Wealth Concentration Drives a New Global Imperialism

Peter Phillips

Regime changes in Iraq and Libya, Syria’s war, Venezuela’s crisis, sanctions on Cuba, Iran, Russia, and North Korea are reflections of a new global imperialism imposed by a core of capitalist nations in support of trillions of dollars of concentrated investment wealth. This new world order of mass capital has become a totalitarian empire of inequality and repression.

The global 1%, comprised of over 36-million millionaires and 2,400 billionaires,employ their excess capital with investment management firms like Black Rock and J.P Morgan Chase. The top seventeen of these trillion-dollar investment management firms controlled $41.1 trillion dollars in 2017. These firms are all directly invested in each other and managed by only 199 people who decide how and where global capital will be invested. Their biggest problem is they have more capital than there are safe investment opportunities, which leads to risky speculative investments, increased war spending, privatization of the public domain, and pressures to open new capital investment opportunities through political regime changes.

Power elites in support of capital investment are collectively embedded in a system of mandatory growth. Failure for capital to achieve continuing expansion leads to economic stagnation, which can result in depression,bank failures,currency collapses, and mass unemployment.  Capitalism is an economic system that inevitably adjusts itself via contractions, recessions, and depressions. Power elites are  entrapped in a web of enforced growth that requires ongoing global management and the formation of new and ever expanding capital investment opportunities. This forced expansion becomes a world wide manifest destiny that seeks total capital domination in all regions of the earth and beyond.

Sixty percent of the core 199 global power elite managers are from the US, with people from twenty capitalist nations rounding out the balance. These power elite managers and associated one percenters take active part in global policy groups and governments. They serve as advisors to the IMF, World Trade Organization, World Bank, International Bank of Settlements, Federal Reserve Board, G-7 and the G-20. Most attend the World Economic Forum. Global power elites engage actively on private international policy councils such as the Council of Thirty, Trilateral Commission, and the Atlantic Council. Many of the US global elites are members of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Business Roundtable in the US. The most important issue for these power elites is protecting capital investment, insuring debt collection, and building opportunities for further returns.

The global power elite are aware of their existence as a numerical minority in the vast sea of impoverished humanity. Roughly 80% of the world’s population lives on less than ten dollars a day and half live on less than three dollars a day.Concentrated global capital becomes the binding institutional alignment that brings transnational capitalists into a centralized global imperialism facilitated by world economic/trade institutions and protected by the US/NATO military empire. This concentration of wealth leads to a crisis of humanity, whereby poverty, war, starvation, mass alienation, media propaganda, and environmental devastation have reached levels that threaten humanity’s future.

The idea of independent self-ruling nation-states has long been held sacrosanct in traditional liberal capitalist economies. However, globalization has placed a new set of demands on capitalism that requires transnational mechanisms to support continued capital growth that is increasingly beyond the boundaries of individual states. The financial crisis of 2008 was an acknowledgement of the global system of capital under threat. These threats encourage the abandonment of nation-state rights altogether and the formation of a global imperialism that reflects new world order requirements for protecting transnational capital.

Institutions within capitalist countries including government ministries, defense forces, intelligence agencies, judiciary, universities and representative bodies, recognize to varying degrees that the overriding demands of transnational capital spill beyond the boundaries of nation-states.  The resulting worldwide reach motivates a new form of global imperialism that is evident by coalitions of core capitalist nations engaged in past and present regime change efforts via sanctions, covert actions, co-options, and war with non-cooperating nations—Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea and Russia.

The attempted coup in Venezuela shows the alignment of transnational capital-supporting states in recognizing the elite forces that oppose Maduro’s socialist presidency. A new global imperialism is at work here, whereby Venezuela’s sovereignty is openly undermined by a capital imperial world order that seeks not just control of Venezuela’s oil, but a full opportunity for widespread investments through a new regime.

The widespread corporate media negation of the democratically elected president of Venezuela demonstrates that these media are owned and controlled by ideologists for the global power elite. Corporate media today is highly concentrated and fully international. Their primary goal is the promotion of product sales and pro-capitalist propaganda through the psychological control of human desires, emotions, beliefs, fears, and values. Corporate media does this by manipulating feelings and cognitions of human beings worldwide, and by promoting entertainment as a distraction to global inequality.

Recognizing global imperialism as a manifestation of concentrated wealth, managed by a few hundred people, is of utmost importance for democratic humanitarian activists.  We must stand on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and challenge global imperialism and its fascist governments, media propaganda, and empire armies.

The Youth Climate Strike and the fight against global warming

Bryan Dyne

Hundreds of thousands of students and young people are expected to take part this Friday in a worldwide Youth Climate Strike to protest the inaction of governments on the issue of climate change. That the international demonstration has evoked a broad response is an indication of both the serious nature of the ecological crisis and the radicalization of youth all over the world.

The strike is the culmination of a series of international protests that began last August after 15-year-old Greta Thunberg began picketing the Swedish parliament every Friday. Since then, students and youth, some as young as 12, have organized weekly walkouts, protests and strikes in many parts of the world. Friday’s demonstrations, which will be the largest to date, will take place in more than 1,200 cities in at least 92 countries across six continents—including in Australia, Brazil, China, Great Britain, India, Iran, Italy, the Philippines, Portugal, Russia, Somalia, Sweden and the United States.

The protests have expanded amidst a series of reports indicating that global warming is accelerating, and that the destruction already caused by climate change from hurricanes, heat waves, droughts and other extreme weather events will become qualitatively more catastrophic as early as 2040. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned that the measures taken by governments to halt global warming are so much empty bluster. It estimates the potential economic damage from unabated climate change to be between $54 and $69 trillion worldwide.

Perhaps the most tragic consequence of global warming is the creation of so-called “climate refugees,” those forced to permanently flee their homes as a result of climate change-related disasters. The United Nations estimates that 210 million people worldwide have been displaced since 2008, and that up to one billion will be displaced by 2050.

The student strikes reflect the politicization and leftward trajectory of a generation that has come of age in a world of unprecedented social inequality, ongoing environmental degradation, growing state repression and expanding imperialist wars.

Polls consistently show a leftward movement of young people and growing support for and interest in socialism. Central to the perspective of genuine socialism is the understanding that there is not a single social problem confronting humanity—from climate change, to poverty and unemployment, to authoritarianism and war—that can be resolved except through the political mobilization of the international working class in a revolutionary movement to overturn capitalism and establish a society based on social need, not private profit.

The objective basis for such a revolutionary movement is beginning to emerge in the growth of the class struggle internationally, beginning in 2018 and escalating this year.

