Top leadership contender in China abruptly ousted

Peter Symonds

Sun Zhengcai, a contender for a role in the top Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership, was suddenly removed from his post last weekend. He is reportedly under investigation by the party’s anti-corruption agency. His ousting is a sign of sharp inner-party tensions ahead of the CCP congress later this year, at which President Xi Jingping is expected to consolidate his grip on power.

Sun was removed as party boss of the inland industrial mega-city of Chongqing on Saturday and replaced by Chen Miner, who is viewed as a trusted protégé of Xi. Few details have been released officially. A source in Chongqing told the South China Morning Post that Sun was suspected of a “serious violation of party discipline.” Such allegations are likely to spell an abrupt end to his political career.

Sun, 53, the youngest member of the CCP’s 25-member Politburo, was seen as a leading candidate for a position on the party’s highest decision-making body, the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee. He was promoted to the Politburo in 2012 along with Hu Chunhua, party chief of Guangdong province. The two were regarded as possible replacements for Xi and Premier Li Keqiang when their two terms in office expire at the 2022 congress.

Xi and Li were installed as the top leadership at the 2012 congress following the removal of Bo Xilai as Chongqing party boss. Bo, along with his wife, was eventually arrested, tried and convicted of corruption charges. Sun was his replacement.

Bo was not ousted over corruption, which is rife at every level of the bureaucratic apparatus, but as a result of differences over economic and foreign policy. He was the most public representative of sections of the CCP bureaucracy who rest on the large state enterprise sector, which global finance capital demands be reduced or eliminated. While fully supportive of capitalist restoration, Bo advocated the transformation of the biggest state-owned enterprises into Chinese “champions” or challengers to existing global corporations.

Bo’s support for state-owned enterprises and revival of Maoist-era songs made him the rallying point of “new left” and neo-Maoist groups. Like Bo, this amorphous grouping did not represent socialism in any sense. It advocated concessions to the working class to avert a social explosion and protect the CCP regime. Bo was also supported by sections of the military that pushed for a tougher stance against the menacing military build-up by the US and its allies in Asia against China.

By contrast, Xi and Li were associated with the strategy of the dominant sections of the CCP leadership: a further opening up of the economy to foreign investors that would inevitably undermine the monopoly position of state-owned enterprises, and, as far as possible, avoid a direct confrontation with the US. The 2013 central committee plenum set out sweeping pro-market restructuring in line with the China 2030 report jointly produced by the World Bank and China’s State Council.

Xi also launched a far-reaching anti-corruption drive that he exploited to remove many of Bo’s closest supporters, including former security chief and Politburo Standing Committee member Zhou Yongkang. The “new left” and neo-Maoist groups, along with their websites and publications, were also suppressed.

Over the past four years, Xi has considerably strengthened his grip on power. He exploited the stock market plunge in 2015 and the panicky response, with which Li was closely associated, to marginalise the premier. Xi has established small leadership groups under his control, including the Leading Group for Financial and Economic Affairs. This body, rather than the premier, now sets overall economic policy.

As a result Xi, who is the head of the party and the military as well as the president, has concentrated power in his hands. At this year’s annual National People’s Congress in March, leading officials referred to the “core leader of the party”—reflecting his dominant position. Li slavishly declared that Xi, as core leader, was of “crucial and far-reaching significance for ensuring the flourishing and long-term stability of the party and country.”

Xi’s prominence led to much commentary in the American and international media on his emergence as the uncontested leader, and the possibility he might extend his rule beyond two terms. A comment published by the US government-funded Voice of America in March was headlined “Is Xi Jinping Putin-izing China?”

Sun Zhengcai’s ousting comes ahead of the key CCP congress in October or November at which both the Politburo and the Politburo Standing Committee (PSC) will be restructured. A large number of members of both bodies, including a majority of the PSC, are expected to stand down as they reach retirement age. The appointment of new members is regarded as a guide to those who will assume the top jobs in 2022 when the next generation is due to take over.

Xi may be planning to stack the leadership bodies with his supporters and lay the basis for a break from recent tradition in order to stay on for a third term. However, Sun’s removal could also reflect ongoing divisions and infighting within the CCP and state apparatus amid a slowing economy, sharpening social tensions and the rising danger of trade war and war with the United States.

Significantly one of the chief accusations against Sun appears to be that he did not do enough to eradicate Bo’s influence in Chongqing. In February, after a two-month investigation, the party’s disciplinary officials criticised Sun and other city leaders for not having completely rooted out the “pernicious ideological legacy” left by Bo and his chief supporter Wang Lijun.

On Monday, Sun’s replacement Chen Miner was reported as pledging to “resolutely eliminate the evil legacy of Bo and Wang thought from thinking, politics and work style.”

No one appears to be accusing Sun of being another Bo. The South China Morning Post wrote: “Sun did not pose a challenge to Xi’s power in the way that Bo potentially could, and his low-key personality was in stark contrast to Bo’s unabashed ambition and desire for attention, which had always raised eyebrows [in the top leadership].”

However, Sun’s replacement does suggest that the divisions over economic and foreign policy reflected in the purge of Bo and his supporters have not disappeared. Moreover, other sections of the CCP apparatus have criticised Xi from the opposite standpoint—not proceeding fast enough with pro-market restructuring and not doing enough to placate Washington.

On the eve of last year’s National People’s Congress, an open letter by “loyal Communist Party members” was rapidly suppressed. It called on Xi to resign on these grounds and accused him of causing the “unprecedented problems and crises in all political, economic, ideological and culture spheres” facing the country.

While the internal life of the CCP is always subject to heavy censorship, the ousting of Sun could be a sign of new political turmoil in the lead-up to this year’s party congress.

High Court approves UK government’s arms sales to Saudi Arabia

Jean Shaoul 

The High Court gave the go-ahead last week for the British government to continue licensing arms sales to Saudi Arabia, which is engaged in a devastating war against its southern neighbour, Yemen.

The judges based their decision on evidence given in secret, supposedly due to “national security concerns” which they did not explain—stating that the open evidence was “only part of the picture.”

The High Court thus gave carte blanche to Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative government to flout international law. Like all its post-war predecessors, this government has relied on the Saudi monarchy as a bulwark of reaction against the working class throughout the Middle East and Central Asia.

The British government’s support for one of the most repressive regimes on the planet is bound up with Saudi Arabia’s crucial role in keeping the region tied to capitalism; its determination to preserve the commercial position of its oil giants Shell and BP, and arms manufacturers, particularly BAE—and the necessity of ensuring that the Gulf States’ substantial foreign exchange reserves that accrue from oil and gas find their way to the City of London.

With Saudi Arabia by far the largest customer of UK arms manufacturers, any judicial review would have challenged the legal and political basis of the government’s arms export policy and undermined the viability of Britain’s arms manufacturers. It demonstrates once again the infinite malleability of the law whenever the commercial and geostrategic interests of the corporate and political elite are at stake.

The Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) launched the case in pursuit of a judicial review challenging the government’s decision to licence the export of military equipment to Saudi Arabia. It argued that the British government could not guarantee that UK-made weapons were not being used against Yemeni civilians.

CAAT said it would appeal the ruling.

The legal challenge is part of a broader campaign by CAAT and a coalition of NGOs, including Amnesty International and Save the Children, to stop “immoral and illegal arms sales” to Saudi Arabia following the launching of its criminal war against Yemen in March 2015.

In January 2016, a leaked United Nations report highlighted the “widespread and systematic” targeting of civilians in Saudi-led air strikes that included attacks on hospitals and schools, as well as refugee camps. A report by Human Rights Watch shows that UK-made weaponry, including a Paveway guided bomb and a Hakim cruise missile, were used in indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets. This includes 13 civilian economic structures in 17 raids by the Saudi-led coalition that killed 130 civilians and injured 171.

The Saudi-led US and UK-backed war to reinstate the puppet government of President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, who was ousted in 2015 by an alliance of Houthi militias and forces loyal to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, has had a devastating impact on the poorest country in the Middle East.

According to UN estimates, more than 16,000 people have been killed by airstrikes and ground fighting, of whom nearly two-thirds have been civilians. A staggering 17 million Yemenis, in a country with a pre-war population of 27 million, are in need of food aid. Seven million are dying from famine, while more than three million Yemenis have been displaced from their homes.

The US has imposed a crippling naval blockade of the country that has resulted in the complete breakdown of Yemen’s physical and social infrastructure and led to the outbreak of a deadly cholera epidemic that has spread rapidly. Some 320,000 Yemenis have contracted the disease, with more than 1,700 having died from it since April. Children account for a quarter of the deaths and half of all infections.

Saudi Arabia and its allies from nine African and Middle East countries have been supplied with bombs and missiles, aerial refuelling and vital logistical and intelligence support from the US and British governments. They have deliberately and ruthlessly carried out air strikes on food markets, schools, residential neighbourhoods, hospitals and other critical infrastructure.

The British government has licensed more than £3.3 billion of arms to Saudi Arabia since the start of the war in Yemen, despite overwhelming evidence that weapons made in the UK are being used in violations of International Humanitarian law. In addition, the Ministry of Defence has stated that it has provided “technical support, precision guided weapons and exchanging information with the Saudi Arabian armed forces.”

The government denied that the Saudi-led coalition was targeting civilians. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson urged the cabinet to continue arms sales to Riyadh, even after the bombing of a funeral killed more than 140 civilians last October. In so doing, he confirmed what Sir Simon McDonald, the top official at the Foreign Office, had told the House of Commons foreign affairs committee in 2015: Human rights were “not one of our top priorities” and commercial interests were far more important.

The government ignored the advice of its own Export Control Organisation, the body responsible for granting arms export licences, that warned against continuing to export, and pressed ahead with the sale of arms to the petro-monarchy. The decision breached both UK and European Union legislation in the wake of the outcry over Saudi Arabia’s action in Yemen, which had been condemned as unlawful by a UN panel of experts, the European Parliament and humanitarian NGOs.

After initially denying it, the British government has admitted supplying Riyadh with cluster bombs, illegal under international law, which have been used repeatedly.

Had CAAT been successful in obtaining a judicial review of the decision to licence arms sales to Saudi Arabia, Britain would have been forced to suspend the export of weapons for use in Yemen, thereby rupturing London’s cosy relations with Riyadh. It could also have prompted a broader investigation into the sale of weapons to other countries suspected of breaching international humanitarian law.

To use the judges’ own words, “the other part of the picture” was revealed last April when Prime Minister Theresa May, acting as sales person in chief for the arms industry, visited Saudi Arabia to try to drum up trade and negotiate a post-Brexit trade deal with the Gulf States after the UK leaves the European Union in 2019.

While in Riyadh, she announced that Britain would help review the House of Saud’s “defence capabilities” and ignored all calls to end arms sales. She has also refused to publish a report into the funding of terrorism in the UK, commissioned by her predecessor David Cameron in 2015, believed to indict Saudi Arabia’s role as a principal sponsor.

So anxious is the City of London to win the listing of five percent of Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s national oil company, on the London Stock Exchange that the Financial Conduct Authority announced it will loosen its regulations to suit the Saudis. It is to create a new category within its “premium” listing rules, which would exempt state-owned companies such as Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer valued at $2 trillion, from some rules that apply to oligarchs or other private groups and allow the Saudi state to conduct business without scrutiny. Xavier Rolet, the head of the London Stock Exchange Group, travelled with May to Riyadh in April to lobby for the flotation.

This comes just four years after Britain was forced to tighten controls on listings of foreign-owned, overseas-headquartered firms, following several scandals involving such companies.

US House proposes over $5 trillion in cuts

Daniel de Vries

Republicans in the US House of Representatives unveiled a draconian budget plan Tuesday seeking to cut trillions in funding to programs that millions of Americans depend upon to meet basic social needs. The plan introduced in the Budget Committee takes aim at Medicaid and Medicare in particular, while siphoning off huge funding increases for the military and preparing tax breaks to pad the coffers of the super-rich.

All told, the long-term budget blueprint proposes to slash more than $5 trillion from social programs over the next decade, eviscerating what remains of the social safety net. Most provocatively, it calls for $4 trillion in reductions to “mandatory” spending programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, following public uproar over attempts to dismantle portions of these health care services under the guise of repealing and replacing Obamacare.

Connected to the funding cuts are proposals to transform these so-called entitlement programs into limited anti-poverty measures. The plan would introduce spending caps for Medicaid, effectively denying service for millions of poor and disabled people who depend on it for access to health care. Medicare would transition to a voucher-based scheme and apply a “means test” to determine the eligibility of seniors.

Other programs under the ax include $150 billion in funding for food stamps, reduced support for student loans and grants, and additional constraints on Social Security disability coverage. Welfare recipients would come up against additional work requirements. Federal workers would see their pensions gutted.

Alongside these deeply unpopular cuts to social programs are increases for the US military and other “defense” spending, which already outstrips the next seven largest national military budgets combined. Over the next decade, the plan calls for an additional $929 billion to prepare for war and social unrest.

The House Republicans’ plan mirrors in most respects President Trump’s budget proposal released this past spring. In certain areas, however, it is even more extreme. It goes further in boosting the military budget, for example, and proposes attacks not only on Medicaid but also on Medicare. The architect of Trump’s plan, Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, praised the House proposal, urging Congress to move it forward.

The House plan also contains a key element of Trump’s agenda in his first year: tax giveaways to the wealthy. If passed it would rewrite both corporate and personal tax codes, consolidating tax brackets and repealing the alternative minimum tax for individuals, while cutting the corporate tax rate and switching to a territorial tax system to only tax domestic income for business.

