Excavation completed at mass shooting site from Stalin’s Great Terror

Clara Weiss

On May 20, the GULAG History Museum in Moscow opened an informational center at “Kommunarka,” an infamous mass execution site of the Stalinist Great Terror outside of Russia’s capital city. Visitors can go on expeditions and get an overview of the site’s history and the efforts to excavate the graves.

Entrance to the "Kommunarka"

Archeologists and historians only recently completed the work of locating and unearthing the remains of the 6,609 people who were executed there between 1937 and 1941. Most of them were victims of the Great Terror of 1936-1938, during which the Stalinist bureaucracy murdered virtually the entire cadre of the Bolshevik Party that had carried out the 1917 October Revolution. Substantial sections of the Third Communist International (Comintern), founded in 1919 under the leadership of the Bolsheviks, were also killed.

The bureaucracy that carried out these crimes was a privileged caste within the workers’ state that arose under conditions of the country’s international isolation and relative economic backwardness. Led by Joseph Stalin, this parasitic elite came into ever more direct conflict with the internationalist and egalitarian program of the October 1917 revolution and the socialist aspirations of the Soviet working class. Based on the nationalist program of “socialism in one country,” the party faction around Stalin betrayed one workers’ revolution after another, above all, in Germany and in China.

The nationalist betrayal of the world revolution by Stalinism was opposed by Leon Trotsky, who had co-led the revolution with Lenin. In 1923, he formed the Left Opposition. In 1938, following the devastating defeat of the German working class and the coming to power of Nazism in 1933—a direct result of the disastrous policies of the Stalinized Comintern—Trotsky founded the Fourth International.

In the three Moscow Trials of 1936-1938, prominent leaders of the revolution were framed up in monstrous show trials, in which they were forced, after intense torture, to make false public confessions about their alleged “counterrevolutionary” activities.

The history of the “Kommunarka”

The “Kommunarka” shooting site became the grave for some of the most famous victims of the trials. It gives a glimpse into the scale of the terror that claimed the lives of at least 700,000 people. Among those who were shot and buried here are:

• Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938) and Alexei Rykov (1881-1938), both of whom had been leading members of the Bolshevik Party since before 1917, and later formed part of the short-lived “Right opposition” to the Stalin faction in 1928-29. They were sentenced to death as defendants of the Third Moscow Trial of 1938.

• Lev Levin (1870-1938), a Kremlin doctor who had treated prominent Soviet political and cultural figures, including Vladimir Lenin, Felix Dzerzhinsky and the writer Maxim Gorky. He too was a defendant in the Third Moscow Trial.

• Nikolai Krestinsky (1883-1938), a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee in 1917 and one of the party’s first secretaries of the Central Committee after the revolution. Krestinsky was a supporter of the Left Opposition from 1923 to 1928. He was also a defendant in the Third Moscow Trial.

Nikolai Krestinsky (on the right) with Georgy Chicherin in Berlin in 1925

• Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko (1883-1938), who led the storming of the Winter Palace in October 1917. Like Krestinsky, Antonov-Ovseenko was a prominent member of the Left Opposition in the 1920s and one of the signatories of its founding document, the Declaration of the Forty-Six. He capitulated to Stalinism shortly after his expulsion from the Bolshevik Party in December 1927. He later played an ignominious role as an executor of Stalinist policies in the Spanish Civil War in 1936-37, before being summoned back to Moscow and killed on February 10, 1938.

• Valerian Osinskii-Obolensky (1887-1938), a Bolshevik since 1907 and a trained economist who became the first head of the VSNKh, the High Council of the National Economy of the Soviet Union after the 1917 seizure of power. A “democratic centralist,” he supported the Left Opposition in 1923-24 but soon broke with it and went on to play leading roles in various economic state institutions. Before his execution, he worked as the director of the Institute of the History of Sciences and Technology at the Academy of Sciences.

Valerian Osinskii-Obolensky

• Boris Malkin (1891-1938), a former leader of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries who joined the Bolsheviks in 1918. He was involved in producing the first audio recordings of Lenin’s speeches and later became a major figure in Soviet cultural life. He worked together with the poet Sergei Esenin, was friends with the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, edited various journals, and helped direct the theater of Vsevolod Meyerhold in the 1920s.

• Turar Ryskulov (1894-1937) and Kaikhisiz Sardarovich Atabayev (1887-1938), both leading Communists in Turkmenistan.

• Hryhoriy Hrynko (1890-1938), a Communist from Ukraine who had previously been a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Borotbist movement. He was the Soviet Union’s finance minister from 1930 to 1937.

• Pavel Tsvetkov (1906-1938), a Bulgarian communist who helped lead the Comintern’s youth movement, the Komsomol, in Bulgaria, and then emigrated to the Soviet Union where he worked in a Moscow factory.

Boris Malkin

Other victims include members of the Chinese and the Korean Communist Parties, students from Moscow universities, workers from various factories in Moscow and the surrounding area, scientists, economists and literary figures. “Kommunarka” also became a major burial ground for those killed during the purge of the Red Army, including dozens of executed high-ranking commanders. Many of them had been trained by Trotsky during the civil war. The beheading of the Red Army was to have devastating consequences when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union just a few years later, in 1941, and launched a war that claimed the lives of at least 27 million Soviet citizens.

The “Kommunarka” shooting site was located on the territory of the luxury residence of Genrikh Yagoda, the longtime head of the NKVD (Soviet secret service). He played a sinister and leading role in the Great Terror before he himself and his subordinates were purged in 1938. He too is buried at “Kommunarka.” The site itself was completely secret until the fall of 1991, just months before the Stalinist bureaucracy finally liquidated the Soviet Union.