Mass protests and strikes in the past several weeks have paralyzed the Algerian government. Protests in Belgium, France, Germany, Portugal and Sudan have erupted against pro-business austerity and the victimization of refugees. Workers in different parts of Iran have been regularly striking for 15 months. Tens of thousands of autoworkers in Mexico have been on strike since January, and tens of thousands of teachers in the United States have gone on strike this year, in conflict with the pro-company unions. Students themselves are joining in these struggles, particularly in support of teachers and to defend public education.

It is to the working class that young people must turn, not to the corporate politicians and government institutions. Young people must study politics and come to an understanding of the role played by organizations that claim to be “left” or “green,” but work to channel opposition behind the ruling class and its policies of war and austerity.

In the United States, New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, has advanced the proposal for a “Green New Deal” to address climate change. The proposal is based on political fictions—namely, that global warming can be halted on a national basis, that the Democratic Party can be made to carry out major social reforms, and that progressive change can be achieved within the framework of the existing economic and political system.

In the upcoming 2020 presidential election in the US, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is once again seeking to appeal to the anger and opposition of young people and workers in order to direct this anger behind the Democratic Party. His campaign, like the “Green New Deal” proposal, is characterized by a basic contradiction between the limited reforms it proposes and the absence of any realistic strategy for their implementation. The Democratic Party, which both Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are dedicated to promoting, is fully responsible, no less than the Republicans, for implementing the right-wing policies that are driving workers and young people into struggle.

Similar efforts to promote the parties of the ruling class are present in every country. Whether it is the Labour Party in Britain, the Socialist Party in France, the Social Democratic, Green and Left parties in Germany—all have played leading roles in implementing policies of war and social counterrevolution.

As for their supposed “solutions” to climate change, these are so many empty pledges and toothless measures. The track record of every international agreement and climate summit shows that none of them are capable of solving the crisis posed by climate change. They are ultimately dominated by the major corporations, which are responsible for global warming in the first place. Any measures that are adopted, such as carbon emissions trading, are thinly veiled mechanisms for these companies to continue business as usual—and even turn the poisoning of the environment into a new source of speculative profit.

The urgent measures needed to address climate change require a major reorganization of economic life on a global scale. The framework of energy production has to be transitioned from one that uses fossil fuels to one that relies on renewable energy. This, in turn, requires an international effort, involving a massive influx of funding for infrastructure, the development of current technologies and the investigation of new ideas.

All such measures come into conflict with the nation-state system, the basic political framework of capitalism, which itself has become an intolerable brake on the development of the world economy. They also collide with the foundation of capitalist exploitation of the working class—private ownership of the means of production and production for profit. As long as a handful of billionaires dominate society, with every aspect of economic life geared to their personal enrichment, not a single social problem, including climate change, can be solved.

This makes the solution to climate change an inherently class question and a revolutionary question. It is the working class that will suffer the brunt of the impact of global warming. It is the working class that is objectively and increasingly defining itself as an international class. It is the working class whose social interests lie in the overthrow of capitalism and the abolition of private ownership of the means of production, which will open the way to the establishment of an economic system based on the satisfaction of human need, including a safe and healthy environment.

The growing opposition of workers and youth must be developed into a conscious, international socialist movement. We call on young people participating in these demonstrations, and all workers and youth internationally, to join the Socialist Equality Party and its youth movement, the International Youth and Students for Social Equality, to lead this fight.

Israel mounts savage air bombardment on Gaza

Jean Shaoul

Israel Defense Forces launched a massive aerial attack on 100 sites in Gaza in the early hours of Friday morning, injuring at least four people in the southern city of Rafah. Hours later, strikes were still pummeling the town of Khan Younis.

According to Palestinian witnesses, IDF planes bombed security facilities belonging to Hamas, the bourgeois Islamist group that has controlled the Gaza Strip since winning the Palestinian legislative elections in 2006, as well as 30 sites held by Islamic Jihad, causing significant damage.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the strikes in retaliation for two rockets that set off air raid sirens across Tel Aviv, Israel’s most populous city. Israel’s Iron Dome defence system intercepted one of the missiles, while another landed in open space, causing no damage or injuries.

Hamas denied any responsibility for the rockets launched against Tel Aviv. It pointed out that the attack took place at the very time when its negotiators were meeting with Egyptian mediators, supported by the United Nations and Qatar, to try to reach an accommodation with Israel to ameliorate the terrible conditions in Gaza due to the crippling 12-year-long blockade by Israel, imposed with the active support of Egypt and President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah-led Palestinian Authority.

Such is the determination for negotiations to succeed that Palestinians stopped the night-time protests that were part of the Great March of Return movement, as well as Friday protests at one of the five gathering points demonstrators have used since 30 March 2018.

Hamas reportedly made these concessions in response to Israeli demands, transmitted by Egypt, calling for the “stopping the coarse tools” used by Palestinians after Israel again halted Qatari aid to Gaza. The talks follow the breakdown of an earlier agreement brokered by Egypt in November, following Israel’s raid on Gaza that triggered renewed fighting. Israel repeatedly broke the agreement, which allowed Qatari payments to Israel for fuel and power as well aid into Gaza.

Netanyahu explained at Monday’s Likud faction meeting that it was better for Israel to serve as the conduit for aid rather than the PA. “Now that we are supervising, we know it’s going to humanitarian causes,” he said. Whoever “is against a Palestinian state should be for” transferring funds to Gaza because maintaining a separation between the PA in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza helps prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.

A spokesperson for Gaza’s interior ministry insisted the rocket fire went “against the national consensus” and promised to take action against the perpetrators.

Two other Palestinian groups, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees, likewise denied responsibility. Daoud Shihab of Islamic Jihad told the Palestinian news agency Quds Network, “These accusations are mere lies by the Israeli occupation. Our movement and its military wing the Al-Quds Brigades did not fire any rockets.”

IDF spokesperson Brigadier-General Ronen Manelis admitted they did not know who had fired the rockets.

In the wake of the Israeli air raids, the Palestinians have called off their Friday protests along the Gaza-Israel fence entirely, the first time the marches have been stopped since they were launched nearly a year ago.

Netanyahu, for his part, is determined to prevent a large protest planned for 30 March. This date marks one year since the start of the demonstrations demanding the Palestinians’ right of return to their homes from which they were driven out in 1948-49 and 1967 and the lifting of the illegal siege that has left much of Gaza without power, sanitation, clean water and basic commodities.

Israel’s massive aerial assault on Gaza takes place in the run-up to elections on April 9, with Netanyahu, who has been indicted on multiple charges of corruption, fighting for his political life.