The inclusion of the tax plan is a procedural gimmick to allow the bill to become law with a simple majority in the Senate, thereby overcoming nominal opposition from the Democratic Party. But it also requires the tax changes to be revenue neutral. The current plan uses many of the same accounting tricks and optimistic growth assumptions as the president’s plan to arrive at that conclusion. However, Trump has favored even larger tax cuts, which add to the deficit despite the mathematical camouflage.

The prospects for the current budget proposal to survive a vote by the full House of Representatives remains uncertain. Already it has generated criticism from both hard-line right-wingers and Republican “centrists” as not going far enough or going too far, respectively. Democrats have denounced the plan. House minority leader Nancy Pelosi called it a “toxic budget whose sole purpose is to hand tax breaks to billionaires on the backs of seniors and hardworking Americans.”

Nonetheless, the brutal austerity proposals prepare the way for a “compromise” to emerge that restores some of the cuts but still accelerates the dismantling of social programs. Together with the long-term concept of transferring to several trillion dollars to the wealthy, the plan contains short-term actions, including mandating $203 billion in cuts, to be determined by 11 different committees.

The general program of rolling back the social safety net and anti-poverty programs has in fact been a common one shared by both Democrats and Republicans. The current budget proposal is a somewhat more austere variation of the $4 trillion in cuts proposed by the Simpson-Bowles Commission convened by President Obama, or the $1.1 trillion sequestration cuts enacted by him.

Yet the ruling class sees now an opportunity to advance its agenda. “In past years, our proposals had little chance of becoming a reality,” House Budget Committee Chairman Diane Black said. “The time for talking is over, now is the time for action.”

Australian governments continue to cover-up unsafe buildings

Richard Phillips 

After the June 14 Grenfell Tower disaster in London, Australian authorities offered crocodile tears for the victims and promised action over flammable cladding on buildings across the country.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, backed by opposition Labor leader Bill Shorten, declared that federal and state governments would initiate a national audit of buildings. Turnbull said a Senate inquiry into “non-conforming building products,” originally established in 2015, would expand its investigations. State governments claimed they would identify unsafe buildings.

These promises were an attempt to deflect the concerns of people living or working in what is estimated to be thousands of fire-prone and unsafe buildings in major cities.

The official cynicism is underscored by the fact that only a handful of flammable-clad buildings have been identified. These include the Royal Women’s Hospital and Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre in Melbourne and the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane.

Asked yesterday about the Princess Alexandra Hospital, Queensland Health Minister Cameron Dick contemptuously declared: “Every building in Queensland has combustible material in it. We have to determine what is the risk. The PA Hospital has stood there for 17 years. It is a concrete building that has cladding around it—it’s quite different to the Grenfell situation.”

Other structures previously identified by a Victorian Building Authority investigation in 2016 have been deemed “safe to occupy” by state government or municipal authorities, despite many building owners failing to implement compliance orders.

No-one residing in dangerous premises has been evacuated and provided alternative accommodation. No builder has been charged for using flammable aluminium cladding, or for falsifying material safety documents. According to recent testimony to the Senate hearing, these practices are rampant.

Victorian Planning Minister Richard Wynne ludicrously insisted that a Grenfell-type disaster is not possible because Australia has “the best building codes of any first-world country.”

Such claims are false. Governments—federal, state and municipal, and from every political stripe—are not only aware there are thousands of unsafe and defective buildings. They have created the conditions for their existence.

During at least the past four years, firefighters, building engineers, strata management bodies and others have issued reports warning that flammable cladding and other unsafe building practices are “rife” and a major disaster is inevitable.

These warnings and the obvious lessons from two serious fires—one in 2012 at Euro Terraces in Bankstown, Sydney and the other at the Lacrosse apartment block in Melbourne’s Docklands area in 2014—have been wilfully ignored by government authorities.

In the Bankstown fire, a Chinese student was killed and her friend seriously injured when an apartment caught fire. A 2015 coroner’s inquest said the young woman would not have died if there had been sprinklers. The multi-storey building was just 10cm less than 25-metres high and therefore did not legally require sprinklers.

The coroner called on the New South Wales (NSW) government and Australian Building Codes Board to change building safety laws, including to make sprinklers compulsory in all new multi-level residential premises. He also called for a new system of fire safety checks so certifiers were properly qualified and independent of developers and builders.

These appeals fell on deaf ears. In October 2015, Australia’s High Court instead ruled that an apartment owners’ corporation in Sydney could not sue the Brookfield Multiplex company for major construction defects. The judges asserted that the company had no “duty of care.”

The NSW government then introduced retrospective legislation that undermined the ability of owners to sue over building defects, by slashing “building warranties” from six years to just two.

One month later, a near-fatal fire erupted at the Lacrosse building in Melbourne. The blaze engulfed one side of the aluminium-clad 23-storey apartment block within minutes.

The Lacrosse fire was not an isolated incident. Flammable cladding has precipitated fatal blazes since 2008 in France, the US and the Middle East.

Three years on, the Lacrosse building is still occupied and the dangerous cladding remains in place. The deadline for its replacement is not until next July and the apartment owners, not the construction company, are being forced to pay.

In April last year, Strata Community Australia denounced the Senate inquiry for “dragging the chain.” The peak body, which represents apartment and housing unit residents, urged the parliamentary parties to produce a plan within 100 days to stop the use of flammable cladding and other non-compliant products.

The statement received no official response.

Testimony to the Senate inquiry over the past week, from firefighting and emergency service authorities, engineers and strata corporations, has provided further evidence of poor building laws and safety practices.

Last Friday, Federal Safety Commissioner Alan Edwards admitted that his agency had no resources and had not conducted a single building materials’ audit in the previous seven months.

Yesterday, Fire Protection Association of Australia CEO Scott Williams told a hearing that hundreds of aluminium-clad buildings under-25 metres tall presented the greatest risk, because they were not legally required to have sprinklers. Other experts said faulty sprinklers and forged safety documentations were widespread.

Australian authorities, assisted by the construction trade unions, are fully responsible for thousands of people, owners and renters alike, facing the risk of a Grenfell Tower-type catastrophe.

Following World War II, state governments built and administered large-scale affordable public housing schemes. Consecutive Labor and Liberal-National governments systematically abandoned these schemes in the 1990s on the demand of the property, construction and real estate companies. Building safety was deregulated and inspection privatised under the banner of removing “red tape.”

Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) national secretary Dave Noonan this week told the media that union members “don’t want to be complicit in building buildings that later could catch fire and potentially kill people … If that means banning [flammable cladding], then ban it we will.”

Despite the years of warnings and previous fires, however, the unions have taken no action to prevent the use of flammable cladding. One significant factor is that the unions have lucrative interests in the building and property market, including through investments from the $16 billion CBUS superannuation scheme.

