Netanyahu makes far-right appeal on eve of Israeli election

Barry Grey

In a flurry of public appearances and interviews on the eve of Tuesday’s parliamentary election, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought to unite right-wing voters behind his Likud Party with a series of ultranationalist, anti-Palestinian declarations.

Narrowly trailing the Labor Party-led Zionist Union bloc in election-eve polls, Netanyahu was evidently attempting to position himself either to win the election outright by siphoning votes away from smaller right-wing parties or place Likud in the strongest possible position to head up a new coalition government even if he fails to secure the largest number of votes.

In an interview posted Monday on the NRG news web site, Netanyahu seemed to revoke his previous formal adherence to a “two-state” policy that sanctions the creation of a demilitarized, internally divided Palestinian mini-state in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza alongside Israel. He declared that if he were reelected, he would not permit the establishment of any Palestinian state.

“Whoever moves to establish a Palestinian state or intends to withdraw from territory is simply yielding territory for radical Islamic terrorist attacks against Israel,” he said. Asked if that meant a Palestinian state would not be established if he remained prime minister, he said, “Indeed.”

Earlier on Monday, Netanyahu visited a Jewish settlement on a hilltop outside of East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians have claimed as the capital of a future state. The settlement, Har Homa, has been declared illegal by the Palestinians and by international authorities. Netanyahu oversaw the establishment of the settlement in 1997 during his first stint as prime minister.

“There was a huge objection” to the creation of Har Homa, he boasted, “because this neighborhood is in a location which prevents Palestinian [territorial] contiguity.” He went on to declare: “We will preserve Jerusalem’s unity in all its parts. We will continue to build and fortify Jerusalem so that its division won’t be possible and it will stay united forever.” On this basis he appealed to disaffected Likud supporters to “come home” on Election Day.

At a rally of right-wing voters in Tel Aviv the previous evening, Netanyahu warned that he could lose the election and urged all those who opposed the so-called “center-left” opposition to coalesce around his campaign.

Netanyahu called the election last December, two years ahead of schedule, confident that he would strengthen his position with a relatively easy victory. But election-eve polls predicted that the Zionist Union would take 24 to 26 seats in the 120-member parliament, compared with 20 to 22 for Likud.

Whatever the outcome, the election will initiate a scramble among contending parties and blocs to form the new government. Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, a longtime Likud member, will decide which party to initially ask to form a government. Normally, the party or bloc that receives the highest vote is asked first, but the president has the discretion to proceed differently.

The main opposition to Likud, the Zionist Union headed by Labor’s Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni of TeNua, offers no real alternative to the right-wing, militarist policies of the incumbent government. This “center-left” bloc has gained an edge in the polls by seeking to exploit widespread social anger over rising prices, especially home prices, as well as growing inequality and official corruption.

On foreign policy, it has called for a revival of negotiations with the US-backed Palestinian Authority, pledged to impose a partial halt to Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank, and criticized Netanyahu for his confrontational stance vis-a-vis the Obama administration over Iran.

Netanyahu had calculated that his appearance two weeks ago before a joint session of the US Congress, organized by the Republican leadership behind the back of the White House, would give his campaign a boost. Netanyahu delivered a tirade against the US-led negotiations toward an agreement on Iran’s nuclear program, implicitly accusing President Obama of jeopardizing the security of both Israel and the US.

But that venture has been roundly criticized within Israel, not only by Herzog and Livni, but also by much of the media and sections of Israeli business. There is considerable concern that a shift in US policy toward Iran could signal a lessening of Washington’s unconditional support for Israeli aggression against its neighbors, and that Netanyahu’s confrontational policy is only making matters worse.

Economy Minister Naftali Bennett, leader of the far-right Jewish Home Party, which relies on support from religious nationalists and settlers, commented on the failure of Netanyahu’s strident security warnings to evoke a greater response from the electorate.

“It’s the first time that I can recall that the voters are zeroing in on the economy,” he said in an interview. “Some thought there might be other issues, like Iran, but there hasn’t been.”

The most recent polls for Israel Army Radio found that more than half of Israelis surveyed plan to vote based on social and economic issues and that fewer than 1 in 3 put security at the top of their concerns. Nine of ten respondents said the cost of living would influence their choice. Surveys also showed that over 70 percent of people believe Israel needs a change of direction.

For their part, Netanyahu and other Likud leaders have broadly hinted at American intervention in support of their opponents. In a radio interview Sunday, Netanyahu charged that hostile Israeli journalists and “foreign powers” were behind an anti-Netanyahu campaign.

Bennett told students at Bar-Ilan University outside Tel Aviv: “All the media and all the NGOs are out to overthrow the right. I’ve never seen such a concentrated effort, with money from abroad.”

This is likely more than just political paranoia. One group active in the campaign against the incumbent prime minister is a so-called “grassroots” organizing group calling itself V15, whose slogan is “Anyone but Bibi.” (Bibi is the commonly heard nickname for Netanyahu). One of V15’s top advisers is a former Obama campaign director named Jeremy Bird.

On Sunday, Livni responded to such charges by saying: “The citizens of Israel will replace Netanyahu, not because of what is written in the newspapers, but because they don’t have enough money to buy a newspaper…or buy apartments for their children.”

Business leaders are taking such populist talk by Herzog and Livni in stride. Many think a change in government could produce a “peace dividend” that would prove profitable. Uriel Lynn, head of the Federation of Israeli Chambers of Commerce, said, “There is no real difference in the economic policy of the political parties who are supposed to be coalition leaders.”

The crisis of Likud and possibility of Netanyahu’s ouster, after six years as prime minister, reflect a broader social and political crisis of Israeli society. Following last summer’s bloody but inconclusive assault on Gaza, which killed over 2,200 Palestinians, overwhelmingly civilians and many of them women and children, there is growing war weariness within the Israeli population and a sense of having reached an impasse. Social grievances have been intensified as a result of stepped-up attacks on living standards and social services carried out to pay for the endless wars and military interventions of the Zionist state.

But opposition among workers and youth from the left can find no real expression within the existing political set-up. The narrowness of the differences between the major official parties is indicated by the fact that both Herzog and Livni were members of Netanyahu’s cabinet before they were forced out of office. They supported the Israeli slaughter of civilians in Gaza this past summer and all of the previous wars carried out by Israel in the region. Livni was foreign minister during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006.