For decades, its exact location, as that of many other mass execution sites from the Great Terror, remained unknown. The NKVD order “On Anti-Soviet Elements,” which initiated the most large-scale operation of the Great Terror, had stressed that the executions should proceed “while maintaining complete secrecy about the time and location.” The location of this and other mass shooting sites was a “state secret,” and documentary evidence about them was systematically destroyed.

While volunteers and historians conducted fieldwork in the vicinity from 2012 onwards, the exact location of the burial sites remained unknown for many years. Professional research, involving archeologists and historians, only began in 2018 at the initiative of the GULAG History Museum. The eventual identification of the mass graves became possible when historians discovered aerial reconnaissance photographs that had been made by the German Luftwaffe on August 26, 1942 in the US national archive.

This research has been conducted in a political and cultural climate that is dominated by the Russian state’s efforts to falsify the history of the October Revolution, glorify Stalinism and engage in the vilest anti-Semitic slanders against its leaders, above all, Leon Trotsky. The government has also secretly destroyed archival documents related to the victims of the purges.

The opening of the museum comes as the case against Yuri Dmitriev, who uncovered a shooting site in Sandarmokh, Karelia, is now in its third trial. The 65-year-old Dmitriev has been sentenced to 13 years in prison on trumped-up charges of sexual abuse of a minor. The aim of the state vendetta against him is to intimidate everyone who seeks to uncover the truth about the crimes of Stalinism.

Like Dmitriev’s, the GULAG museum’s political orientation is anticommunist. The institution’s permanent exhibit makes almost no mention of the Left Opposition and tends to obscure the political nature of the Stalinist suppression of all opposition within the Soviet Union. Instead, it portrays the terror as a natural outcome of the October Revolution. On the website of the new informational center at Kommunarka, the names of those who were murdered are accompanied by an extremely brief biography that ignores their participation (or non-participation) in the October Revolution and the Left Opposition.

The origins of the Great Terror

Such an approach obscures the real historical origins and significance of the Great Terror. Far from representing a continuity of the October Revolution, the terror was the apex of the Stalinist and nationalist reaction against it. While the sweep of the purges went well beyond tens of thousands of Trotskyists, it was fundamentally, in the words of Soviet historian Vadim Rogovin, a “political genocide.” The chief defendant in the Moscow Trials was Leon Trotsky, who like no other represented the socialist opposition to Stalinism and the program of world socialist revolution. The accusation of “counterrevolutionary Trotskyist activity” was at the center of the murderous purges.

In his closing speech to the Dewey Commission in 1937, which cleared him and his son, Leon Sedov, from all the charges of the Stalinist bureaucracy and found the trials to have been frame-ups, Trotsky explained the underlying reasons for the terror and the monstrous frame-ups, in which leaders of the October Revolution were forced to denounce themselves as “saboteurs” and “counterrevolutionaries”:

The position of a privileged bureaucracy in a society which that bureaucracy itself calls Socialist is not only contradictory, but also false. The more precipitate the jump from the October overturn—which laid bare all social falsehood—to the present situation, in which a caste of upstarts is forced to cover up its social ulcers, the cruder the Thermidorian lies. It is, consequently, a question not simply of the individual depravity of this or that person, but of the corruption lodged in the position of a whole social group for whom lying has become a vital political necessity. In the struggle for its newly gained positions, this caste has re-educated itself and simultaneously re-educated—or rather, demoralized—its leaders. It raised upon its shoulders the man who best, most resolutely and most ruthlessly expresses its interests. Thus, Stalin, who was once a revolutionist, became the leader of the Thermidorian caste.

The formulas of Marxism, expressing the interests of the masses, more and more inconvenienced the bureaucracy, in so far as they were inevitably directed against its interests. From the time that I entered into opposition to the bureaucracy, its courtier-theoreticians began to call the revolutionary essence of Marxism — “Trotskyism.” … The incessant Party purges [in the 1920s] were directed above all toward the uprooting of “Trotskyism,” and during these purges not only discontented workers were called “Trotskyites,” but also all writers who honestly presented historical facts or citations which contradicted the latest official standardization. Novelists and artists were subject to the same regime. The spiritual atmosphere of the country became completely impregnated with the poison of conventionalities, lies and direct frame-ups.

All the possibilities along this road were soon exhausted. The theoretical and historical falsifications no longer attained their aims—people grew too accustomed to them. It was necessary to give to bureaucratic repression a more massive foundation. To bolster up the literary falsifications, accusations of a criminal character were brought in. ... To justify the repressions, it was necessary to have framed accusations. To give weight to the false accusations, it was necessary to reinforce them with more brutal repressions. Thus the logic of the struggle drove Stalin along the road of gigantic judicial amalgams.

With the purges, the bureaucracy consolidated itself as a caste and proved to imperialism that it was opposed to socialist revolution and any prospect of another October anywhere in the world. Moreover, by dragging the leaders of the revolution through the mud before murdering them, the bureaucracy sought to discredit the October Revolution in the eyes of millions worldwide and destroy the historical and socialist consciousness of the working class in the USSR and internationally. The Stalinist liquidation of the Soviet Union three decades ago in 1991, out of which the Putin regime emerged, cannot be understood outside this broader context.

Leon Trotsky consults his lawyer Albert Goldman during the Dewey Commission hearings in Coyoacan, Mexico. His wife Natalia is to his left.

Against this backdrop, the recent efforts to locate these mass graves and establish basic biographical information about those who were murdered are an important and indispensable contribution to the historical record.