Federal and state governments continue to insist they will act on Senate hearing recommendations. The three-year inquiry, however, has yet to issue a single finding and its deadline has been extended six times in the past two years. There is still no clear end-date.

Two weeks ago, the federal government met with state housing and construction ministers, who agreed to set up flammable cladding taskforces.

Little credence can be given to these taskforces. Victoria’s will be headed by former Labor deputy premier John Thwaites and ex-Liberal premier Ted Baillieu. Both presided over the development of the Docklands area and building deregulation that enabled non-compliance to flourish.

Irrespective of the evidence presented to the Senate hearings, the governments will do everything possible to block the necessary steps being taken to make buildings safe. The primary concern of the political establishment is protecting the profits of the banks and corporations, and preventing any collapse of Australia’s speculative real estate market.

The Grenfell Towers disaster and last week’s deaths of three people in a Honolulu apartment block are not accidents, but crimes for which capitalism is responsible. They further reveal the utter incapacity of the profit system to provide one of the most essential social rights—safe and affordable housing—to millions of working people.

Workers, students and youth are clearly confronted with the need to organise independently of the trade unions and other agencies that defend the profit system. New broad-based organisations of political struggle are required which will involve residents, building workers, firefighters, safety engineers and other sections of the working class. Only then will the real situation in apartments, units and homes, as well as office blocks, schools and health facilities, be laid bare, those responsible exposed and action taken to rectify the safety breaches.

Everything that has been revealed, both prior to and since the Grenfell Tower disaster, testifies to the need for a workers’ government committed to socialist policies that meet social need, not the profit interests of a wealthy elite. The major banks and conglomerates, including the large construction companies, must be expropriated from their corporate owners and placed under the democratic control of the working class.

French armed forces chief of staff resigns in protest over military budget cuts

Alex Lantier 

General Pierre de Villiers, the chief of staff of the French armed forces, resigned yesterday after a week-long public conflict with President Emmanuel Macron over the defence budget. De Villiers issued a communiqué stressing his “reservations” about planned military budget cuts and attacking Macron’s policies as a threat to national security.

“In the current circumstances,” he wrote, “I believe I can no longer preserve the type of army which I believe is necessary to guarantee the protection of France and the French people, and to support the ambitions of our country. Consequently, I have drawn the conclusions that were imposed on me and presented, today, my resignation to the president of the Republic, who accepted it.”

De Villiers’s resignation is without precedent outside times of war. The last time France’s top officer resigned was in 1961, at the height of the Algerian war crisis, when General Jean Olié stepped down after the attempted April 21, 1961, coup d’état in Algiers led by officers opposed to Algerian independence and to the government in Paris.

This breakdown in Macron’s relationship with the army is all the more remarkable in that Macron has aggressively courted the military. During the presidential election campaign, he discussed restoring the draft and pledged an almost 50 percent increase in defence spending, to 2 percent of France’s gross domestic product (GDP), by 2025. When, on July 11, Public Accounts Minister Gérald Darmanin announced a temporary, one-year defence budget cut of €850 million, however, de Villiers led a public revolt against the move.

De Villiers appeared the next day at a meeting of the National Assembly’s defence committee attended by many first-term legislators of Macron’s newly founded The Republic on the March (LRM) party. He denounced the budget cuts and, to applause from the committee, concluded, “I am not going to let anyone f*ck me like that.”

The committee’s president, leading LRM member Jean-Jacques Bridey, supported him: “Not a single soldier should die due to insufficient equipment. Our armies need resources.”

Macron responded on July 13 by publicly upbraiding de Villiers in front of his subordinates at a reception for the army brass before the July 14 Bastille Day military parade. Addressing the officer corps, Macron said: “I find it undignified to have certain debates in public. I have made certain commitments. I am your leader. I know how to keep the commitments that I have made to our fellow citizens and to the army. And on this score, I do not need any pressure or comments.”

De Villiers responded by posting a provocative letter on his Facebook page on Bastille Day. He wrote, “Unusually, I will keep silent on the subject of my next post,” which proved to be his resignation letter. Without naming Macron, he cited General Charles Delestraint’s July 1940 speech on the Nazi conquest of France, before Delestraint entered into the armed Resistance to the French government and its collaboration with the Nazis.

De Villiers wrote, “‘Even though defeat was a fact, his speech was a firm appeal to reject the ‘mentality of a beaten dog or a slave.’ Months later, acting on these words, he became the leader of the Secret Army. Arrested, tortured and deported, he died at the camp in Dachau on April 19, 1945, less than three weeks before the final victory which he had actively help bring about.”

This evocation of Delestraint, while intended to wrap de Villiers in the aura of resistance to Nazism, also contained a definite threat. Several of Delestraint’s fellow leaders of the pro-capitalist, Gaullist factions of the Resistance who survived World War II, like Georges Bidault and Jacques Soustelle, ended up aligning with far-right forces during the Algerian war and supporting the 1961 putsch.

The ongoing public confrontation between the president of France and the leader of its armed forces points to the collapse of democratic forms of rule across Europe. European imperialism’s growing military aggressiveness in the quarter century since the Stalinist bureaucracy dissolved the Soviet Union in 1991, together with growing social inequality and class conflict at home, have vastly strengthened the political position of the military. European armies not only joined US-led neo-colonial wars from Afghanistan to Iraq, Libya, and Mali, but emerged as key forces in domestic politics.

The growing mood of popular revolt against austerity, social inequality and militarism in Europe was recorded in this year’s “Generation What” poll of young people in Europe. It found that more than half of European youth, and over 60 percent of French youth, would be willing to join a “large-scale uprising” against the political system. As it becomes ever clearer that Europe is entering into a pre-revolutionary situation, the ruling class leans ever more heavily on the army and the far right.

In Germany, which launched in 2014 the re-militarization of its foreign policy and a major escalation of military spending, far-right academics and historians are campaigning to rehabilitate Hitler and the Nazis. After an extensive neo-Nazi network was discovered this spring in the German army, including officers posted in France, leading news magazine Der Spiegel published an article by military historian Sönke Nitzel calling for Nazi officers to again be held up as role models.

In France, the army was assigned to domestic patrol duty after terror attacks in 2015, under a state of emergency that suspended basic democratic rights and ended judicial oversight of the security forces’ policing operations. The state of emergency was then used to justify a brutal crackdown on mass protests by youth and workers against a widely unpopular labour law that Macron now aims to use to impose deep cuts on workers’ pay and benefits. These are intended to fund the multibillion-euro increase in military spending that Macron is preparing.

Macron sought to cultivate the military and police agencies, as well as the far right, as a political base for his reactionary policies. He offered a “Republican salute” to defeated neo-fascist presidential candidate Marine Le Pen on the night of his election. Now, as he pushes for defence spending cuts to maintain a balanced budget before the cuts against the workers go fully into effect, Macron is facing a revolt from officers who refuse any limitations on their prerogatives.