His strategy is based on an escalated far-right orientation, including the cultivation of neo-fascist forces both within Israel and internationally, that is shifting official Israeli politics to the right.

He has brokered a merger between the fascist Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party and the more established right-wing party of religious Zionists, Jewish Home. This is aimed at securing sufficient support from the ultra-nationalist and religious parties to form another Likud-led coalition under his leadership. In so doing, he has legitimized an organization that traces its roots to the long-outlawed Kach party of Meir Kahane, which the United States declared a terrorist organization.

Otzma Yehudit, like Jewish Home, encourages violence against Palestinians, calls for the expulsion of Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories, and advocates a ban on intermarriage or sex between Jews and Arabs. This fascistic outfit could, following its electoral alliance with Jewish Home, win seats in the Knesset and become part of the next government.

The two leaders that head the Otzma Yehudit list and could win parliamentary seats—Michael Ben Ari and Itamar Ben Gvir—are cofounders of a group implicated in a 2014 arson attack on a school for Jewish and Arab children in Jerusalem. Ben Ari was denied a visa to the US in 2012 as a member of a terrorist organization. Ben Gvir has acknowledged having a picture in his home of Baruch Goldstein, the Kahane supporter who murdered 29 Palestinians at a mosque in Hebron in 1994.

While Israel’s Elections Committee has allowed these Jewish supremacists to run in the elections, it has barred the Arab nationalist Balad Party along with Dr Ofer Cassif, the sole Jewish candidate on the combined Arab list of Communist Hadash and Ta’al, headed by Ahmed Tibi. They have appealed to the High Court to overturn the decision.

At the same time, Netanyahu has forged alliances with far-right and neo-fascist forces and leaders around the world, including Viktor Orban of Hungary, Matteo Salvini of Italy, Sebastian Kurz of Austria, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil and, above all, Donald Trump in the US.

Accompanying this turn, Netanyahu is whipping up virulent nationalism against the Palestinians, Iran and its regional allies, Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon, prompting Israel’s mainstream parties to compete over who is the most ardent defender of Israel’s security.

Netanyahu’s bourgeois political rivals competed with each other to demonstrate an even more bloodthirsty attitude toward the Palestinians. Education Minister Naftali Bennett of Hayamin Hehadash demanded that Netanyahu draw up plans for the assassination of Hamas leaders. “I call on Netanyahu to order that the IDF present the cabinet a plan to defeat Hamas.”

Benny Gantz, the former general who heads the Kahol Lavan party demanded that the Israeli military take “significant and harsh” measures to “renew its deterrence.”

Similar statements were issued by other leading Israeli politicians. While competing with Netanyahu, all of them like him, aim to deflect social tensions within Israel outwards.

Israel is among the most economically unequal advanced economies in the world and has the highest poverty rate of any country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). It has seen a growing wave of working class strikes and demonstrations, including a mass protest of thousands of people demanding an investigation into the fatal police shooting of Yehuda Biadga, a mentally unstable Ethiopian-Israeli.

Netanyahu has responded to the weekly Palestinian protests along the Gaza-Israel fence with the utmost brutality. The IDF has killed at least 267 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip since March 30 last year and injured 29,000 more. Many of them are disabled for life. The UN Independent Commission of Inquiry that investigated Israel’s actions in Gaza during the protests stated that they “may constitute war crimes or crimes against humanity.” A further 60 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, while Israel has lost just two soldiers.

The authorities have continually escalated tensions around Al-Aqsa Mosque in East Jerusalem, the third holiest site in Islam, over the last month, sparking repeated protests and demonstrations. On Tuesday, Israeli police sealed off the entrances to Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, following an alleged firebombing of a police station on the site that in fact was caused by children playing with fireworks, leading to scuffles between Palestinian worshippers and the police, injuring at least 10 Palestinians and leading to several arrests.

Anti-Semitic propaganda distributed at Polish parliament as government witch-hunts Holocaust historians

Clara Weiss

On Wednesday, an edition of the right-wing newspaper Tylko Polska with a front page article on “How to spot a Jew” was distributed at the Polish Sejm (parliament). In the manner of Nazi-style anti-Semitic propaganda, the article listed “names, anthropological features, expressions, appearances, character traits, methods of operation” and “disinformation activities” which allegedly allowed for identification of Jewish people.

A parliamentary deputy from the center-right Poland Comes First party denounced the distribution of the newspaper as an “absolute scandal” and described it as “filthy texts, as if taken from Nazi newspapers.” Following a public outcry internationally, the Sejm Chancellery, which had initially refused to take action, declared that the newspaper would be removed from kiosks at the Polish parliament.

There was nothing accidental about the distribution of this far-right newspaper at the Sejm. Its very publication was part of what can only be described as a state-sponsored witch-hunt of Holocaust historians.

Next to the article “How to spot a Jew,” the Tylko Polska newspaper ran the headline, “Attack on Poland at a conference in Paris,” and a picture of the historian and sociologist Jan Gross, who has written extensively on pogroms against Jews by Poles.

What the newspaper described as an “attack on Poland” was, in fact, a far-right assault on a Holocaust studies conference in Paris on February 21–22. Hosted by the prestigious Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), the conference was entitled “The new Polish school of Holocaust history.” It was disrupted by a group of some 30 Polish anti-Semites and nationalists, affiliated with the far-right newspaper Gazeta Polska, who shouted anti-Semitic slurs at the conference presenters (among them Jan Gross) and denounced them for spreading “anti-Polish” sentiments. In the weeks leading up the conference, its organizers in Paris had received threatening phone calls and mail. To ensure security, the conference started behind closed doors on its first day.

According to French media reports, the Polish government-controlled Institute of National Memory (IPN) was “effectively present and expressed itself without condemning what was going on.” The Polish ambassador in Paris also retweeted criticism of the conference by the IPN along nationalist lines on his Twitter account.

While the EHESS later published a statement denouncing the assault by Polish nationalists as an “attack on freedom of speech and academic freedom,” Poland’s vice-prime minister Jarosław Gowin tried to downplay the incident in an official letter. He denied that the slurs had an openly anti-Semitic character and denounced the criticism of the Law and Justice (PiS) government by conference participants who described it as a “regime” as “not being protected by the freedom of academic expression.”

Apart from Tylko Polska, numerous right-wing and pro-PiS publications have denounced the conference. The Wiadomości, for instance, called it a “festival of anti-Polish slander.”