In fact, the leaders of all of the pro-Zionist parties contending in the election and bidding to play the role of kingmaker in forming the next ruling coalition were previously ministers in the Likud government under the current prime minister. This includes Avigdor Lieberman, head of the settler-based Israel Our Home Party, Moshe Kahlon of Kulanu, and Yair Lapid, the former talk show host who leads Yesh Atid.

Syriza makes new pledges to impose troika austerity

Robert Stevens

On Monday, Greece’s Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left) government continued talks with representatives of its main creditors, the “troika” of the European Union (EU), European Central Bank (ECB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The “technical talks” between Greece and its creditors—now called the Brussels Group—began last week in Brussels and are continuing in Athens on Thursday. They are centred on finalising the austerity measures to be implemented by Syriza by the end of April.

The talks stem from Syriza’s February 20 capitulation to the troika, when it agreed to a four-month extension of the hated austerity programme. They will reportedly focus on “structural reforms”, including changes in labour regulations and privatisation policies, and assess a list of reforms proposed by Syriza.

The troika’s stranglehold over Greece has tightened since Syriza’s election, with banks unable to access money markets and reliant on temporary, high-interest loans from the ECB. Without a further tranche of €7.2 billion in loans, now being withheld by the troika until an austerity package to their satisfaction is agreed, Greece will be forced to default on its €320 billion debt in a matter of weeks.

On Monday, Greece paid €580 million due to the IMF; it must pay a further €350 million on Friday.

This weekend, Greek prime minister and Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras and Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis deepened their commitment to the troika’s austerity agenda, making clear that the pledges made in Syriza’s election programme are to be shelved indefinitely.

Varoufakis chose the Ambrosetti finance forum in Cernobbio on Saturday as the venue to sell Syriza as the only force capable of enforcing the necessary changes to make the Greek economy internationally competitive.

On Monday, the Financial Times hailed his appearance under the headline, “Varoufakis spreads gospel of radical reform to Italy’s capitalists”. The FTwrote that in a “bravura performance”, Varoufakis “appeared to win over a sceptical audience of Italian business leaders.”

Varoufakis told his audience that “successive Greek governments were to blame for many of his country’s problems,” the FT noted approvingly. Varoufakis said, “We blame ourselves. That is why this government was elected. We are the leftwing riff raff that has been arguing for decades that the Greek oligarchy is the greatest impediment to growth.” He called on the ECB—who responded to Syriza’s election on an anti-austerity ticket by cutting off the new government’s access to any external funding—to loosen credit and introduce a “kind of Quantitative Easing in cooperation with the European Investment Bank.”

On the sidelines of the conference, Varoufakis said of Syriza’s election pledges, including increasing the minimum wage, that “our promises concern a four-year parliamentary term ... They will be spaced out in an optimal way, in a way that is in tune with our bargaining stance in Europe and also with the fiscal position of the Greek state.”

On Sunday, Syriza continued to grovel before the troika. Varoufakis told German public broadcaster ARD, “Our intention is to do everything possible to pay back every single euro. My message to the viewers this evening is very simple: help us to grow, so that we can pay the money back.”

The latest pledge to adhere to the rapacious demands of the financial aristocracy came after Tsipras secured a “Joint Document of Co-operation” with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The document aims at the “design and implementation of the structural reforms needed to ensure inclusive and sustainable economic growth.”

It states, “Greece is already making important progress in a number of other reform areas identified by the OECD”, referring to the OECD’s leading role in designing austerity measures imposed on Greece since 2010. By January 2014, the previous New Democracy (ND) government had agreed to around 80 percent of the OECD recommendations. Two months later, the OECD authored a “Competition Assessment Review” on Greece, noting that its study “identifies hundreds of competition-distorting rules and provisions.”

Syriza’s OECD agreement takes over where ND left off. It calls for new measures, “Reducing the administrative burden to business” and commits to policies in favour of big business, including “good labour practices”. Under the section on “Public finance and spending”, it calls for a plan to “improve the efficiency of public financial management frameworks.”

Another key area of cooperation is “Disrupting oligopolies and cartels through greater competition and product market reform” and setting up “a dynamic business environment.”

The clearest indication of the type of measures being prepared is the following boast: “Since the crisis, the OECD has been providing targeted advice to a number of governments, including Mexico, Ireland, Portugal, Italy, Spain and France ... OECD recommendations are regularly used as the basis of reforms and legislation”. In all these countries, crippling austerity measures have been forced through, with no popular mandate, over the last decade.

While Syriza is doing everything possible to reach an agreement that will satisfy finance capital, there are concerns within ruling circles that the troika’s intransigence leaves no room for Syriza to manoeuvre and placate social opposition that will grow as austerity worsens.

In a sign of growing tensions, Panos Kammenos—who leads Syriza’s coalition partners, the right-wing xenophobic Independent Greeks—is ramping up his party’s nationalist bile.

He was responding to comments by German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, who said due to a lack of progress on an austerity agreement, Greece could accidentally leave the euro zone, in a so-called “Grexident”. Schäuble said, “We don’t exactly know what those in charge in Greece are doing”, and warned “we can’t rule out” a Greek exit from the euro zone.

Kammenos said, “I don’t understand why he turns against Greece every day in new statements.” Describing Schäuble’s comments as “psychological war”, he said, “I get the feeling that the German government is out to get us and some really want to push us out of the euro zone.”

Previously, Kammenos threatened to use Greece as a base to send thousands of migrants to other parts of Europe, including Germany, if Greece was forced out of the euro zone. Repeating this, he said if Greece exited, “Then no agreements would be valid anymore, no treaties, nothing. We would no longer be obliged to take in refugees as a country of arrival. Whoever wants to push us out of the euro zone should know that.”

Kammenos also demanded that the EU compensate Greece for its loss of trade due to ongoing sanctions against Russia. Kammenos, who previously said that Greece could seek funding from Russia instead of the troika, warned if Athens received no compensation from the EU, “[W]e can’t and don’t want to take part in sanctions against Russia, which are only damaging our economy.”

The daily To Vima, which supported the previous ND/PASOK government, raised that the demands of the troika were “destabilizing the economy and businesses”, forcing “Tsipras into a constant retreat, capable of exhausting and undermining him politically.”

It said, “The government has made a major turn and is prepared to back down some more,” and “are even prepared to accept privatisation and tax measures that the previous government would not even date discuss.”

It warned that an agreement may not be reached by April, and “Our partners want us on our knees by June, committed and incapable of anything, to be addicted and pleading for a new €30-40 billion loan, which will bind us forever, once and for all.”

Russian President Putin says Ukraine crisis threatens nuclear war

Alex Lantier

According to a documentary aired Sunday on Russian public television, featuring interviews with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Russia prepared for nuclear war after last year’s pro-Western putsch on February 21-22 in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev.