While de Villiers has resigned his position, there is little reason to believe—after he issued a call for resistance—that this will resolve the conflicts that are erupting inside the French ruling elite. Not only are budget conflicts set to intensify, but de Villiers himself has broad support in far-right circles.

His brother is Philippe de Villiers, the leader of a right-wing nationalist and anti-European Union (EU) party based in the Vendée region, the Rally for France (RPF), who indicated his sympathies for Marine Le Pen in the presidential elections this year. While Philippe de Villiers did not formally endorse Le Pen, Arise France (DLF) leader Nicolas Dupont-Aignan did.

Le Pen and leading RPF and DLF officials all praised de Villiers after his resignation yesterday in official statements. Le Pen denounced Macron as “arrogant,” saying that his handling of the crisis with de Villiers “illustrates the very serious excesses and the extremely worrying limitations of Mr. Macron, both in his attitudes and in his politics.”

Australian government seeks new military call-out powers

Mike Head 

The Australian government this week outlined plans for expanded powers to call out the armed forces to deal with domestic crises. The changes will mean that the full lethal force of the military can be mobilised to suppress protests and other civil disturbances.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced the sweeping changes on the pretext of dealing with “terrorist incidents,” seeking again to whip up fears of terrorist attacks. He staged his announcement at a Sydney army base, surrounded by masked commandos from an elite Tactical Assault Group, who displayed their deadly weaponry.

The proposals go far beyond combatting alleged terrorism. They will substantially extend the military call-out powers, which already can be triggered by the government declaring there is a threat of “domestic violence” or a danger to “Commonwealth interests” or “critical infrastructure.”

These vague and undefined terms can cover any major outbreak of social unrest. “Domestic violence”—a formulation in the Australian Constitution—can include protests outside parliaments, clashes with police or crippling industrial action. Terrorism itself has been defined since 2002 in far-reaching terms, with the potential to cover many kinds of political opposition or dissent.

Under the Defence Act, the government must currently assert that the supposed threat is beyond the capacity of a state or territory government and its police and other security forces. A state or territory government must request the military call-out.

Those limits will now be removed, although no details of the proposed legislation have yet been released. From media reports, the states and territories will be able to request a military call-out even if their police forces have the capacity to respond themselves. “Under extraordinary circumstances,” the federal government would not need to wait for an invitation from a state or territory government to send in troops.

Already, in a “sudden and extraordinary emergency,” the prime minister or two other ministers can order a military call-out. In addition, standing orders can be issued for the activation of the Australian Defence Force (ADF) by the chief of the armed forces. Yet the government claims that these procedures are not “streamlined” enough.

Calling out the military onto the streets overturns a centuries-old principle, derived from the overthrow of the absolute monarchy in Britain, against the use of the armed forces to attack or kill civilians domestically. It might also be unconstitutional. Section 119 of the Constitution specifies that a state government must request a call-out to deal with “domestic violence.”

Other plans outlined by Turnbull and Defence Minister Marise Payne include:

•  Special Air Service (SAS) and other Special Forces commandos will provide “specialised training” to state and territory law enforcement agencies.
•  ADF units will be “pre-positioned” to assist police forces.
•  The Defence Act will be amended to allow troops to support police in preventing suspects “from leaving the scene of an incident.”

Over the past 16 years, the Special Forces have spearheaded the Australian involvement in the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, specialising in night-time raids on homes, in which innocent civilians have been killed. During the same period, two contingents have been established for domestic interventions—Tactical Assault Group (TAG)-East, based in Sydney, and TAG-West, based in Perth.

These units were established on the pretext of fighting terrorism, just like the involvement in the predatory US-led wars in the Middle East and every previous wave of legislation overturning basic legal and democratic rights. The real aim of the “war on terrorism” has been to secure US control over the Middle East and justify the erection of a police-state apparatus at home.

Domestic call-out laws were first introduced, with no public debate, in 2000, under the guise of protecting the Sydney Olympics from terrorists. They were expanded in 2006, on the excuse of shielding the Melbourne Commonwealth Games, even though no terrorist threats were made to either event.

Once deployed, the military has authoritarian powers. Soldiers can take over buildings, detain people, search premises and confiscate possessions. Military personnel can also use lethal force, issue commands to civilians, interrogate them and seize documents. The ADF’s “shoot to kill” powers can be used with legal impunity—a defence of following “superior orders” was inserted in the Defence Act in 2006.

Over the past 10 months, the government and security officials have conducted a secretive review of the military call-out powers. No report of that review has been released because it could reveal the real political calculations behind the latest changes.

To justify the measures, Turnbull and his ministers have endlessly cited the December 2014 Sydney café siege, falsely labelling it a terrorist attack and claiming it demonstrated the need for the SAS to have the capacity to intervene with lethal force. The truth is that, like many similar incidents around the world, the café hostage-taking was perpetrated by a mentally-disturbed individual, who was long under close surveillance by police and intelligence agencies.

At his Sydney media conference, flanked by defence force chief, Air Chief Marshal Mark Binskin, Turnbull declared that his only concern was to protect the Australian people. A prominent government parliamentarian, former SAS commander Andrew Hastie, was more blunt. “The most lethal means of statecraft resides with the ADF,” he told Fairfax Media.

The government has been assured of bipartisan backing by the Labor Party, which itself boosted the military-intelligence apparatus when in office from 2007 to 2013. Shadow defence minister Richard Marles said he supported the proposals, while criticising Turnbull for “politicising” the military by using commandos as “props” for a media conference. Marles’s only concern was that people would “sniff” the stunt “from a mile away” and judge it accordingly.

The Australian population was last confronted by heavily-armed soldiers on the streets in 1978. The Fraser government seized upon the still-unexplained Sydney Hotel bomb incident to place 1,500 armed troops, with armoured personnel carriers and helicopters, along a major highway on Sydney’s outskirts and in the nearby town of Bowral.

This week’s announcement is part of an international turn. In May, the British government exploited the Manchester “terrorist” attack to deploy hundreds of soldiers, mainly in London. In 2015, the French government seized on a terrorist attack to mobilise 10,000 troops in Paris and imposed legislation to allow the military to search and detain persons without warrant, close down peaceful protests, harass people and commit assaults. Those emergency powers, since continued by President Emmanuel Macron, were used to issue 155 decrees prohibiting public assemblies between November 2015 and 5 May 2017, according to an Amnesty International report, including protests against regressive labour law measures.

Although no military call-out has occurred in Australia since 1978, major events—from the 2000 Sydney Olympics to the 2014 G20 summit in Brisbane—have been accompanied by displays of military might and huge police mobilisations.

