British retail sector continues shedding thousands of jobs

Simon Whelan

On Wednesday, the Resolution Foundation think tank revealed that UK retail sector workers are more likely to be made redundant and endure a prolonged period of unemployment than workers in any other sector. Its report found that nearly a third (31 percent) leave for this reason. This compares with 26 percent on average for all other sectors of the economy.

At least 70,000 retail jobs were lost in the final months of 2018, according to figures from the British Retail Consortium (BRC), with Christmas shopping failing to amend poor turnovers.

The number of employees working in retail was down 2.2 percent in the final business quarter of 2018, compared to the same period in 2017. The BRC chief executive, Helen Dickinson, said: “The retail industry is undergoing a profound change and the latest employment data underpins those trends.”

Young people will be hard hit by the job cuts, with the Resolution Foundation showing that three in five ex-retail workers are under 30. After losing retail jobs, two in five redundant workers remain unemployed for at least six months.

Marks and Spencer has announced the closure of many department stores, with over a thousand jobs at risk. The retail chain will close more than 100 stores by 2022. For its third business quarter up to December 29, 2018, they reported 4.8 percent decline in UK sales, with like-for-like sales down 2.4 percent.

Changes in the range of services offered, like cutting their in-store bakeries and ending the serving of hot food in staff canteens by Tesco, the UK’s largest supermarket chain, have left 9,000 jobs at risk. Tesco’s workers will no longer be able to buy a cooked meal during their shifts even though it raked in a billion pounds in profit last year.

Other job losses announced this year include:

• Music store HMV closing 27 stores, with the loss of 455 jobs.

• Brighthouse credit appliance to close 30 stores, with 350 job losses.

• House of Fraser distribution centre shed 250 jobs.

• Jeweller Chapelle made 250 redundancies.

• John Lewis department stores released 127 staff.

Some 19,000 high street jobs have been lost or put at risk in the two months since Christmas. Consultancy firm Altus told the Press Association that 18,722 workers were made redundant or threatened since December 25—breaking down as 14,377 lost jobs and with a further 4,345 at risk. That equates to 400 retail job losses per day.

A third of retail businesses plan to shed staff in 2019.

According to research conducted by the Centre for Retail Research, 18,355 stores closed in 2018 in Britain, an all-time high. In the year up to August 2018, 28 retail companies with multiple stores ceased trading, affecting 2,085 stores and 39,000 jobs.

The number of small businesses like shops, pubs and restaurants going out of business outnumber those opening. The deficit is more than double the number ever previously recorded over the first six months of a year since the Local Data Company (LDC) began its research, five years ago. Closures increased by nearly 17 percent to 24,205 across 3,000 towns, cities, retail parks and shopping centres monitored by LDC. The number of new small businesses declined by 2.1 percent to 19,803 over the same six months.

In November last year, a report by the accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) estimated that about 14 shops were closing every day, with traders facing their toughest trading climate in five years. PwC suggested more than 1,000 shops disappeared from Britain’s top 500 high streets in the first six months of 2018.

English and Welsh towns and city centres have lost 8 percent of their shops on average in the five years since 2013. The situation of closed shops and businesses in South Yorkshire is among the worst in the country. One of the UK’s largest cities, Sheffield, has lost almost 18 percent of its shops in the city centre. Large and small business closures and chains closing branches have created a city centre pockmarked by boarded-up premises. Next door in Rotherham town centre, the large loss of business is similar in percentage to Sheffield.

The greatly reduced spending power of workers, due to savage government austerity imposed over the last decade, has brought about much of the closures. Other structural issues play a role in the decline of traditional shopping patterns. In November 2018, for the first time in the UK, more than £1 of every £5 of shopping was spent online. To compound the crisis, many reports have noted looming economic uncertainty over Brexit as a reason for a decline in consumer confidence.

Retail, however, remains the largest private sector employer in the UK, with approximately one in 10 workers employed in the sector. Amazon muscled into the top five businesses last year, behind the giant supermarkets, and now accounts for £4 in every £100 spent in the UK. The struggle between businesses—traditional high street and online—to win an increasing share of a dwindling amount of disposable income is creating a cut-throat competitive environment where they seek to trim costs, especially workers’ wages, to a minimum.

Employment within all layers of retail, whether in a warehouse or on the shop floor in a store, is increasingly precarious. Many workers are contracted on zero-hours contracts, with irregular and anti-social working hours and poverty wages.

Employment practices that have emerged within retail over the past decade are frequently criminal, as the exploitation of growing part-time workforces is facilitated at every turn by a thoroughly deregulated labour market.

What the WSWS described as the “grossly exploitative, parasitic and downright criminal character of British capitalism” was exposed before a parliamentary select committee in 2015. They held two separate hearings, one into the retail giants Sports Direct and another into the now-collapsed department store chain BHS.

The Sports Direct hearing was prompted by the revelations that the retailer paid its employees below the minimum wage and had created a climate of fear such that employees were so scared to take time off that one female worker even gave birth in the Shirebrook warehouse toilet in 2014. According to a witness, who in January gave details of the horrific incident, the mother cut the umbilical cord herself with a box cutter and repeatedly said, “I’ve got to go back to work, I’ve got to go back to work.”

Sports Direct is run by multibillionaire Mike Ashley. Its Shirebrook warehouse is not run by Sports Direct directly but contracts its day-to-day operations out to Transline, which oversees the workforce. Ashley, one of the wealthiest men in Britain, has a fortune estimated at £3.5 billion and owns the top-flight football club Newcastle United.

The Observer newspaper recently called Ashley the “the High Street’s most voracious shopper,” as he is currently engaged in buying up ailing businesses that he believes he can make profitable again once his own brand of super-exploitation is imposed upon the workforce.

Buoyed by strong profits and pliable bank arrangements, he has recently expressed an interest in buying a bigger share in department store chain Debenhams, where he already owns a 30 percent share. Ashley’s holdings also include 30 percent of Sofa.com and Evans Cycles and similar percentage shareholdings in French Connection and Game Digital, amongst others he picked up at auction-type prices.

Not a single job loss will be opposed by the trade unions. The Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers (Usdaw) has more than 430,000 members, with many set to lose their livelihood’s in the retail jobs cull.

None of these will be mobilized, with Usdaw national officer Pauline Foulkes merely noting the difficulties faced by the retail conglomerates. She stated, “Staff at Tesco are shocked and dismayed by the scale of yet another round of potential job losses, which clearly demonstrates the pressure retailers are under in the current very difficult and uncertain economic climate, as the cost cutting continues.”

Foulkes detailed how Usdaw has acceded to every wish of management, with the Tesco workforce having “played a crucial role in Tesco’s turnaround project, contributing to 12 successive quarters of growth, solid Christmas trading and over a billion pounds of profit.”

Deportations from Germany to Maghreb states rise sharply

Elisabeth Zimmermann

The number of deportations from Germany to the Maghreb states (Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia) rose sharply last year. This was reported by the Rheinische Post in its online edition of February 22, based on figures obtained from the federal Interior Ministry. Almost 1,900 people were sent back to the North African states during 2018.

