The Global Land Grab: The New Enclosures

Liz Alden Wily


Consider this. It is 1607. The English have been taking lands in Ireland for several centuries. First written down in the 7th century, Irish customary law is sophisticated and still administered by trained traditional magistrates (Brehons). Now rulings in the English courts on Gavelkind (1605) and Tanistry (1607) finally deny that customary law delivers property rights. Family holdings are made tenancies of by now well established Anglo-Irish elites, and the commons, crucial to grazing and hunting, are made more absolutely the property of the elites and new waves of English and Scottish settlers. Irish communities may use the commons at the will of these new owners.

Now 1823 in America. Chief Justice Marshall rules that while Indian natives were rightfully in possession (“Aboriginal title”) of 43,000 square miles of disputed land – in a case he engineers to be brought before the Supreme Court (and in which he has a private interest) – they illegally sold this tract to developers. He argues that by virtue of conquest, the British Crown became the owner of North America (“the right of discovery”). Therefore only the Crown or its administrations may lawfully sell or grant lands. Possession is no more than lawful occupation and use, and doesn’t count. Forty-year-old opinions of the Privy Council in London aid Marshall’s argument. These opinions established in 1772 and 1774 that English law supersedes local law, and that for the purposes of property, land is “uninhabited” (unowned) when empty of civilized people (McAuslan 2006).

1845 in England. The villagers of Otmoor, Oxfordshire in England, as described by Linebaugh in this volume, have lost the fight to keep their commons, as have hundreds of other communities across the realm. In fact, feudal land law in England (and the rest of Europe) has dictated for some centuries (since 1285) that only those granted land by the king, i.e. the lords, own the land. Local populations hold no more than use rights. These legal realities have come harshly into focus only with industrialization and with private capital hungry for lands and the financial killings which may be made from selling the commons to railways and factories. Parliament, made up of wealthy landlords, is on their side, passing law after law since 1773 to legalize the dispossession of commoners. The Inclosure Act 1845 [sic] administers the coup de grace, speeding up the process. Of course private gains under these “parliamentary enclosures” are “in the public interest.”

1895 in Africa. A decade earlier the Plenipotentiaries of European Powers (as they refer to themselves) agreed to establish respective “spheres of economic influence” throughout the continent and make key entry points like the Niger and Congo Rivers free trade zones. As the newest industrial power and especially anxious to extend trade, Germany hosts the meeting in Berlin in 1884-85. Europe is in economic crisis (the Great Depression 1873-1896). Factory owners desperately need new markets for unsold textiles and other manufactures. Fabulously wealthy entrepreneurs, with “vast accumulations of capital burning holes in their owners’ pockets” (Hobsbawn 1987) also seek new enterprises to invest in. The new working classes, having lost their livelihoods and now dependent upon (failing) factory jobs are also in need of new locales to migrate to. The matter is so important that the Powers create an early international trade law, the General Act of the Berlin Conference on West Africa, 1885. In practice, opening markets and enterprise in Africa does not work out so well and free trade goes out the window. By 1895 the economic scramble for Africa has segued into a political scramble with the creation of colonies and protectorates to protect new markets and tap the increasingly apparent wealth of resources and cheap labor in the African hinterlands.

The problem from the 1890s is, How to acquire such massive lands cheaply? For some time traders, profiteers and missionaries have been buying lands from coastal chiefs to create trading posts, ports, missionary enclaves, and more recently, for anti-slavery monitoring posts. Companies backed by European governments have been doing the same. The British Royal Niger Company alone has several hundred land contracts made with West African chiefs guaranteeing access to land for mainly commercial oil palm production, supporting inter aliathe burgeoning soap industry in Europe. Chiefs are now selling exploration rights to gold mining companies. Such purchases suggest that European governments are amply aware that Africa is far from unowned. There is also the 1844 Bond to consider. This is a bilateral investment treaty signed between “sovereigns of equal power” along the Gold Coast and the British Crown. Nor are such kings and chiefs naive, with a long history of slave and commodity trading behind them and well-established trade missions and embassies in European capitals.

Luckily the old feudal land laws of Europe along with the Marshall Ruling of 1823 mentioned above come to the rescue. These offer a clutch of routes to legalize dispossession at scale. Legality is of concern to colonizers and their parliaments, not least to appease humanist groups at home who count the abolition of slavery as a first success. But the “right of discovery” assures the colonizers undisputed ownership of the soil. This may not work so well along coastal areas but can be amply applied to hinterland areas. Natives themselves unwittingly open the way; many of them claim that only God can own the soil or that their communities, continuing from the past into the present and future, are the owners. While firm in their respective schemes of possession they admit the land itself cannot be sold, at least not without the consent of communities. To Europeans, this conceded lack of fungibility and tendency to communalism “proves” that Africans do not own their lands in the manner European property laws acknowledge. Where bills of sale have queered the pitch, natives may be guaranteed secure occupancy and use – for as long as they actively occupy and farm the land. It would not, in any event, be wise to make it difficult for natives to feed themselves.

Conditionality of occupation and use leaves the attractive prospect that Europeans may claim ownership of several billon hectares of unsettled and unfarmed lands – in short, the communal property within their customary domains. Have not Smith, Locke, Mills and others established long ago that private property only comes into existence by the hand of man’s labor? The concept of “wastes” from feudal tenures is neatly applied to the continent by all colonizing powers. Counterpoint constructs of “effectively occupied lands” in the form of settlements and permanent farms, and “unowned and vacant lands” quickly evolve. In the absence of acknowledged owners, the commons fall directly to colonial administrations as their private property. And if there is still any doubt, it is obvious to the white men that the lucrative forests, wetlands and grasslands of Africa cannot amount to property as they are in communal possession; in Europe, private property means individual property. Moreover property obtains legal protection only when an individual person or company has a deed to prove it. Africans do not. In oddly mixed ways, these various proofs of terra nullius are applied.

Legal dispossession of Africans is more or less total. In practice, the ability of colonizers to settle and “develop” more than a million or so hectares in each new polity is constrained (South Africa aside). Natives continue to occupy and use lands which they no longer legally own.

Through the 20th century major colonial incursions are made into these lands. Although cities and towns multiply, they prove more notable for the conflicts they generate than the actual hectares they absorb. Settler schemes, commercial plantations run by parastatals and private enterprise, take a much greater toll, along with evictions caused by the issuance of concessions to foreign enterprises for oil, mining and timber exploitation. Laws are also passed declaring certain resources generically the property of the state; minerals (surface mined for centuries or not), waters, beachfronts, marshlands, mountains, forests and woodlands, fall like ninepins to the state, irrespective of local possession.

The 1960s in Africa. Liberation from Europe begins mid-century. Curiously, colonial notions of tenure are sustained in most post-independence land laws. Or perhaps not so curiously, for keeping rural majorities as tenants at will is as useful to new African governments as it had been to colonial masters. Class formation and land commoditization have grown apace since the 1940s. The new African middle class share not only political power and business interests, but the same deep commitments to market-led development so strongly advocated by the new donors (the former colonizers) and international agencies. Positions expressed in the landmark studies of late colonialism in Anglophone (1955) and Francophone officialdom (1959) become embedded national policies in Africa, reinforced by the land policies of the World Bank (1975). These read little differently from those of Malthus and Lloyd, as recorded by Linebaugh: land privatization is prerequisite to productivity.

Indigenous tenure regimes in general and communal landholding in particular are to be done away with as obstructions to individual-centric economic growth, to allow the polarization needed to produce a landless class for urban industrialization and fewer and larger native land owners assisted to produce food and commodities at scale. As is now so well known, Garrett Hardin, confusing collective group-owned property with open access regimes, adds his penny’s worth to destructively good effect (1968).