Stellantis moves to cut half of hourly workforce at Belvidere, Illinois, Jeep plant beginning June 1

Jessica Goldstein

Stellantis is moving forward rapidly with the planned layoff of nearly half of the hourly workforce at its Belvidere Assembly Plant in Belvidere, Illinois, south of the Wisconsin border. Local news station WIFR reported last week that workers at the plant received a message stating that only first shift would report to work when production is expected to resume June 1. The plant has been idled off and on since February of this year due to the ongoing semiconductor chip shortage, which has disrupted production throughout the global auto industry.

Belvidere Assembly Plant in Illinois

The layoff of the plant’s entire second shift, to be completed by July 26, was announced less than one week before the company announced the latest shift reduction. The planned layoff is to be “indefinite,” that is to say, most likely permanent.

This attack on the workers at Stellantis Belvidere Assembly Plant will have a devastating impact on working-class families in the area. The plant is one of the main employers in the Rockford, Illinois, region, which has undergone a decades-long process of deindustrialization. WIFR cited Illinois Republican Senator Dave Syverson’s concern that the economic impact of the layoff will “reach every corner” of the Illinois-Wisconsin border area.

Workers at the Belvidere plant have complained that many of them have faced difficulty in collecting unemployment benefits during the production cuts, a problem that has not been resolved. Furthermore, already facing increased risk of infection due to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) dropping its mask and social distancing guidelines during the deadly coronavirus pandemic, workers will face even more dangers to their health and safety at work as a result of the reduction in the workforce. Speedup and sheer lack of support for maintenance and operations in the plant could lead to more fatigue, injuries and even deaths.

According to Automotive News, Stellantis took close to 38,000 vehicles out of production in North America during the third week of May, the majority of which, 36,000, were Jeep SUVs scheduled to be built at the Belvidere plant. Another 1,100 Chrysler Voyager minivans and 900 Chrysler Pacifica minivans were taken out of production at its Windsor, Ontario, plant in Canada, which has been idled since March 29 and will remain shut down through the end of this week, according to the latest company reports. The Windsor plant is expected to restart production on a partial basis beginning May 31.

Ford had also announced that eight of its North American plants would remain idled through various times in June, with plans to reopen on reduced schedules for limited production in order to continue to squeeze out profits during the ongoing chip shortage. Ford cut 93,000 vehicles from North American production in the third week of May.

Like their fellow workers at other auto plants around the world, Ford workers in the US have also been forced to bear the brunt of the production crisis. Ford workers face ongoing layoffs and job cuts with no end in sight. Workers have been finding it difficult to secure unemployment payments, with many states having begun to eliminate the federal $300 weekly supplemental unemployment payments.

In total, nearly 3 million vehicles have been taken out of production worldwide in 2021 as a result of the parts shortage, and automakers and suppliers now widely believe that the chip shortage will continue to impact production for an extended period. A May 22 report by industry news site caranddriver.com remarked that an April survey of global auto industry experts found that “almost three-quarters of respondents,72 percent, said they expect the chip shortage crisis to impact the industry for at least six months.”

Carmakers have now implemented processes in an attempt work around the chip shortage so that plants can continue to run and profits can continue to flow.

Stellantis has cut out the intelligent rear-view mirror from Dodge Ram 1500 pickup trucks, and Nissan has opted out of adding navigational systems to some vehicles. Ford has reportedly continued to build its best-selling F-150 trucks without the chips, with the idea that the chips will be added when they become available.

According to the Motley Fool, “Stellantis said that the chip shortage cost it about 11% of its planned production in the first quarter, or roughly 190,000 vehicles.” Yet, the corporation, which formed as the result of a merger between Italian-American automaker Fiat Chrysler and French automaker PSA, expects to be on track to meet post-merger profitability targets. Stellantis has posted 14 percent net pro forma revenue gains in the first quarter of 2021 compared to what the merged companies were projected to have made separately in the first quarter of 2020. Its pro forma net revenue is reported to be $37 billion, with combined global shipments up 12 percent overall in spite of a quarter-end drop in inventory of nearly 33 percent.

The immense amount of wealth generated by Stellantis even in the midst of a supply chain crisis against the backdrop of the global pandemic is the result of relentless attacks on the working class that the corporation has carried out worldwide with the help of nationally based trade unions. At Belvidere Assembly 3,900 workers were permanently laid off in 2020 soon after the United Auto Workers (UAW) pushed through a sellout agreement following the union’s isolation and betrayal of the strike by 48,000 General Motors workers. The UAW went on to force the same pattern of concessions it accepted at GM on workers at Ford and what was then Fiat Chrysler.

The layoffs at its Belvidere plant take place under conditions where Stellantis has been making efforts to consolidate its US production in Michigan in order to squeeze out as much profit as possible from fewer and fewer workers. In April Stellantis implemented a grueling 12-hour per day, 7-day per week work schedule for skilled trades workers at its Sterling Heights Assembly Plant near Detroit. Although met with fierce opposition from rank-and-file autoworkers, the UAW sanctioned the draconian schedule through the terms of the alternative work schedule it negotiated in the 2019 sellout agreements.

The UAW has done virtually nothing to oppose the cuts at Belvidere Assembly, which point to the possibility if not the likelihood that the plant could be shut down entirely. A lawsuit brought by rival automaker GM in 2020 labeled the UAW an “ FCA-controlled enterprise.” In reality, the union has been completely exposed as a pro-corporate, criminal organization deep in the pockets of all major US auto corporations. The findings of the criminal probe of the UAW reveal an organization which takes workers’ dues money and forces through sellout contracts, while from the top down to the local level, officials receive a share of corporate profits extracted from the sweat of workers in addition to bribes and kickbacks from the corporations themselves.