Last year, 369 people were deported to Tunisia compared to just 251 in 2017; 687 were returned to Algeria, compared to 504 in 2017; and 826 were sent back to Morocco, compared to 634 in 2017. This amounts to a 35 percent increase in the deportation rate in one year.

If the figures are compared with 2015, the deportation rate has increased 14-fold. Although only 135 people were deported to the three countries in 2015, the total last year was 1,873.

These countries are yet to be declared “safe countries of origin.” The Bundesrat—Germany’s second parliamentary chamber at the federal level, with representation from the country’s 16 states—postponed a vote on this issue on February 15 after state governments where the Green Party participates announced they would abstain. By contrast, the federal parliament declared the three Maghreb states and Georgia to be safe countries of origin on January 18, with the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) and Social Democrats (SPD) voting in favour.

The description “safe countries of origin” has nothing to do with the political and economic realities in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. Social tensions are at the breaking point across the Maghreb, with youth unemployment extremely high. As the refugee aid organisation ProAsyl reported, there have been several reports from the region of undesirable journalists and oppositional youth being tortured, as well as homosexuals being persecuted.

Five years ago, the classification of the Balkan states as “safe countries of origin” laid the basis for the mass deportation of tens of thousands of refugees and asylum seekers. They travelled to Germany after the Western states incited ethnic nationalism in the former Yugoslavia and promoted war and civil war. Ever since, the authorities have brutally deported people to these war-torn countries, even though they can’t live a life there. The classification of the Balkan countries as “safe countries of origin” was made possible by Baden-Württemberg, which is led by the Greens and Minister President Winfried Kretschmann, voting for the measure in the Bundesrat.

The attempt to classify a growing number of countries as “safe countries of origin” violates the basic constitutional principle that the reasons for a person’s flight and persecution must be carefully and individually reviewed in each case. The expansion of the “safe country” concept would make it easier for German authorities to reject asylum applications and deport people more quickly who seek refuge in Germany. This amounts to a further hollowing out of the basic right to asylum, which has been all but abolished.

There have already been a number of arbitrary and erroneous asylum decisions. The Federal Agency for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) makes so many errors and dubious asylum decisions that in 2017, 40 percent of the cases appealed by asylum applicants were found to have been decided wrongly. The court found in favour of the complainant in each case, and many asylum applications had to be corrected because the BAMF used out-of-date facts and text passages from a template to reach its decisions.

According to Interior Ministry statistics, deportations to other countries have also increased. Between 2017 and 2018, deportations to Russia rose from 184 to 422, from 184 to 346 for Armenia, from 121 to 284 for Afghanistan, from 32 to 212 for India, from 32 to 144 for Gambia, and from 84 to 210 for Ghana.

The rapid rise in deportations is a component of the brutal anti-refugee policies of the grand coalition, which has fully embraced the far-right Alternative for Germany’s (AfD) policies.

The deportations do not even go far enough for Interior Minister Horst Seehofer (CSU). In mid-February, Seehofer presented a 60-page draft law on deporting refugees which bears the imprimatur of the AfD from beginning to end. The draft law’s purpose is to remove rejected asylum seekers from the country as quickly as possible if they cannot be deported to their home country due to war or persecution, or if the deportation can’t be carried out due to the absence of personal papers. The draft law bears the cynical name “law for orderly returns,” but it could more accurately be described as the “foreigners out law,” as the World Socialist Web Site previously commented.

The draft law, which ignores all democratic principles, proposes to step up the practice of taking refugees who are due for deportation into detention in order to speed up the process. Additionally, it intends to criminalise the activities of those who assist and support refugees. Anyone who publicises deportation appointments or planned deportation flights can be punished with a prison sentence of up to three years.

The SPD is also endorsing this plan. The expansion of the “safe countries of origin” category to include Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia was already contained within the grand coalition agreement, which the SPD signed and is working to implement. This was underscored once again when Justice Minister Katarina Barley (SPD) criticised the Interior Ministry from the right for allegedly not carrying out deportations efficiently enough. According to the SPD minister, the biggest problem with deportations is that the countries of origin continue to refuse to take back rejected asylum seekers. “The Interior Ministry has been obligated to negotiate agreements for some time, but isn’t managing to do so.”

The Greens are also fundamentally in agreement with the basis of the government’s stance. Their opposition to the confirmation of further “safe countries of origin” is entirely unprincipled. Green party co-leader Annalena Baerbock declared on January 18, “The point that repatriations must take place more quickly is fully shared by the Greens. But there are other means of achieving this.” For example, she described deportations to Georgia as “entirely appropriate,” but added that the Interior Ministry has “not done its homework.” In December, Baerbock called for sped-up deportations for asylum seekers convicted of a crime.

The Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei vehemently opposes the attacks on refugees and their supporters. In our statement “No to nationalism and war! For the United Socialist States of Europe!” which calls for support for the SGP’s campaign in the European elections, we state:

“To justify and test the ground for the construction of a police state, the ruling elites are intentionally picking on the most vulnerable members of society. Refugees are being herded into camps under inhumane conditions, robbed of elementary democratic rights, and deported to war zones following Gestapo-like raids. This is setting a precedent that will be used to eradicate the democratic rights of all workers.

“We defend the right to asylum, as well as the right of all workers to live and work in the country of their choice. The working class cannot allow itself to be divided. To defend their rights, workers must declare their solidarity with refugees and wage a common struggle against exploitation and war.

“We demand equal rights for everyone who lives here, an end to deportations, and the closure of detention centres.”

Strike wave shakes North Africa

Kumaran Ira

The escalating mass protests against the Bouteflika government in Algeria over the past week have erupted in the context of a growing wave of workers’ strikes and demonstrations spanning Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco since the beginning of the year. The upsurge in the Maghreb is part of a rise of workers’ struggles around the world.

For several weeks, there have been strikes by educators in all three countries, as well as walkouts by workers in transport and the civil service. In Algeria, the education unions (Unpef-Cnapeste-SNTE-Snapeset-Cela-Satef) announced a strike on February 26-27, followed by regional sit-ins in Relizane, Blida, Batna and Laghouat, according to a union source. The unions called the two-day strike after holding negotiations with the Ministry of Education several times after a strike on January 21.

After four days of bilateral meetings ending February 23, the unions accused the Ministry of Education of “sabotaging the negotiations by dragging them out and by having a negotiating position that is still so vague.” The unions’ demands concern “the special status, the maintenance of proportional retirement and retirement without age conditions, the definitive repeal of Article 87a of the 2015 Finance Act and the creation of a specific bonus for common bodies and skilled workers.”

The unions’ calling of the strikes was aimed at diffusing immense anger among teachers. The unions’ concerns are that the government recognize their role, provide them with more benefits, integrate them further into the state and use them to stop workers mobilizing against the Bouteflika regime.