After an all-night meeting with Russian security officials, Putin decided at dawn on February 23 to prepare the return of Crimea to Russia. Fearing that far-right Ukrainian nationalist militias would attack the largely ethnic Russian population of Crimea and the strategic Russian naval base at Sevastopol, Russia mobilized forces it stationed in Crimea, under the terms of Russia’s lease of the Sevastopol base.

The Crimean population ultimately voted to rejoin Russia, and pro-Kiev forces in Crimea did not resist and were allowed to escape Crimea unharmed. “We monitored the situation and had to bring in our equipment,” Putin said. “They would have been wiped out after the first salvo.”

According to Putin, however, as the Kremlin and the Russian military began their planning, they did not know whether NATO would react by going to war: “This could not be understood immediately, therefore at the first stage of work, I was accordingly forced to provide guidance to our Armed Forces. And not just provide guidance, but issue direct instructions, orders regarding the possible conduct of Russia and our armed forces given any development of events.”

Putin said he was ready for “the most adverse development of events.” As the interview makes clear, this referred to all-out nuclear war with NATO. The Kremlin prepared to arm its nuclear forces, Putin said: “We were prepared to do this. I was talking with Western colleagues and saying to them that [Crimea] is our historical territory, that Russian people live there, that they were in danger, and that we could not abandon them.”

He later added, “As for our nuclear forces, they, as always, are in a state of full combat readiness.”

The implications of Putin’s statement that he prepared Russia’s army for any possible development are staggering. Washington has always refused to issue a so-called “no first use” pledge not to launch a first nuclear strike. It must be assumed Russia’s nuclear forces were placed on a hair trigger, prepared for a full-scale response to signs of a US-led NATO nuclear attack on Russia.

While the details are naturally classified, such a response would involve mass launches of Russian missiles in minutes, before they were caught on the ground and annihilated by incoming NATO missiles. Thousands of missiles—each far more powerful than the US bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, killing hundreds of thousands—would rain down on army bases, industrial infrastructure, and communications and control centers across North America and Europe.

Putin’s remarks confirm the warnings made by the World Socialist Web Site throughout the Ukraine crisis. In the midst of the US provocations following the crash of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17, the WSWS wrote, “Are you ready for war—including possibly nuclear war—between the United States, Europe, and Russia? That is the question that everyone should be asking…”

From the beginning, the driving force in the Ukraine crisis has been the intervention of Washington and Berlin to back a putsch against pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych and install a far-right regime in Kiev. This has been part of a broader, aggressive agenda for asserting US hegemony over Eurasia that poses the risk of a nuclear conflagration threatening the survival of humanity itself.

The response of the Putin regime to the imperialist offensive, based on nationalism and the defense of capitalist property, is reactionary and politically bankruptcy. The corrupt Russian business oligarchy that emerged from the restoration of capitalism in the USSR in 1991 is incapable of appealing to mass opposition to war internationally. It oscillates between threatening nuclear war and seeking an accommodation with imperialism.

The TV interview suggested that Putin initially faced pressure from the Russian military for a more aggressive course of action. It cited reports from the Russian Defense Ministry that “military specialists” proposed using “all available means” to demonstrate Russia’s readiness to defend itself.

In the interview, however, Putin downplayed the crisis. He said, “Despite the complexity and dramatic nature of the situation, the Cold War has ended, and we do not need international crises like the one in the Caribbean [the 1962 Cuban missile crisis]. All the more so since the current situation has not prompted the need for such actions, and that would contradict our own interests.”

Even as Putin charged Washington with plotting the Kiev putsch and laid out Russian fears of nuclear annihilation at the hands of NATO, he grotesquely referred to US officials as “our American friends and partners.”

In fact, if anything the situation is more dangerous now than during most of the Cold War. Last year, a London think tank issued a report stating that, amid the NATO military buildup in Eastern Europe after the Kiev putsch, forty “near misses” brought NATO and Russian planes close to direct conflict. German news magazine Der Spiegel and former Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev have warned of the risk of world war.

The aggressive role of imperialism is highlighted by discussion in US ruling circles of adopting a policy of aggressive nuclear war. This was summarized in a 2006 article by two professors, Keir Lieber and Daryl Press, in Foreign Affairs, the US political establishment’s leading foreign policy journal.

“It will probably soon be possible for the United States to destroy the long-range nuclear arsenals of Russia and China with a first strike,” they wrote. Due to the disintegration of Russian infrastructure after the restoration of capitalism, Russia had only a few nuclear bomber bases or mobile missile launchers; its ballistic missile submarines largely spent their time motionless in port. These could all be obliterated by a massive, preemptive US nuclear strike.

Washington could now contemplate a preemptive nuclear strike to disarm Russia and China, according to Lieber and Press. Citing computer models of nuclear war, they wrote that a “surprise [nuclear] attack would have a good chance of destroying every Russian bomber base, submarine, and ICBM.” They added that China’s nuclear arsenal, lacking mobile land-based nuclear missiles or effective ballistic missile submarines, “is even more vulnerable to a US attack.”

They did also note, however, concerns about such a policy in some US foreign policy circles: “Russia and China will work furiously to reduce their vulnerability by building more missiles, submarines, and bombers; putting more warheads on each weapon; keeping their nuclear forces on higher peacetime levels of alert; and adopting hair-trigger retaliatory policies… [T]he risk of accidental, unauthorized, or even intentional nuclear war—especially during moments of crisis—may climb to levels not seen for decades.”

Putin’s remarks on the Ukraine crisis make clear that such risks have indeed come to pass. The nuclear arms race is intensifying in line with the risk of war.

Before the US and Russia formally announced that they would end their collaboration on nuclear disarmament in January, the Obama administration unveiled plans last year to spend more than $1 trillion in upgrading the US nuclear arsenal.

Russia and China are also pouring billions of dollars into their nuclear arsenals, hoping to develop the ability to deter a US first nuclear strike. Russia has begun a comprehensive modernization of its nuclear arsenal that is expected to come to fruition early in the next decade. The proportion of nuclear missiles housed on mobile launchers is expected to pass from 15 to 70 percent, and Russia is launching a new Borei class of nuclear missile submarines.

China is introducing DF-31 ballistic missiles, housed on mobile launchers, that are solid-fueled and therefore quicker to prepare for launch. It has also built the Yulin Naval Base, which houses new Type-094 ballistic missile submarine on Hainan Island in the South China Sea. It is working to increase the range of its submarine-launched nuclear ballistic missiles, which still lack the range to threaten a retaliatory strike against United States from launch points in the South China Sea.