Constant “counter-terrorism” exercises have also been conducted in major cities, featuring military helicopters and Special Forces troops. These operations have been testing grounds for methods of military repression that will be directed against mounting social and political discontent.

Three months after the Meethotamulla disaster in Sri Lanka

Vijith Samarasinghe 

Last Friday marked three months since the catastrophic collapse of the Meethotamulla garbage dump in Colombo. Angry victims are blaming the government for the loss of lives and for evicting them from the area without providing proper housing or a means of income.

The official death toll of the Meethotamulla disaster is 32, with another eight people listed as missing. Residents, however, claim the real figure would be much higher, as the poorest victims, who were buried alive, did not appear in official records. The military-led rescue teams called off the search for bodies after several days. Around 146 houses have been damaged, affecting 198 families or around 1,000 people.

Unsafe open dumping in natural wetland in Meethotamulla began in 1987, and was continued by successive governments. It produced a huge garbage mountain covering 9 hectares and exceeding 60 metres in height (22 acres and 200 feet).

Local people held one protest after another against the health hazards and the danger that the massive pile could collapse and take lives. The governments of former President Mahinda Rajapakse and the current President Maithripala Sirisena deployed police to violently suppress the protests.

During the 2015 presidential election campaign, Sirisena sought to exploit the mounting anger by promising to “solve” the Meethotamulla problem. His government has now seized on the disaster to try to evict poor residents and take their land.

The Rajapakse government began clearing 70,000 poor families from their shanties in Colombo as part of its plan to transform the capital into a major commercial and financial hub in South Asia. The residents of Meethotamulla have been pushed to move since 2011. The present government extended the plan, with Meethotamulla earmarked as prime land in the Megapolis project.

This basic fact has been deliberately buried by the government and the establishment media, which blame the refusal of local residents to move for the disaster. The president has appointed a one-man inquiry into the disaster that will whitewash the government’s role and cover up the real reasons for the tragedy.

People are now banned from the area. In the name of providing alternative housing for the victims, authorities are systematically dispersing displaced residents. Families have been given a grossly inadequate allowance of between 50,000 and 150,000 rupees ($US325-975) to relocate.

Some families have been allocated tiny apartments in the 10th and 11th floors of a multi-story “low-income” complex, not suitable for decent living, about a kilometre away. Others are staying nearby in rented houses, hoping to get compensation for their land and houses. Those who lived in tiny wooden houses will be given a pittance and will be unable to find suitable accommodation elsewhere.

Meethotamulla was not an accident or an isolated phenomenon. Following the collapse, protests erupted against dozens of unsafe open dumps throughout the country, including in Kandy, Hatton, Karadiyana and Muthrajawela. The government responded with brutal police assaults on protestors.

The bankrupt Sri Lankan capitalist class is completely incapable of addressing the social and democratic needs of the vast majority of working people. The limited social rights won through the struggles of the working class, such as public education and health, have been severely eroded.

President J. R. Jayawardene’s government was one of the first in the world to initiate pro-market restructuring to open up the economy to foreign investment. The tax concessions and other benefits offered to investors were paid for by slashing public spending on essential social services. Privatisations opened up new areas of the economy to private profit. Living standards, jobs, wages and working conditions have all been sacrificed to the constant demand for “international competiveness.”

Similar processes have taken place internationally, including in the major imperialist centres, widening the gulf between rich and poor. The Meethotamulla tragedy found its parallel in the June 14 inferno that engulfed the Grenfell tower, where poor workers were housed, in the middle of a wealthy district of London.

The onslaught on the working class has intensified since the 2008 global financial crisis. The International Monetary Fund has directly intervened in Sri Lanka to force governments to further slash public spending. The small allocation of 2 percent of gross domestic product on health that existed in the 1970s has plunged to 1.2 percent.

Colombo has been effectively segregated as large swathes of land have been cleared for businesses and luxury apartments. The poor have been driven into low-income ghettos. The World Bank directly encourages the drive to “beautify” downtown areas and affluent suburbs of the city to attract foreign investment.

Colombo symbolises the social inequality in Sri Lanka. According to the 2016 British-based Knight Frank wealth report, 170 individuals in the Colombo district had wealth of more than $10 million. On July 1, the World Capital Centre signed a $2 billion agreement to build Asia’s tallest tower with 117 floors in Colombo containing luxury apartments, hotel rooms and commercial outlets.

A dengue epidemic, which is engulfing the country, is rampant in the Colombo district. The official death toll nationally has climbed to 290 and the number of patients to more than 90,000. This reflects the decay of public health measures, but the government has blamed the epidemic on residents, particularly the poor, and launched a police crackdown.

Special police units arrested around 1,200 individuals for the “errant disposal” of household waste in the last fortnight of June alone. Joint police and army groups have been deployed, along with municipality officials, to inspect the houses and gardens for mosquito breeding places, with special powers to impose on-the-spot fines.

The fight for elementary democratic and social rights is necessarily bound up with a political struggle to abolish the outmoded capitalist order that leads to tragedies such as occurred at Meethotamulla.

Such a struggle is not only opposed by the major capitalist parties but their pseudo-left apologists and supporters. Their role has been exposed by the record of the Frontline Socialist Party (FSP). It joined local United National Party (UNP) leaders in directing residents’ protests into appeals to the Rajapakse government, and then to the present “unity” government, in which the UNP is a major partner.

This whole policy is based on pressuring the political representatives of the capitalist class that is responsible for such disasters. Now the FSP is deflecting the anger of residents by acting as an intermediary with the government to get the “best” compensation for the victims.

The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) is fighting for an opposed political perspective. The SEP insists that the Meethotamulla victims must be provided with decent housing and a secure income. The fight for this demand has to be linked to the struggles of workers against the broader attacks of the government on jobs, wages and living conditions in a common fight for a workers’ and peasants’ government and socialist policies. These include the repudiation of foreign debt and the nationalisation of the banks, big companies and estates under the democratic control of the working class.

Those responsible for the Meethotamulla tragedy must be held accountable and punished, and its causes unearthed. That is why the SEP has called an Independent Workers Inquiry on the Meethotamulla Disaster. We urge workers, youth and all those who value social and democratic rights to support this campaign. Enrol for this inquiry today.

Trump threatens redoubled economic sanctions against Venezuela

Alexander Fangmann 

US President Donald Trump called for “strong and swift economic actions” against the Venezuelan government on Monday, raising the implicit threat of sanctions against that country’s oil industry, which would have a devastating effect on the country’s economy.

The threat from Washington follows an escalation of the right-wing opposition’s campaign against the government’s plan to hold a constituent assembly which would rewrite the constitution. This has culminated in a call for a 24-hour national strike to be held on Thursday, July 20.

