgeois democracies. But there are a couple of problems for the United States. The US is what I call the last second-world country. It has unchecked access to markets and can spend without consequence thanks to the supremacy of its military and therefore its currency. However it has no functioning government and any crisis whether that be toxic trains, guns, police murder, drug prices, college prices or polluted water, cannot and will not be solved by the government. The solution is to buy and work more and turn away from politics because there is no left represented.

The United States is not a group of people in a geographical space but rather a series of individuals who make things that are used to control the rest of the world. The working class consciousness is lacking in the United States because of nationalism. The conclusion of Bernie Sanders was not international socialism but rather democratic socialism where what workers get in workers should get out. The problem is this is only a politics of mutual exploitation and it is this sort of politics of equity that dominates the mind of the bitter American who aims to achieve the American Dream rather than become a serious political person.

Peter Obi comes from a third party, but only recently. The tired debate on the US left is whether or not to form a third party. The answer is obvious. Both sides are wrong. Kazy of Marxist Alternative in Nigeria notes: “The primary role of Obi in these historical events is to act as a brake on the movement. His task is to moderate the anger of the youth and the masses generally and divert this anger to safer and more accommodating channels. This explains why a minority section of the ruling class fully supports him. Whether he has enough authority to achieve this objective or not remains to be seen in the near future. But nevertheless, there is now the prospect of a fight to win the workers and youth who are looking to the Labour Party, wrestling them away from the influence of the bourgeois gangsters who lead it today, and turn these forces into a genuine mass vehicle of the working class.”

Obi sounds a lot like Sanders. An establishment guy who nonetheless can inspire young people into genuine political action. Obi, like Sanders, has the role of sheepdogging this energy back into capitalist politics. The moment comes not before this intervention into politics where we are all nihilistic or after when we are cynical but during this moment when we all have hope and organization and momentum.

Sanders failed to seize this moment but Obi, in challenging the results of the Presidential victory of Bola Tinubu, a figure as bumbling as Joe Biden, is proving to be far less “obedient” than Sanders. Obi’s movement dubbed Obidient has a lot more backbone than the Sandernistas. The state of American hopelessness and mediocrity is especially strong at the moment. At least under Trump, there was hyper-politics, a traumatized liberalism that while ultimately reactionary, was admitting a certain type of crisis, even if it was misnamed fascism or authoritarianism rather than capitalism or climate catastrophe.

For a note on the state of American culture, it is worth quoting from Jeffrey St. Clair’s most recent column: “Ed Sheeran says his new record, Subtract, is informed by “fear, depression and anxiety.” Whatever became of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll?”

Indeed most of the left feels sorry for itself and remains naive about the true stakes of politics and the brutality of modern life. Nigerians on the other hand believe in something. I am not saying this something has to be a god, in fact, it would be better if it wasn’t. But American idealism is ultimately cynical. The things American dream for is not to win the struggle of life but rather to deny and ignore it entirely. The goal of being happy or feeling better is the primary goal of Americans, even in a political context.

Nigerians already have this good-natured attitude. They are a kind and enthusiastic people and the state of their country gives some people the impression that they roll over. But even a bourgeois politician like Peter Obi is proving this isn’t the case. Obi is astute to recognize the timing of a political crisis in Nigeria and is attempting to seize the opportunity.

Obi, like current President Muhammadu Buhari before him, has the reputation of being less personally corrupt than others and this is near the top of most Nigerian’s list of demands in a country where as Michael Roberts notes corruption hinders government spending: “General government revenue in Nigeria was 7.3% of GDP for 2021—less than half of the average in countries belonging to the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and nearly a third of the average of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)—and ranked as 191st out of 193 countries in the world! Almost all government revenues are swallowed up by debt service and payment of government salaries.”

The dying Jimmy Carter represents the limits of a neoliberal President who isn’t personally corrupt but it is a basic step that needs to be accomplished. Buhari’s restriction on bank notes was a supposed attempt to limit the bribing from politicians but it resulted in poor people who only had access to cash being hurt the most, causing riots at banks and ultimately voter suppression as many young people who supported Obi could not travel to vote in the place they were registered to.

This is far from the only crisis in Nigeria. Inflation, lack of electricity, terrorism, lack of fuel, floods, drought, and hunger have all picked up recently and been in the international news cycle. This is the moment for a country with a worse life expectancy than Afghanistan.

Nigeria, set to pass the population number in the United States in the near future, represents the limits of peacetime capitalism. For one the supposed peace of capitalism presents an obstacle for those seeking refugee status. Horror stories pop up of people’s desperation. I read about a Nigerian going to fight for Ukraine because he has a better chance than in his own country. I read about this same endless supply of US weapons meant for Ukraine going into the hands of Nigerian terrorists.