These developments underscore the immense dangers to the population of the entire world produced by the reckless and incendiary operations of US imperialism. The question of nuclear war is not simply a theoretical possibility, but an increasingly immediate danger. This danger must be answered through the building of a powerful movement of the international working class, based on the perspective of international socialism.

The oil workers’ strike and the return of the class struggle in the US

Jerry White

The month-and-a-half strike by oil workers in the United States has demonstrated once again that the essential driving force of social and political development in the US, like the rest of the world, is the class struggle.

Despite musings about the “disappearance of the working class” and the obsessive fixation with race and gender in upper middle-class academic circles, capitalist society, in the famous words of Karl Marx, is split “into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other—Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.”

The struggle has pitted 30,000 oil workers against some of the richest and most politically connected corporations in the world: the energy conglomerates, which buy and sell governments, order the launching of wars and military coups and pollute the planet with impunity.

Driven solely by profit considerations, Shell, ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron and the other companies neglect infrastructure repairs, refuse to hire full-time workers and exploit the present workforce to the point of exhaustion, indifferent to the explosions, fires and environment damage that result with alarming regularity.

Tens of millions of workers in the US and around the world—who have suffered eroding living standards even as corporate profits and the stock markets hit record highs—support the fight of the oil workers. Once again, however, the greatest obstacle to the unification of the working class has proven to be the pro-capitalist and nationalist trade unions, which sabotaged the strike and are now seeking to impose the dictates of corporate management and the Obama administration.

From the beginning, the United Steelworkers union (USW) worked consciously and deliberately to try to ensure the strike’s defeat. The USW limited the strike to a small fraction of the workers it represents in the industry, although USW workers have the power to shut down two-thirds of the refinery capacity in the US. It isolated striking workers even as Shell executives announced that they would replace them with “relief workers.” The union joined the effort to starve workers into submission by withholding any significant aid from its $350 million strike fund.

Finally last week, the USW agreed to a supposed “contract” that is an insult to the workers who manned picket lines, in some cases in the freezing cold, for more than six weeks. Worthless promises from management to provide the union with “opportunities for discussion” on fatigue issues and contracting out work were palmed off by USW President Leo Gerard as “vast improvements in safety and staffing.” By demobilizing workers, the USW has now left workers continuing the strike at BP, Tesoro and Marathon to fight alone.

Once again workers have been confronted with the brick wall known as the American “labor movement.” Like so many struggles over the last four years—the Indianapolis GM workers, Wisconsin public sector workers, Verizon workers, Chicago teachers, Illinois Caterpillar workers, Findlay, Ohio Cooper Tire workers, New York City school bus drivers, West Coast dockworkers, to name a few—the defeats inflicted were not due to any lack of determination on the part of the workers. In every case, the enormous potential revealed in these struggles was systematically sabotaged, defused and smothered by the AFL-CIO and other unions.

The role of the unions is a product not simply of the corruption of individual leaders, though of this there is plenty. The transformation of the trade unions into direct tools of the corporations and the government is the product of a decades-long degeneration, rooted in powerful objective changes in the structure of the world economy. These transformations have rendered the nationally based and pro-capitalist trade unions obsolete and in fact reactionary.

The great impulse for the mass industrial organization of the American working class was the victory of the Russian Revolution, which served as an immense inspiration to the class struggle internationally. In the 1930s, the US saw insurrectionary class battles that led to the formation of the industrial unions. Under conditions of revolutionary upheaval, the ruling class responded by implementing certain social reforms—an effort to “save capitalism from itself.”

The newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), however, remained subordinate to the Democratic Party. The alliance with this capitalist party meant the abandonment of any fight for a fundamental change in social relations, and the new unions quickly made their peace with American capitalism. This was cemented by the postwar anticommunist purge of the socialist pioneers who had built the industrial unions. The merger of the AFL and the CIO in 1955 marked the repudiation of any radical social struggle.

The period of social reform—which Walter Reuther and other union leaders claimed would last forever—proved to be short-lived. By the late 1970s, facing the loss of its economic hegemony, the US corporate and financial elite shifted its policy from class compromise to class war. President Reagan’s firing of the PATCO air traffic controllers in 1981 initiated a period of social counterrevolution, pursued by both big-business parties, that continues to this day.

The global integration of capitalist production was the final nail in the coffin for the nationally based trade unions in the US and around the world. In every country, the unions have abandoned any defense of workers’ interests and have overseen the relentless destruction of wages, benefits and work conditions.

The anti-working class alliance between the unions and the Democratic Party has been on display in the oil workers’ strike. From the beginning, the USW was determined to prevent the struggle from escalating into a political confrontation with the Obama administration, with which the USW has the closest relations. USW President Leo Gerard sits on Obama’s Advanced Manufacturing Partnership committee, where he conspires with the CEOs from Alcoa, Caterpillar and other Fortune 500 companies to lower wages and pension and health care costs in order to “in-source” production from China, Mexico and other low-wage countries. The oil workers’ strike is a harbinger for the reemergence of open class conflict in America after decades in which the trade unions suppressed it. Under conditions in which corporations are making record profits and the stock market is booming in the sixth year of a so-called economic recovery, there is a growing determination by tens of millions of workers to reverse years of eroding living standards.

To unleash the social power of the working class, it is necessary first of all to throw off the dead weight of the pro-company trade unions. New organizations, led by the most self-sacrificing and militant workers and democratically controlled by workers themselves, must be built to spearhead a counteroffensive by the working class. This must involve far wider sections of workers, including the majority who are not in unions and the tens of millions of immigrant and unemployed workers.

At the same time there must be an understanding that workers face not a trade union struggle but a political struggle against an economic and political system—capitalism—that operates on a world scale. The fight to defend the social rights of workers—to decent paying and safe jobs, to economic security, health care, education and a future for the next generation—pits workers directly against the two parties of big business and the bankrupt profit system they defend.

Nowhere does the necessity for socialism and economic planning demonstrate itself more clearly than in the global energy industry. If social needs, including the health and well-being of oil workers, are to take precedence over the single-minded drive for profit, then the industry must be nationalized under the democratic control of working people, as part of a socialist planned economy in the US and internationally.