Meziane Meriane, leader of the Union of Secondary and Technical Education Teachers (Snapeste), said: “Every time we go back to square one, and it is not the fault of the social partners who are willing to participate and propose solutions to the crisis…

“If they (the authorities) have the will to definitively resolve the problems, what prevents them from including in the negotiations, a representative of the Department of Finance and a representative of the Public Service, as we have proposed; and then we will emerge with solutions that will put an end to these conflicts.”

The strike occurred against the backdrop of a strike movement of educators across the United States, protests by “red pens” in France, and strikes by teachers in Mexico and Argentina. In every case, teachers are coming into conflict with the unions.

In Algeria, workers have also struck in the airline and port sectors, where the unions are also working to suppress opposition. On February 25, Air Algérie had to cancel several international flights following a surprise strike by flight crews calling for a revision of the salary scale. Two weeks earlier, workers at the port of Algiers had unexpectedly gone on strike, causing loading and unloading operations to stop.

In Morocco, thousands of teachers demonstrated on February 20 after the unions announced a one-day strike. Police intervened against the teachers’ demonstration and injured several strikers.

Since the beginning of the year, teachers have been holding demonstrations to demand a review of the precarious status of contract teachers, including their integration into the civil service. They also denounced the deductions from strikers’ wages and demanded wage and other compensation increases that have been frozen since 2011. In January, several thousand municipal employees participated in a 24-hour strike to protest against catastrophic working conditions.

There is enormous social anger against the Moroccan monarchy, as it announced new spending to impose military service despite the dilapidated state of public services.

In Tunisia, secondary school teachers have been on strike since October 2018 to demand their integration into the civil service, as well as that of their primary school colleagues, and to denounce their working conditions. The education union of secondary teachers has ended the strike following an agreement with the government.

The Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT), a long-standing ally of the government, is working to block a workers’ mobilization against the regime. They cancelled a general public service strike scheduled for the end of February and a transportation strike scheduled for February 5. In the public sector, the government is committed to imposing drastic austerity measures and cutting wages following an agreement reached with the International Monetary Fund in 2016.

The role of the trade union apparatuses and their pseudo-left political allies is similar in every country: they cut off the workers from their struggling class brothers and sisters in other countries, and isolate them by industry, in order to subordinate them to corrupt and hated regimes. The French unions also denounce “yellow vests” protests as right-wing and even anti-Semitic, in order to legitimize the Macron government’s right-wing policies.

The new wave of struggles in the Maghreb comes eight years after the “Arab spring” in 2011 when a revolutionary movement of the working class overthrew imperialist-backed dictatorships of Zine El Abedine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt.

As workers move into struggle once again, it is essential to learn the lessons from this experience. Even the most heroic struggles will not defeat capitalism without a political struggle against the trade union apparatuses and their political allies and the creation of a revolutionary and internationalist leadership in the working class. With the help of trade unions such as the UGTT, the main ally of Ben Ali's overthrown regime, the bourgeoisie was able to suppress the mass movement.

From a national perspective, UGTT supported the Constituent Assembly to maintain illusions about a possible reform of Tunisian capitalism from 2011 until Nidaa Tounes’ return to power in 2014, covering for the former Ben Ali regime. The reactionary evolution of the Tunisian regime since then has confirmed the analysis of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). The ICFI was alone in insisting that 2011 marked the opening of an era of international revolutionary struggles, whose only progressive resolution lies in the taking of power by the working class and a struggle for socialism. The same tasks confront the working class today.

Mass protests erupt in Algeria against Bouteflika’s bid for fifth term

Alex Lantier

Yesterday, hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated in cities across Algeria against President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s bid for a fifth term in April 18 elections. It comes following protests by students and journalists against Bouteflika after the ruling National Liberation Front (FLN) announced his candidacy on February 9, and a wave of strikes across the Maghreb.

Hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated throughout Algeria Friday

Since suffering a major stroke in 2013, Bouteflika has been incapacitated. He is receiving treatment at the University Hospital of Geneva (HUG) in Switzerland, with his brother Saïd the unofficial head of state. The FLN’s decision to run Bouteflika testifies to the bankrupt and sclerotic character of the Algerian capitalist regime, which after winning independence from French imperialism in a bloody 1954-1962 war emerged in recent decades as a mainstay of imperialist war strategy.

Mass protests took place in Algiers, Oran, Constantine, Annaba, Tizi Ouzou, Béjaïa, Sétif, Sidi Bel Abbès and other cities. Though the regime banned TV coverage of the marches and restricted Internet access, closing 3G and 4G networks, what predominated in the marches was anger against unemployment, low wages and austerity and calls for bringing down the regime.

The Algerian protests are part of an ongoing, international upsurge of class struggle: bread riots in Sudan, strikes in Tunisia, the “yellow vest” protests in France, and teachers’ strikes erupting independently of the trade unions across the United States. Having suppressed political opposition for decades, the Algerian regime now faces a challenge from below. Protesters are harking back to slogans of the 2011 uprisings in which workers brought down the pro-imperialist dictatorships of Zine El Abedine Bin Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt.

In Oran, tens of thousands cried “Down with Bouteflika” and “Down with the system.” One told Le Monde he opposed a “government that unfortunately is rotten,” while another said, “You cannot imagine the misery we live in.” A third attacked the European Union (EU) for leaving thousands of immigrants to drown in the Mediterranean: “What do we do next? Take a ship and leave for France? No, I don’t want to drown at sea. And I am also marching to say I am thinking about the thousands of youth who died at sea.”

Protests also shook the ethnically-Berber region of Kabylie. Tens of thousands marched in Béjaïa, while an estimated 10,000 marched in Tizi Ouzou shouting the slogan of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, “The people want the fall of the regime.”

In Algiers, the capital’s main avenues were filled with protesters numbering 800,000 according to police estimates, or in the millions according to press reports. After Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia denounced the protests, warning that protests in Syria led to a decade of war, protesters chanted “Algeria is not Syria,” as well as “The people want the fall of the regime.”

Chourouk, a young hydraulic technician, told El Watan: “With President Bouteflika in power for 20 years now, with each passing year we’ve seen a growing separating between the social classes. The middle class is disappearing, leaving a vast gulf between the class of the rich and the class of the poor. Since the new budget, it is ever harder to maintain our living standards. The education system is in decline, educational achievement at all levels is drifting.”

Dozens were wounded in Algiers, including 53 police, after marchers tried to reach the presidential palace and ran into a large police detachment firing volleys of tear gas and stun grenades. Videos online also show Algerian infantry traveling on trucks towards the capital to secure key government buildings during the protests.

At this stage in the struggle against the regime, the forces that are mobilized are socially and politically heterogeneous. Called on social media, the protests involve sections of workers and youth, as well as managers and business owners, and factions of the political establishment.

Several leaders of official opposition parties—all closely tied to the regime, and some of which are simply FLN split-offs—called on their supporters to join the marches. They aim to block a revolutionary challenge to the regime from the working class, and to increase the share of the power and privileges accruing to them inside the existing regime.

The Front of Socialist Forces (FFS), a Berber-nationalist party affiliated to the so-called Socialist International of European imperialist social-democratic parties like France’s unpopular Socialist Party (PS), wrote that “the end of the regime is approaching.” It pledged to “work for a convergence of the forces of peaceful change to mobilize the Algerian women and men capable of creating the conditions for an organized, pluralist political dynamic.”