Nigerians must live on under two dollars a day. 35% of children are stunted from lack of food. And yet they are doing well in the eyes of the US because there is capitalism. However, it is bit of a backward exercise in capitalist relations. The oil cannot be used in international markets because it is stolen and the only good jobs are in government. The private sector’s practice of selling labor is a pointless exercise. Own your own business or get into government or terrorism or rely on your family. These are the non-capitalist relations possible in capitalist hell.

However, this also presents an opportunity. While the United States still has the majority of its people loyal to capitalist desire, Nigerians have clarity about the brutality, joy, and randomness of life. Americans think good things are earned and this is the ideology of the ruling class which Americans identify through nationalism. The coveted identity of being an American, even if it guarantees you nothing when you fail, is something we believe in because of the things it gets us when we succeed. And we all believe we will succeed because we don’t believe in anything but ourselves.

In Nigeria the global crisis of putting militarism and capitalism before environmentalism and food security is presenting an opportunity and a tragedy. America’s dream of being radical is almost always a posture, a substitution for the gritty work of politics and the decency of ordinary life. Americans think big and grasp for a magical world beyond our own. Americans detest reality because it is too radical for us.

The violence at the center of the means of production is punching us in the face with environmental catastrophe upon environmental catastrophe. We ignore Nigerians because we don’t recognize them. We say who are strange people dancing and laughing and being free? Who are these odd ones? Don’t they know that freedom comes from a political orientation and capitalist relations not from interactions with others?

We say who are these strange people making political demands? Will this not hurt the market and the ability to compete? After all of this we are still waiting for our capitalist God to drop something to us from the sky. We are obedient to Him and Him alone. The joke of Peter Obi, to be Obi-dient, rather than obedient, is lost on American people who like the Scooby Doo cartoon, run fast, go nowhere, and are about to fall flat on their face.

The radical alternative culture of America is a retreat from the production in everyday life. We do not even talk to each other about anything serious or real. We do not ask each other how we are selling our souls and bodies to the reproduction of capitalism. We ask each other about our anxiety and how to fix it. We then pretend we are doing great.

We refuse to examine the life and even worse we refuse to live it. Our obedience is to capitalism and we pretend to be rebels by refusing to be obedient to anything else. We thus all have individual identities, that will mercifully be forgotten, because they are too mediocre to recall.

UK government plans mass detention and expulsion of asylum seekers

Thomas Scripps

On Tuesday, the UK government published details of a plan to immediately and permanently deny the right to asylum to almost all migrants who enter the UK on a small boat.

An Illegal Migration Bill will apply a “rights brake,” severely restricting their ability to appeal to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), to which the UK is a signatory, or to the UK’s own modern slavery laws.

People thought to be migrants disembark from a British Border Force patrol boat after being picked up from a dingy in the English Channel in Dover harbour, England, Thursday, Sept. 16, 2021. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)

People who cross the English Channel on small boats will be immediately detained without bail or judicial review for 28 days. A duty will be placed on ministers to remove them “as soon as reasonably practicable”, with grounds for suspending removal limited to those under 18, medically unfit to fly, or at a real risk of serious and irreversible harm in the country they are being deported to. Home Secretary Suella Braverman pointedly referred to this legal bar in Parliament as “exceedingly high”. All other claims would have to be “heard remotely after removal.”

Those denied asylum after reaching the UK in this way would be permanently barred from entering the UK in the future.

This is the policy of a police state. It was introduced to parliament by Braverman using the fascistic, scaremongering language of Donald Trump, referring to “waves of illegal migrants… 100 million people around the world [the global number of refugees]… They are coming”.

If enacted, the law would deprive tens of thousands of people of their democratic rights every year and lead to the huge expansion of internment camps in Britain.

Roughly 28,000 people entered the UK on small boats in 2021, another 45,000 in 2022, and another 2,950 so far this year—giving an annual projection of 65,000.

People make this dangerous crossing—which is believed to have killed 52 people, including children, since 2018—to flee war, persecution, hunger and poverty at home. Most will already have risked even more perilous journeys—across the Mediterranean Sea or by foot through Europe—to make it to the French coast. Those drowned in the Channel include Iraqi and Iranian Kurds, Afghans, Ethiopians, Somalis, Vietnamese, Senegalese and Egyptians.

These are victims of British imperialism and its allies, whose wars abroad, backing of dictatorial regimes, economic exploitation of oppressed countries, and abandonment of their populations to the consequences of climate change have created the biggest refugee crisis in history.

The government has used a recent increase in the numbers of Albanians making the journey to try to pull the wool over workers’ eyes about what is happening, claiming the UK is being overwhelmed by purely economic migrants with no legal right to stay in the UK. This is a lie.