Biden budget plan calls for record military spending directed against China

Barry Grey

On Friday, the Biden administration released its budget proposal for fiscal year 2022, which begins on October 1 of this year. At its center is the call for a record military budget of $753 billion, including a massive allocation of $24.7 billion for nuclear weapons modernization, a major expansion of US air and nuclear-capable naval forces, and the largest ever request for research and development—$112 billion.

The budget proposal is openly directed against China, in the first instance, followed by Russia, Iran and North Korea. Coming in the midst of the orchestrated revival of the scientifically baseless Wuhan lab conspiracy theory on the origins of the coronavirus by the Biden administration and the entire political and media establishment, aimed at creating a causus belli for war with China, the Pentagon budget is a stark warning to the American and international working class. US imperialism is seeking to extricate itself from its intractable global and domestic contradictions by preparing for military conflict against what it deems to be its most dangerous rival.

President Joe Biden speaks at Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Hampton, Va., Friday, May 28, 2021. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

Since coming to office four months ago, Biden has stepped up the drumbeat of anti-China propaganda and military provocation against Beijing initiated by the Obama administration and escalated by Trump. He has gone further than any previous president in undermining the “One China” policy and related policy of “strategic ambiguity” toward Taiwan inaugurated under the Carter administration in 1978. He has opened discussions with Taiwan, Japan and South Korea on stationing offensive missiles on their territory directed against the Chinese mainland, a move that China has warned it would consider an act of war.

The budget released yesterday allocates $5.4 billion toward the development of these plans, under the rubric of the “Pacific Deterrence Initiative.”

The Biden administration and media outlets aligned with the Democratic Party are presenting the $6 trillion budget proposal as a turn toward liberal social reform, with a total increase in discretionary spending for fiscal year 2022 of $1.52 trillion. However, in the midst of an ongoing pandemic and social devastation for tens of millions of workers, the war budget accounts for nearly half of the spending increase, and the latter is geared to rebuilding America’s crumbling infrastructure and insourcing production of hi-tech components critical to a future war against a rising power such as China. The actual social reforms are at best half-measures that do not challenge the ever-rising fortunes or economic domination of the financial oligarchs.

The budget announcement released Friday by the Defense Department bristles with anti-Chinese militarism. It begins with a statement by Biden’s secretary of defense, Retired Gen. Lloyd Austin, which declares:

The budget provides us the mix of capabilities we need most and stays true to our focus on the pacing challenge from the People’s Republic of China, combating the damaging effects of climate change on our military installations, and modernizing our capabilities to meet the advanced threats of tomorrow.

 In testimony Thursday before the House Appropriations Committee Defense Subcommittee, Secretary of Defense Austin and Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made chilling remarks on the need for the US to upgrade and modernize its military to prepare for war against its “strategic competitors,” first and foremost, China.

Austin declared: “We must maintain and improve this advantage on land, at sea, in the air, and in emerging domains, including space and cyberspace. I am confident that the President’s budget request helps us do that. The request is driven by our recognition that our competitors—especially China—continue to advance their capabilities. We must outpace those advances to remain a credible deterrent to conflict around the world.”

Austin stressed that the US military had to modernize its forces in line with technological advances in order to maintain “the rules-based world order that we have helped foster for the past seven decades,” (i.e., the rules determined by US imperialism after World War II).

Expressing the increasingly desperate position of the US ruling class after decades of economic decline and financial parasitism, he warned: “China has invested heavily in new technologies, with a stated intent to complete the modernization of its forces by 2035 and to field a ‘world-class military’ by 2049. Russia has shown that it is not afraid to target the United States in contested domains like cyberspace and still shows a continued interest in regional hegemony. Iran continues to advance its nuclear and ballistic missile programs and to support destabilizing proxy groups in the Middle East in an effort to threaten its regional neighbors. We also face challenges from North Korea, a country with the ambition to be capable of striking the U.S. homeland.”

On the topic of “regional challenges,” Austin began with China and the Indo-Pacific region (focusing on North Korea and Iran), then moved to Europe (targeting Russia), the Western Hemisphere (alluding to China’s growing economic influence in Latin America), and the US mainland. In that connection he noted positively the continued deployment of troops on the US-Mexico border and their role in imprisoning migrant children.

He touched on virtually every inch of the global landmass as places that must be “defended” by the US military, including the Arctic. The remit also includes US military domination of outer space and cyberspace.

Austin concluded by presenting as part of the necessary preparation for military conflict against “strategic competitors” the Biden Defense Department’s efforts to root out sexual harassers and extremist elements and boasted of his guidance aimed at removing barriers to transgender people in the military. This reflects both serious concerns within the military brass over the potentially disruptive impact of far-right elements under pre-war conditions and the political need to offer a sop to the upper-middle class identity-obsessed constituency within the Democratic Party.

Milley was, if anything, even more blunt in his remarks to the committee.

“China,” he said, “is our #1 geostrategic security challenge…China is challenging the peaceful status quo in the Pacific, and is intent on revising the global international order by mid-century. China is conducting large-scale exercises in the region with an emphasis on amphibious landing, joint fires, and maritime strike scenarios. These actions threaten our allies and partners’ autonomy, jeopardize freedom of navigation, overflight and other lawful uses of the sea, and compromise regional peace and stability. In short, China has and continues to develop significant nuclear, space, cyber, land, air, and maritime military capabilities.”

Milley stressed the vast changes in warfare since the end of World War II, stressing the need for the US military to intervene with massive forces far more quickly than in the past.

“The United States as a nation has always had the advantage and time to conduct a long build up prior to the beginning of hostilities. The operating environment of the future will likely not afford us the luxury of time to project force so having modernized forces in sufficient size and readiness will be the key to sustaining deterrence and maintaining the peace and if deterrence fails then fight and win,” he stated.