On The Interrelationship Between Bovine And Human Beings

Subhash Gatade

''in our religious scriptures ( Puranas) life of a cow is more important than any number of people'' ( Puranon me insaan se jyada gay ko mahtv diya jata hai)

- Giriraj Kishore, Vice President of VHP, On the public lynching of five dalits, October 2002

BJP Haryana chief Ram Bilas Sharma has promised to treat cow slaughter as a crime as heinous as murder. If elected, he said at the manifesto release function...

TNN | Oct 3, 2014, 05.06AM IST

There is a competition of sorts between BJP ruled states to fulfil what a Haryana leader said ' to fulfil Modiji's dream'. Close on the heels of Maharashtra government's getting clearance to ban cow slaughter, there is news in a section of the press that the government in Haryana would table a similar bill in the assembly.

Sharing few snippets of the bill and comparing it with punishment of other offences, a newspaper report tells us that if the offence is insult to modesty of women the maximum jail sentence would be one year or fine, if it is molestation then it would be two years or fine, for theft the maximum jail term would be three years, for assault it would be 3 months or fine, and for causing grievous hurt it would be maximum seven years. (Times of India, 14 th March 2015) and if it is beef in any form then it would be punishable by upto ten years in jail.

Once the bill is passed by the assembly and ratified by the President, Haryana perhaps would reach number one position as far as extending punishment for this act. If for a similar act Maharashtra has stipulated 5 years punishment, M.P. has decided to have 7 years punishment, Haryana plans to give 10 years. People would very well remember that during campaign for assembly elections the BJP had promised to make a stringent law 'equalling cow slaughter with murder'.

Undoubtedly, Giriraj Kishore, (1920-2014) the octogenarian leader of Vishwa Hindu Parishad, an affiliated organisation of the RSS and a veteran of the Ram Janambhoomi movement, would have definitely rejoiced over this proposal about increase in quantum of punishment, in a state ruled by a fellow RSS Pracharak. He would have felt that the state is slowly inching towards 'glory of ancient India' which he had shared with people as far as interrelationship between bovine and human beings is concerned when the state had witnessed public lynching of five dalits by a blood-thirsty mob in Dulina, Jhajjar.

Not very many people would remember today his words when those hapless five dalits who were under police custody- who were engaged in trade in hides and were carrying a dead cow in a minitruck- were brutally killed by a few hundred/thousand mob of people, in the very presence of many senior officials of the police deptt as well as administration. (12 th October, 2002). It was an event very much on the lines of the recent Dimapur killings and in some ways worse than it. Instead of condemning this act of lynching of fellow human beings and demanding strict action against the perpetrators and at least expressing sympathies towards the departed victims Giriraj Kishor had in an obtuse way tried to 'rationalise' this clear crime against humanity by pontificating on how religious scriputres treat human beings vis-a-vis the bovine. Perhaps his reaction had also do with the fact that many activists of different Hindutva Supremacist organisations were found to be involved in committing the crime and this veteran of Ram Janambhoomi movement - who had started his social-political life as a RSS worker - wanted to send a message to the powers that be.

In any civilised country such an incident of public lynching by a mob would have generated such an uproar and anger that the police would have been forced to take immediate actions against its perpetrators and it would have also led to serious introspection on part of the rest of the society. Nothing of that sort happened. A society which is based on graded hierarchies rooted in the logic of 'purity and pollution' and which is even sanctified by the gods or the religion which people profess, we have yet to develop real sympathies for a fellow human being, if s/he is not related to one's own caste/community. In fact, our is a society which has witnessed larger crimes against humanity and preferred to cleverly maintain conspiracy of silence, with the perpetrators even being rewarded with positions of power and privilege. Anyone having doubts about this can as well look back at the mass killings of dalits in different parts of India or the n number of communal conflagarations which we have been witness to or the deaths of innumerable adivasis and other exploited sections fighting for basic human rights on various occasions.

It is now history but important to remember that despite provisions of the Sc ST Act (Prevention of Atrocity Act 1989) which under section four talks of prosecuting government officials for their inaction, none of the officials who were mute spectators in the lynching of Dalits in Dulina, Jhajjar faced any trouble and as if to show their love for 'Gomata' (mother cow), the first cases in this lynching were registered against the dead dalits only supposedly for 'killing a cow'. Later when it was discovered through medical examination that the cow was already dead, the cases were withdrawn. One still shivers to remember that the same administration even denied police protection to the families of victims who had come to take the dead bodies home for cremation stating that people are in a frenzied mood and they will not be able to protect them. ( 'Jhajjar me Daliton ki Hatya, PUDR, April 2003) And when ultimately the government in power in the state led by INLD Supremo Om Prakash Chautala ( now in jail for participation in a scam) was forced to take symbolic action against people who had supposedly led the mob, then these alleged ringleaders of the crowd were accompanied by thousands of people to the nearest police station to court arrest and were projected as 'martyrs' for the cause of cow protection.

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Anyone conversant with the trajectory of the Hindutva right in this country would tell you that whenever it comes to cow and its protection, none from the RSS Parivar is able to hide its fascination for 'ancient scriptures'. All those scriptures have denied basic human rights to majority of population and have legitimised that a microscopic minority among them derives all the privileges. People would very well remember that when Uma Bharati became chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, in the first half of last decade, one of the first steps taken by her government was banning cow slaughter which was 'justified' by quoting Manusmriti. She had in fact promulgated an Ordinance (January 23, 2004) banning cow slaughter in the state. Explaining the rationale the official statement referred to Manu Smriti (Codes of Manu) to justify the ban which read:

"Manu Smriti ranks the slaughterer of cow as predator and prescribes hard punishment for him.

As rightly commented by Shamsul Islam : 'It was for the first time in the legal history of independent India that a law was being justified for being in tune with Manusmriti.. It had no qualms in declaring its committment to Manusmriti although it very well knew that it was in contravention to the basic principles of constitution.' A look down the memory lane would even tell you that when the Constitution was being drafted under the Chairmanship of Dr Ambedkar, the Hindutva rights and its leaders had opposed its preparation on the specious plea that this same Manusmriti be made independent India's new constitution.

As the state of Haryana is preparing to bring in this new legislation centring around cow, a collage of pictures just flipped before my mind's eye reminding me of the precarious situation of human rights in the state when it comes to marginalised sections of our society.

It has been more than two and half years that 145 Maruti workers are in jail - without bail - who were arrested in the aftermath of the violence on July 18, 2012, in the Manesar plant of Maruti Suzuki in Haryana.