All over Africa (and Asia) privatization schemes are launched, aiming to individualize, title and register houses and farms (Alden Wily 2011). Where these work, such as in Kenya, commons are subdivided among wealthier farmers. Or they are handed over to governments as forest and wildlife reserves or state-run commercial agriculture developments. Ultimately the reach of privatization schemes is limited, so that by 1990 only around 10 percent of the rural lands of Africa are subject to statutory entitlement, and most of this in the white settler areas of southern Africa. But this is not problematic for African administrations who continue to dispose of untitled, customarily-owned lands at will, often to themselves or other private interests.

1990 in Africa. Despite privatization pressures the customary sector remains dominant. As the century nears end half a billion Africans are still regulating their land relations according to community-based norms, shaped by customs but adjusted regularly to meet changing realities. Despite significant failures in the 1970s and 1980s governments hold tenaciously to mechanized large-scale farming as the route to growth. Smallholder agriculture remains starved of investment even though customary smallholders represent the overwhelming majority. Families eke out a living on less and less farmland per capita. Levels of concentration and farm landlessness within the African peasant sector look increasingly like those of South Asia in the 1960s. But where the commons remain these routinely make the difference between pauperization and survival. As in Linebaugh’s village of Otmoor over a century past, the unfarmed commons continue to provide a host of services and products, from “pasture to pannage, to fish and fowl” and the waters needed to irrigate farms. Woodlands and forests are especially valuable, doubling the livelihood of the poor in many areas (IUCN 2010). And of course, the rural poor are the majority, some 75 percent of the rural population.

Democratization in the 1990s provokes tenure reforms, often following years of bitter social conflict. A handful of governments, most notably Uganda, Mozambique and Tanzania, acknowledge that Africans cannot remain forever squatters of their own land (Alden Wily 2011). They pass new land laws which for the first time endow customary rights with the legal force of real property, and irrespective of whether or not these interests are formally titled and registered, or owned by individuals, families or communities. The last opens the way for communities to secure thousands of hectares of commonage as acknowledged collective property. However, as well as being flawed in diverse ways, these cases are the exceptions. Most governments continue to avoid real change to their land laws. World Bank structural adjustment programs aid and abet this, coercing governments to accelerate privatization and sell off untitled lands (including the commons) to foreign investors.

Now consider this. It is 2011. Hundreds of rural communities in Africa – as well as parts of Asia and Latin America – are physically confronted with eviction or displacement or simply truncation of their livelihoods and lands they customarily presume to be their own. These lands are willfully reallocated by their governments to mainly foreign investors to the tune of an estimated 220 million hectares since mainly 2007, and still rising.1 Two thirds of the lands being sold or mainly leased are in poverty-stricken and investment-hungry Africa. Large-scale deals for hundreds of thousands of hectares dominate, although deals for smaller areas acquired by domestic investors run apace (World Bank 2010).

This is the global land rush, triggered by crises in oil and food markets of the last decade, and compounded by the financial crisis.2 The latter adds backing and raises the speculative stakes enormously. The crisis provides lucrative new investment opportunities to sovereign wealth funds, hedge funds and global agribusiness, the new entrepreneurs with “accumulated capital burning holes in their owners’ pockets.” Global shifts in economic power are evident; while western actors continue to dominate as land acquirers, the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China) and food-insecure Middle Eastern oil states are active competitors. A regional bias is beginning to show; China and Malaysia dominate land acquisition in Asia while South Africa shows signs of future dominance in Africa. Two South African farmer enclaves already exist in Nigeria, and Congo Brazzaville has granted 88,000 hectares with promises of up to ten million hectares to follow. Negotiations are ongoing in at least 20 other African states (Hall 2011).

What foreign governments and other investors primarily seek are lands to feed the lucrative biofuel market by producing sugar cane, jatropha and especially oil palm at scale.3 They also want to produce food crops and livestock for home economies, bypassing unreliable and expensive international food markets. Additionally, investors seek to launch lucrative horticultural, floricultural and carbon credit schemes. For all this cheap deals are needed: cheap land (US$0.50 per hectare in many cases), duty-free import of their equipment, duty-free export of their products, tax-free status for their staff and production, and low-interest loans, often acquired from local banks on the basis of the new land titles they receive.

This rush for land, the new landgrab, does not stand alone. Local banks, communications, infrastructural projects, tourism ventures and local industry are also being bought up with a vengeance. These take advantage of the new market liberalization that poor agrarian governments now finally provide after decades of nagging by international financial institutions. For host governments, foreign investment is the new aid and path to economic growth, firmly facilitated by international agencies (Daniel 2011). Local land speculation flourishes in its service. The promise of jobs is more or less the only immediate benefit to national populations, and experience thus far suggests these are not materializing.

Nor is the phenomenon a one-way street. Extending and entrenching competitive “spheres of economic influence” is also on the agenda. Foreign capture of population-rich new markets for home manufactures is actively sought alongside land deals. This is best illustrated in the largely foreign capital buy-in and buy-up of Special Economic Zones (SEZ), most advanced in India but emerging elsewhere, such as in the Chinese “Shenzhen” planned in eight African states (Brautigam 2011). Should these develop they will provide tariff-free entry for Chinese goods at scale and locales for Chinese producers and laborers seeking to escape the saturation of home markets. Bilateral investment treaties, of which nearly five thousand have been signed between North and South states over the last decade, provide the governing framework for these developments.

In short, economic crises and shifts in the balance of political power once again produce seismic shifts in who owns and controls land, resources and production. But where are the poor and the commons in all this?

THE COMMONS AND COMMONERS

The answer is quite simple. Much of the lands being sold or leased to entrepreneurs are commons. This is not surprising because lands defined as commons in the modern agrarian world generally exclude permanent farms and settlements. Governments and investors prefer to avoid settled lands as their dispossession is most likely to provoke resistance. They also want to avoid having to pay compensation for huts and standing crops, or for relocation. Only the unfarmed commons – the forest/woodlands, rangelands and wetlands, can supply the thousands of hectares large-scale investors want. But most of all, the commons are deemed “vacant and available.” For the laws of most host lessor states still treat all customarily-owned lands and unfarmed lands in particular asunowned, unoccupied and idle. As such they remain the property of the state. This makes their onward sale or lease to private investors perfectly legal. Indeed, without such legality in domestic land law, and investor-friendly international trade law to take their side in international courts if needed, no international or local investor would proceed.

Of course the commons are neither unutilized or idle, nor unowned. On the contrary, under local tenure norms virtually no land is, or ever has been, unowned, and this remains the case despite the century-long subordination of such customary rights as no more than permissive possession (occupancy and use of unowned lands or lands owned by the state).

In practice, customary ownership is nested in spatial domains, the territory of one community extending to the boundaries of the next. While the exact location of intercommunity boundaries are routinely challenged and contested, there is little doubt in the locality as to which community owns and controls which area. Within each of these domains property rights are complex and various. The most usual distinction drawn today is between rights over permanent house and farm plots, and rights over the residual commons. Rights over the former are increasingly absolute in the hands of families, and increasingly alienable. Rights over commons are collective, held in undivided shares, and while they exist in perpetuity are generally inalienable. This is not least because the owner, the community, is a continuing, intergenerational entity. This does not mean that in the right circumstances, parts or even all of a community’s commons cannot be leased. Whether the community wishes to do so or not, is, communities believe, a matter for commoners to decide. Clearly, most domestic statutory legislation does not agree, let alone consider these critical estates in land to be community assets in the first instance.