Albanians made up the largest proportion of any country of origin for small boat arrivals in 2022, but this was still just 28 percent of the total. Secondly, more than half the people from Albania applying for asylum receive it (55 percent in the first half of 2022), because being returned home would infringe their basic human rights.

Overall, fully two-thirds of those who crossed the Channel last year would be granted asylum, according to analysis by the Refugee Council, half of them from Afghanistan, Iran, Eritrea, Sudan or Syria.

These thousands of people use illegal routes because they have no other choice. Outside of specific schemes for some Afghans, Ukrainians, and Hong Kongers with British National (Overseas) status, the UK offers only extremely limited refugee resettlement and family reunion schemes as legal pathways to asylum. Barely more than 6,000 people were allowed into the country in this way in September 2021-22.

Under the proposed law, everyone else who arrives would be subjected to a de facto blanket policy of imprisonment. The UK government currently has no agreements in place to remove asylum seekers to passed-through European countries where they could previously have claimed for asylum, or to their home countries. It’s barbaric plan to ship vulnerable people to Rwanda is not functional.

In these circumstances there is no reason to believe migrants will be detained for just 28 days. There are currently 160,000 people in the UK with pending asylum applications and the government is working night and day to dismantle the current system of housing them in hotels and sheltered accommodation—through underfunding and xenophobic rhetoric. Braverman referred repeatedly on Tuesday to the costs of asylum accommodation and her efforts to end the “farce of accommodating migrants in hotels.”

Asylum seekers denied even a legal hearing will therefore increasingly be held indefinitely in a network of detention camps, holding tens of thousands more people every year.

Conditions in migrant detention and processing centres are already inhumane. Last October, a scandal broke out over the appalling treatment of migrants held in the overcrowded Manston holding centre. Designed to accommodate 1,000 people, the former Royal Air Force base was holding 4,000 in what were described as “wretched conditions”, with detainees suffering violent abuse and outbreaks of scabies, norovirus, diphtheria and MRSA. A coroner’s inquest is ongoing into the death of one migrant who had tested positive for diphtheria.

With state spending cut to the bone and given the explosive conditions which would prevail in dozens of camps of thousands of people, their expansion would depend on the police and armed forces. An army detachment was held on standby during the Manston events. In January 2022, the Navy was involved in policing the Channel through Operation Isotrope, along with 200 personnel mainly drawn from the army.

Given the scale of the operation required and the inevitable legal clashes in the European Court, there is a possibility that the government’s new plans will flounder. Its announcements are an attempt to energise its far-right constituency and whip up xenophobic feeling in sections of the working class abandoned by the Labour Party and the trade unions. But in doing so, the Tories are running ahead of what the state apparatus can accomplish in such a short space of time.

But whatever its time frame or exact form, the extreme right-wing trajectory of the government’s asylum policy is clear and will be facilitated by a complicit Labour Party.

Britain’s nominal opposition offers no defence of democratic rights whatsoever. Its criticisms of Tory policies amount to calls on the government to try harder.

Responding to Braverman in parliament Tuesday, Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper began, “The government has allowed criminal gangs to take hold along the Channel and along our border. At the same time, convictions of people smugglers have halved… costly, inappropriate hotel use has soared, removals of unsuccessful asylum seekers are down 80 percent on the last Labour government”.

Against previous Tory policies to crack down on migration which “did not work” and “didn’t deter anyone”, Labour had “put forward plans for a cross-border police unit, for fast-tracked decisions and returns, to clear the backlog and end hotel use”.

Britain’s capitalist parties are conspiring to create a viciously right-wing, anti-migrant political climate. They are scapegoating a few tens of thousands of people to distract from the crimes committed by British imperialism in their home countries and to turn British citizens against their fellow workers from abroad, rather than the multi-hundred millionaires and billionaires who keep all workers impoverished.

This is done to prepare ever more authoritarian laws directed against the working class. A ruling class prepared to deny rights to tens of thousands of refugees and imprison them en masse is also preparing to deny millions of British workers the right to strike and protest. And the army has been mobilised to break strikes by health workers and to police migrants.

Millions suffer plunge in living standards as cost of living surges in UK

Robert Stevens

Millions of people in Britain are cutting back on meals and being forced to switch off the heating due to soaring prices.

A survey of 2,000 people published this week by the Which? consumer rights and advice organisation revealed that one in seven people 15 percent are skipping meals as prices rise. This is a substantial increase from the one in eight (12 percent) skipping meals recorded just three months ago.

A shopper enters a supermarket in London, January 12, 2021 [AP Photo/Alastair Grant]

As well as people skipping meals, almost 10 percent prioritised meals for other family members above themselves.