It will be exactly one year on 23 rd March which brought in new focus on the Bhagana case - which has seen protest by dalits for incidents of atrocities on them , encroachment by upper caste people on shamlat land and social boycott - since quite some time. On 23rd March 2014, 4 Dalit girls belonging to the Dhanak community were abducted, drugged and raped by a group of upper caste men in Bhagana, Haryana. The mastermind of this assault on dalit girls is still roaming free.

As we go to the press there is news clipping which showed a Church under construction was demolished in Haryana's Hisar district and the miscreants even hoisted a flag with "Shri Ram" at the site replacing the cross.

All these incidents are mere tip of the iceberg.

One can rather go on enumerating facts and figures about the peaceful existence of denial of life human dignity to large masses of people and the apathy of the state and its vast machinery towards them. We should not forget that Haryana happens to be no one as far as cases of honour killings are concerned where there have been occasions when the Punjab and Haryana high courts had even prodded it to use provisions of special laws to curb the menace. It is also the state which has one of the worst sex ratios in the country underlining the fact that gendercide is occurring at frantic speed under the very eyes of the administration.

As things stand today it appears that the people in power seem to be more concerned with making the desi-videsi moneybags happy to maintain a conducive atmosphere for bringing in new investments and also catering to 'sentiments' of a dominant section of people around cow. It is just another way to say that while human beings will have to wait but the bovine cannot.

Rapist Mukesh Singh Is Not Alone In Denigrating Women

Shamsul Islam

The memories of December 16, 2012 rape of a young girl, her brutalization with her male friend and her subsequent death continue haunting us. It is true that rapes are not uncommon in India. Generally, the victims are Dalit or poor women. According to RK Raghavan, ex-chief of the CBI data available on rapes in India “is a gross underestimation. A majority of rapes occurring in villages are suppressed by local bigwigs who run their parallel criminal justice system…Our Caste system and the role of money in the rural setting are principal contributors to this state of affairs.”But this rape in a busy area of the capital of India with clear visuals of terrible brutalization of the victims shook the conscience of Indians specially the middle classes of the capital. The anger of the people was assuaged by the fact that the culprits were tried by a fast track court and sentenced to death.

But these terrible memories have been resurrected with the appearance of a documentary film by the British filmmaker, Leslee Udwin titled ‘India’s Daughter’ which was to appear on BBC and NDTV on March 8; International Women’s Day. This film is based on the interviews of convicts, their families and victim’s parents. The director of the film who herself was victim of sexual assault when she was 18 years old claims that the object of the film is to expose de-humanized set of attitude towards women and through this film she has confronted her own monsters. But the most controversial part is the interview of one of the rapists, Mukesh Singh (sentenced to death). In this interview Mukesh blames the dead victim for attack by arguing that “girls are far more responsible for rape”.He criticizes the rape victim for resisting her attackers, saying that when being raped, she shouldn't have fought back. She should just have been silent and allowed the rape. Then they'd have dropped her off after doing her and only hit the boy. It is to be noted that Udwin’s film does not endorse Mukesh’s pervert ideas on the contrary questions his mindset through other interviews.

Mukesh Singh also claimsthat rape victim would not have died if she hadn't fought her attackers. In this interview Mukesh describes the rape as an accident and declares that a decent girl won't roam around at nine o'clock at night. He also declares that boys and girls are not equal and work assigned for girls is “Housework and housekeeping” is for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night doing wrong things, wearing wrong clothes.
Two lawyers who defended the rapists in court also appear in the film and defend the treatment meted out to victim by the rapists. One of them A P Singh had previously declared that if his sister or daughter “disgraced herself” by being seen with a man, he would put petrol on her and set her alight.Another defence lawyer in the case, ML Sharma, said: “In our society, we never allow our girls to come out from the house after 6.30 or 7.30 or 8.30 in the evening with any unknown person…You are talking about man and woman as friends. Sorry, that doesn't have any place in our society. We have the best culture. In our culture, there is no place for a woman.”

The Government of India banned this film and Delhi Police registered a first information report against unknown persons in connection with the controversial interview in the film despite the fact that director of the film was present in Delhi. The FIR stated that the content of the documentary were intended to insult the modesty of women and fell under the category of criminal defamation. Minister of state for information and broadcasting Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore said the documentary seems to incite violence against women and it “also creates a sense of fear in the women in our society.” The Home Minister, Rajnath Singh was too furious with the film and assured the nation that all necessary steps would be taken to stop this film from screening. In an identical statement to both houses of parliament he said: "Our government condemns the incident of December 16, 2012 in the strongest possible terms and will not allow any attempt by any individual, group or organisation to leverage such unfortunate incidents for commercial benefits".

It is true that Mukesh made reprehensible statements about women in general and rape victim in particular. It is debatable whether banning a film containing such statements is the solution but fact is that rapist Mukesh is not alone in holding male chauvinistic views denigrating women.India is flooded with popular religious literature denigrating women. Geeta Press based in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, is the largest supplier of this kind of literature. It publishes literature espousing the ‘Hindu’ way of life for women on a very large scale. The low-priced publications are available throughout the country, especially the Hindi belt, and are even sold through Government allotted stalls at railway stations and government roadways stands.

Geeta Press has published more than a dozen titles on the subject, the most prominent of which are: Nari Shiksha (Education of Women) by Hanuman Prasad Poddar, Grahsth Mein Kaise Rahen by Swami Ramsukhdas,Striyon ke Liye Kartawya Shiksha (Education of Duties for Women) and Nari Dharm (Religion of Woman) by Jai Dayal Goindka and a special issue of magazine Kalyanon women.

The authors extensively quote from ancient texts like Shiva Purana and Manusmriti. They borrow heavily from these and other ‘holy’ texts and uphold a subservient wife as the ideal Hindu woman. For instance in the book titled How to Lead a Household Life which is in question—answer format, when a question is posed, “What should the wife do if her husband beats her and troubles her?” Swami Ramsukhdas offers the following sagely advice to the battered wife and her parents. “The wife should think that she is paying her debt of her previous life and thus her sins are being destroyed and she is becoming pure. When her parents come to know this, they can take her to their own house because they have not given their daughter to face this sort of bad behaviour.” And if her parents do not take her to their house, learned Swamiji’s pious advice is: “Under such circumstances what can the helpless wife do? She should reap the fruit of her past actions. She should patiently bear the beatings of her husband with patience. By bearing them she will be free from her sins and it is possible that her husband may start loving her.”

And there is another piece of holy advice for a rape victim and her husband. “As far as possible, it is better for woman (rape victim) to keep mum. If her husband also comes to know of it, he too should keep mum. It is profitable for both of them to keep quiet.”