The results of this continuing denial that property ownership exists except as recognized by “imported” European laws are clear for all to see in the current land rush. Not just commons but occupied farms and houses are routinely being lost as investors move in. In Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, villagers with homesteads scattered in the forest have lost their entire domains to commercial crop farmers and now squat in a neighboring National Park from whence they will in due course also be evicted (Mpoyi 2010). In Ethiopia, communities are already being relocated from 10,000 hectares allocated to a Saudi-Ethiopian company with many more relocations anticipated as its lease is extended to 500,000 hectares (Oakland Institute 2011). Elsewhere communities are merely dramatically squeezed, retaining houses and farms but losing their woodlands and rangelands. Investors are clearing forests, damming rivers and diverting irrigation from smallholders, causing wetlands crucial to fishing, seasonal fodder production and grazing to dry up and enclosing thousands of hectares of grazing lands for mechanized farming for export. All this happens in Ethiopia, where local food security is already an issue and the specter of famine looms. The Ethiopian government is meanwhile expanding areas designated for investors to grow oil and food crops for export by 900,000 hectares in another region.

Sometimes villagers tentatively welcome investors in the belief that jobs, services, education and opportunities will compensate for the loss of traditional lands and livelihoods. The reality can be very different. Villagers in central Sierra Leone, Rwanda, and Kenya are among those not told that canal construction for industrial sugar cane production would dry up their wetlands, critical for seasonal rice production, fishing, reed collection, hunting and grazing.4Deng (2011) records the case of a community in South Sudan agreeing to hand over 179,000 hectares to a Norwegian company for an annual fee of $15,000 and construction of a few boreholes; the company aims to make millions on both production and carbon credit deals.

In such cases, traditional leaders and local elites are often facilitators of deals, making money on the side at the expense of their communities. Reports abound of chiefs or local elites in Ghana, Zambia, Nigeria and Mozambique persuading communities of the benefits of releasing their commons to investors, and even reinterpreting their trusteeship as entailing their due right to sell and benefit from those sales. Central government officials, politicians and entrepreneurs are routinely on hand to back them up. Such accounts are repeated throughout Africa, and in some Asian states such as Indonesia and Malaysian Borneo, where 20 million hectares have been scheduled for conversion into oil palm plantations (Colchester 2011). Everywhere the story is more or less the same: communal rights are being grossly interfered with, farming systems upturned, livelihoods decimated, and water use and environments changed in ways which are dubiously sustainable.

Clearly possession is no more sufficient today than it was for the English villagers of the 17th and 18th centuries of enclosure. Only legal recognition of commons as the communal property of communities is sufficient to afford real protection. A handful of states in Africa (and somewhat more in Latin America) have taken this crucial step, setting aside fungibility and formal registration as prerequisites to admission as real property. The land rush instead not only activates the effects of failing to make such changes a thousandfold. It also raises concern that fragile reformist trends will not be sustained. Governments appear to find leasing out their citizens’ land too lucrative to themselves and aligned elites, and too advantageous to market-led routes of growth, to let justice or the benefits of the commons stand in their way.

Full-time jobs and wages falling in Australia

Mike Head

Thousands of full-time jobs are being eliminated every month in Australia and real wages are falling, according to official statistics released this week. The results provide a picture, in a limited form, of the accelerating assault being conducted on the working conditions and living standards of the working class.

Even by the under-stated figures produced by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), full-time jobs fell by 64,500 over the past year, while 136,300 workers were pushed into part-time work, which is typically less secure and worse paid.

Jobs are being destroyed throughout mining-related and manufacturing industries, with the only jobs growth occurring in service sectors, such as hospitality, education and tourism, dominated by low-paid, casualised conditions.

This is a deterioration of a longer-term trend, which has been intensified by the deepening world slump and the further restructuring of economic life for the benefit of the financial elite since the global crash of 2008.

Although the ABS’s official headline unemployment rate dropped from 5.8 percent to 5.7 percent for July, this figure disguises the true levels of joblessness and the growth of an army of “under-employed” workers who want longer hours of employment in order to pay their bills.

The ABS statistics exclude all those working more than just an hour a week. Surveys conducted by Roy Morgan Research, a private consultancy, indicate a substantially worse situation, with 1.36 million workers unemployed and seeking work (10.5 percent) and 1.17 million under-employed (9.0 percent) in July. By this measure, 2.53 million workers, nearly one-fifth of the total workforce (19.5 percent), are either jobless or looking for more work.

The ABS estimate is also distorted by the fact that more unemployed workers are giving up looking for jobs. Last month, the seasonally adjusted workforce participation rate remained steady at 64.9 percent. Over the past year, however, about 33,000 adults dropped out of the ABS unemployment calculation.

In July, there was a slight increase in total working hours, but the average working month fell over the past year by just over an hour to 138 hours and 46 minutes, contributing to an overall decline in workers’ incomes and living standards.

The results further expose the fraud of the slogan of “jobs and growth” adopted by the Liberal-National government after Malcolm Turnbull ousted Tony Abbott as prime minister last September. Nevertheless, Treasurer Scott Morrison hailed the results as evidence that the government was delivering the greater “flexibility” required by business.

“What we’ve been seeing for some time now on the part-time, full-time front is there is more flexibility in the labour force,” Morrison told Sky in an interview. “I know some people tend to look down on those sorts of jobs; I certainly don’t,” Morrison said. “A job is a job, and more jobs is always a good thing.”

These comments, full of contempt for the victims of this process, underscore the fact that the corporate elite regards the jobs crisis as an opportunity to force unemployed workers into cheap labour. This is especially the case for the quarter of a million young people out of work, with the official youth unemployment rate at 13 percent—more than double the overall rate.

Part-time jobs doubled at the expense of full-time employment over the past four decades. In the late 1970s, only 15 percent of jobs were part-time, a figure that rose to 25 per cent by the late 1990s. Now it stands at a record 31.9 percent. Part-time work is becoming the “new normal” for growing layers of workers, with devastating consequences for living standards.

Throughout the corporate media, efforts are being made to present this process as one of “lifestyle choices” by workers to spend less time working. But a closer examination of the latest ABS data indicates otherwise.

In the first place, male employees, typically mining and industrial workers, are being affected the most. Close to 1.2 million males were engaged in part-time work as of June, compared with 1.07 million in June 2014. The 11 percent growth in male part-timers was more than double the rate of growth of females working part-time.

This shift reflects the collapse of the mining boom that largely sustained Australian capitalism in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 crisis, mainly driven by unsustainable credit-fuelled growth in China. The most mining-reliant states now have highest official unemployment rates—South Australia 6.4 percent, Western Australia 6.3 percent and Queensland 6.1 percent. By contrast, New South Wales, the state that hosts most financial companies and where housing prices and construction have not yet dropped, has the lowest rate of 5.2 percent.

Since mining export prices began to fall four years ago, tens of thousands of formerly high-paid mining jobs have been destroyed, with many more in related manufacturing and service industries. During the same period, the elimination of industrial jobs has gathered pace, led by the ongoing closure of the entire vehicle assembly industry by General Motors, Ford and Toyota, with all plants due to shut by the end of 2017.

This corporate offensive is driving down average wages. Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) economist John Peters commented that the “lift in spare capacity in the labour market” had “toned down workers’ pursuit of higher wages,” with workers “possessing little real negotiating clout.”

According to the ABS Wage Price Index, the results for the past six months were the weakest since the current index began in 1998. During the June quarter, wages growth stayed at a record annual low of 2.1 percent, with wages rising by 1.9 percent in the private sector and 2.3 percent in the public sector. Among mining workers, the rate was just 1.3 percent.