The essentially state-backed, far-right attack on the Paris conference—an unprecedented event in academic life in recent European history—was the product of a massive campaign in Poland against all those working on the history of the Holocaust and Polish anti-Semitism. It is aimed at ensuring that the ongoing state-sponsored, systematic rewriting and falsification of the history of Polish nationalism and the crimes of Nazism goes unopposed.

The “legal” framework for this campaign was created with the “Holocaust bill,” passed by the Polish parliament and president in early 2018, which criminalizes speech and writings addressing crimes by Poles against the Jews.

In the past few years, an unknown number of lesser-known historians and students have been victimized by this campaign. Now, it is openly targeting the best-known figures in Polish-Jewish historiography: Dariusz Stola, the head of the POLIN museum of Polish-Jewish history, and Barbara Engelking, the co-founder and head of the Center for Research on the Annihilation of the Jews (Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów ). Both are scholars of world renown and are heading institutions that are among the most significant internationally in the research into and public education about the Holocaust.

In February, the Polish government announced it would not support the extension of Dariusz Stola’s contract, which is running out at the end of this year, and opened a competition for the post of director of the museum. A petition denouncing the government’s attempt to remove Stola from his position was signed by over 4,500 people. Stola announced that he would reapply for the position.

The moves against Stola came after official criticism of a special exhibition at the POLIN museum, held last year, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the anti-Semitic campaign waged by the Polish Stalinist government in 1968–69.

In response to student protests in March 1968 in Poland, and amid a mass general strike in France, the Polish Stalinist government, fearing that the working class struggles in Western Europe would spread to Poland and undermine its rule, unleashed a vicious anti-Semitic campaign against the student leaders. The Stalinist press depicted the protests as an intervention of Jewish “outside” forces. Within the following two years, at least some 13,000 people, among them numerous survivors of the Holocaust and some of the country’s leading academics and scientists, were forced to leave the country and give up Polish citizenship. The exhibition, which openly raised parallels to the current promotion of anti-Semitism by the PiS government, was viewed by some 116,000 people. The POLIN museum itself has been attended by well over a million people since it opened its doors in 2014.

The Polish ministry of culture, which is among the main sponsors of the POLIN museum, refused to support the exhibition financially. Poland’s vice-minister of culture attacked the exhibit at the POLIN, falsely claiming that “no Poles” had been involved in this campaign. Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who marched alongside far-right forces last November, said that Poland had nothing to apologize for with regard to 1968 and that the events were entirely the responsibility of an “outside great power,” that is, the Soviet Union, which had “occupied” the country.

Parallel to the campaign against Stola and with perhaps even greater ferocity, the government and right-wing media have attacked Barbara Engelking and her Center for Research on the Annihilation of the Jews. The attacks started after the publication of an extensive, two-volume book on the “Fates of Jews in select districts of occupied Poland,” edited by Engelking and Jan Grabowski and published under the aegis of the Center. The book, based on years of research, details the fate that Jews suffered including those hiding in Nazi-occupied Poland. It addresses the role of the Polish “Blue police” in hunting down Jews and handing them over to the Nazis or murdering them on their own, as well as anti-Semitic pogroms perpetrated by Polish nationalists. The study found that most of the 200,000 Polish Jews who were murdered outside the Nazi concentration camps were killed directly by or with the help of Poles.

The book and its editors were subject to an intense attack, spearheaded by the IPN and the Polish Anti-Defamation League, an extremist nationalist outfit for academics closely affiliated with PiS. Historian Jan Grabowski has pointed out that many of the “criticisms” by members of the IPN were based on notorious anti-Semitic pamphlets.

Engelking has since been removed by the government from her position as the head of the International Council for the State museum of the former concentration and death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau.

To their credit, none of the historians are prepared to give in to the massive pressure by the state and affiliated far-right forces. Stola has denounced the attacks on himself and published a statement, on behalf of POLIN, to defend Engelking and her research Center. Grabowski has sued the Polish Anti-Defamation League before a Warsaw court for “defamation.” He stated: “The line of action taken against Engelking and myself is designed to set an example. Polish teachers of history have told me that they are now under pressure to only teach according to the ideology of the government. Students of history and doctoral students openly say that they do not want to tackle burning topics because they fear for their careers.”

The PiS government is spearheading what is an international campaign to systematically bolster fascist forces through state support and through targeted historical falsifications. These policies have created a right-wing and dangerous political climate which increasingly resembles that of the 1930s.

At the beginning of this year, the mayor of Gdansk, Paweł Adamowicz, who had been an outspoken critic of the promotion of anti-Semitism and xenophobia by the PiS government, was assassinated. Later that month, some 100 fascists were allowed to march at the site of the Auschwitz death camp, where over 1 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust. In February, the offices of the Polish political and human rights activist Paweł Kasprczak were targeted with Nazi graffiti, including the words “Red Swine,” and “Jude raus.”

Fascist terrorists murder 49 in Christchurch, New Zealand

Tom Peters & John Braddock

Forty-nine people were killed and another 48 injured in a horrifying terrorist attack yesterday afternoon on two mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch. The attack is by far the largest mass shooting and the most severe act of terrorism in New Zealand’s history, and one of the world’s worst in the recent period.

Seven people died at Linwood Masjid Mosque and 41 at Masjid Al Noor Mosque next to Hagley Park, near the city centre. Another person died in hospital. It is possible the death toll will rise.

Ordinary people internationally have expressed shock over the attack and sympathy with the victims. Vigils are planned in New Zealand towns and cities on Saturday night and in coming days.

Mourners outside Wellington mosque

Three people have been arrested in connection with the massacre. Weapons were found near each of the mosques. Police also disarmed two explosive devices found in one vehicle—an indication that further attacks might have been planned. So far, only one man has been named, 28-year-old Australian citizen Brenton Tarrant, who appeared in court today charged with murder.

The attack is a horrific crime, an act of barbarism motivated by racism and extreme right-wing ideology. It is not just a New Zealand event, but is the outcome of the rise of far-right, fascistic networks that have developed around the world, promoted and protected from the highest levels of the state apparatus. Their activities have expanded alongside the rapid escalation of the international class struggle and desperate moves by the ruling elites to suppress opposition by eviscerating basic democratic rights.

Tarrant drew his inspiration from, and had a definite audience among, far-right, anti-immigrant groups internationally. Video footage of the Al Noor Mosque attack was broadcast live on Facebook and YouTube, apparently from a camera mounted on Tarrant’s head. The footage, since taken down, shows the gunman driving to the mosque, entering the building and carrying out his cold-blooded and systematic massacre. Defenceless victims, including small children, had little chance of escaping the hail of bullets from the assault rifle.