Workers Party (PT) leader Louisa Hanoune attended the march but reportedly was booed and did not deploy her party’s banners. The PT advised the regime not to repress the protests, which could provoke an uncontrollable eruption of working class anger and bring down the FLN. “The national authorities,” Hanoune said, “cannot ignore or seek to limit the profound desire for change of the overwhelming majority of society expressed by the youth and broad masses, without taking the risk of provoking something irreparable.”

The PT is linked to France’s Independent Democratic Workers Party (POID), an offshoot of Pierre Lambert’s Organisation communiste internationaliste(OCI), which broke with Trotskyism and the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) in 1971 to ally with the PS. The PT is a longstanding supporter of the FLN. Hanoune attracted ridicule last week by saying, amid the initial protests against Bouteflika’s fifth term bid, that “The slogans are not against Bouteflika.”

This only echoes calls from imperialist foreign policy circles in the European Union (EU) for regime change in Algeria, backed by the army, to strangle the protests. Professor Jonathan Hill of King’s College London predicted: “The EU will take its lead from France, which in turn will support the regime to stage-manage the transfer of power.”

With his polls at record lows amid “yellow vest” protests, President Emmanuel Macron ordered French Ambassador to Algeria Xavier Driencourt to make an extraordinary covert, one-day trip to Paris on Tuesday for talks.

Elysée presidential palace sources also indicated they are desperate to prop up the FLN—because of intelligence and logistical aid it offers to French wars in Mali and the broader Sahel, and to limit opposition in France’s three million-strong Algerian community. They intend to make no concessions to popular opposition to Bouteflika.

One source told Nouvel Obs: “France and the president cannot be indifferent to anything occurring in Algeria. The stakes for us are considerable. With Algeria, our historical, economic, and security ties are very deep. France has interests there, it also has a large Algerian and Franco-Algerian population. So for us the stability of Algeria is a major issue, especially given the geographic proximity and human ties between the two states. And then there is the security issue, including on the regional level. We need cooperation with Algeria to struggle against terror groups in the Sahel.”

The way forward for workers entering into struggle with the FLN regime is to orient to the upsurge of the international working class. The social and democratic demands of workers across the Maghreb cannot be met without an expropriation of the ruling class, including the Algerian regime’s vast oil and gas wealth, on an international scale. This requires a conscious struggle for socialism against capitalism, imperialism and war, and a ruthless break with all the forces that have worked for decades to tie workers and youth in Algeria to the FLN.

The best allies of Algerian workers in struggle against the FLN regime are the workers in Europe and around the world entering into struggle. The key element in this struggle is the fight to draw a balance sheet of past revolutionary upsurges and the fresh experiences of struggle today. The events in Algeria raise directly the response of the ICFI to the initial upsurge of the working class in Tunisia in 2011.

In its 17 January 2011 statement, “The mass uprising in Tunisia and the perspective of permanent revolution,” it warned:

The Tunisian masses, however, are at only the initial stages of their struggle. As is already clear from the continuation of military violence under the new interim president, the working class faces immense dangers. The crucial question of revolutionary program and leadership remains unresolved. Without the development of a revolutionary leadership, another authoritarian regime will inevitably be installed to replace that of Ben Ali.

The turn now is to building sections of the ICFI in Algeria and across the Mediterranean and the world to offer political leadership to the growing international movement of the working class.

India and Pakistan tobogganing toward a catastrophic war

Keith Jones

India and Pakistan, South Asia’s rival nuclear-armed states, are teetering on the brink of a full-scale military conflict. Early Tuesday morning, Indian warplanes attacked Pakistan for the first time since the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War. Striking deep inside Pakistan, they destroyed what New Delhi claims was the principal “terror base” of the Jaish-e-Mohammed, an Islamist group involved in the separatist insurgency in Indian-held Kashmir.

After a brief period of confusion, as it assessed the damage and strategic implications of the Indian attack, Islamabad vowed a strong military response. Pakistan, it declared, would not allow India to “normalize” illegal US or Israeli-style attacks inside Pakistan, whether mounted in the name of retaliation for, or preemptive strikes against, Kashmiri insurgent attacks.

The next day, Indian and Pakistani war planes engaged in a dogfight over the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, after Islamabad launched what New Delhi claims was an unsuccessful strike on Indian military installations. Both sides are claiming to have shot down at least one enemy plane in Wednesday’s encounter, with Islamabad presenting a captured Indian pilot as proof of its claim.

The US, China, Russia and other world powers are now publicly scrambling to avert the eruption of all-out war—a war they concede could quickly spiral into a catastrophic nuclear exchange, even were it to be “confined” to the subcontinent. Yet even as they counsel restraint and make offers of mediation, the great powers—themselves locked in, to use the Pentagon’s term, “a new era of strategic competition”—are trying to use the South Asian war crisis to advance their own geostrategic interests.

Washington, in particular, has used the standoff to further its efforts to diplomatically and militarily encircle China. It publicly greenlighted India’s attack on Pakistan as “self-defense,” and is using the current crisis to underscore the strength of the Indo-US “global strategic partnership.”

Adding to the explosiveness of the situation are the interconnected socio-economic and political crises buffeting the two states, headed respectively by Narendra Modi and his Hindu supremacist BJP and the Islamic populist Imran Khan.

Elected Pakistan’s Prime Minister just seven months ago on promises of jobs, development, and increased social spending, Khan has seen his popularity plummet as his government implements IMF-demanded austerity. Modi and his BJP are shamelessly using the war crisis to muster votes for India’s multi-stage April-May general election. The BJP is accusing the opposition of imperiling “national unity,” for not ceasing all criticism of the government and for not trumpeting its claims that the “strongman” Modi has thrown off the shackles of “strategic restraint” in India’s relations with Pakistan.

With the full support of the military, the corporate media, and virtually the entire opposition, the Modi government has rejected Khan’s offer of talks. New Delhi is insisting, as it has for years, that there will be no high-level interactions, let alone “peace negotiations,” between India and Pakistan until Islamabad demonstratively capitulates to New Delhi’s demands by cutting off all logistical support from Pakistan for the Kashmir insurgency.

A nuclear catastrophe in the making?

No one should underestimate the danger of what would be the first-ever war between nuclear-armed states. Since the 2001-2002 war crisis, which saw a million Indian troops deployed on the Pakistan border for nine months, both countries have developed hair-trigger strategies, with a dynamic impelling rapid escalation. In response to India’s Cold Start strategy, which calls for the rapid mobilization of Indian forces for a multi-front invasion of Pakistan, Islamabad has deployed tactical or battlefield nuclear weapons. India has, in return, signaled that any use by Pakistan of tactical nuclear weapons will break the “strategic threshold,” freeing India from its “no first use” nuclear-weapon pledge, and be met with strategic nuclear retaliation.