Average real wages, taking inflation into account, have now been stagnant, or falling for some workers, for the past three years. While record low interest rates have helped workers paying off mortgages, those who are renting or not benefiting from lower prices of some items within the official “inflation basket” are worse off.

Since 2013, real wages have grown just 0.3 percent, using the underlying inflation measure of the “trimmed mean.” This does not take into account changes to welfare payment thresholds and rises in nominal pay that push people into higher levels of taxation and above certain cut-offs for welfare payments. As a result, on average, working-class living standards would have decreased in that time.

The widening gulf between working people and the wealthiest layers of society—the top 1 percent and 10 percent—was illustrated when the CBA reported this month that its CEO Ian Narev’s total pay for the past year rose to $12.3 million, an increase of 50 percent.

The bank itself, which was privatised by Labor governments between 1991 and 1996, posted a record profit of $9.45 billion, up 3 percent, with the lion’s share going to the corporate giants that dominate its share register. During the last half of 2015, the bank shed 727 jobs, adding to the unemployment and under-employment crisis.

Decades-long cover-up of “black lung” among Australian miners

Oscar Grenfell

A report by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “7.30” program last Monday indicated that authorities knew of black lung cases among coal miners in Queensland before last year’s official “rediscovery” of the disease.

Coal workers’ pneumoconiosis, also termed black lung, results from the accumulation of dust particles in the lung, leading to scarring and inflammation. The incurable condition can cause chronic bronchitis, lung failure, scleroderma and heart problems. In severe cases, the disease ends in an excruciatingly painful death.

“7.30” stated that Queensland Workers Compensation data, obtained by the program under freedom of information legislation, showed four compensation claims for the disease between 2007 and 2012. One claim was reportedly approved, while another is pending.

According to the program, a Queensland Health audit of public records showed four possible and seven probable instances of black lung between 1995 and 2015.

Safe Work Australia, the statutory authority responsible for health and safety across the country, had also identified two compensation claims for the disease in New South Wales and one in Western Australia. It was not clear whether the claims were from workers who had been employed in the state, or they had moved from Queensland.

The revelations point to a cover-up by successive Labor and Liberal-National Queensland state governments, regulatory authorities and mining companies. For three decades, they claimed the disease had been eradicated in the state.

While “7.30” did not raise the issue, the workers compensation cases also underscore the absurdity of the claims by the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU), which covers mine workers, to have been unaware of the existence of the disease. The union is often involved in compensation cases brought by current and former workers.

In the past, the CFMEU has boasted of its intimate involvement with health and safety practices in the mining sector. In 2014, for instance, Andrew Vickers, general secretary of CFMEU’s Mining and Energy Division, stated: “The CFMEU has been instrumental in ensuring some of, if not the world’s, best health and safety laws in the coal industry. Indeed, at a time that pneumoconiosis—also known as ‘black lung disease’—is again on the rise, Australia has not had a reported case since the early 1970s.”

There are growing indications that the number of miners affected by the disease is rising.

On August 11, the Queensland government confirmed three more cases, bringing the official total to 18. The CFMEU, however, claims to know of at least 30 workers who have contracted the disease. On August 12, the union reported that a former worker had died of a condition associated with black lung.

One of the confirmed cases is Stephen Mellor, 39, who has worked in five mines since 2003. He was diagnosed while taking time off work earlier in the year to care for his father. Mellor is now unable to work and has received no compensation. Subsequent chest x-rays found that he was affected by the disease for the bulk of his mining career, without it being identified in his employers’ medical examinations.

Mellor told the Daily Mercury on Thursday: “I was devastated, I was really dumbfounded. I didn’t know what to do. I knew there and then that my career was over... I’ve got no savings left. I’ve pretty much used up everything I have.”

The health crisis is the direct result of inadequate safety standards and monitoring. Coal dust standards vary from state to state. In Queensland, where individual companies are allowed to monitor the dust, the allowable level of dust exposure for a single shift is 3 milligrams (mg) per cubic metre of air, well above what are regarded as “safe” levels in Britain and the US.

State and federal government inquiries into black lung earlier this year revealed that the standards are frequently violated. Testimony to the federal Senate inquiry indicated that eight of ten coal mines in Queensland operated above the 3 milligram limit between 2012 and 2015, with one registering 6.5 milligrams. Federal and state government authorities took no action against the companies involved.

A review of black lung cases at Monash University in July found a “a major system failure at virtually all levels” of the Coal Mine Workers Health Scheme, which operates under legislation passed by the Queensland state Labor government in 1999 and 2001.

Written in the dry language of an academic paper, the report was nevertheless a damning indictment of a system designed to cover-up, not treat and expose, health problems. One of its summary findings was that “it is clear that the focus of the respiratory component of the scheme is on fitness for work rather than the detection and management of early CMDLD (black lung).” It said the scheme was not being used to monitor trends in the respiratory health of miners.

The study found that the bulk of spirometry tests, which measure lung functioning, are conducted by unqualified staff. Almost half the tests reviewed were conducted so poorly they provided no indication of lung functioning. Only one of the 30 tests showed abnormalities that were identified correctly.

When lung functioning issues were recognised, they were generally ascribed to cigarette smoke, without further investigation. Two thirds of spirometry machines had not been calibrated this year. Professor Malcolm Sim, who headed the review, said he was “not surprised” by the emergence of the disease.

A 2012 report by the American Centre for Disease Control, warning of the possible re-emergence of black lung cases in Queensland, was not acted upon by successive state governments. The report said “longwall mining, with its generally higher dust exposures, began in Queensland in the mid-1980s… Given the latency of CWP (black lung), new cases among the cohort of miners who worked on these longwalls may begin to be discovered through an effective surveillance program.”

The existence of black lung, which is often viewed as a condition typical of 19th century conditions, is a graphic expression of the subordination of workers’ health and safety to the profit drive of the major companies.

Yesterday, Queensland’s current 18-month-old Labor government pushed through parliament a vote for a parliamentary review into the disease outbreak. The move followed calls by some Labor MPs, backed by the CFMEU, for a royal commission, which would provide a more elaborate whitewash. Labor is seeking to cover-up its responsibility for the health crisis. It was earlier in office from 1998 to 2012, overseeing the Coal Mine Workers Health Scheme. Likewise, the CFMEU is anxious to prevent any probing of its intimate familiarity with the substandard conditions forced upon miners.

The union’s real role, in collaborating with the major mining companies, has been underscored by its enforcement of sweeping sackings following the collapse of the mining boom and the slump of global commodity prices. Over 2,000 mining jobs were destroyed in the first two months of the year. Since then, thousands more have been laid-off. A National Australia Bank report in June forecast another 50,000 retrenchments by the end of the year.

Indian PM Modi “plays Balochistan card” against Pakistan

Deepal Jayasekera & Keith Jones

In a major and highly provocative strategic shift, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has taken to denouncing Pakistan for human rights abuses in Balochistan.

This is a calculated move, aimed at inflaming relations with India’s historic rival and under conditions where tensions between South Asia’s nuclear-armed states are already near the boiling point.

Islamabad has repeatedly accused Indian intelligence of providing logistical support to the longstanding ethno-national secessionist insurgency in Balochistan. Pakistan’s impoverished south-western province is resource-rich. But its geo-strategic importance has greatly increased, because its newly-built Arabian Sea port, Gwadar, has emerged as the linchpin of the China Pakistan Economic Corridor—a rail, road and pipeline network that will link western China with the Middle East and Africa.