Although many details are not yet known, it is clear that this was not a random or “senseless” action. According to a 73-page “manifesto” published by Tarrant online, he spent two years planning the attack after spending some time living in Europe.

Entitled “The Great Replacement,” the manifesto makes clear that Tarrant was a white supremacist and considered himself a “fascist.” The document praised mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, who killed dozens of young people and children at a Norwegian Labour Party camp in 2011, motivated by anti-Islamist prejudice. Tarrant claimed to have had “brief contact” with Breivik and to have received his “blessing” for the New Zealand attack.

Just last month, US authorities arrested a Coast Guard Lieutenant, Christopher Paul Hasson, who was plotting to carry out terrorist attacks against socialist groups, Democratic Party politicians and media personalities. Hasson is a neo-Nazi who also proclaims Breivik as his idol.

Tarrant hailed US President Donald Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.” Like Trump, Tarrant described immigrants as “invaders,” stating: “We must crush immigration and deport those invaders already living on our soil.”

The shooter also threatened leftists. A passage headlined “to Antifa/Marxists/Communists” stated: “I want you in my sights. I want your neck under my boot.” On March 12, Tarrant posted numerous photos on Twitter of his assault rifle, covered in written messages, including references to Josué Estébanez, a neo-Nazi who murdered a teenage anarchist in Spain in 2007. Another slogan is “Vienna 1683,” which references the armed repulsion of Ottoman invaders by Austrian militias.

Astonishingly, NZ Police Commissioner Mike Bush claimed that neither New Zealand nor Australian police, or any other agencies, had any prior knowledge of Tarrant or the other people arrested. They were not, apparently, on any extremist “watch lists.” If this is true, it underscores the fact that the state authorities have turned a blind eye to, and are complicit in, the activities of the far-right networks.

No explanation has been given as to how such an attack could be planned for years without coming to the attention of police. Questions are also being raised about how the attackers acquired their weapons. New Zealand has no gun register and there are 1.3 million legally-owned weapons, in a country of just under 5 million people.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern stated in a press conference on Friday evening that New Zealand was “not chosen for this act of violence because we condone racism, because we are an enclave for extremism. We were chosen for the very fact that we are none of those things. Because we represent diversity, kindness, compassion.”

In fact, the attack took place in a definite domestic and international political context characterised by imperialist violence and increasing nationalism, xenophobia and racism. It follows almost two decades of New Zealand and Australian participation in US-led wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, which have killed more than a million people. Troops from New Zealand and Australia have been implicated in multiple massacres and atrocities against civilians in Afghanistan.

Under deteriorating social conditions, growing inequality and poverty, there has been a definite move to foster the creation of an “alt-right” movement in NZ. It is designed to confront the growing radicalisation of the working class and youth.

The atrocity in New Zealand follows not only the mass murder committed by Breivik in Norway, but the 2012 murders carried out by fascists at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin in 2012 and at a Jewish care home in Overland Park, Kansas in 2014; the 2015 massacre of African-American worshippers in Charleston, South Carolina; the 2016 murder of British Labour politician Jo Cox; the 2017 killing of nine people at a mosque in Quebec City, Canada; and the murder in 2018 of 11 Jewish worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—to name only some of the right-wing acts of terrorism.

Echoing the recent assault on British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, NZ Green Party leader James Shaw was attacked in a Wellington street last Thursday, by an individual shouting slogans against the United Nations. The assailant may well have been motivated by recent protests by far-right groups against New Zealand signing the UN Migration Compact.

Anti-Islamic sentiment has been deliberately stoked by politicians in Australia and New Zealand. Australia’s extreme right-wing Independent Senator Fraser Anning issued a fascistic press release blaming the Christchurch massacre on the victims themselves. He described Muslim immigration as the “real cause” of the attack. Anning recently attended a rally at St Kilda Beach organised by prominent Australian neo-Nazis.

At her first press conference on Friday evening, Ardern declared that “there is no place in New Zealand” for purveyors of “hate.” However, Ardern has embraced, and brought into the very centre of her government, the racist and populist NZ First Party, which was founded in the early 1990s on an explicit anti-Asian, anti-immigrant platform.

NZ First, which is a partner in the Labour-led coalition government, is a notorious spreader of anti-Muslim xenophobia. Despite receiving just 7.2 percent of the votes in 2017, NZ First was given the roles of foreign minister, defence minister and deputy prime minister.

Following the June 2017 London terror attacks, NZ First leader Winston Peters demanded in parliament that New Zealand’s “Islamic community” “clean house” by naming potential terrorists in “their own families.” Without producing any evidence of such extremism, Peters denounced the “twisted spirit of inclusiveness” that accommodated “the culture of Damascus” and “Tripoli” in New Zealand. He declared: “We must avoid the same politically correct trap that has allowed such communities apart to form… We must stop the slide as a people, as a culture in the West.”

Last year, NZ First called for a “New Zealand values test” to be administered to new immigrants, clearly a dog-whistle aimed against Muslims and Asian migrants. Peters said it would stop migrants who believe “women are cattle and second-class citizens.” Another NZ First member, Roger Melville, declared that people from “Pakistan, Indians and some Asian-type nations” were “forcing their ways on others.”

The Christchurch attack provides a deadly warning about the dangers ahead. An atmosphere of toxic nationalism, militarism and anti-immigrant xenophobia is being whipped up internationally, providing the basis for the re-emergence of fascism as capitalism lurches into its greatest crisis since the 1930s. It must be answered by the building of an international, socialist movement, unifying the working class of all countries in the struggle to end capitalism and the fascist reaction it has spawned.

The US reinforces political and military relations with the Maldives

Rohantha De Silva 

Maldives Foreign Minister Abdulla Shahid’s recent US trip underscores the strategic importance of this small Indian Ocean archipelago to Washington’s foreign policy. Shahid, accompanied by senior government officials, was invited by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Last month’s trip came after Shahid’s earlier visit to India—Washington’s strategic partner in the region—to boost relations with that country. The new Maldivian government is distancing itself from China and strengthening its political and military connections with Washington.

As well as Pompeo, Shahid met with Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for South and Central Asia Alice Wells and Under Secretary for Political Affairs David Hale, as well as officials from the US National Security Council, USAID and the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. He also held talks with the State Department’s Coordinator for Counterterrorism, Nathan Alexander Sales, about involvement in future programs.

Shahid declared that Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy was good for his country and stability in the Indian Ocean. Contrary to this assertion, however, the US is the principal destabilising factor in the region.