All this would play out in a relatively small, densely populated area. The center of Lahore, Pakistan’s second largest city with a population in excess of 11 million, lies little more than 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) from the Indian border. The distance from New Delhi to Islamabad is significantly less than that between Berlin and Paris or New York and Detroit and would be travelled by a nuclear-armed missile in a matter of minutes.

A nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan would not only kill tens of millions in South Asia. A 2008 simulation conducted by scientists who in the 1980s alerted the world to the threat of “nuclear winter” determined that the detonation of a hundred Hiroshima-scale nuclear weapons in an Indo-Pakistani war would, due to the destruction of large cities, inject so much smoke and ash into the upper atmosphere as to trigger a global agricultural collapse. This, they predicted, would lead to a billion deaths in the months that followed South Asia’s “limited” nuclear war.

Whatever the immediate outcome of the latest war crisis—and events could easily spin out of control in the next days or weeks—it exemplifies how the breakdown of the postwar geopolitical order and the resulting surge in imperialist antagonisms and inter-state rivalry are inflaming all the unresolved conflicts and problems of the Twentieth Century: a century in which capitalism survived the challenge of socialist revolution, but only by dragging humanity through two world wars, fascism, and countless other horrors.

Partition and the historic failure of the national bourgeoisie

The Indo-Pakistan conflict is rooted in the 1947 communal partition of the subcontinent into an expressly Muslim Pakistan and a predominantly Hindu India—a crime perpetrated by South Asia’s departing British overlords and the political representatives of the rival factions of the native bourgeoisie, the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League.

Partition defied historical, cultural and economic logic and unleashed a firestorm of communal violence in which two million people were killed and another 18 million fled India to Pakistan or vice versa. But it served the cynical interests of the rival ruling elites of India and Pakistan, by bringing a bloody end to the mass anti-imperialist upsurge that had convulsed South Asia during the preceding three decades; and by giving them, as part of the independence-partition deal with London, control of the British-colonial capitalist state machine with which to meet the threat from an increasingly combative working class.

Unable to find any progressive solution to the problems of the masses, the Indian and Pakistani bourgeois have for the past seven decades used their strategic rivalry and communally-laced nationalist appeals as a mechanism for diverting social anger in reactionary directions.

The open wound that is Kashmir is testimony to their common bankruptcy. The Indian bourgeoisie has subjected the population of Jammu and Kashmir, Indian’s only Muslim majority state, to three decades of military occupation and expresses consternation at the continued mass popular disaffection with Indian rule there, even as it celebrates a party and prime minster implicated in anti-Muslim pogroms.

As for Pakistan’s venal ruling elite, it has run roughshod over the rights of the Kashmiris over whom it rules, and has manipulated the opposition in Jammu and Kashmir to bring forward the most reactionary Islamist elements.

For a working-class led movement against war and imperialism

Over the past two decades, the nature of the Indo-Pakistani conflict has been transformed. It has become enmeshed evermore inextricably with the US-China confrontation, giving it a massive new explosive charge, and raising the threat that an Indo-Pakistani conflict could draw in the world’s great powers.

Since the beginning of the current century, Washington, under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, has aggressively courted India, showering it with strategic favours, including access to advanced civilian nuclear fuel and technology and advanced US weaponry, with the aim of harnessing New Delhi to its strategic agenda.

The importance that US war-planners attach to South Asia and the Indian Ocean—the waterway that is the conduit for the oil and other resources that fuel China’s economy, as well as its exports to Europe, Africa, and the Middle East—is underscored by the recent renaming of the US Pacific Command as the Indo-Pacific Command.

Under Modi, as attested by India’s opening of its bases to US warplanes and ships and its increasing bilateral, trilateral, and quadrilateral strategic cooperation with the US, and its principal regional allies (Japan and Australia), India has been transformed into a veritable “frontline state” in the US military-strategic offensive against China.

Islamabad, during the Cold War Washington’s principal South Asian ally, has warned in increasingly shrill tones that US actions have shattered the “balance of power” in the region and emboldened India, but to no avail.

Consequently, Pakistan has dramatically strengthened its longstanding military-strategic partnership with China, which similarly fears the burgeoning Indo-US alliance.

Even as the US seeks to cool the current Indo-Pakistani tensions, on the calculation an all-out South Asian war would at this point cut across its global objectives, it does so within the framework of its drive for world hegemony including ultimately subjugating China. As part of this drive, Washington has made clear that it is determined to thwart China’s efforts to make Pakistan an anchor of its One Belt, One Road Initiative, and in particular to use the China Pakistan Economic Corridor to counteract US plans to economically blockade China by seizing Indian Ocean and South China Sea “chokepoints.”

The workers and toilers of India and Pakistan must join forces in opposition to the criminal war preparations of the ruling elite.

In South Asia, as around the world, the struggle against war is inseparable from the struggle against capitalism—against the rival nationally-based capitalist cliques whose rapacious struggle for markets, profits and strategic advantage finds ultimate expression in the drive for the repartition of the world; and against the outmoded, and in the case of South Asia, communally-infused nation-state system, in which capitalism is historically rooted.

In opposition to the bourgeoisie’s program of war, austerity, and communal reaction, workers and socialist-minded youth in South Asia should fight for the building of a working-class led movement against war and imperialism, as part of a global antiwar movement.

Such a movement will only be built in political struggle against the Stalinist parliamentary parties in India, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM and the Communist Party of India (CPI), and the myriad Maoist groupings. The CPM and CPI as demonstrated yet again by their participation in the BJP’s “all party” war-crisis meetings, are chauvinist, pro-military parties that are helping blind the masses to the danger of a catastrophic war. For decades they have functioned as an integral part of the Indian political establishment, helping prop up governments, many of them Congress Party led, that have implemented neo-liberal restructuring, pursued the Indo-US alliance, and rapidly expanded India’s military prowess in pursuit of the bourgeoisie’s great-power ambitions. The Maoists are steeped in nationalism and hostile to the struggle for the political independence of the working class.

It is in the international socialism of Lenin and Trotsky, represented today by the International Committee of the Fourth International, and the fight to undo partition from below through the struggle for workers’ power and the establishment of the Socialist United States of South Asia that the workers of India and Pakistan will find the antipode to capitalist war and reaction.

Hundreds laid off at Activision Blizzard and other video game companies

Zachary Thorton

On February 12, Activision Blizzard laid off 800 workers despite earning record profits in 2018. The layoffs took place as CEO Bobby Kotick delivered a report detailing the company’s earnings to shareholders in a conference call, a move that is reminiscent of that of GM CEO Mary Barra, who reiterated her commitment to the profit interests of shareholders and investors after announcing the elimination of 14,000 jobs and the closure of five plants in the US and Canada.

Activision Blizzard is the result of a merger that occurred in 2007 between Activision, Inc. and Blizzard’s parent company, Vivendi, S.A. On the Activision side, the company is responsible for titles such as Call of Duty, Spyro, and Crash Bandicoot, while on the Blizzard side, the company is known for World of Warcraft, Starcraft, and Overwatch. In terms of profitability, it is the largest game company in the Americas and Europe. Its annual revenue for 2018 was $7.5 billion, which was a 6.88 percent increase from 2017.