UK household energy bills began to shoot up at the end of 2021, even before the war in Ukraine forced them to record levels. According to House of Commons research published in January, “Average bills were £760 in 2021 compared to £450 in 2020, a 36% real increase.”

Energy bills have continued to rise. Despite a unit of electricity currently being capped for households at 34p and unit of gas for 10.3p across the country, the average annual bill for a home is around £2,500 a year. This is just an average and for those with extra energy requirement, it can be much larger.

Last month energy regulator, Ofgem, announced that its energy cap—the amount utility suppliers can charge for average dual fuel—is to fall for three months from April 1 to £3,280, from its current £4,279.

The government’s energy discount scheme is due to be slashed at that point, meaning that the actual price paid by an average household will still rise by 20 percent from £2,100 a year in April to £3,000. But even if the government, as mooted, continues some support, energy prices will remain huge at around £2,500 for all but the most vulnerable—with nearly 7 million (6.7 million) people struggling to afford them. Were the government to pull its discount entirely, the numbers struggling to pay bills from April would surge to 8.4 million.

Which? found that heating costs are intolerable. More than seven in ten people (72 percent) are putting their heating on less, almost four in ten (39 percent) are using less hot water and a fifth of people (19 percent) have cooked fewer meals. An 85-year-old man told Which?: “The house is cold due to the cost of heating, so I am continually wearing layer upon layer of clothes. Saving money on heating allows more money for food.”

Which? also found an estimated 2.3 million households missed or defaulted on a vital payment such as their mortgage, rent, credit card, or bill payment in the last month.

There is no evidence of any respite in the continual decline in living standards, with the government’s CPI inflation measure still in double digits at 10.1 percent and the more accurate RPI rate even higher at 13.4 percent. A survey conducted by the Office for National Statistics from February 8 to 19 found that 92 percent of adults in Britain reported an increase in their cost of living in January-February 2023, from the situation a year ago. Even compared with one month previous, 67 percent of respondents reported a cost of living increase. Giving reasons for the rise in their cost of living, 95 percent said it was due to price of food shopping; 79 percent their gas or electricity bills; and for 45 percent the price of fuel.

According to Which?, nearly two-thirds of people (59 percent), or 16.5 million households, have made at least one financial adjustment in the last month. These include cutting back on essential items, dipping into savings, or selling possessions to cover essential spending.

Shoppers are hit with a higher rate of inflation at supermarkets (15.9 percent) in January. However, the price of value items on the shelves supermarkets’ most basic ranges is much higher still, at 21.6 percent. Which? Found, “Among the most alarming items soaring in price include muesli, which went from £1.20 to £2.25 at Sainsbury's (up 87.5%), tins of sliced carrots went from 20p to 33p (up 63%) at Tesco, and pork sausages went from 80p to £1.27 (up 58.2%) at Asda.”

The Barnardo's charity published a report this week which found that 30 percent of people were worried about losing their homes. Almost half (49 percent) were struggling to keep their home warm for their children. The survey found that 16 percent of parents said that during the winter months, their children have had to share a bed with them, their partner or a sibling, due to the household not being able to afford to replace bedding. Almost a quarter of the 1,000 adults surveyed found it difficult to put food on the table for their families.

Millions of people were horrified at the death in December 2020 of two-year-old Awaab Ishak as the result of “prolonged exposure” to mould spores in his family’s rented flat. Awaab was initially hospitalised with flu-like symptoms and difficulty breathing. He was readmitted to urgent care two days after being discharged, suffering respiratory failure, and died of cardiac arrest.

Despite widespread public anger over the death, well over a million children continue to live in cold, damp or mouldy homes. A study issued last month by Citizens Advice found that 1.6 million children in England live in such accommodation in rented homes in the private sector. Thirty percent of renters cannot heat their home to a comfortable temperature, increasing to 45 percent of disabled tenants. The survey of 2,000 renters in the private sector, taken in January, found 2.7 million households had poor living conditions, compounded by high energy bills and a lack of insulation.

Foodbank use is normal for millions of people after more than a decade of austerity in which wages have fallen far behind inflation. Overall grocery price inflation has reached 17.1 percent, adding a crippling £811 to households annual bills.

Foodbank outside a supermarket in Salford, England [Photo: Salford Foodbank/Facebook]

Britain’s largest food bank network, The Trussell Trust, now operates more than 1,300 of them and distributed 1.3 million emergency food parcels between April and September last year alone. This was an increase of a third over the same period in 2021 and over 50 percent up on the number of parcels given out in the same period prior to the pandemic.

The Independent Food Aid Network reported last month that almost 90 percent of food banks surveyed saw increased demand in December 2022 and January 2023.