He concluded by blustering that “the United States Joint Force is a flexible and adaptable force ready to deter, fight, and win our Nation’s wars. The PB22 budget request increases the readiness of the force by developing the Joint Force of the future… Many enemies have grossly underestimated the United States and the American people in the past. They’ve underestimated our national resolve. They’ve underestimated our capability, our skill and our combat power, and each made a fatal choice which ended with their enrollment in the dustbin of history.”

New or expanded weapons systems listed in the Pentagon budget announcement include:

• B-21 Long Range Strike Bomber—$3 billion
• Columbia Class Ballistic Missile Submarine—$5 billion
• Long-Range Stand-Off (LRSO) Missile—$609 million
• Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD)—$2.6 billion
• Sea-Based Ballistic Missile Defense System (AEGIS BMD)—$1 billion
• Ground-Based Midcourse (GMD) and Improved Homeland Defense/Next Generation Interceptors (NGI)—$1.7 billion
• 85 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters—$12 billion
• 14 KC-46 Tanker Replacements—$2.5 billion
• 30 AH-64E Apache Attack Helicopters—$825 million
• CVN-78 FORD Class Aircraft Carrier—$2.9 billion
• 2 Virginia Class Submarines—$6.9 billion
• 1 DDG-51 Arleigh Burke Destroyer—$2.4 billion

To partly offset the increased spending and shift the strategic orientation to more hi-tech weapons and communications systems, the budget calls for certain cuts in existing “legacy” military programs. This will undoubtedly provoke opposition from lawmakers who are on the take from defense contractors in their districts whose profit could be impacted.

Opel/Stellantis: Job cuts and intensified pressure on the workforce

Marianne Arens

On May 26 workers at the main Opel Autos factory in Rüsselsheim took part in a protest against ongoing job cuts and a massive increase in work pressure. The German IG Metall trade union called for a rally at the end of the morning shift in an effort to allow workers to vent their anger. Currently, one part of the workforce is slaving away under great pressure, while others continue to work reduced hours (with reduced pay) in line with the government’s coronavirus short-time working scheme.

Since January, the Opel plants now belong to the new car giant Stellantis, the product of the merger of the PSA Group, to which Opel belongs, with Fiat-Chrysler (FCA). The merger has been accompanied by massive attacks on workers’ jobs and conditions.

The new corporate giant is in the process of converting to electric-mobility and digital driving and is intent on cutting costs to maintain its position as the world’s third largest auto concern based on sales. The process of conversion to e-mobility involves the destruction of thousands of jobs. At the time of the merger in January, PSA boss Carlos Tavares announced, “From day one, we will focus on exploiting synergies and increasing competitiveness.”

Opel plant in Rüsselsheim

One of the first steps Stellantis has taken is to dissolve its entire network of authorised dealers and terminate all European dealership contracts as of May 31. Only Opel, Fiat, Peugeot or Vauxhall dealers who receive a so-called Letter of Intent (LoI) by mid-July will continue to be supplied—and only then under stricter conditions.

Five billion euros are to be saved per year at the company, and no job is safe. At Opel, IG Metall has already agreed to eliminate 2,100 jobs by the end of this year and another 2,000 jobs by the end of the decade. This means that out of 19,000 employees employed in Opel factories when PSA took over in 2017, only 8,100 will remain—less than half.

The union patted itself on the back, claiming that the 2,100 jobs to be cut would be “voluntary,” via severance payments and early retirement. Under pandemic conditions, however, only 500 workers were persuaded to leave their jobs “voluntarily.” Consequently, the company executive and IG Metall set up a “transfer company,” which is invariably the prelude to compulsory redundancies.

Although the Opel-Blitz model is to be retained, the Rüsselsheim factory will inevitably be downsized. The local newspaper Main-Spitze posed the question: “Is Rüsselsheim to be downsized to the level of a ‘token’ factory?”

Pressure on autoworkers is being sharply intensified and workers have undergone prolong periods of short-time working since the start of the pandemic. Currently, only one shift is operational and the reintroduction of a second shift, announced for this autumn, is by no means certain.

What has already been imposed in American auto plants is now to be introduced in Rüsselsheim; increased “flexibilisation” of working time, which eliminates the eight-hour day—an important achievement in the last century. In addition, depending on demand, a six-day week will be reintroduced at Opel’s main factory.

At the Stellantis plant in Sterling Heights near Detroit, a new working-time system for skilled tradesmen was introduced at the beginning of April that permits twelve-hour shifts and a seven-day week. The United Auto Workers (UAW) agreed to this murderous system.

One half of the workforce is expected to be made redundant in the Opel departments of tooling and prototype construction, parts warehouses and design workshops. In these departments, workers are already being asked by their supervisors to apply internally for different posts, although they have not yet been laid off.

Employment in the development department, which once employed 7,000, will be especially affected by job cuts. Two thousand jobs have already been eliminated during the last three years, and 750 workers were forced to switch to the French development service provider Segula, where Opel plans to cut at least another 600-800 jobs.

Pressure is being exerted more and more openly by management, increasingly at the expense of established rights and protocols. For example, several employees were dismissed because they refused to transfer to Segula. The Hesse Labour Court recently ruled in favour of the eight dismissed employees and against Opel. The workers had sued against their dismissal, which has now been negated, although Opel may appeal at the Federal Labour Court.