Just over a week after Activision Blizzard made its announcement, another developer announced it was laying off workers as well. The studio ArenaNet, responsible for the titles Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2, informed workers on February 21 that it would be cutting a substantial portion of its workforce. ArenaNet, a subsidiary of the Korean publisher NCSoft, employs around 400 workers, and although no official amount has been revealed, it is believed the company will eliminate at least one third of its workforce.

In Australia, Electronic Arts (EA) has carried out massive layoffs at its mobile development studio FireMonkeys, which is based in Melbourne. The studio, one of the largest in the country, is the result of a 2012 consolidation between IronMonkey Studios and FireMint. The studio employs some 200 people, and it is suspected that anywhere from 80 to 100 have been let go.

EA, for its part, is the second-largest gaming company in the Americas and Europe. It is responsible for various sports-related titles, as well as franchises such as Battlefield and The Sims. In 2018, its revenue was $5.15 billion, a 6.3 percent increase from the previous year.

The advances in computer technology over the past two decades have allowed the global video game industry to take up a significant portion of the entertainment industry market, eclipsing both the film and music industries. In 2018, the global value of the video game market was $115.34 billion, which is projected to increase over the coming years as mobile gaming, eSports and virtual reality are poised to take off.

The industry has become a cultural institution as well. Every year, thousands flock to various conferences and expos across the world, often dressed as their favorite characters, a practice known as cosplay. The video-streaming service Twitch, where users can watch and broadcast gameplay, boasts 140 million monthly unique viewers and 15 million daily active users. The Akihabara district in Tokyo, Japan, is dedicated, in part, to video games.

The cultural significance and artistic potential of video games have imparted a sense of prestige to those who work within the industry. Often, this is exploited to justify what is known as “crunch,” which is days or weeks in which workers are subjected to drastically increased work hours with little to no time off.

Following the publication of an interview with the head writer of the 2018 game Red Dead Redemption 2, where he claimed to have put in “100-hour weeks” during the final stages of development, many of those within the industry have come forward with their own experiences.

Andrew Weldon, a senior technical designer at developer Bungie, wrote on Twitter, “In my career, I have worked 36 consecutive hours over a weekend in the midst of working 80+ 7 day weeks for several months straight. My sleep schedule didn’t recover for 5 years. One of our teammates who pushed himself further went on 6 months medical leave.”

Another, Job J. Stauffer, wrote, “It’s been nearly a decade since I parted from Rockstar, but I can assure you that during the GTA IV era, it was like working with a gun to your head 7 days a week. ‘Be here Saturday & Sunday too, just in case Sam and Dan come in, they want to see everyone working as hard as them.’ ”

One worker named Jared Rea, who was employed as a Quality Assurance (QA) tester at Atari, worked “12+ hour days” consecutively for “weeks on end.” Describing the impact this had on his life, he wrote, “After a few weeks I wasn’t able to eat, sleep, or function. I spent lunch breaks in my car, either trying to nap, or crying, or both.” As development wound down, he was eventually laid off.

For all of the grueling hours that workers are subjected to, and the impact this has on their health and social lives, none of it guarantees their job security. There is a constant pressure to perform, to ensure a game’s success, or else be terminated. In an article on the website Compelo, the author describes the experience of a worker named Tommy Millar:

“According to Tommy, the boss said: ‘We need to get this game to 60 frames per second and we need to get 85-plus on [review aggregator] Metacritic or some of you won’t have jobs to come to in the New Year.’ Alongside the ultimatum from the head of the studio, someone from HR was tasked with going from desk to desk, tapping people on the shoulder and asking them to leave.”

In order to address the working conditions within the video game industry, there are those calling for workers to unionize in order to pay dues to one of the corrupt anti-worker organizations which conspire with management to enforce concessions and take bribes to negotiate contracts favorable to management. The Socialist Equality Party rejects this call, and instead insists that workers form their own independent rank-and-file workplace committees, democratically elected by the workers themselves to expand and unite their struggle with other sections of the working class, including teachers fighting to defend public education, hyper-exploited Amazon warehouse workers and auto workers fighting against layoffs and plant closures.

Second summit between Trump and Kim collapses with no agreement

Ben McGrath

United States President Donald Trump and North Korea Chairman Kim Jong-un held their second summit in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi on Wednesday and Thursday. Talks collapsed on the second day with the two sides failing to produce any tangible results, highlighting the ongoing danger of a US-instigated war on the Korean Peninsula.

Washington and Pyongyang disputed the reason for the summit’s abrupt ending. Trump claimed that the North agreed to dismantle its nuclear enrichment facilities at Yongbyon only if all sanctions were lifted. He stated, “They were willing to denuke a large portion of the areas that we wanted, but we couldn’t give up all of the sanctions for that...We had to walk away from that.” The US demanded that other aspects of Pyongyang’s weapon programs be dismantled before any lifting of sanctions.

North Korea’s Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho disputed this account at a Friday press conference, saying, “If the United States removes partial sanctions, mainly removes the articles of sanctions that hamper the civilian economy and the livelihood of our people in particular, we will permanently and completely dismantle all the nuclear material production facilities at Yongbyon, including plutonium and uranium, in the presence of US experts.”

Ri added that Pyongyang would put in writing a pledge to permanently halt nuclear and long-range missile testing, but added, “Given the current level of trust between North Korea and the United States, this was the maximum step for denuclearization we could offer.”

Prior to the summit, Washington hinted it could ease demands for “complete, verifiable, and irreversible” denuclearization before lifting any sanctions. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on February 21, “We won’t release that pressure (from sanctions) until such time as we’re confident we’ve substantially reduced that risk (from North Korea).”

Despite the summit’s failure, Pompeo stated that he was still optimistic about negotiations in the near future, claiming they had not come to an end. In addition, South Korea stated that Trump spoke via phone to President Moon Jae-in after leaving Hanoi, asking Moon “to actively perform the role of a mediator” between Washington and Pyongyang.

Negotiations came only as a result of Washington’s provocative and bellicose threats, made explicit by Trump in 2017 to “totally destroy” the North. Pyongyang is well aware that any deal it reaches to give up its nuclear program could still end in regime-change operations, as Washington has a long history of abrogating agreements it no longer finds politically useful.

The reality is that North Korea’s nuclear and weapon programs, as well as issues over human rights, have served as pretexts for Washington to place economic and military pressure on Pyongyang and ultimately force the Stalinist regime into the US orbit. This process, beginning after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, accelerated in recent years as part of the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia” and the Trump administration’s even more dangerous preparations for war against China.

In this regard, whether or not Pyongyang maintains some degree of weaponry or continues to suppress the democratic rights of North Korean workers and farmers is of little importance to Washington so long as Pyongyang can be counted as an ally in the war drive against Beijing.

This was a major reason for the holding of the summit in Vietnam, with Trump tweeting a day before the summit, “Vietnam is thriving like few places on earth. North Korea would be the same, and very quickly, if it would denuclearize. The potential is AWESOME, a great opportunity, like almost none other in history, for my friend Kim Jong Un. We will know fairly soon - Very Interesting!”