President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih’s government came to power in November 2018, following a Washington-orchestrated operation to remove President Abdulla Yameen’s administration, and to politically realign the island country away from China and toward the US.

Washington’s geo-political manoeuvres in the Indo-Pacific region are aimed at establishing a tight network of alliances to militarily encircle China.

Shahid endorsed Washington’s claims of commitment to a “free and open” Indo-Pacific region. In fact, under the guise of “freedom of navigation” in the South China Sea, Washington is provocatively violating the 12-nautical-mile territorial limits around islets claimed by China, including Mischief Reef in the Spratly islands group.

On February 21, Shahid signed a Memorandum of Agreement on Aviation Cooperation with Alina Romanowski at the US State Department. Romanowski is the State Department’s principal deputy coordinator on counter-terrorism. Washington’s counter-terrorism posturing is a cynical lie. The US is responsible for the rise of Islamic fundamentalist forces, such as Al Qaeda and ISIS, and the death of millions of civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq and across the Middle East and North Africa.

Maldivian security forces are being integrated into Washington’s military plans. The US will provide training to local law enforcement bodies and a new aviation security advisor at Male International Airport.

Shahid’s meeting with Pompeo also involved discussions on “judicial sector reforms, efficient governance and rule of law, transparent public financial management and anti-corruption.” No details were made available about these talks.

Washington reportedly agreed to assist in “civil society development,” including improvements in infrastructure and education. China remains the largest infrastructure investor in the Maldives but India is moving to displace Beijing.

The Solih government has accused the former Yameen administration of creating a debt crisis by borrowing heavily from China and has appealed for financial assistance. Beijing claims that the Maldives’ debt to China is only $1.5 billion, but Solih insists it is much larger.

While Washington wants to fully integrate the Maldives into its geo-strategic operations, it has offered only a financial pittance—approximately $US9.5 million—in assistance. Shahid, however, responded enthusiastically, tweeting: “Had productive meetings with senior officials @State Dept. Both sides agree that we are living through some of the best times in the relationship between the Maldives and USA...”

Running parallel with the reorientation of Maldivian foreign policy, President Solih has launched an “anti-corruption” campaign against the pro-Chinese faction of the country’s ruling elite. Anti-China critics claim that previous government infrastructure projects were awarded to Chinese investors at inflated prices and that corruption was institutionalised.

Several leaders of the pro-Chinese opposition, including former President Yameen, have been arrested on corruption allegations. Yameen has been accused of receiving $US1 million in government money.

According to the reports, a private company operated by Yameen’s supporters deposited government money into the former president’s personal account at the Maldives Islamic Bank. The alleged money-laundering operation involved more than $79 million in tourism revenue.

Yameen has denied the allegations, telling reporters in January that the money was given to him by “various parties as campaign funds.” His lawyers have declared that the Anti-Corruption Commission has not proven that the money was “state funds obtained through corruption.”

Yameen’s five-year-administration was marked by escalating attacks on the media and democratic rights, with nearly all opposition leaders arrested or forced into exile. The current administration’s so-called fight against corruption and “for good governance,” however, is a cover for its pro-US foreign policy.

Pompeo enlists US energy conglomerates for global oil war

Bill Van Auken

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered an extraordinary speech this week to a conference attended by representatives of the major US energy conglomerates in which he appealed to “Big Oil” to play an increasingly direct role in the drive by US imperialism for global dominance and the preparation for war on every continent.

Speaking Tuesday at the annual CERAWeek conference in Houston, Texas which brings together US oil and gas company executives, representatives of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and US government officials, Pompeo stressed that the steep growth in US energy production, driven by what industry insiders describe as the “shale revolution,” has provided Washington with a potent weapon to use against its global rivals.

The growth in energy production, with the US surpassing both Russia and Saudi Arabia as the largest crude oil producer late last year, and estimates that US exports will exceed those of Russia in the next three years and those of Saudi Arabia in the next five, is seen by the US ruling elite as a means of exerting its hegemony on a worldwide scale.

Pompeo’s speech provided a blunt description of US predatory aims across the planet that involve the interests of the American-based energy conglomerates.

His attempts to present this as some kind of moral crusade were laughable. Countries targeted by US imperialism, he claimed, were “using their energy for malign ends, and not to promote prosperity in the way we do here in the West. They don’t have the values of freedom and liberty, or the rule of law that we do, and they’re using their energy to destroy ours.”

The “prosperity” promoted by Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and other US-based energy conglomerates is that of their CEOs and major capitalist investors. Their values of “freedom and liberty” and “rule of law” extend just as far as their freedom to exploit the planet’s energy reserves at will and to impose the rules dictated by the US government to protect their interests.

Pompeo went on to link the interests of “Big Oil” to the multiple geostrategic conflicts between US imperialism and its global and regional rivals.

He stressed that US energy production and export was crucial to countering a series of “bad actors.”

“We don’t want our European allies hooked on Russian gas through the NordStream II project, any more than we ourselves want to be dependent on Venezuelan oil supplies,” Pompeo said, referring to the expansion of a natural gas pipeline linking Russia to Central Europe. He stressed that US liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports could “make Europe free from that Russian intervention.”

This pitch for promoting US energy dominance in Europe came as the Pentagon announced that it is preparing to develop and test new low-flying intermediate-range nuclear missiles beginning in August, after the formal expiration of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) between the US and Russia, torn up by the Trump administration last month. The Pentagon has also sent officials to Warsaw to discuss the establishment of a permanent US base in Poland, dubbed “Fort Trump” by Polish officials.

Pompeo also denounced China, claiming: “China’s illegal island-building in international waterways isn’t simply a security matter. By blocking development in the South China Sea through coercive means, China prevents ASEAN members from accessing more than $2.5 trillion in recoverable energy reserves.” Clearly, the main concern is that these reserves could be exploited by US-based conglomerates.

Beijing issued an angry rebuke to Pompeo’s charge, denouncing his remarks as “irresponsible” and insisting that “Nations in the region are capable of resolving and managing the disputes in their own way.” It added, “Nations outside the region should refrain from stirring up trouble and disrupting the harmonious situation.”

The day after Pompeo’s speech, two B-52H Stratofortress bombers flew from Guam over the disputed areas of the South China Sea, the second flight carried out in 10 days in the face of Chinese objections. The warplanes are capable of carrying nuclear payloads.

The US secretary of state also signaled the importance of US energy production in underpinning the economic blockades imposed by US imperialism on both Iran and Venezuela, measures that are tantamount to acts of war.