Research commissioned by Quaker Oats cereal company and carried out by One Poll found that 19 percent of 2,000 UK adults had “benefitted from the use of a foodbank or free food at donation points to feed themselves and their family”. Many people are taking other desperate measures to get their hands on food with the survey finding that 15 percent had asked friends or family for food and 19 percent of people surveyed had taken second jobs to try to keep afloat. Nearly a third of parents (31 percent) had skipped breakfast to ensure their children got a meal.

China’s National People’s Congress convenes amid mounting crises

Peter Symonds

China’s annual National People’s Congress that formally appoints top government officials, endorses policy and enacts legislation opened in Beijing on Sunday and will run for more than a week.

The highly stage-managed affair takes place amid worsening crises confronting the government on all fronts: aggressive confrontation and threats of war by the US and its allies, a sharp slowdown in the economy and mounting social tensions, exacerbated by its criminal decision to lift all COVID-19 restrictions.

Chinese President Xi Jinping attends a session of China's National People's Congress (NPC) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Tuesday, March 7, 2023. [AP Photo/Ng Han Guan]

In these conditions, President Xi Jinping is expected to be appointed for a third presidential term and to consolidate his grip on power by installing his close supporters in top positions and leadership bodies. Li Keqiang will retire after two terms as premier and is mooted to be replaced by Li Qiang, Xi’s former chief of staff, who was party secretary in Shanghai during its pandemic lockdown last year.

Xi’s appointment to a third term as Chinese Communist Party (CCP) general secretary last year broke the two-term rule that had been in place since the 1980s. He is now routinely referred to as the indispensable “core” of the party and his vague general “thought” is enshrined in the constitution as a guide to the CCP bureaucracy. Xi’s reappointment as head of state at the end of the congress is as good as certain.

The emergence of Xi as party strongman is not, however, a sign of the CCP regime’s strength but rather of the need to hold the party together amid sharp internal divisions produced by the broader crisis of Chinese capitalism. The work report presented by Li Keqiang as premier on the first day of the congress and a speech by Xi to a closed-door meeting of private business representatives on Monday pointed to the huge problems confronting the government.

As reported by state-owned media, Xi dispensed with the usual oblique references and specifically accused the US of deliberately undermining the Chinese economy. “[In the past five years,] Western countries led by the United States have contained and suppressed us in an all-round way, which has brought unprecedented severe challenges to our development,” he declared.

The Biden administration has not only maintained the massive trade sanctions imposed on China under Trump but has introduced an escalating series of bans on the sale to Chinese companies of the most advanced computer chips and the machinery needed for their manufacture. US imperialism, which regards China as the chief threat to its global hegemony, is determined to cripple China’s ability to compete in hi-tech sectors.

Xi said that to “foster new growth drivers and new strengths in the face of fierce international competition, China should ultimately rely on scientific and technological innovation.” He appealed for increased cooperation between private enterprise, academia and research institutes to support “original and pioneering research.”

Li also placed considerable emphasis on technological development, particularly the need for China to be able to manufacture advanced semiconductors. Government expenditure on research and development is to double over the next five years.  The government has already pledged to invest an extra $US1.9 billion in the country’s biggest maker of memory chips, Yangtze Memory Technologies. Small and medium tech companies will be able to deduct their R&D spending from their taxable incomes.

Li said that the growth target for the Chinese economy for 2023 would be “around 5 percent,” down from the figure of “around 5.5 percent” set for last year. Unlike previous years when “targets” were met with implausible exactness, growth for 2022 was just 3 percent. The figure was the lowest since 1976, excluding the low of 2.2 percent in 2020 when the COVID pandemic first hit.

The CCP regime has long regarded 8 percent growth as essential for maintaining employment and social stability. According to Li, urban joblessness is stable at 5.5 percent and the government is seeking to create more than 12 million jobs. Youth unemployment, however, among 16-24 year olds hit 20 percent in 2022, declining only marginally to 16.7 percent in December. No figures are available for unemployment and underemployment in rural areas.

Clearly concerned by rising social tensions, Li announced that spending on public security will be increased by 6.4 per cent in 2023, up from 4.7 per cent last year. At the same time, Xi is reportedly intending to overhaul and exercise greater central control over the internal security apparatus.

China’s zero-COVID policy, which the government dismantled in December under huge pressure from the major imperialist powers and international finance capital, was not mentioned in Li’s work report. Instead he declared that China had secured victory over the pandemic but made no mention of the huge human cost of the government’s ending of zero-COVID.

Like its counterparts around the world, the Chinese government has downplayed the massive wave of infections that swept China over the past three months after public health measures were abruptly ended. The death toll officially is about 87,000 but various estimates by epidemiologists put the real figure at a million or more. The homicidal let-it-rip policy created a crisis in the hospital system and has led to an unknown number of cases of long COVID.