Recent developments at Segula demonstrate that the workers were right to refuse transfer. The development company, which took over the 750 ex-Opel employees with a job guarantee until 2023, now wants to get rid of 100 jobs and has no compunctions about imposing compulsory redundancies. The company works council had played its part in ensuring that more than 1,300 employees who did not want to switch to Segula lost their jobs at Opel via severance payments.

When it comes to the conversion to electro-mobility and digital driving, the company is not motivated by preserving jobs. What counts is not the welfare and security of the employees or what is necessary for society or the climate. The only thing that matters are the portfolios of company shareholders and the banks, based on maximum profitability.

To defend their jobs and health and create decent conditions for all, workers must take independent action and join the Network of Action Committees for Safe Workplaces. The World Socialist Web Site advocates the building of action committees to establish links between workers in different plants and countries. Stellantis has 25 production facilities in Europe alone and around 400,000 workers worldwide, all facing similar threats.

The company’s connections extend to Asia. To equip the cars digitally, Stellantis has not only signed a contract with Google, but has also set up a new company (“Mobile Drive”) with the Taiwanese tech group and mobile phone manufacturer Foxconn. This means that autoworkers and developers have the opportunity to connect with colleagues in the US, in Asia and around the world. The decisive factor is political perspective. The defence of jobs requires globally coordinated action by workers in different countries. It must be based on a socialist and international programme and resolutely reject the trade union policy of divide and rule.

IG Metall has both feet planted in the camp of management and shareholders. Opel personnel manager Ralph Wangemann recently reaffirmed this. He told the Main-Spitze newspaper that Opel could not understand the purpose of the protest on May 26. He declared that the executive had “implemented the imperative restructuring measures of the past years in line with the applicable contracts on a voluntary basis and the reduction of 2,100 jobs with the agreement of IG Metall.”

IG Metall is indispensable for Opel/Stellantis’ plans to impose further attacks on the workforce. With the help of the union, it has already succeeded in closing Opel plants in Antwerp and Bochum and slashing many thousands of jobs without triggering a social uprising. To forestall opposition time and again, IG Metall and its works councils have stirred up nationalism and played off workers at different plants against one another.

One plant that may currently be facing closure, and which IG Metall completely ignores, is the Opel plant in Aspern, east of Vienna. The factory employed 3,000 workers in the 1990s. Today there are just 800. Half a year ago, engine production came to a halt and now the massive Opel hall, almost a kilometre long and one of the largest production halls in Europe, is up for sale.

Australia: Qantas to axe hundreds of international cabin crew jobs and freeze wages

Terry Cook

Qantas, Australia’s largest carrier, is moving to axe hundreds more jobs and freeze wages, exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic to deepen the decades-long assault on airline workers.

A section of a Qantas airplane [Credit: pxfuel.com]

Qantas CEO Alan Joyce last week launched an “expression of interest program” to encourage international cabin crew to register for “voluntary redundancies.” He expected the program to generate “several hundred applications.”

Joyce also announced a two-year wage freeze across all operations, to be imposed via new trade union enterprise agreements that are coming up for renewal. The freeze would be followed by 2 percent annual increases—another real pay cut after years of wage suppression, including a two-year freeze inflicted in 2014.

Qantas, like its global and domestic competitors, has ruthlessly utilised the pandemic to bring forward previously-prepared restructuring plans, loading the cost of the crisis on the backs of workers. The company has already slashed 8,500 jobs since the pandemic erupted in March 2020, restricting air travel.

Joyce sought to justify further gutting the 29,000-strong workforce by declaring the company was heading for a loss of more than $2 billion this financial year.

In reality, the restructuring measures implemented last year were designed to slash costs across the airline’s operations by $15 billion over three years and then $1 billion annually after 2023. Qantas now expects to realise before interest, tax and depreciation earnings for the June half of around $450 million, and to be cash flow positive by the first half of 2022.

This anticipated outcome is the result of Qantas’s aggressive drive to gain a competitive edge over its rivals in domestic travel, which has been its most profitable market since the Keating Labor government privatised it in the 1990s.

According to Qantas, it is now well on the way to reach 95 percent of its pre-COVID domestic capacity by mid-2021, while its low-cost carrier Jetstar is expected to hit 120 percent of its pre-COVID capacity. The Qantas Group has added 38 new routes since the start of the pandemic, many more than it did in the previous 10 years.

While it cries poor, Qantas’s bottom line has been bolstered by massive tax-payer funded subsidies handed to it by the Liberal-National federal government, with the support of the Labor Party opposition, even as the company axed thousands of jobs and gutted workers’ conditions.

Qantas has been the majority recipient of government support to airlines during the pandemic, raking in $1.2 billion in direct payments, waived charges and underwritten flights during 2020.

This included $726 million through the JobKeeper scheme, which was supposed to keep employees on the books by subsidising wages. The scheme allowed major companies like Qantas to slash their wages bills at public expense.

Qantas also received 59.5 percent by value of the subsidies dished out under the government’s so-called aviation relief package. Now it is tagged to get the biggest share of the $200 million new government international aviation support program and from an extension of the Domestic Aviation Network Support and Regional Airline Network Support programs.

Transport Workers Union’s (TWU) Michael Kaine decried the decision to freeze wages and destroy more jobs, declaring that management was “acting like a dictator” by “using public resources to shore up its position, cut jobs and impose unilateral decisions on its workforce.”

Any condemnation by the TWU or any of the airline trade unions is empty blather designed to distract from their own decades-long role in suppressing workers’ opposition to the airlines’ ongoing assault on jobs and conditions.

Kaine’s beef with Qantas is not over its vicious treatment of its workers but is generated out of fear that Qantas is tending toward sidelining the unions and moving to more direct means of imposing its demands.