Pompeo vowed to tighten the stranglehold on Iran in the coming period. “We’re committed to bringing Iranian crude oil exports to zero as quickly as market conditions will permit,” he said. He declined to answer a question as to whether Washington is preparing to revoke waivers granted to a number of countries dependent upon Iranian oil.

Pompeo told the energy executives that Washington is “using all of the economic tools at our disposal” to effect regime change in Venezuela, including the embargo on Venezuelan oil exports imposed in January. He denounced the Venezuelan government for shipping oil to Cuba at a “subsidized price,” contrasting this practice to the “superior business model” of the United States.

After delivering the speech, Pompeo, asked by CNBC whether Washington is considering military action in Venezuela, thuggishly repeated the mantra that “every option is on the table.”

Appearing together with Pompeo, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry was asked if the overthrow of Maduro would lead to the reassertion of control over Venezuela’s oil reserves, the largest on the planet, by US-based energy giants. “Absolutely, I think that is the real message, that the national companies want to see this regime outside so that we can return,” he replied.

Pompeo’s pep talk to US “Big Oil” about supporting the predatory aims of US imperialism was hardly necessary. The two have been intertwined for well over a century. Pompeo’s predecessor as secretary of state, it should be recalled, was Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of Exxon, whose predecessor, Standard Oil, monopolized control of Venezuela’s oil industry until its nationalization in 1976.

The oil corporations have been intimately involved in the US wars of the 21st century. The invasion of Afghanistan, directed at furthering US influence over the vast energy reserves of Central Asia, resulted in the installation of Hamid Karzai, a former consultant of Unocal, as president. The US ambassador to the country, Zalmay Khalilzad, who served as Karzai’s handler, also worked for the oil company in plotting the construction of strategic pipelines across its territory.

In advance of the Iraq war, Vice President Dick Cheney, the former CEO of the oil service giant Halliburton, organized a “task force” on Iraqi oil comprised of major US oil executives. Detailed maps were drawn up for the parceling out of the spoils of the US war of aggression launched in 2003.

If the secretary of state is compelled to make a fresh appeal to the “patriotic” profit interests of the energy conglomerates it is because US imperialism is now preparing for a far greater conflict, a world war with catastrophic implications for humanity.

Auto workers in China face job losses and closures

Gary Alvernia 

A growing number of car manufacturers have announced job cuts and factory closures in China, amid figures indicating that 2018 saw the country’s first decline in car sales in nearly 28 years.

Ford and Korean auto-giant Hyundai have recently announced that they aim to reduce factory production and make workers redundant, due to increased competition from local Chinese companies. In the case of Ford, it has also been hit by US trade war tariffs imposed on China.

Hyundai stated its intent in January this year to cut 1,500 jobs at its Beijing manufacturing plant, citing a decline of 23 percent in sales for 2018. Ford, which is among the worst performing foreign car producers in China, has released figures indicating a 37 percent decline in annual sales for 2018. Its factories in Chongqing are operating at just 20 percent of total capacity and the company has reportedly been “quietly laying off thousands” of its 20,000-strong workforce, according to the New York Times.

The cuts and closures are not confined to two companies. Japanese car-makers have also experienced declining sales, with Suzuki announcing total pull out of China in August last year, selling its facilities to its partners in China. Nissan is reducing domestic production by 30,000 vehicles in the first three months of 2019, roughly a 30 percent cut in order to bolster weakening car prices.

European companies have also reported declining sales in China. British carmaker Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has been hit particularly hard, with a staggering 46 percent decline in sales last year that led to the shuttering of a factory in Changshu. Other companies, such as Volkswagen (VW) and especially luxury brands like Mercedes and BMW have been less affected. However, according to remarks made by analysts at Japanese financial firm Nomura to the Financial Times, they are now concerned that China will become a “profit drag rather than profit driver.”

While domestic Chinese manufacturers have not engaged as yet in large scale sackings, they have also been impacted by failing sales. Geely, the largest domestic Chinese car producer, reported just a 0.7 percent increase in sales last year, while state-owned companies BAIC Motor and Dongfeng Motor Group suffering 11 and 17 percent declines respectively, according to the Nikkei Asian Review.

Job cuts have so far centered on those workers on part-time or casual contracts, with full-time workers shielded for the present by existing labour protections. This reflects fears in the Chinese regime that mass retrenchments in the auto industry, at a time of cuts in the steel and coal industry, could provoke an increasingly restive working class.

The Communist Party of China (CPC) apparatus views low unemployment as key to preventing worker opposition to exploitative conditions. Auto manufacturing employs nearly five million people in China, not counting those working in various support services and related businesses.

Currently, at least an estimated 2 million cars on stock are unsold, with that number likely to increase. Local and foreign manufacturers have massively expanded productive capacity in recent years, to take advantage of the previously buoyant market and corporate tax breaks only recently terminated by the Chinese government. With the high level of inventory surpluses, further factory closures, increased idle production, and job losses are virtually inevitable. Nomura analysts told the Financial Times that production would have to fall another five percent to match expected sales declines this year.

The result of declining sales and increased inventories has been a price cutting war between the different car companies both domestic and international. Some manufacturers such as Hyundai have slashed prices by 15 percent, with the resulting financial losses likely to cause further attacks on jobs and conditions of workers.

The job losses are not likely to be confined to China. As American and European car makers now derive on average up to one-third of their profits from the Chinese automobile market, the risk of a large worldwide wave of layoffs has increased substantially. Citing losses in China as a partial cause, JLR shuttered its plant in Solihull, England for two weeks, while Fiat Chrysler announced late last month that it would lay off 1,400 workers at its Jeep Cherokee plant in Belvedere, Illinois.

The crisis confronting automakers is being compounded by the US tariffs imposed on Chinese goods as a part of the Trump administration’s trade war. This is particularly damaging for American manufacturers who had intended to use China as a low-wage labour base to cheaply produce vehicles for US and European consumption.

Additionally, while Chinese officials are concerned about large-scale job losses provoking social unrest, there is some indication that the regime might use the opportunity to allow poorly performing companies, especially so-called “zombie companies,” to fail. These companies are largely propped up by government support and contributed to China’s massive debt-to-GDP ratio.

Another factor leading to job losses has been the push towards electric vehicles whose sales are increasing. This has meant more car models are obsolete and being discontinued as car companies re-direct their resources.

However, in the final analysis, lower car sales are largely a reflection of the broader and ongoing economic downturn confronting China. The largest declines in car ownership appear to be among young workers and students, with a rise in car-sharing schemes and hikes in petrol prices impacting car affordability. Significantly, those car brands experiencing the greatest losses are those in the budget and small car ranges, most likely to be purchased by workers and youth, while sales for many luxury brands remain high.