The CCP has joined governments around the world in sacrificing lives to corporate profits in its efforts to boost the economy, which is heavily burdened by debt, built up by local governments in particular to the tune of $9 billion. It is also plagued by the risks associated with a fragile real estate market grossly inflated by speculation.

In a bid to encourage foreign investors, Li foreshadowed changes to the foreign investment law reducing the number of areas that are off limits to overseas companies. However, the rapidly intensifying US confrontation with China undermines any incentives that Beijing might offer to encourage investment.

The US is not only imposing huge economic penalties on China but is rapidly boosting its military build-up and war preparations throughout the Indo-Pacific. Under Biden, the US has revived and elevated the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, a quasi-military alliance with Japan, Australia and India, and established the AUKUS pact with Australia and Britain. The US Indo-Pacific Command, already the Pentagon’s largest, has been given additional funding and weaponry, and is consolidating basing arrangements throughout the region.

Following on from Trump, Biden has recklessly inflamed what is arguably the most explosive flashpoint in Asia—Taiwan—effectively tearing up the One China policy that has governed US-China relations since 1979. Washington had de facto acknowledged Beijing as the legitimate government of all China including Taiwan. Now Washington is engaged in high-level discussions with Taipei and has boosted arms sales to, and US military personnel on, Taiwan.

Beijing has responded on the one hand with attempts to end the stand-off, and on the other, by increasing its own military preparations. Washington’s latest provocation—the shooting down of what in all likelihood was a Chinese research balloon blown off course—demonstrated again that it is on a path of confrontation and conflict, not an easing of tensions.

The US and Western media have seized on the latest figures for Chinese military spending to inflate the so-called threat from China. Li announced a 7.2 percent increase in the defense budget—virtually the same as last year. Yet various pundits were quick to point out that it was higher than the overall increase in government spending and to speculate on new military hardware that China might be acquiring. In reality, China’s military budget is dwarfed by US military spending both in absolute terms and as a percentage of GDP.

While the National People’s Congress is carefully choreographed to project an image of strength and stability, the CCP bureaucracy is clearly fearful of the unprecedented dangers it confronts—both external and internal.

Chinese officials: US war plans threaten “confrontation” in the Pacific

Andre Damon

In response to the United States’ trade war and military escalation against China, Chinese officials warned that the relationship between the world’s two largest economies is “derailing.”

“Western countries led by the United States have implemented all-round containment, encirclement and suppression of China, which has brought unprecedented grave challenges to our nation’s development,” Xi said.

On Tuesday, China’s new foreign minister, Qin Gang, followed up with a warning that unless the U.S. changes course “there will surely be conflict and confrontation.”

The Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in formation during Rim of the Pacific exercises July 28, 2022. (Canadian Armed Forces photo by Cpl. Djalma Vuong-De Ramos) 220728-O-CA231-2003 [Photo: Canadian Armed Forces photo by Cpl. Djalma Vuong-De Ramos]

“If the United States does not hit the brake, but continues to speed down the wrong path, no amount of guardrails can prevent derailing and there surely will be conflict and confrontation.”

Over the past year, the United States has initiated a multipronged campaign of stifling China’s economic growth through trade war, arming Taiwan as part of its military buildup in the Pacific, and whipping up a racist and xenophobic campaign to demonize China among the US population.

These actions of “soft” power turned kinetic last month, when the United States shot down what China claimed was a non-maneuverable research balloon that had been blown over the United States, against the backdrop of a nonstop media hysteria accusing China of spying.

Responding to the statements by Chinese officials, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby replied that “there is nothing about our approach to this most consequential bilateral relationship that should lead anybody to think that we want conflict.”

Kirby’s public statements are completely at odds with actual US military doctrine, which calls for the United States to prepare, in the words of the latest NATO strategy document, for full-scale war with nuclear-armed “peer competitors.”

“We will ... deliver the full range of forces ... for high-intensity, multi-domain warfighting against nuclear-armed peer competitors,” declares NATO’s strategy document published on June 30.

Last October, Biden said that the United States is in the midst of a “decisive decade” in which the country must “win the competition for the 21st century.”

In March of last year, Biden declared that the world is on the brink of a “new world order” and that “we’ve got to lead it.”

In January, Gen. Mike Minihan, head of Air Mobility Command, sent a letter to his subordinates stating, “My gut tells me we will fight in 2025,” and urging them to get their “personal affairs” in order in preparation for a conflict with China.

While the doctrine of “great power conflict,” first initiated in 2018 with the Trump administration’s national defense strategy, has largely been put into practice without public knowledge, more and more the US media is beginning to speak openly of the potential of a “two-front war” between the US and NATO on one hand, and China and Russia on the other.