When Qantas last year announced the outsourcing 2,000 ground crew positions, the TWU only complained that it had not been brought into the consultation process, during which it would have undoubtedly offered to provide other cost-cutting alternatives, as it has in the past. The TWU then unsuccessfully attempted to convince Qantas to employ the union itself as the cheap labour contractor for its outsourcing operation.

Just last month, the TWU and other airline unions pushed through new three-year enterprise agreements at Virgin Australia that featured 18-month to two-year pay freezes and stays on the payment of a range of allowances. The Virgin Independent Pilots Association (VIPA) is set to impose a similar outcome on its members.

Such deals, always sold by the unions to workers as necessary to make “their” particular airline competitive, only serve to play workers off against each other, resulting in a never-ending downward spiral of conditions.

The TWU has called on the federal government to take a part stake in Qantas, declaring “we need level-headed management at the helm of our biggest airline to guide us through the difficult coming months.” A “part stake” would actually maintain private ownership and funnel even more government funds into the airline.

The reference for “level-headed” management smacks of an appeal by the TWU for the inclusion of union representatives in lucrative board of management positions, where they could collaborate even more closely to impose further restructuring.

Airline workers need to draw lessons from the years of bitter experiences and union betrayals. The struggle to defend jobs and working conditions requires a definitive break with the unions and the construction of new genuine working-class organisations, including rank-and-file committees across the aviation industry in Australia and globally.

South Korea records hundreds of new COVID-19 cases a day

Ben McGrath

South Korea has gone through the first half of this year experiencing a sharp growth of COVID-19 cases, including more contagious and dangerous variants from countries like the United Kingdom. Daily new cases have averaged around 500 to 700 for the past several weeks. However, the South Korean government of President Moon Jae-in has responded to the surge in cases with half-measures in order to reduce the impact on big business.

People wearing face masks as a precaution against the coronavirus walk through a tunnel in Seoul, South Korea, Monday, May 24, 2021 [Credit: AP Photo/Lee Jin-man]

As of Wednesday, there were a total of 137,682 cases in the country, including an additional 707 new cases from the previous day. Nearly 2,000 people have died from the virus, though the real number is likely far higher. The BMJ (British Medical Journal) reported this month that South Korea had 4,000 excess deaths in 2020, double the official death count from the virus.

Seoul has decided that these numbers are acceptable. Rather than implementing measures to contain the outbreak, the central government has instead utilized a 5-level scheme designed to appear to be enforcing social distancing while largely allowing businesses to stay open and keeping workplaces like auto factories and distribution centers up and running.

Even the limited measures currently in place have only been imposed in a reactive manner, with the government announcing new restrictions only after the COVID-19 virus had begun to spread. Currently, Seoul and the surrounding Gyeonggi-do Province are under Level 2 social distancing guidelines while the rest of the country is under Level 1.5. This includes a ban on gatherings of five or more people and a requirement for businesses like restaurants and bars to close by 10 p.m. Schools, which are a major source of transmission for the virus, remain open with students rotating between in-person and online classes.

Even this half-measure for schools is now set to be scrapped. Seoul announced on May 12, that all schools would reopen to in-person classes without any online classes in September—the second half of the school year. This is before the government’s plan of achieving herd immunity by November through its vaccination program, meaning more students, teachers and their families will be put at risk.

Underscoring the danger, the very next day, health authorities reported that at least 331 students had caught COVID-19 in that past week, an increase of more than two students per day over the previous week. Many students also continue to attend after-school academies for subjects like mathematics, English, and music, in contact with others from different schools and risking a broader transmission of the virus.

Seoul’s disregard for public safety is despite the fact that the country has reported more than a thousand cases of the more contagious variants from Britain, South Africa, Brazil, and India. Over the past two weeks, the number of cases with unknown infection routes stood at 27.2 percent. Allowing daily new cases to stay in the hundreds without an effective response is inviting an even more explosive growth of the deadly virus.

Despite this, the ruling Democratic Party (DP) suggested on May 24 that restrictions could be further relaxed for those who have been vaccinated, including exemptions from quarantine, the ban on gatherings of more than five people, and allowing them to patronize restaurants after 10 p.m. The DP is also considering loosening the mandated nationwide wearing of masks, which was implemented shortly after the pandemic began last year and has played a large role in preventing even wider outbreaks.

These plans go against medical advice. There have been at least four “breakthrough” COVID cases of people who have caught the virus despite being vaccinated. The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency has stated that even if fully vaccinated, people still need to wear masks. This is in line with epidemiologists in the US who have sharply criticized the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention there for lifting mask restrictions on vaccinated people as it is still unclear if vaccinated people can spread COVID.

Furthermore, while beginning in February, South Korea’s vaccination program has largely been a failure, with only about 3.8 percent of the country’s 52 million people fully vaccinated. At the current rate, only about 11 percent of the population will be fully vaccinated by the government’s November deadline.

The Moon administration has instead acted to secure lucrative business deals for South Korean companies while aligning with Washington’s anti-China campaign. During Moon’s trip last week to Washington for a summit with President Joe Biden, Samsung Biologics signed a deal with Moderna to package the latter’s COVID-19 vaccine in South Korea. The companies have not released details of the deal. South Korean companies already have similar deals for the AstraZeneca, Novavax, and Sputnik V vaccines.

Vice Health Minister Gang Do-tae stated, “Through the cooperation between South Korea and the United States, we can significantly increase the production and supply of COVID-19 vaccines, which will eventually ease the supply shortages around the globe.” However, increased production for US companies will allow Washington to continue hoarding vaccines, deepening so-called vaccine nationalism, not easing it.