Modi signaled the change in Indian strategy at an August 12 “all-parties conference” on the unrest in Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state. Modi denounced Pakistan, which has occupied northern and western sections of the former British Indian Empire princely-state of Kashmir since 1947-48 and lays claim to all of Indian-held Jammu and Kashmir, for fomenting “terrorism” in the Kashmir Valley. He then declared: “Pakistan forgets that it bombs its own citizens using fighter planes. The time has come when Pakistan shall have to answer to the world for the atrocities committed by it against people in Balochistan and PoK (Pakistan occupied Kashmir).”

Throwing further fuel on the fire, Modi called on the Indian Ministry of External Affairs to “approach the people of PoK residing in different parts of world and collect information about the miserable conditions in PoK and bring them to the knowledge of the world community.”

Modi repeated this line of attack in his August 15 Independence Day address to the nation, making clear thereby that his remarks three days before were not off the cuff, but rather the launching of a strategic offensive. He boasted of having received thanks from “the people” of Baluchistan, PoK, and Gilgit-Baltistan (the northern-most part of Pakistan-held Kashmir, which Islamabad administers separately from PoK) for having spoken out against Pakistani abuses. People “settled far across,” who “I have not seen,” “have not met,” continued Modi, show “goodwill … towards me … acknowledge the Prime Minister of India, they honour him, so it is an honour of my 125 crore (1.25 billion) countrymen.”

Modi’s claims of support from Pakistani-held Kashmir and Baluchistan prompted a swift, angry retort from Sajjat Aziz, Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s chief foreign policy advisor. He said, “Prime Minister Modi’s reference to Balochistan, which is an integral part of Pakistan, only proves Pakistan’s contention that India, through its main intelligence agency RAW, has been fomenting terrorism in Balochistan.”

It is not uncommon for Indian officials, including prime ministers, to speak about Pakistan-held Kashmir, which New Delhi claims is rightfully Indian territory. References to Pakistani “atrocities” in Baluchistan, however, are virtually without precedent and were immediately recognized on both sides of the border as representing a major escalation of tensions between New Delhi and Islamabad.

“Prime ministers,” said an editorial in the Chennai-based daily Hindu, “have often used the Independence Day speech to answer threats and provocations from Pakistan. … Even so, Modi’s reference to Balochistan marks a first, and deliberate, shift in India’s consistent policy of refraining from commenting on the internal affairs of another country.”

India’s military-intelligence establishment was quick to endorse Modi’s sally against Pakistan. RAW Chief Vikram Sood sent out a tweet welcoming Modi’s anti-Pakistan statements as “a qualitative shift in our policy if we sustain this approach.” An unnamed intelligence officer told the Times of India Modi’s overt intervention in Pakistani affairs marks “a shift from being on the back foot to coming out and claiming what’s legally right.” Hinting at the activities of Indian intelligence agencies inside Pakistan, he added, “Our agencies have been following the injustices in these regions, yet diplomatically we’ve acted with restraint.”

Modi’s ostensible Indian political opponents have supported the new hardline. The Congress Party quickly disassociated itself from a statement of former Foreign Minister Salman Kurshid expressing concern. “The Congress,” declared party spokesman Randeep Surjewala, “feels the violations in Balochistan, the way democracy and democratic dissent is being stifled, India should raise it in bilateral and international fora.”

Modi’s claim to speak on behalf of the Balochis, and the implied threat India could support the dismemberment of Pakistan, is in the first instance a response to the growing crisis his government faces in Jammu and Kashmir. The state has been convulsed by mass protests for the past six weeks—ever since Indian troops killed Burhan Muzaffar Wani, the 22-year-old commander of the Hizbul Mujahideen (HM), a pro-Pakistani, Kashmiri separatist and Islamist group.

India’s government, led by Modi’s Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party, insists the unrest in Jammu and Kashmir is solely a product of Pakistani subversion. But the continuation of mass protests in the face of brutal repression by Indian military and para-military forces that has left more than 60 people dead attests to a deep sense of alienation among Kashmir’s Muslims.

Pakistan, for its part, has sought to exploit the protests to whip up animosity against India and advance the reactionary strategic rivalry it has pursued against India since the two states were created in 1947 through the bloody communal partition of the subcontinent. Sharif dedicated his August 14 Pakistan independence speech “to the freedom of Kashmir.”

While there is an element of tit-for-tat in New Delhi choosing to counter Pakistani propaganda about India’s human rights violations in Kashmir with denunciations of Pakistani “atrocities” in Balochistan, the intensification of the Indo-Pakistani strategic rivalry is above all rooted in the US’s anti-China “Pivot to Asia.”

The US drive to harness India to its military-strategic offensive against China has overturned the tenuous balance of power in South Asia. Emboldened by the US’s elevation of India to the status of “global strategic partner,” its offers of advanced military equipment and co-development of weapons systems, and its support for New Delhi’s ambitions to become an Indian Ocean power and expand economic and strategic ties with East Asia, the Modi government has pushed aggressively against Pakistan. This has included instructing military commanders to take a more belligerent stance in exchanges of cross-border firing and vowing not to pursue peace talks until Islamabad demonstrably bows to its demands for the suppression of anti-Indian Kashmiri separatists and Islamist groups in Pakistan.

Facing the common threat of an ever-more explicit Indo-US military-strategic alliance, Pakistan and China have significantly enhanced their own ties over the past two years. The China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which is being backed by $46 billion in Chinese investment, is a key element in this. A huge boost to the beleaguered Pakistani economy, the CPEC also has major strategic implications for China as it would allow Beijing to partially offset the US plans to impose an economic blockade on China by seizing Indian Ocean and South China Sea chokepoints in the event of a war or war-crisis.

The Modi government has vociferously condemned the CPEC on the grounds that it would pass through “Indian territory,” that is Gilgit and other parts of Pakistan-held Kashmir. Its real concerns are the shot-in-the arm the CPEC constitutes for the economy of its arch-rival Pakistan and its role in underpinning strategic ties between Islamabad and Beijing.

It is no coincidence that the areas where New Delhi has chosen to highlight Pakistani human rights abuses, Gilgit, PoK and, above all, Balochistan, are all slated to play an important role in the CPEC.

There are real grievances in Balochistan rooted in the abuse and neglect to which the population has been subjected by the Pakistan state. During the past decade, the military has mounted a brutal counter-insurgency war against the Balochi separatists, involving carpet-bombing, illegal detentions, and summary executions.

The Balochi nationalists offer no way forward, however. They represent sections of the local bourgeois elite who hope to carve out a separate state so they can make their own deals with imperialism at the expense of the workers and toilers. Their selfish class aims find expression in their violent attacks on of Pashtun workers and other non-Balochis resident in Balochistan.

The Balochi nationalists have long hoped to secure the patronage of the Indian bourgeoisie and above all US imperialism. Writing in the Indian Express this week the head of the Washington-based Balochistan Institute, Malik Siraj Akbar, warmly welcomed Modi’s “recognition” of the “Balochi nation.” Making clear the Balcohi nationalists’ readiness to enlist in Washington’s strategic offensive against China drive, Akbar declared, “Given Balochistan’s geostrategic location and increasing Chinese involvement there, the Baloch will have no option but to search for allies in the region to protect their land and resources.”

There are some Indian press commentators who have voiced concern at the incendiary implications of Modi’s “playing of the Balochistan card.” They argue it could redound against India by weakening international support for its claim to Jammu and Kashmir, lending legitimacy to ethno-nationalist secessionist movements inside India, and further complicating New Delhi’s already explosive relationship with Pakistan. But these arguments are being drowned out by the chorus of voices from the military-intelligence establishment and corporate media that are cheering Modi on in this reckless gambit—a gambit that could quickly spiral out of control and plunge the region into a war with incalculable consequences.