Is it proper for woman to demand equal rights? The sagely answer is very unambiguous: “No, it is not proper. In fact, a woman has not the right of equality with man…in fact it is ignorance or folly which impels a woman to have desire for the right of equality with man. A wise person is he/she who is satisfied with less rights and more duties.”

This literature about Hindu women openly preaches and glorifies the ghastly practice of Sati. To the question—“Is ‘Sati Partha’ (viz., the tradition of the wife being cremated with the dead body of the husband on the funeral pyre) proper or improper?”—the answer is: “A wife’s cremation with the dead body of her husband on the funeral pyre is not a tradition. She, in whose mind truth and enthusiasm come, burns even without fire and she does not suffer any pain while she burns. This is not a tradition that she should do so, but this is her truth, righteousness and faith in scriptural decorum…It means that it is not a tradition. It is her own religious enthusiasm. On this topic Prabhudatta Brahmachariji has written a book whose title is Cremation of a Wife with her Husband’s Dead Bodyis the Backbone of Hindu Religion, it should be studied.”

Apart from glorifying Sati, the Gita Press publications like Nari Dharmproduces dozens of shlokas from holy scriptures to establish that women are not capable of enjoying independence. This book begins with the chapter swatantarta ke liye striyon ki ayogeta (incapability of women for independence). Ironical as it may seem, the above publications of Geeta Press can be bought from government allotted rent-free stalls at more than 70 railway stations and book vendors or mobile vans that often sell their ware even in the premises of the Central Secretariat in New Delhi from where the Democratic India is governed.

The ideas of rapist Mukesh Singh and his lawyers are not aberrations or isolated ideas. As commented by Santosh Desai in the Times of India such ideas are not the preserve of a criminal few but “part of a much larger system of belief”. They are drops from the ocean of de-humanized anti-women popular religious literature freely available in India. They are the creation of an anti-women philosophical system which is allowed a free run. The Indian Penal Code and the Criminal Procedure Code which have been invoked to ban Leslee Udwin’s film are reduced as mere spectators in face of the onslaught by such literature on women. If characters like Mukesh Singh are to be controlled and contained then we will have to check sources from where such evil ideas originate.

Religion, Politics And Society: A Birds Eye View

Ram Puniyani 

What has religion to do with politics? What has violence to do with religion? And how does the expression of major political agenda shape itself in contemporary times? Roughly speaking it seems that the religion is being used as a cover for many a political phenomenon. This seems to be the observation more so from South Asian-West Asian perspective.

To talk of last few decades, the first major presence of religion in politics began with the coming to power of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. This was the political aftermath of the overthrow of Mossadeq, the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran in 1953. Mossadeq had nationalized the oil wealth and this move hurt the interests of the Western oil (mainly US) companies. After the overthrow of this Government, Raza Shah Pahlavi, a US stooge, was installed into the seat of power. He was overthrown in a revolution which was so manipulated that Ayatollah Khomeini came to capture power. Khomeini and Company’s politics was that of Islamic Fundamentalism. With this, there were rumblings in the media, and phrase ‘Islam: the new threat’ came to be coined. In South Asia during these decades in India we see the rise of politics of identity constructed around Hindu religion, in Pakistan Zia ul Haq Islamized the politics and Maulana Maududi’s interpretation of Islam came in handy for Zia to consolidate his power. A bit later in Myanmar in due course we saw the rise of likes of Ashin Wirathu, also called as Burma’s Bin Laden, Sri Lanka also saw the emergence of Buddhist clergy which ran along to supplement the politics in name of Buddhism. On a different note one also recalls the presence of Christian Fundamentalism in US.

With the Twin Tower, 9/11, attack, the US media coined the word “Islamic terrorism’, dragging Islam into the murky world of terrorist violence. Here after ‘Islam, Muslims are the cause of terrorist violence’ has been a part of social understating all over. The deviant tendencies with Islam, Political Islam have done enough to deepen this understanding to the detriment of Muslims all over.

The morality aspects of most religions’ talked of Humanism in the contexts in which they emerged. Somehow, the identity aspects of religion, the rituals; communitarian functions, clergy etc. became the dominant one’s and have been perceived as major parts of religion today.
In feudal society, pre-industrial society, we see a big alliance of clergy of religions with the powers that be. Clergy did evolve the concepts for people’s subservience to the power of the rulers. King-Pope in Europe, Nawab-Shahi Imam in large parts of Islamic world and Raja-Rajguru, where Hinduism was prevalent; formed the nexus of this alliance where the rulers took the cover of religion to carry on with their goals of power. During this era again we see that Kings' expansionism also expressed through the language of religion, the quest of Christian kings for expansion was called Crusade, Muslim kings had Jihad as a cover and not to be left behind Hindu kings expanded their kingdoms under the guise of Dharmayuddh.

The countries where the process of secularization, removal of the hold of feudal-clerical elements from social affairs was substantial, the religion was kept in the by lanes of society. Religion became related more to matters personal. State came to treat all its citizens on par, irrespective of their personal beliefs. In contrast; in South Asia in particular; the process of secularization remained incomplete and the declining sections of landlords and Clergy hit back with the politics in the garb of religion. In India we saw the emergence of Hindu and Muslim communal streams from the section of Kings and landlords, later to be joined in by the section of educated middle classes. They were exclusive, Hindu or Muslim Nationalists, and were led by small section the educated elite, likes of Jinnah or Savarkar or Golwalkar. This had its own trajectory, assisting the colonial project of ‘divide and rule’ and to maintain the economic dominance of colonial now imperialist powers. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi stood tall religious person advocating the secular state. The communal streams, spread hatred against the other communities.

The communal violence in South Asia is now a frighteningly disturbing phenomenon. It is taking the cover of Hinduism in India, of Islam in Bangladesh and Pakistan, of Buddhism in Myanmar and Srilanka for example. This violence has a political motto, the agenda; the values of the pre Modern feudal classes in a modern context. The attempt to reinforce the feudal values of caste and gender hierarchy is made in a language which sounds modern and is modified for the contemporary context.

To add salt to the injury of violence in the name of religion, the post Khomeini, labeling of “Islam as the new threat’ was boosted by the phrase “Islamic terrorism’ in the wake of 9/11 attack on twin towers. The Al Qaeda came to the forefront. This organization is the root of most the terrorist violence in the central-west Asia. The Boko Haram, ISIS and AL Qaeda form the triad where Islamic identifies is kept at the core. The process started with joining the anti Soviet forces in Afghanistan, calling the communists as infidels and so the violence. Now other’ sects of Muslims are called as infidels and done to death in the scary manner. Surely, more Muslims have died due to this violence than any other community.