What of course goes unmentioned is that Vietnam, after decades of war against French and US imperialism, used the restoration of capitalism in the 1980s to offer up its working class as a source of cheap labor in the interest of international capital. The Stalinist regime enriched itself while policing its workers and farmers to prevent any opposition to this exploitation. In addition, Vietnam has become an integral part of Washington’s war plans in the region, as military cooperation between the two continues to grow.

The Stalinists in Pyongyang hope to replicate this turn in order to increase their own wealth at the expense of the North Korean working class, but are uneasy about the strain it would place on relations with China, the North’s largest and only significant economic backer. Behind the scenes, the Trump administration is undoubtedly pressing for Pyongyang to “flip” militarily, though historically it has maintained better relations with Beijing than Hanoi has. It is this that lies at the heart of Trump’s engagement with Pyongyang and in fact underlines US policy in the Asia-Pacific.

Whatever the immediate outcome of the summit and future negotiations, the world is increasingly resembling the period before the outbreak of World War II, with its sudden and rapid shifts in alliances between countries. The broader context, however, is the rapidly intensifying preparations by the United States for military conflict with its “great power” rivals, Russia and China.

India and Pakistan issue fresh war threats

K. Ratnayake

After direct clashes between their air forces Wednesday, tensions between India and Pakistan remain on the boil, threatening the eruption of all-out war between South Asia’s two nuclear-armed powers.

Addressing a joint session of parliament yesterday, Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan declared that his government had decided to release captured Indian Air Force Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman today as a “peace gesture.” However, Khan warned that “Pakistan will have to retaliate” should the situation “get out of hand.”

Varthaman was captured during Wednesday’s clash between Indian and Pakistan Air Force jets, which erupted when Pakistani jets crossed into Indian-administered Kashmir in an apparent attempt to strike Indian military facilities. Although India thwarted the attack, Pakistani forces shot down an Indian MiG-21 and captured its pilot.

The commanders of India’s three armed forces held a press conference late yesterday afternoon. While welcoming the release of the wing commander, they vowed to continue military strikes inside Pakistan. “As long as Pakistan continues to harbour terrorists, we will continue to target the terror camps,” declared Major General Surendra Singh Mahal. He denounced Pakistan for targeting Indian military installations, adding: “[I]f they provoke us any further, we are prepared for exigencies.”

Pakistan’s military spokesman, Major General Asif Ghafoor, was no less belligerent, warning earlier in the day: “Pakistan Army troops are at high alert along the Line of Control (LoC) to thwart any Indian aggression.” The LoC separates Indian- and Pakistan-controlled Kashmir.

These threats demonstrate that the stand-off will not be resolved by Islamabad releasing a pilot and New Delhi welcoming the gesture.

Locked in a reactionary military-strategic rivalry since the 1947 communal partition of South Asia, the capitalist elites of India and Pakistan have fought three declared wars and numerous border skirmishes, as they have jostled for advantage and used their antagonism as a means of diverting domestic social discontent.

The latest conflict is bound up with mounting political crises in both countries, and Washington’s drive to transform India into a “global strategic partner” and frontline state in its confrontation with China.

India’s Hindu-supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, seized on a February 14 attack at Pulwama in Kashmir by Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), an Islamist terrorist group with bases in Pakistan, to ratchet up tensions with Islamabad. The attack claimed the lives of more than 40 Indian soldiers.

New Delhi retaliated on Tuesday via an attack at Balakot, deep inside Pakistan—New Delhi’s first air strike inside Pakistan since the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war. Based on information provided by a top government official, the Indian media is asserting that the Balakot attack claimed between 200 and 300 lives.

Modi’s government prepared the attack by imposing punishing economic measures on Pakistan, including cancelling its most-favoured nation trading status, and vowing to exercise its rights under the Indus Valley Water Treaty to reduce water flows into Pakistan that are needed for irrigation and power generation.

Modi’s attempt to politically exploit the military conflict was underscored yesterday when he organised a meeting of BJP activists in 15,000 locations, dubbed the “world’s largest video conference.” Reports claimed that Modi interacted with 10 million people during the meeting.

Modi vowed: “India will fight, live, work and win as one and nobody can create hurdles in its march towards development.” He added that the BJP’s 2014 election victory was a “mandate for fulfilling people’s necessities” and “the 2019 polls will be about fulfilling people’s aspirations.”

Seeking to incite war fever, Modi stated: “We have complete faith in the capabilities of our defence forces. Hence, it is very crucial that nothing which affects their determination happens.”

In a thinly-veiled threat to India’s opposition parties, he denounced those who rejected “a strong government.”

After coming to power in 2014, Modi, with the full backing of India’s super-rich elite, deepened New Delhi’s strategic partnership with US imperialism so as to advance India’s great power ambitions, above all at the expense of China and Pakistan. He is determined to hold onto power in the upcoming elections in April and May, after which he hopes to strengthen his autocratic rule to pursue India’s foreign policy interests more aggressively and enforce the ruling elite’s economic dictates by suppressing social opposition.

Opposition party leaders, including Congress Party president Rahul Gandhi, accused Modi of politicising the crisis to boost his reelection campaign. However, they rushed to join an all-party meeting Tuesday called by External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, and endorsed the government’s war drive against Pakistan “in one voice.”

More generally, they have long backed the Modi government’s position—repeated by the prime minister again yesterday—that New Delhi will not resume high-level contacts with Pakistan, let alone negotiations on a peace settlement, until it suppresses all logistical support from Pakistan for the separatist insurgency in Indian-administered Kashmir.

Many Indian media commentators are vociferously backing India’s anti-Pakistan campaign.

The Times of India published an article Wednesday comparing the military arsenals of both sides, including the nuclear stockpiles. Although the article’s ostensible purpose was to underline India’s military superiority, it confirmed that the ruling elites of both countries could unleash a nuclear holocaust that would exterminate millions of people in the region and beyond.

According to the Times, India possesses between 140 and 150 nuclear warheads, while Pakistan has 130 to 140. Both countries have ballistic missiles capable of carrying the warheads, with India’s Agni-V able to travel 5,000 kilometres, compared to a 2,000-kilometre limit for Pakistan’s Shaheen missiles.

India’s army of 1.2 million soldiers controls 336 armoured personnel carriers, 3,565 tanks, and 9,719 military guns, while Pakistan has 1,605 personnel carriers, 2,496 tanks, and 4,472 artillery pieces. The list goes on.

Both New Delhi and Islamabad have spent lavishly to acquire such deadly military firepower, leaving millions of workers and poor peasants to go hungry and without access to basic social provisions. India’s 2018 defence budget was a massive $58.1 billion, or 2.1 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), while Pakistan spent $11 billion, or 3.6 percent of its GDP.

Media reports confirm that in the lead-up to the Balakot air strike, the Indian government began preparations for all-out war. State-run oil companies were asked to increase their stores of jet fuel at northern airfields six days before the strike.