Venezuela opens border with Colombia in order to alleviate growing social tensions

Alexander Fangmann

Nearly a year after unilaterally he closed the country’s border with Colombia, primarily to stem smuggling operations and the flow of goods onto the black market, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro joined with Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos in announcing on August 12 that both countries would move ahead with a plan to reopen it.

The plan, adopted following a series of high-level meetings, envisions a partial reopening at first. This follows limited reopenings recently that saw hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans pour over the frontier in order to try to buy foods, medicines and other basic goods that have become scarce in their country due to the growing economic crisis.

According to Migración Colombia, Colombia’s customs and migration agency, 78,000 Venezuelans visited the country last Saturday, the first open border day since the announcement of the agreement, while 58,000 visited on Sunday.

According to the agreement, five crossings along the 2,200 km border will be open, for 13 hours a day. During this first phase, only pedestrians will be allowed to cross, and Colombia has created a special card for border transit that will authorize only limited access to the country. Users of the card will need to provide full identification and indicate the reason for their travel to Colombia. Both entrances and exits will be tracked, presumably to help identify those most involved in developed smuggling operations.

Maduro closed the border last summer following an attack on Venezuelan soldiers attributed by the government to right-wing paramilitaries, but which was widely believed to have been carried out by smugglers. Immediately following the border closing, Venezuela forcibly deported around 1,000 Colombians living near the border, while 5,000 to 6,000 left “voluntarily.”

Smuggling has increased tremendously due to the growing economic crisis and the possibility of exploiting differences in subsidized prices and exchange rates between the two countries. These factors are not, however, the main cause of the crisis, which ultimately remains the global breakdown of the capitalist system and the dramatic effect that it has had on commodity prices.

As part of the public relations campaign following the agreement, on the following Monday Colombia announced that it had broken up a gasoline smuggling network operating along the border with Venezuela.

Venezuela has seen scarcity of 50 to 80 percent of food products, and 80 percent of medicines, as the government has sharply curtailed imports of those products, as well as the raw materials needed by domestic manufacturers. Total imports have fallen 40 percent. The immediate cause of this has been the precipitous decline in the price of oil, which makes up 96 percent of Venezuelan export earnings, and which finances many of the government’s own programs.

The result has been a series of food riots and demonstrations by wider and wider layers of the population. There have also been strikes by bus drivers, as well as a general fear on the part of the ruling class of a wider strike wave. The move to open the border is being used as a way to alleviate that threat by allowing at least some Venezuelans to acquire goods in Colombia.

By and large, most people crossing the border are unlikely to be able to satisfy their needs. Peter Hakim, president emeritus of the Inter-American Dialogue, said the average amount spent by Venezuelans was about $20. He said, “This suggests these are people without large incomes, without access to a lot of money that are really struggling to make ends meet,” and that “$20 a person, even in Colombia in rural areas, does not buy a whole lot of food.”

Aside from the issue of scarcity, the extreme inflation gripping the Venezuelan economy also means that, increasingly, Venezuelans cannot afford to buy enough food. According to a study by Simón Bolívar University, that number is about 9 in 10, with the remainder being the upper-middle class and the boliburguesía (Bolivarian bourgeoisie).

While the government estimates that inflation has been about 370 percent for the past year, the IMF estimates that inflation may top 700 percent for 2016. This has largely eroded the buying power of the vast majority of Venezuelans, who are now dependent upon food subsidies to make ends meet.

In response to the inflation, the Maduro government recently announced it would raise the minimum wage from 15,051 bolivars, around $23 at the lower of the two official exchange rates, to 22,576 bolivars, equivalent to about $35. The Venezuelan food subsidy program, known as Cestaticket, will increase from 18,585 bolivars to 42,480 bolivars, an increase of 128 percent that brings the subsidy up to $66. The total increase is nearly double, but still paltry, and not nearly enough to make up for inflation.

Even after the increase in the minimum wage and the limited opening of the border, the situation for working-class Venezuelans remains dire, and protests and strikes will inevitably increase in response.

Government indifference in the midst of historic Louisiana flooding

Tom Hall

As floodwaters continue to recede, the historic scale of the destruction in south Louisiana is becoming more apparent. The Red Cross calls the floods, caused by unprecedented rainfalls which began last weekend, the worst US natural disaster since Hurricane Sandy in 2012, which devastated much of the East Coast.

The figures for the humanitarian crisis are being constantly revised upward. At least 13 people have been killed and 40,000 homes damaged, many beyond repair. Some 30,000 people have had to be rescued from the rising waters, either trapped in their homes or stranded in their cars on the highway while trying to evacuate. More than 7,000 people remain in emergency shelters, set up at the last minute by government agencies.

A broad area encompassing 20 of the state’s 64 parishes (counties) has been declared a disaster area by the federal government, spanning from the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, considered part of the New Orleans metropolitan area, westward towards Lake Charles, near the border with Texas. Many places are still flooded, almost a full week after the initial rainstorms.

Entire parishes have been almost wiped out by the floods. A spokeswoman for the Livingston Parish Sheriff’s office estimated that three quarters of the parish’s homes were a “total loss.” Livingston Parish, comprising eastern suburbs of Baton Rouge, the state capital and second largest city in the state, is home to 138,000 people. More than 15,000 people were rescued in this one parish alone, which received more than 31 inches of rain in 15 hours on Friday. In nearby Ascension Parish, to the south of Baton Rouge, which is home to 114,000 people, more than 30 percent of the homes in the parish were flooded.

While the worst of the flooding has passed in most areas, the situation is far from over. With yet more rain in the forecast for the area over the weekend, many areas where water levels had been subsiding are faced with the prospect of renewed flooding. “The problem is there is nowhere for the water to run off” in the flat terrain of south Louisiana, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service told NBC News. “In the last couple of days, we’ve had to reissue flash flood warnings in areas that had been showing improvement.”

The federal response to the disaster is a mixture of stinginess and outright indifference.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) caps its financial assistance to flood victims, according to previously set guidelines, at a paltry $33,000 per family, far less than the costs faced by those whose homes were wiped out. However, most victims will likely see only a tiny fraction of even this inadequate sum; the average payout in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which killed more than 1,000 people and flooded 80 percent of the city of New Orleans, was a paltry $7,114, according to figures published by the Advocate newspaper.

This is all the more significant because the vast majority of the flood victims have no flood insurance, meaning they will be compelled to rely entirely on their own savings, if they have any, and upon government aid to rebuild their lives. Many areas affected by flooding lie outside of federally designated flood zones, where residents assumed that they would not need flood insurance. However, less than half of homeowners in even high-risk areas throughout the state lack flood insurance, according to FEMA.

Summing up official indifference to the plight of people whose lives have been destroyed by the floods, FEMA spokeswoman Robin Smith told the Wall Street Journal, “we’re like a life vest, not a lifeboat,” and told the newspaper that victims must look to private nonprofit groups, not the federal agency charged with responding to natural disasters, to be made whole. Some 86,000 people have already applied for help from FEMA, which has approved payouts of only $3.7 million so far, the paper noted.

The miserly aid to flood victims contrasts sharply with the virtually unlimited sums of money laid out by the federal government for the military. TheJournal estimated that the total property damage from the floods could surpass $1 billion. By comparison, the Obama administration spent $80 billion to bail out General Motors and Chrysler. The net cost of the bailout of the auto bosses, $9 billion, is four times the total in disaster grants awarded by FEMA.