According to a Reuters report, an expansion of targeted sanctions aimed at regime officials has already been prepared and needs only to be announced by Trump. Two figures thought to be targeted by the measures are defense minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez and Diosdado Cabello, the former speaker of the National Assembly and a key figure in both the Venezuelan military and the chavista United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). These new sanctions would involve a freeze on these officials’ US assets and prohibit business dealings with US companies and individuals.

This follows two earlier rounds of sanctions against officials of the Venezuelan government and state-owned oil company PDVSA. Most recently, the US Treasury Department announced it was blocking Vice President Tareck El Aissami from the US financial system for alleged involvement in drug trafficking.

According to a report published in the Financial Times, when asked about the possibility of a ban on Venezuelan oil imports, one US official reportedly stated that “all options are on the table.” The US receives around 25 percent of Venezuela’s crude oil production, meaning that any reduction in imports would reduce the foreign currency available to the Venezuelan government to finance imports of food, medicine and other basic necessities, exacerbating already severe shortages.

However, there has been opposition to a blanket embargo on Venezuelan oil from US refinery operators who depend upon Venezuelan crude for their operations and would face difficulties in switching to other crude sources. The president of the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers association, Chet Thompson, wrote to Trump saying, “Sanctions limiting U.S. imports of Venezuelan crude would disadvantage many U.S. refineries, particularly those in the Gulf Coast and East Coast regions, that have optimized to utilize sour crudes produced in Venezuela.”

Among the largest importers of Venezuelan oil are Citgo, the US subsidiary of PDVSA, Valero Energy, Phillips 66 and Chevron. As a whole, Venezuela accounts for around 9 percent of US crude oil imports. A reduction in the availability of Venezuelan crude would mean a rise in gasoline prices and even possible layoffs at refineries.

Because of the political difficulties involved in widening sanctions beyond prominent chavistas, much of the US pressure on Venezuela has come through its support for the right-wing opposition centered on the Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD) and its call for new elections and some kind of power-sharing arrangement based upon its control of the National Assembly.

This led on Sunday to a MUD-organized national referendum on the constituent assembly plan. Though held outside of the auspices of the National Electoral Council, which called the vote illegal, the MUD claimed a voter turnout of 7.2 million or 37 percent, with 98 percent voting against the constituent assembly. Such a figure lines up closely with recent vote totals for the MUD in national elections and apparently includes votes cast at polling stations in over 100 countries, including the United States.

On the same day as the MUD referendum, the Venezuelan government scheduled a “dry run” of its own constituent assembly vote, with pro-government news sources such as Telesur claiming that millions participated. The actual vote is scheduled for July 30. Once convened, the constituent assembly will be tasked to rewrite the constitution in order to consolidate the chavista hold on at least certain aspects of the Venezuelan government and economy.

Following the referendum, the opposition declared that it was “zero hour” for the Maduro government, and called for a 24-hour nationwide strike on Thursday. However, sensing the isolation of the MUD from the working class and broader social layers, Freddy Guevara, the vice president of the National Assembly and a member of the Popular Will party, said on Twitter that the “civil strike this Thursday cannot come only from businessmen. The country belongs to everyone and everyone needs to guarantee to paralyze Venezuela.” According to an Associated Press report, Venezuela’s largest chamber of commerce even announced that employers would not punish workers for striking.

Reports are also emerging that there are high-level international negotiations over how to put an end to the crisis in Venezuela. The Financial Times cited an anonymous source who said that Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos is set to fly to Havana on Sunday at least in part to convince Raul Castro to lend support to a negotiated end to the crisis, possibly by even taking in Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, as political exiles. The private intelligence agency, Stratfor, also claims that Cuba is the nexus for indirect talks between Russia and the United States, in which former Spanish prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has been a key figure. Stratfor also noted that it “has received persistent reports that he [Maduro] has considered asking for refuge in Russia or Cuba.”

Cuba, Russia and China all have substantial economic interests in Venezuela and would be hurt significantly by being cut out entirely were the Maduro government to fall. By taking part in negotiations in which Maduro exits the scene, they hope to ingratiate themselves with the right-wing MUD and maintain their present relationships for as long as possible.

The chief obstacle standing in the way of any negotiated settlement to the crisis, or a palace coup, is the working class itself. For the working class, all of the proposed outcomes, based as they are on the maintenance of capitalism, mean continued austerity in order to shore up Venezuela’s continually declining balance sheets and pay off its bondholders.

Poll shows 76 percent of Americans fear a major war

Bill Van Auken

The widening chasm that separates the US ruling establishment—including its two major parties and the corporate-controlled media—from the masses of American working people is finding a particularly sharp expression over the threat of war.

An NBC poll released Tuesday found that fully 76 percent of the US population fears that the country will be dragged into a major war within the next four years. The data indicated that the share of Americans who are worried about the growing war danger has risen by 10 percent just since February.

These fears are well-founded. Since February, the American population has been subjected to an unrelenting campaign of anti-Russian hysteria centered on supposed collusion by the Trump camp with alleged Moscow interference in the US elections. The driving force for this political and media campaign is the determination within the military and intelligence apparatus to continue and intensify the US military confrontation with Russia, the world’s second largest nuclear power. The Pentagon and CIA see Russia as an obstacle to US imperialism’s attempt to assert its hegemony in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and around the world.

Simultaneously, the Pentagon has engaged in continuous provocations against China, including violations by US warships of Chinese-claimed territory in the South China Sea, encouragement of an Indian-Chinese border dispute, and support for military buildups in both Japan and Taiwan.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has repeatedly threatened military action against North Korea, most recently in response to its test of a purported intercontinental ballistic missile.

The sharp increase since February of those fearing the outbreak of a major war has no doubt been fueled by a further series of events, including the US cruise missile attack on Syria in April, the subsequent downing of a Syrian fighter jet by a US warplane and the unleashing against Afghanistan of the so-called MOAB bomb, the largest weapon employed by the US military since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

While largely concealed from the American public by the craven corporate media, the United States is perpetually involved in war crimes across the planet. Within the last week, the scale of the slaughter of civilians in the US-led siege of Mosul—with at least 7,000 believed buried in the rubble—has begun to emerge.

In Afghanistan, the number of civilians killed in the first half of 2017 has reached a record high for the 16-year US war, with 1,662 slaughtered in just six months. The death toll among women rose 23 percent and among children 9 percent compared to the same period last year, as the number of US air strikes returned to the level that prevailed when Obama’s “surge” sent over 100,000 US troops into the country.

At the same time, Washington has stepped up its support for the near-genocidal Saudi-led war of aggression against Yemen, where massive bombing has killed over 12,000 and destroyed basic infrastructure, creating the conditions for famine and a mass cholera epidemic.

The newly released poll has exposed two diametrically opposed processes unfolding within the US. On the one hand, the vast majority of the American population is growing increasingly fearful of and opposed to war. On the other, the US government and the ruling oligarchy it represents are ever more bent on provoking a major military confrontation.