The anti-China perspective was on full display at the Biden-Moon summit, where the two leaders released a joint statement primarily targeting Beijing. The two called for “reforming” the World Health Organization (WHO), a jab at the body for failing to endorse Washington’s campaign blaming China for the COVID-19 pandemic.

Their statement went on to say, “We will also support a transparent and independent evaluation and analysis of the origins of the COVID-19 outbreak and for investigating outbreaks of unknown origin in the future.”

This seemingly innocuous phrase is in fact another attack on China. While the WHO has ruled out the possibility of COVID-19 being released from a lab, first Donald Trump and now the Biden administration have propagated the lie that Beijing is responsible for unleashing the virus, whether on purpose or through an accident.

The US-South Korea “vaccine alliance,” as Moon called it, is nothing more than the continuation of the US anti-China campaign and drive to war, not a genuine effort to eradicate COVID-19 or protect the global population.

Sri Lankan president imposes strikes ban on state-sector workers

W.A. Sunil

Sri Lankan President Gotabhaya Rajapakse issued an extraordinary gazette on Thursday, declaring that most state sectors were “essential services,” effectively banning all industrial action. The aim of the draconian order is to suppress the rising popular anger and unrest over deteriorating living conditions and the escalating attacks on democratic rights as COVID-19 infections rapidly increase across the country.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa [Credit: AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena]

All ports, customs, petroleum, state railway and bus transport, administrative and welfare offices, state banking, including the Central Bank, and insurance services nationally, as well as waste management by local authorities, are now under Essential Public Services Act.

Under this law, any employee of these institutions who does not attend work faces “conviction, after summary trial before a Magistrate” and “liable to rigorous imprisonment” of two to five years and/or a fine of between 2,000 and 5,000 rupees ($US11–$US25) or both. The “movable and immoveable property” of anyone convicted can be seized by the state and his or her name “removed from any register maintained for profession or vocation.”

In addition, it is an offence for an individual to “incite, induce or encourage any other person” not to attend work through a “physical act or by any speech or writing.” This means that anyone fighting to defend the democratic rights of those employees can be punished.

The immediate reason for Rajapakse’s decision appears to be in order to ban a planned national strike on Thursday by 12,000 government village officers, who are demanding COVID-19 vaccinations. However, the government’s draconian measure is to preempt strikes and protests over similar demands by broader sections of the working class.

Last November, Rajapakse promulgated an essential service order on 15,000 port authority workers, after they began raising concerns and threatening industrial action over the danger of COVID-19 in their workplaces and the government’s privatisation measures. The strike ban on port workers was allowed to lapse after three months, but only after the trade unions temporarily dissipated workers’ protests.

Escalating COVID-19 infections, sharp price rises in food and other essentials, and the refusal of the government to provide adequate social relief or proper protection has seen the eruption of strikes and protests involving postal, railway, plantation, education, health and electricity workers in recent months.

While Sri Lanka officially recorded 94,949 COVID-19 cases between March 15, 2020 until April 15, these numbers, however, have spiked by 80 percent, up by 76,328, since then. These figures are a serious underestimate of the real situation because of low testing numbers.

The sudden rise in coronavirus infection numbers has shattered Rajapakse’s claims that the pandemic is under control and has heightened concerns by Sri Lankan workers, youth and the rural masses who are anxiously following the coronavirus disaster in India and globally.

Medical specialists in Sri Lanka and internationally have publicly warned that the island faces an impending “catastrophe” and called on Colombo to lockdown all non-essential services and rapidly overhaul the country’s rundown health services.

The government, which vehemently opposes any lockdown, has responded by imposing travel restrictions for two weeks, until June 7. President Rajapakse insists that the economy, and the export sector in particular, must remain open. Last week he banned health and other officials making media statements about the pandemic unless authorised by him, because it might “panic people.”

Health workers, including attendants, nurses and doctors, are becoming increasingly angry over impossible workloads as hospitals are inundated with COVID-19 patients. Several health workers have died from the highly-infectious virus.

Hundreds of infections have been reported in garment factories, in and outside the country’s free trade zones (FTZ), some employing as many as 5,000 workers. In recent weeks several plants were forced to close in response to angry concerns by workers and nearby residents over the lack of COVID-19 safety measures.

Like every capitalist government around the world, the Rajapakse regime, which unwaveringly defends the profit interest of big business, insists that employees must keep working.

On May 4, Nimal Siripala de Silva, the labour minister, declared that garment bosses could cut workers’ wages by 50 percent and terminate them if their companies faced problems created by the pandemic.

Not a single opposition party or trade union has opposed Rajapakse’s draconian announcement on Thursday, a measure that directly affects the democratic rights of hundreds of thousands of state sector workers and anyone defending their right to take any industrial action. The same unions and political parties did not oppose the essential services order imposed on port workers last November.

This is no accident. These organisations have no fundamental differences with the Rajapakse government’s repressive measures and are dedicated to defending the profit system.

Earlier this month Samagi Jana Balawegaya, the main opposition party, urged the government to call an all-party conference on the worsening pandemic. The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, declared that if the regime was not ready to work with the opposition a “broad-based mechanism” should be formed. Similar advice was offered by the Tamil National Alliance.

Like the Rajapakse government, these parties are acutely nervous about the developing mass opposition of the working class and the poor.

President Rajapakse has also reactivated its previously declared extraordinary gazette to mobilise Sri Lanka’s armed forces to “maintain law and order” in the country’s 25 districts. These forces and the police who are now patrolling the streets, will be mobilised against the working class and the poor as they come into struggle.

The working class must take these developments seriously. The Rajapakse government, aided and abetted by the opposition parties and the trade unions, is intensively stepping up its preparations for all-out class war.