In another expression of the virulently anti-Pakistan campaign whipped up by the media, right-wing geostrategist Brahma Chellaney wrote: “Peace with Pakistan is a mirage, and the Indian Air Force (IAF) aptly employed its Mirage 2000 aircraft to bomb terrorists there.”

Chellaney also referred to the December 2001 attack on the Indian parliament, allegedly carried out by JeM, and criticised then Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee for not having “quickly responded with punitive airstrikes.” He continued: “Balakot represents the first time a nuclear power carried out an airstrike inside another nuclear-armed state.” India was “busting Western academic theories about the inevitability of tit-for-tat actions rapidly triggering a serious nuclear crisis.”

In plain language, Chellaney urged New Delhi to use its firepower to eliminate “terrorists” in Pakistan, while dismissing the possibility that events could spiral out of control into a potential nuclear exchange. This underscores the recklessness of India’s ruling elite.

In an editorial board statement entitled “A socialist strategy to oppose war on the Indian subcontinent” published on May 31, 2002, the World Socialist Web Site warned: “It would be a dangerous folly for the working class to believe that the outbreak of a nuclear war is impossible. Indian defence analysts have sought to dampen public fears by speculating on the prospects of ‘a limited war,’ confined to attacks on alleged terrorist training camps in the Pakistani-controlled region of Kashmir. Any clash, however, would have a military and political dynamic of its own.”

The balance of power in the region has shifted dramatically during the intervening 17 years. The India-Pakistan rivalry has become enmeshed with US imperialism’s confrontation with China. In its determination to consolidate its hegemony in the Asia-Pacific, Washington has deepened its military ties with New Delhi. In response, Beijing has expanded its military and economic ties with Islamabad.

Any war between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan therefore has the real potential of precipitating US and Chinese intervention, triggering the eruption of a catastrophic third world war.

The Trump administration, which publicly declared in advance its support for India “punishing” Pakistan for the February 14 Pulwama bombing, has called on both sides to exercise restraint and forego further military action. But even as it did so, Washington emphasised its partnership with India and demanded Islamabad dismantle “terrorist” havens—the better to strengthen its anti-China alliance with New Delhi.

Netanyahu to face charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust

Jean Shaoul

Israeli Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit announced on Thursday his decision to indict Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in connection with three separate cases on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust, pending a hearing at which Netanyahu can challenge the charges.

The indictment announcement, following three years of deliberations over recommendations to prosecute by numerous authorities, comes just 40 days before the general election set for April 9. It centers on Netanyahu’s dealings with businessmen to whom he allegedly granted regulatory concessions in return for lavish gifts or favorable news coverage.

Benjamin Netanyahu [photo credit: Office of the Israeli Prime Minister]

If the hearing, likely to be held after the election, rejects his challenge, Netanyahu, who has held the premiership since 2009 and before that from 1996 to 1999, will become the first sitting prime minister to be indicted.

While being the subject of a criminal investigation does not require Netanyahu to resign, it puts him under pressure to do so and seems likely to alter the course of the election, in which his Likud Party had been expected to win the largest number of seats in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset.

The indictment announcement comes in the context of mounting tensions and divisions within the Israeli political establishment exacerbated by Netanyahu’s increasingly pronounced far-right orientation, including the cultivation of neo-fascist forces both within Israel and internationally.

Facing an unexpectedly serious electoral challenge from former army chief Benny Gantz in the April 9 vote, Netanyahu last week engineered a deal to shore up his right-wing coalition by merging the fascist Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party with the more established right-wing party of religious Zionists, Jewish Home. This effectively legitimized an organization that traces its roots to the long-outlawed Kach party of Meir Kahane. That party was declared a terrorist organization by the United States.

Like Kach, Otzma Yehudit 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. With its merger with Jewish Home, this organization could win seats in the Knesset and possibly become part of the next government.

The two leaders of Otzma Yehudit who could win parliamentary seats—Michael Ben Ari and Itamar Ben Gvir—are cofounders of a group that was 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.

Netanyahu’s electoral alliance with outright fascists has sparked outrage and revulsion within Israel as well as among Jews in the United States. Even elements within the Israeli religious right are likening the politics of Otzma Yehudit to the Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws. Last week, influential sections of the Israel lobby in the US that have generally supported Netanyahu, including the American Jewish Committee and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), issued denunciations of Netanyahu’s inclusion of Otzma Yehudit in his electoral bloc.

The decision to indict thus takes place under conditions of growing concerns within the Israeli ruling elite and state that the far-right policies of Netanyahu are alienating Jews outside the country and destabilizing the Zionist regime internally. 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 protests.

Last July, there were protests within Israel over the passage of the “Nation-State Law,” which enshrined Jewish supremacy as the legal foundation of the state.

At the same time, Netanyahu has solidarized the Israeli government 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, of course, Donald Trump in the US.

None of this, it should be noted, has deterred the corporate media and political establishment in Britain, France, Germany and other countries from prosecuting their fraudulent campaign against “left-wing anti-Semitism,” targeting those who criticize the Israeli state’s oppression of the Palestinians.

Speaking at a press conference in Hanoi, where he was meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Trump declared his support for Netanyahu in advance of the Israeli attorney general’s announcement, saying he “has done a great job as prime minister.”

Netanyahu joins a long line of Israeli politicians who have faced corruption and other charges. His immediate predecessor, Ehud Olmert, received a six-year jail term for bribery offences when he was mayor of Jerusalem prior to becoming prime minister. Olmert’s predecessor, Ariel Sharon, had the good fortune to become incapacitated before charges against him could be proved. Sharon’s predecessor, Ehud Barak, became extraordinarily rich after he left office in 2001.

Netanyahu’s wife, Sara, is the defendant in a trial, stalled since last October, on charges of aggravated fraud and breach of trust for allowing staff at the prime minister’s residence to order $100,000 worth of meals from restaurants between 2010 and 2013.

Of the three cases for which Mandelbit is recommending that Netanyahu be indicted, the most important is the Bezeq affair, known as Case 4000, which relates to allegations that the telecom billionaire Shaul Elovitch gave Netanyahu flattering coverage on his Walla news website in exchange for regulatory favours.

Speaking on television, Netanyahu denied the charges and said they would collapse “like a house of cards.” He boasted that he intended to continue as prime minister “for many more years.”

Leading members of Likud, while publicly remaining supportive and calling the charges “political persecution,” have been lining up to put themselves in contest for the leadership position, with his long-time rival and former aide Gideon Saar coming third in the Likud primaries.

According to a poll by the Times of Israel conducted before Mandelbit’s announcement, the decision to go ahead with a prosecution would have a major impact on the election, giving his chief rival, former Israel Defence Forces Chief of Staff Gantz, a decisive lead, with 44 seats in the 120-seat Knesset against Likud’s 25.

The indictment announcement also takes place in the immediate aftermath of the release of the report by the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry on Israel’s actions against the Palestinians in Gaza during the protests that started on March 30, 2018. The panel declared: “Israeli soldiers committed violations of international human rights and humanitarian law. Some of those violations may constitute war crimes or crimes against humanity.”