Just four days before the NBC poll was released, the US House of Representatives approved by an overwhelming bipartisan majority a Pentagon budget of nearly $700 billion—more than the amount requested by the Trump White House—to fund the ongoing US wars and the preparation of new ones.

A recently released study prepared by the US Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute on “risk assessment in a post-primacy world” offers a glimpse into the thinking of those directing the escalating buildup to war. It cites two “adverse realities confronting the United States” and its military: “The first is the increasing vulnerability, erosion and, in some cases, the loss of an assumed US military advantage vis-à-vis many of its most consequential defense-relevant challenges. The second concerns the volatile and uncertain restructuring of international security affairs in ways that appear to be increasingly hostile to unchallenged US leadership.”

The US military study defines Washington’s strategic objectives during a period of “post-US primacy” to include securing US access to “strategic regions, markets and resources” and extending “US military advantage and options.” In other words, the relative decline of US imperialism’s worldwide dominance is to be countered by means of military force.

It admits that this strategy “will expose substantial US military capability to serial ‘capacity tests’ that are bound to either fail or result in substantial losses or costs.” In other words, the wars being prepared will entail American casualties on a scale not seen since the end of the Second World War.

The document also implicitly acknowledges the need to counter the overwhelming popular hostility to war. “At the same time,” it states, “the US homeland, individual American citizens, and US public opinion and perceptions will increasingly become battlefields.”

Until now, this battle has been largely one-sided. The drive to war enjoys the overwhelming support of both the Democratic and Republican parties. The mass media has been reduced to a propaganda arm of the Pentagon and the CIA.

And a new constituency for imperialist war, a layer of nominally “left” political organizations and publications that in a previous period worked to channel antiwar sentiment behind the Democratic Party, has played a politically vital role in this battle. Today, these elements not only are hostile to any form of protest against the crimes being carried out by the US military, they have become vocal advocates of US imperialist regime-change operations, from Libya to Syria, Ukraine and beyond.

These groups, such as the International Socialist Organization in the US, the New Anti-capitalist Party in France and the Left Party in Germany, are helping to pave the way for the far bloodier conflicts to come, turning to obsessive denunciations of Russia, China and Iran as “imperialist,” even as they justify the crimes of US imperialism under the disreputable banner of “human rights” and support CIA destabilization operations in Syria and elsewhere as “revolutions.”

Their politics are firmly rooted in the interests of affluent sections of the middle class, whose personal fortunes have risen along with stock and real estate prices, underwritten by the global eruption of American militarism.

The broad and deep-rooted popular hostility to war, in the US and around the world, can find no expression within the existing political setup. The Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International are fighting to give this sentiment a conscious and organized form through the building of a mass antiwar movement based on the working class and guided by an internationalist and socialist perspective.

Chinese Responsibility on DPRK: No ‘Theory’, Immutable Reality

Manpreet Sethi

Recent videos from North Korea - or Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) - show their Supreme Commander of the Army, Kim Jong-un, chuckling away as he watches his country’s missile launches. Indeed with the recent test of the claimed ICBM, which has been justified by the country as a legitimate right to self defence, the 'Dear Leader' has several reasons to smile. It is the US that is fuming, faced as it is with rather grim options. Exasperated, US President Donald Trump has not been shy of accusing China of not living up to its responsibility to help defang North Korea of its nuclear weapons. US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson warned that the US was at the end of its strategic patience.

Cheekily, China advised him to undertake proactive diplomacy with the DPRK instead. Refusing to accept American allegations, China has hit hard at what it calls the “China responsibility theory.” It maintains that the core of the problem is the security conflict between the US and the DPRK and that the two should handle it themselves. As stated by the Chinese Foreign ministry spokesman, “China is neither the focus of the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue, nor the one that escalates the tension.” Rather, it claims to have played a “constructive role” in trying to find a solution and accuses vested interests of “confusing public opinion.” 

Indeed, the North Korean nuclear imbroglio is far more complicated for any one country to solve. But, China is punching far below its weight on the DPRK when it shirks its responsibility on the matter by dismissing it as a ‘theory’. After all, China was responsible for the creation of the problem when it provided tacit support to the Kim dynasty’s nuclear efforts, including facilitation of cooperation through other beneficiaries of its own nuclear weapons largesse. And, it is China that still wields the maximum amount of leverage through its economic and political relations with an otherwise isolated Communist regime. While China has gone along on some of the more recent UN Security Council resolutions that sanction the DPRK, it has been careful not to take any measures that destabilise the regime. The US, though, alleges that China ignores/condones/allows some Chinese enterprises to continue working with North Korea. In fact, one Chinese bank was cut out of the American financial system for allegedly being involved in laundering money for North Korea. 

Is there a way out of these allegation and counter-allegations of the big powers? It is clear that Kim Jong-un would like to leverage his nuclear and missile programme as a bargaining chip. The key lies in finding what he would be willing to settle for.

China has seconded the DPRK's suggestion of a halt of US-South Korea military exercises in exchange for a moratorium on missile launches and nuclear tests by the DPRK. This might not be a bad idea especially since South Korea's President, Moon Jae-in, has taken a first step in indicating his willingness to have talks with his neighbour. But the time so gained through this double suspension and the ultimate objective of the talks would have to be to provide a sense of security to the regime.

This would only be possible through some sort of an acceptance of its nuclear status, an issue that has evoked much indignation in the US and South Korea since any hint of grant of such status to a ‘rogue’ nation is deemed anathema to the non-proliferation hardliners. 

While this is understandable, it is often forgotten that other nations described as rogue at another point of time in history have been accommodated in the past. China itself was one of them. In 1966, two years after China tested its nuclear weapon, it was described as a rogue regime when the then Chairman of the Communist Party of China, Mao Zedong, began the bloody Cultural Revolution in which millions of Chinese died and when it aggressively sought to export its revolution to other countries. But within five years of the Chinese nuclear test, the US had engaged the country in a dialogue, though covertly at first. 

The point of the above paragraph is not to condone the actions of North Korea, but to provide a perspective. It must be accepted that denuclearisation of the DPRK is not a possibility. Even a military offensive has little chance of success, but it would certainly extract a very high cost on human life. The next best thing then to do would be to engage the country in such a way as to enhance its sense of security to eventually reduce its reliance on nuclear weapons, enmesh it in an architecture of verifiable safeguards, and nudge its nuclear thinking and behaviour along more acceptable norms. Then, in time, if universal nuclear disarmament was ever to become a reality, North Korea could also join in as another nuclear possessor.

It does not behove China, and nor is it in its regional security interest, to dismiss its responsibility in resolving the North Korean nuclear crisis as mere theory. Countries become great powers by taking responsibility for matters of international concern, not merely by announcing huge projects, counting only ‘rogue’ regimes amongst their best friends, and winning over smaller nations only with money and military muscle.