In a long article entitled “The U.S. Is Not Yet Ready for the Era of ‘Great Power’ Conflict With China and Russia,” Michael R. Gordon, the notorious propagandist who peddled false claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, documents the ongoing war games being played out by the US military in preparation for a war with China:

When the Washington think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies ran a wargame last year that simulated a Chinese amphibious attack on Taiwan, the U.S. side ran out of long-range anti-ship cruise missiles within a week.

Godon’s article continued,

If a conflict with China gave Russia the confidence to take further action in Eastern Europe, the U.S. and its allies would need to fight a two-front war. China and Russia are both nuclear powers. Action could extend to the Arctic, where the U.S. lags behind Russia in icebreakers and ports as Moscow appears ready to welcome Beijing’s help in the region.

In his response to statements by Chinese officials, Kirby continued, “We do not support independence for Taiwan. We’ve been very clear about that. We also don’t want to see the status quo cross across that strait changed unilaterally.”

Kirby was very well aware of the fact that he spoke these words following the passage of last year’s National Defense Authorization Act, which for the first time made provisions for the United States to directly arm Taiwan—which it had for decades treated as part of China—effectively ending the one-China policy.

In February, the Wall Street Journal reported that the United States plans to quadruple the number of troops stationed on the island and to directly train Taiwanese troops on US territory.

Last week, the House of Representatives Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party held its first hearing, in which committee Chairman Michael Gallagher declared, “This is an existential struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century—and the most fundamental freedoms are at stake.”

On Wednesday morning, the committee will hold another hearing, this time aimed at promoting the false claim that COVID-19 was created by scientists in China. The hearing will invite as a star witness Nicholas Wade, a notorious advocate of racist pseudoscience, who claimed the genetic “adaptation of Jews to capitalism,” and whose work was hailed by former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke.

Ukrainian government spends millions on monuments and streets to honor Nazi collaborators and neofascists

Maxim Goldarb

80 years ago, in 1943, Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, was liberated from Nazi occupation by troops of the Red Army, led by General Nikolai Vatutin.

Shortly after the liberation of Kiev, General Vatutin died as a result of a wound inflicted on him in an ambush by Ukrainian Nazi collaborators from the OUN—the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. In 1944, he was buried in one of the central parks of Kiev that he had liberated, and a monument was erected on his grave with the inscription: “To General Vatutin from the Ukrainian people.”

The general was deservedly considered a hero; flowers from the people of Kiev always lay at his monument.

And now, in our days, in the year of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Kiev, the monument to Vatutin was demolished. With this demolition, the Kiev authorities also desecrated his grave. 

The demolition of the monument to Red Army general Nikolai Vatutin. [Photo: WSWS]

The destruction of monuments to the soldiers of the Red Army, which liberated Ukraine and Europe from fascism, is going on throughout Ukraine. In some cities, such as Chernivtsi, Rivne and many others, they are demolished, and in some places they are completely blown up, as happened, for example, in Nikolaev.

In addition, many other monuments are being demolished: monuments to the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, to the writers Nikolai Ostrovsky and Maxim Gorky, the test pilot Valery Chkalov and many others.

The monument to the Soviet writer Nikolai Ostrovsky that has now been demolished in a photograph from 2021. [Photo: WSWS]

Moreover, in recent years, cities, villages, streets and squares have been massively renamed in Ukraine.

Since February 2014, after the coup d'état during the Euromaidan, more than a thousand settlements and more than 50,000 streets have been renamed in Ukraine.

Last year alone, 237 streets, squares, avenues and boulevards were renamed just in Kiev,  as the city’s authorities, headed by mayor Vitaliy Klitschko, proudly report. The same government, which for nine years since 2014, when Klitschko first became mayor, could not build in Kiev, a city of 3 million people with constant traffic jams on the roads, a single new metro station, a single new multilevel transport interchange, a single new medical center, a single new campus, a single waste processing complex, and so on.

Where did such an insistent desire to rename everything and everyone come from? Is it because a large number of local residents wanted this? Because they were suddenly no longer satisfied with the names of the cities and streets, where they themselves, their parents, and sometimes grandparents were born and raised? Nothing of the sort. There were no referendums, no votes of local residents on these issues, no one asked their opinion.

On the contrary, in the few cases that polls were conducted, they almost always showed their overwhelming disagreement with the renaming. For example, in the case of the renaming of the regional center Kirovograd a few years ago, which had been named so almost 90 years ago in honor of the famous Soviet statesman Sergei Kirov, the absolute majority of the city's population—82 percent—did not support the decision to rename the city to “Kropyvnytsky”. Only 14 percent supported it. 

But neither in this case, nor in any other of the many cases when monuments were demolished and streets renamed did the authorities care at all about the opinion of the citizens.

Why then is all of this happening? The answer to this question becomes clearer if you look closely at the new names and monuments that are now being erected. 