The $33,000 maximum FEMA grant “is not even going to cover repairs to the structure, not to mention the entire contents of the house stacked up by the street soaking wet,” Gene Broussard, whose brother was killed in the floods, told the Wall Street Journal. “The government bails out a company or another country, and you’ve got a good section of the state of Louisiana in total loss, and you’re going to offer us $33,000 to fix up our home and replace everything?”

To make matters worse, the destruction of much of the area’s housing stock by the floods will render essentially moot FEMA’s principal form of financial aid to homeowners, temporary rental assistance designed to provide some form of housing while their homes are rebuilt. The flooding of more than 40,000 homes will likely produce the most severe housing crisis in the state since Hurricane Katrina, which forced hundreds of thousands to seek shelter in hotels or shoddily built “FEMA trailers,” or to leave the state altogether in search of housing. FEMA “can’t rely on [rental assistance],” National Public Radio noted, because “there simply aren’t habitable homes available for rent.”

The political establishment has responded to the disaster with cold indifference. Hillary Clinton announced on Facebook that she would not be traveling to Louisiana, using the lame excuse that relief efforts couldn’t “afford any distractions” created by such a visit. Her Republican opponent Donald Trump made a photo-op appearance for a few hours in the Baton Rouge area on Friday afternoon before boarding a plane for a rally in Michigan.

But the most callous response so far has come from President Barack Obama, who has refused calls to end his two-week vacation on Martha’s Vineyard early to travel to Louisiana. Only on Friday afternoon did the administration finally announce that Obama would visit the state next Tuesday, after he ends his vacation and returns to the White House Sunday night.

While large portions of Louisiana remained under water, Obama spent his days “letting loose, staying out til 1 at night with friends and hitting the golf course by day at the beautiful island destination,” Time magazine reported, adding that vacation cottages in the area carry a rental charge from $2,900 to $20,000 a week. Obama did, however, take an afternoon off from his vacation to attend a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton, also held in Martha’s Vineyard, where a well-heeled group of 60 people paid $10,000 to $33,400 apiece.

Obama’s decision recalls the actions of George W. Bush during Hurricane Katrina. Bush initially refused to cut short his vacation at his ranch in Texas, later engaging in the infamous “fly-over” of Air Force One over New Orleans on his way back to Washington DC.

The comparison was not lost on the local media in Louisiana, where the Baton Rouge-based Advocate, concerned by the poor “optics” of this repeat performance, wrote an editorial criticizing Obama for passing his time in “a playground for the posh and well-connected,” while “Louisiana residents [languish] in flood waters.”

Obama’s evident indifference to the plight of the people of southern Louisiana is itself a political statement. It demonstrates that the response to Katrina was not motivated merely by Bush’s personal callousness or racism, but was rather an expression of the class position of the entire capitalist political establishment towards the devastating social conditions facing working people.

American jets scramble against Syrian aircraft bombing Kurdish rebels

Alex Lantier

In a move starkly pointing to the risk of all-out war between the major powers in the Middle East, the US military said yesterday that it had scrambled fighter jets Thursday against government bombers inside Syria, to protect US Special Forces operating with Kurdish rebel militias.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime had sent two Su-24 bombers to bomb Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) forces advancing on government-held positions in the city of Hasakah. The bombers nearly hit US Special Forces troops who are deployed illegally in Syria, embedded in the YPG. US officials tried to contact Syrian government and Russian forces operating in the region, and Russian officials replied that their bombers were not involved.

The US fighter planes arrived after the Syrian bombers had left the area, and no US soldiers were injured. Washington then stepped up its air patrols in the region, however. Yesterday, Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis warned of military action against any threat to US forces.

Washington, he said, would “take whatever action is necessary” to protect US Special Forces in Syria. “We will ensure their safety, and the Syrian regime would be well-advised not to do things that place them at risk. … We view instances that place the coalition at risk with utmost seriousness, and we do have the inherent right of self defense.”

Davis also criticized the Assad government for suddenly attacking the YPG, which until recently served as its de facto ally against CIA-backed Islamist militias. “This is very unusual, we have not seen the regime take this type of action against YPG before,” he said.

Davis’ barely veiled threat that the Pentagon could attack Syrian government forces to protect its troops, which are operating in Syria in violation of the country’s sovereignty and without even the fig leaf of a UN mandate, point to the basic war aims of Washington and its European allies. Claims that their intervention is aimed at fighting Islamist terror groups, which evolved out of militias they supported against the Assad regime, are a political fraud. The imperialist powers’ goal was and remains regime change.

As the CIA arms the Al Qaeda-linked Al Nusra Front in Aleppo against Assad’s forces, the Pentagon is supporting the offensive of the YPG, which recently renamed itself the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) after absorbing a few smaller, ethnic-Arab militias.

Washington’s reckless threats to use force against Syrian government forces risk escalating the conflict into a catastrophic global war of the United States and its European allies against the major powers intervening in Syria to defend the regime: Iran, Russia, and now China.

Tehran, Moscow and Beijing have all presented their operations in Syria as missions to fight Islamist terror groups alongside Washington. After Russia intervened in Syria militarily last year, Moscow and Washington developed channels of communications to prevent simultaneous US and Russian air strikes in Syria from accidentally leading to a military clash between the world’s two leading nuclear powers.

The façade of international unity built around agreements to bomb the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militia was, however, superficial and false. Washington and powerful forces in the European Union still aimed for regime change, and deeply-rooted conflicts persisted between the major powers. Moscow and Beijing fear the drive for hegemony in the Middle East mounted by Washington after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991—especially the regime change policy applied in the illegal 2003 US invasion of Iraq, the 2011 NATO war in Libya, and then Syria.

As Washington stoked conflict with Russia after toppling a pro-Russian regime in Ukraine in 2014, and with China over the South China Sea and North Korea, Moscow and Beijing manifestly concluded that they cannot sanction yet another violent, US-led regime change in Syria. US threats have not succeeded in whipping Russia and China into line. Instead, Russia and China are escalating their involvement in Syria.

The near-confrontation between US and Syrian jets points to the danger that this situation will trigger a military clash—either with an accidental collision between US, Russian, or allied forces in Syria, or a deliberate attack aimed as a signal to the opposing side—that could escalate into all-out war.

The Syrian government launched more air strikes against YPG forces near Hasakah yesterday. Fighting had broken out earlier this week between Kurdish forces and the pro-regime National Defense Forces (NDF) militia in Hasakah, and the Syrian army issued a statement declaring it had “responded appropriately” to Kurdish attempts to conquer the city.

Hasakah residents are reporting that both the US-backed YPG and pro-government forces are using heavy weaponry in the city.

“This is the first time the regime used warplanes to strike in Hasakah. The bombing is very strong. This is the first time the relationship between the two sides reaches this level,” Hasakah resident Lina al-Najjari told the Wall Street Journal. “We live in an area that is surrounded by the fighting. We have prepared our suitcases to leave once we get the chance. But we cannot leave our house at the moment. We cannot step outside.”

The Kremlin also launched large-scale air strikes on Islamist targets across Syria, in the north near Aleppo and in the northeast around Deir-ez-Zor, from warships in the Black Sea and strategic bombers flying out of bases in Iran and Syria.

Meanwhile, Chinese officials continued to voice support for the Assad regime, after Beijing took the unprecedented step of sending a high-level military delegation earlier this week to Damascus. Admiral Guan Youfei, the director of the Chinese military’s Office for International Military Cooperation, agreed with Syrian Defense Minister Fahad Jassim al-Freij to step up personnel training and aid from China for the Syrian army.

The Chinese army’s English-language China Military Online web site declared, “There are already Chinese military advisors in Syria, focusing on personnel training in weapons, since the Syrian government forces are buyers of Chinese weapons, including sniper rifles, rocket launchers, and machine guns.” Moreover, it asserted that, while many Syrian-Chinese arms deals were suspended due to the war, now “there could be engagement again over these contracts.”