The global character of the auto industry underscores the necessity of an international struggle by auto workers against the drive by the major corporations to impose the brunt of the downturn through closures and job losses. Auto workers in China need to reach out to their counterparts in North America, including the US, Mexico and Canada, and Europe to build a unified movement based on a genuinely socialist program.

Jobs bloodbath in the global auto industry

Jerry White

Volkswagen Group, the world’s second largest automaker, is eliminating up to 7,000 jobs as part of a brutal cost-cutting drive to boost profit margins and appease investors who have driven down the German automaker’s stock price 54 percent over the last half-year.

Nearly three years ago, VW set out to slash 30,000 jobs around the world, including 23,000 in Germany, under Future Pact 2016, a plan drawn up by the IG Metall union officials who sit on its corporate board under the country’s “co-determination” scheme.

The VW cuts are part of an ongoing jobs bloodbath in the global auto industry. With trade war tensions growing, signs of a new economic recession and falling sales, the global auto giants are engaged in a brutal competition to slash labor costs and beat out their rivals in the costly but still tenuous market for electric and self-driving cars.

On Wednesday, US-based Ford Motor Co. confirmed that it is continuing its worldwide restructuring to save $25.5 billion over the next few years and, according to Ford CEO Jim Hackett, double its profit margin from 2018. Analysts say the number of job cuts could be as high as 25,000, mostly in Europe.

The carmaker is closing its plant in São Paulo, Brazil, ending South American truck production, shutting a transmission factory in Bordeaux, France, cutting output in Saarlouis, Germany, consolidating its UK operations, preparing to exit Russia and slashing jobs in China.

Korean automakers Hyundai and Kia are downsizing in China, along with other foreign-based transnationals who flooded into the country to exploit cheap labor and the world’s largest car market. Kia is considering closing a plant in Yancheng, following the ending of production at Hyundai’s oldest plant in Beijing.

Last week, production ended at the General Motors Lordstown, Ohio, assembly plant, which once employed 13,000 workers and was the site of militant autoworker struggles in the early 1970s. Last November, GM announced plans to close five plants in the US and Canada and slash more than 14,000 jobs. The company, which made $11.8 billion in 2018 profits, intends to save $4.5 billion through the job cuts, less than half the $10 billion it has squandered on stock buybacks for its richest investors over the last four years.

On Wednesday, Schaeffler Group, a German producer of engine and transmission components, announced it will slash 900 jobs, after missing profit targets and seeing investors drive down its stock value by 44 percent. Mass layoffs have also occurred in Matamoros, Mexico, largely in retribution for the courageous strikes by maquiladora workers, which led to a shortage of parts for US and Canadian auto plants. At least 4,000 workers have been fired and another 50,000 layoffs have been threatened by Mexico’s main business organization.

The principal mechanism for carrying out this coordinated global assault on autoworkers has been the financial markets. By driving down share prices, powerful hedge funds and wealthy shareholders give their marching orders to corporations to escalate the attack on workers’ jobs, wages and conditions. This increases the returns on their investments, thereby funneling even more money to the financial oligarchy.

“Low industry [share] valuations show investors want more changes with spending at a record, profits falling and new competitors vying to jump onto the autos bandwagon,” Bloomberg News wrote in a March 6 article. “The great auto-industry shakeout has started to arrive in force,” the article continued, noting that “Consolidation, while no silver bullet, would help eliminate the duplicate outlays on everything from expensive software ventures to battery technology.”

Several major automakers are considering potential tie-ups, including VW and Ford, Daimler and BMW, and French automaker PSA with Fiat Chrysler or GM. Such a consolidation would be carried out at the expense of the jobs of hundreds of thousands of white-collar and production workers.

In his mid-19th century work, Wage Labor and Capital, Karl Marx identified the consequences of the “industrial war of capitalists among themselves” over markets and profits. “This war has the peculiarity that the battles in it are won less by recruiting than by discharging the army of workers. The generals (the capitalists) vie with one another as to who can discharge the greatest number of industrial soldiers.”

Workers are beginning to fight back. After decades in which the class struggle was suppressed by the unions, there has been a resurgence of strike activity among workers around the world. In the first ten weeks of 2019, strikes by auto and auto parts workers have taken place in Hungary, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, China and other countries. The growth of resistance poses fundamental questions of perspective and strategy.

First, the global assault on jobs must be met with a global response by autoworkers. It is impossible for workers to fight transnational corporations on a nationalist basis. The answer to the fratricidal race to the bottom between workers is forging the closest links between workers in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa in a common fight to defend the jobs and living standards of all workers.

Second, the unions long ago abandoned any defense of workers and have been transformed into direct tools of corporate management and the state. This was the result not simply of the cowardice and corruption of the union bureaucrats, but the inability of these nationalist and pro-capitalist organizations to respond in any progressive way to the globalization of production.

The United Auto Workers and the Unifor union in Canada have responded to GM’s plant closings by launching an anti-Mexican campaign, even as Mexican workers revolt against slave labor wages and sweatshop conditions. At its just concluded bargaining convention, the UAW made clear that it plans to impose even deeper concessions on 150,000 GM, Ford and Fiat Chrysler workers, whose contracts expire this summer, by using the same lie it has for four decades: that concessions “save jobs.”

The same is true everywhere. The long-time IG Metall leader and chairman of the joint works council of the Volkswagen Group, Bernd Osterloh, who makes $848,000 (€750,000) a year, has already signaled his support for VW’s new cost-cutting plan.

In order to fight, autoworkers need new organizations: rank-and-file factory and workplace committees that are independent of the unions. These committees must oppose the corporate dictatorship in the factories and mobilize the broadest sections of the working class in mass protests, plant occupations and national and cross-border strikes to defend jobs and living standards.

Finally, the growing industrial movement of the working class must be developed into a powerful political movement against capitalism and the economic and political domination of the corporate and financial elite. The new wave of layoffs demonstrates that under capitalism, revolutionary advances in technology such as artificial intelligence, 3-D printing, machine-to-machine communication and self-driving cars are used not to improve life for the broad masses of the population, but to drive more workers into destitution.

The only answer to this is the fight for socialism. The vast fortunes of the super-rich must be expropriated and the giant banks and corporations converted into public enterprises democratically controlled by the working class, as part of the scientifically planned reorganization of the world economy.

This requires that the working class take political power on a world scale, reorganizing society to meet social needs. Only in this way can the immense potential of globally integrated production and labor-saving technologies be used for the common good of all of mankind.