The avenue of General Vatutin, who helped liberate Kiev from Nazism, which was discussed at the very beginning of the article, was renamed to the avenue of Roman Shukhevych, a Ukrainian fascist. A the time of the attack of Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union in June 1941, Shukhevych served as a member of the Nachtigall battalion, a subdivision of the Abwehr (the military intelligence of the Wehrmacht), which consisted of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators.

What was formerly “Moscow Avenue” in Kiev was renamed to the Avenue of Stepan Bandera—another Ukrainian Nazi collaborator, and leader of the OUN (b), the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which during the Second World War “became famous” for its collaboration with the German Nazis, and its genocidal massacres of the Polish and Jewish population.

There are now many monuments erected and streets named in honor of Bandera in cities throughout Ukraine.

Stepan Bandera Monument in Lviv [AP Photo/Bernat Armangue]

The Druzhby Narodov Boulevard in Kiev was renamed into the Mykola Mikhnovsky Boulevard. Mikhnovsky was one of the main ideologists of Ukrainian nationalism, the author of the chauvinistic slogan: “Ukraine is for Ukrainians!”

And the street named after the Soviet military leader, Ukrainian Marshal Malinovsky, one of the leaders of the Red Army during the war against Nazism, was named the Street of the Heroes of the Azov Battalion. The Azov Battalion is a neofascist paramilitary formation that is now an official part of the Ukrainian army. Its emblem is the “wolfsangel,” a notorious Nazi emblem that has been used by units of the Nazi SS, in particular. For those who did not know or forgot, let me remind you that Azov was recognized as a neo-Nazi and terrorist group even by the US Congress.

Azov Battalion soldiers with Nazi flag. [Photo by Heltsumani / CC BY-SA 4.0]

At about the same time when the monument to General Vatutin was being demolished in Kiev, the Tenth Separate Mountain Assault Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine was officially renamed Edelweiss. During the Second World War, “Edelweiss” was the name of the First Mountain Infantry Division of the Nazis’ Wehrmacht. This Division played a major role in the deportation of Jews, the execution of prisoners of war, as well as in punitive operations against the partisans of Yugoslavia, Italy, Czechoslovakia and Greece. Today, skull patches, which practically do not differ from the emblems of the SS division “Death’s Head” and other Nazi units, are openly worn not only by many military personnel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, but also by the Supreme Commander.

The current government in Ukraine is completely destroying everything that is somehow connected with Russia, which most of Ukraine was part of for hundreds of years—even monuments and streets that were named in honor of world-famous writers—like Leo Tolstoy. It is also destroying everything that is related to the 70-year-old Soviet period in the history of Ukraine, and with socialism and leftist ideology in general. For example, streets named after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels have been renamed, monuments to them have been demolished, socialist and communist symbols—from the red flag to the performance of the “Internationale'—are prohibited. Likewise, all left-wing parties are banned in Ukraine, including the Union of Left Forces - For New Socialism, which I head.

Socialism and communism are banned, left-wing activists are persecuted and imprisoned, and neo-Nazism is becoming an element of state policy and increasingly the dominant ideology.

This all-out war by the Ukrainian authorities against all public symbols, monuments and names that are associated with Russia, the October Revolution and Soviet history, or leftist ideology, requires a lot of money.

The cost of just one plate with a new street name for one house, according to the Kiev authorities, is at least 1,000 hryvnia (about 25 euros). This must be multiplied by the dozens (and sometimes hundreds) of houses on the same street. And then this must be multiplied by the tens of thousands of streets that are being renamed. Let me also remind you of more than 1,000 renamed cities and villages.

But the cost of the new address plates is only a small part of the enormous costs of this right-wing campaign. There are many more components. All institutions and enterprises have to change documents, order new seals and stamps, update signs at the entrance, and so on. We need new signs on the roads, entrances to the settlement, as well as for streets and roads throughout Ukraine. Many institutions—not only in the renamed cities but throughout the country—need to be provided with new maps and atlases.

For instance, the renaming only of the city “Zhdanov” to “Mariupol” cost about 24 million euros. According to the most conservative estimates, the massive wave of street renaming and the demolition of monuments throughout the country has already cost more than 1 billion euros!

And this is in the most impoverished country in Europe, and during a war at that! This is in a country which is now in critical need of financial assistance and 60 percent of whose state budget revenues this year are provided by funding from abroad, mainly from the EU and the United States.

This means that the money of European and American taxpayers is now being spent, among other things, on the mass renaming of streets in Ukraine in honor of Nazi collaborators and neo-Nazis.

I don't think most citizens of the “donor” countries would agree with this. But it seems that they, like most citizens of Ukraine, are not going to be asked for their opinion.