Citing Middle East Studies Professor Zhao Weiming of Shanghai International Studies University, the site also stated that Beijing’s new Syria policy was retaliation for the US “pivot to Asia” aiming to isolate China. “Since the US has been interfering militarily in China's backyard in the South China Sea, this could be push-back from the Chinese military into an area, the Middle East, that is usually considered a US sphere of military influence,” it reported.

A major factor in the sudden public intervention of China into the Syrian conflict, Chinese analysts explained, is last month's failed US-backed coup in Turkey. “In developing a closer relationship with Syria, one has to take into account the changes at hand in Syria and the region, including the fast recovering relations between Turkey and Russia,” said Wang Lian of the School of International Studies at Peking University.

The Assad regime's bombing of the YPG points to some of the geo-strategic concerns that underlay Washington's decision to give at least tacit backing to the coup attempt.

Washington’s search for reliable proxies in Syria, and in particular the Pentagon’s choice of the Kurdish YPG as a suitable candidate, ultimately united a wide coalition of countries against it. Turkish officials were deeply concerned that YPG victories in Syria would stoke Kurdish-separatist sentiment in Turkey itself. The Syrian regime, backed by Russia and China, was preparing an attack on the YPG to keep it from gaining too much influence and setting up a US-backed regime in northern Syria.

The failure of the coup in Turkey and the subsequent purge of pro-US Turkish officers suspected of sympathy for the coup, however, only shifted Ankara closer to the Russian and Syrian regimes.

The main danger that arises is that, in order to salvage its intervention in Syria, the US government and its allies will mount an even more reckless military escalation.

The ruling class and the spectre of Leon Trotsky

Chris Marsden

Seventy-six years ago today, the assassin Ramon Mercader plunged an ice axe into the head of Leon Trotsky at his home in Coyoacan, Mexico City. Gravely wounded, Trotsky valiantly fought back against his killer. He died of his injuries the following day.

The aim of the assassin’s paymaster, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, was to silence the voice of his principal foe and so deprive the Russian and international working class of its greatest revolutionary leader.

Stalin failed. Today, the dictator’s name and that of his followers is reviled. He was, as Trotsky warned, “The grave digger of the revolution,” whereas Trotsky is forever associated with the incorruptible struggle against Stalinism and for international socialism.

Trotsky remains not only a towering historical personality, but also a figure of acute contemporary political relevance for workers the world over. This finds confirmation in the way that his name has been invoked repeatedly in the deepening crisis of the British Labour Party.

The right wing of the Labour Party, beginning on August 9 with an article in the Guardian by its deputy leader Tom Watson, is bitterly denouncing “Trotskyist entryists” and portraying all supporters of Labour’s current leader, Jeremy Corbyn, as unwitting dupes of these shadowy forces.

In the Corbyn camp, the response has been to express outrage and incredulity that such an accusation has been made—with Corbyn reassuring the Observer, “At no stage in anyone’s most vivid imagination are there 300,000 sectarian extremists at large in the country who have suddenly descended on the Labour Party [emphasis added].”

None of this has prevented Britain’s major newspapers from being inundated with articles on Trotsky, seeking to denigrate him and warn against any association with his ideas. Repeated references have been made to “Trotsky’s ghost” haunting the Labour Party and portraying the political struggle within it as one between reform and revolution.

Whatever the factional intentions of the Labour right, the emergence of Trotsky’s name to the centre stage has enormous objective significance. Indeed, whenever capitalism is gripped by crisis and an eruption of social and political conflict involving the working class, Trotsky’s presence is always felt.

Why is this?

Despite the declarations of his supposed “irrelevance”, the ruling elite and its media is acutely aware of the threat posed by Trotsky and Trotskyism under conditions of bitter social divisions, the political turmoil produced by the Brexit referendum and, above all, the threatened breakup of the Labour Party that has policed the struggles of the working class for more than a century.

Millions of workers and young people are looking for a means of fighting back against austerity and militarism. Corbyn’s pretence of being such an alternative, while opposing any break with the Labour Party, cannot last. The question of building a new and genuinely socialist party will inevitably arise.

The situation in Britain only expresses that which is developing the world over. The working class is moving to the left, but it has yet to build the socialist leadership it requires.

Next year is the 100th anniversary of the October 1917 revolution in Russia. Alongside Lenin, Trotsky’s name is synonymous with that epochal event that established the first workers state in the world. Today, world capitalism is once again in the grip of an escalating economic, political and social crisis that raises anew the question of whether humanity will be dragged into an era of dictatorship, barbarism and war, or whether the working class will succeed in establishing world socialism, ending class exploitation and national divisions.

Trotsky led the political fight against the degeneration of the Soviet Union under Stalin. His struggle and that of the Left Opposition, which culminated in the founding of the Fourth International in 1938, refutes the central claim of anti-communist propagandists that Lenin led to Stalin, and that socialism produced bureaucratic tyranny.

Trotsky is the author of the Theory of Permanent Revolution and of such epoch-defining phrases as “The death agony of capitalism.” He is the personal embodiment of the perspective of world socialist revolution. And as far as Britain’s ruling class and its counterparts internationally are concerned, this makes Trotsky the most toxic and dangerous figure in history.

Even after the passage of decades, Trotsky’s writings have immediate relevance. Not only did he pay close attention to the class struggle in Britain, he offered the most trenchant and scathing appraisal of the Labour Party and of its role as a defender of capitalist rule. His classic work, “Where is Britain Going?” was published in 1925, just one year before the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress betrayed the General Strike. His writings on the Fabian left and its impotence, cant and hypocrisy, provide a salutary warning against placing any trust in Corbyn and his backers in the union bureaucracy:

They are the main prop of British imperialism and of the European, if not the world bourgeoisie. Workers must at all costs be shown these self-satisfied pedants, drivelling eclectics, sentimental careerists and liveried footmen of the bourgeoisie in their true colours. To show them up for what they are means to discredit them beyond repair. To discredit them means rendering a supreme service to historical progress.

In the next period, the burning issue that must be clarified among advanced workers and youth internationally is that of Trotsky and his political legacy. The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), the world Trotskyist movement that is represented in Britain by the Socialist Equality Party, has dedicated itself to refuting what we have termed the “post-Stalinist school of historical falsification” regarding Trotsky and his life and work.

In the first decade of this century, and on the eve of the 2008 financial crash, British historians Ian Thatcher, Geoffrey Swain and Robert Service all published biographies of Trotsky. World Socialist Web Site Chairman David North conducted systematic work to expose the lies and falsifications they contained. Published in 2010 under the title In Defense of Leon Trotsky, North described their tendentious works as “pre-emptive biographies” seeking to “completely discredit Trotsky as a historical figure” on the eve of renewed revolutionary struggles.

In his introduction, North made the following observation of the motivations for all present efforts to denigrate Trotsky:

Leon Trotsky was, above all else, the great tribune and theoretician of world socialist revolution. The passions evoked by his name testify to the enduring significance of Trotsky’s ideas. Arguments about Trotsky are never simply about what happened in the past. They are just as much about what is happening in the world today, and what is likely to happen in the future.

Since these words were written, much additional ink and paper has been wasted on seeking to diminish and slander Trotsky. Yet despite these slanders and those that will follow, it has never been possible to erase his enduring presence. This is because Trotskyism is not only a spectre but a political movement. The organization that he founded, the Fourth International, is the conscious expression of deep objective tendencies that are once again bringing the working class all over the world into revolutionary struggle against the capitalist system.