Al Qaeda was a product of three major foundations. On one hand was Islamism of Zia ul Haq, who set up Madrassas in Pakistan for indoctrinating the youth. The ideology used here was from Saudi Arabia, Wahabism, which centers on the ‘king-ruler as the representative of God. Here one who disagrees with this version is the Kafir (Infidel), and killing the kefir is projected as the noble act Jihad, with reward of Janna waiting for those doing this inane violence. The major support for this endeavor came from US, which poured in 8000 million dollars and 7000 tons of armaments to build this root of the cancerous Al Qaeda and terrorist violence in the name of Islam.

So where do we go from here. The roles of religion have been changing over periods of time. We need to pick up the threads from the saint tradition of religions and face the present challenge to human society. Religion as a moral force needs to be projected; and morality of religions needs to be projected and the violence in the name of religion needs of is deconstructed to see the real intent of the violence, which is aimed at the preservation of pre modern values or which is an offshoot of the politics of oil. The activists and scholars of religion need to harp on the morality aspect of religion and debunk the religion as identity part.

Kshama Sawant: The Most Dangerous Woman In America

Chris Hedges

SEATTLE—Kshama Sawant, the socialist on the City Council, is up for re-election this year. Since joining the council in January of 2014 she has helped push through a gradual raising of the minimum wage to $15 an hour in Seattle. She has expanded funding for social services and blocked, along with housing advocates, an attempt by the Seattle Housing Authority to allow a rent increase of up to 400 percent. She has successfully lobbied for city money to support tent encampments and is fighting for an excise tax on millionaires. And for this she has become the bête noire of the Establishment, especially the Democratic Party.

The corporate powers, from Seattle’s mayor to the Chamber of Commerce and the area’s Democratic Party, are determined she be defeated, and these local corporate elites have the national elites behind them. This will be one of the most important elections in the country this year. It will pit a socialist, who refuses all corporate donations—not that she would get many—and who has fearlessly championed the rights of workingmen and workingwomen, rights that are being eviscerated by the corporate machine. The elites cannot let the Sawants of the world proliferate. Corporate power is throwing everything at its disposal—including sponsorship of a rival woman candidate of color—into this election in the city’s 3rd District.

Sawant’s fight is our own.

I met Sawant in a restaurant a block from City Hall in Seattle. She is as intense as she is articulate. Sawant, born in India, is a leader of the Socialist Alternative Party. She holds a doctorate in economics from North Carolina State University and before her election to the City Council was a professor at a community college. She knows that there will be no genuine reforms, let alone systemic change, without the building of radical mass movements and a viable third party. She is as familiar at Seattle street demonstrations, where she has been arrested, as she is in City Council hearings. If there is any hope left for the absurdist political theater that characterizes election campaigns it is in renegades such as Sawant.

“The idea that things have to get a lot worse to have some sort of awakening and bring about an alternative to this corrupt and defunct corporate political system is inaccurate,” she said to me. “What we need is a big surge for an independent working-class political alternative while people are experiencing a sense of confidence, after decades of bitter defeat. The $15-an-hour victory in Seattle is going nationwide. And while unions are under massive attack, as you see in Wisconsin with Scott Walker, there are also successful labor initiatives getting onto the ballot. Four states—two of them Republican states—increased the minimum wage last year. Occupy and the Black Lives Matter movement have radically shaken U.S. consciousness. Now is the time for us to strike.”

Sawant said it is incumbent upon socialists and the entire U.S. left to swiftly begin the task of building working-class political campaigns independent of the Democratic Party in order to create the space for a viable national party. Efforts to reform the Democratic Party, whose leaders are in the service of the corporate oligarchy, amount to pouring energy into “a black hole,” she said. The Democratic elite dominate Seattle government, and the Democratic elite, as they did with Ralph Nader, have declared war against Sawant. As long as she remains in office she will expose the leaders in the Democratic Party for who they are—corporate puppets.

Sawant believes that because of the presidency of Barack Obama—who has served corporate power, expanded imperial wars, carried out a massive assault on civil liberties and failed to address the needs of the mounting numbers who are unemployed or underemployed—many people, especially young people, are hungry for political alternatives to “the two big business parties.” Poll after poll, she pointed out, shows the American majority to be disgusted with the Congress. And she cited the problems of Chicago Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel in seeking re-election as evidence that even the very beginnings of movements by working people and communities of color can shake and weaken the Democratic Party establishment. “He was considered undefeatable,” she said of Emanuel. “But look now at his vulnerability. Look at the campaign ad he just put out saying, yes, I made mistakes, but I am a human being. Who could have imagined that kind of false humility from him? Even spending $15 million on a mayoral race and having President Obama come and campaign wasn’t enough to buy him an easy victory. This demonstrates the wide opening for the U.S. left to present a principled working-class alternative. This is why we need to begin that project now. It won’t be easy. But this moment is qualitatively different from the period when Ralph Nader ran. The consciousness of the American people has changed. Uprising is in the air.”

Sawant emphasized that the process of building a radical alternative will be long and difficult. The obstacles the Establishment will throw up to prevent such a movement will be numerous, costly and unscrupulous.

“We cannot have illusions,” Sawant said. “We want to win. But we also know that in one year we are not going to vanquish the money machine of the Democratic establishment. The goal of this campaign should be to launch a massive grass-roots effort nationwide, and to build on it after the election, something that Ralph Nader failed to do. We have to provide a place for people looking for something different, especially the younger generation. Any presidential campaign cannot be run as an end in itself. That will dishearten people. People know what is going to happen in 2016. It is going to be Hillary Clinton or some Republican. Our campaign needs to be a launching pad for something bigger. It needs to be about building a mass movement, a viable radical alternative. This is what is happening in Greece and Spain.”

Sawant proposed that the left prepare the ground for a new party that will be “broad-based, organized around democratic principles and have as its fundamental goal the mission of working with the labor movement, nonunionized workers and young activists of color.”

“It has to be 100 percent grass roots,” she said. It must be willing to “use the platform of the presidential campaign and other electoral campaigns to push the message of mass movements.” And, she stressed, it must never accept corporate money. This last condition, she said, “has to be non-negotiable.” The party, she added, “must not bow down to the pressure to endorse Democratic candidates against Republicans, which would completely undermine its independence and ultimately relegate it to the role of an enforcer for the Democrats, as the Working Families Party has become.”

Might there be a role for the Green Party in such a change? Sawant offered this assessment:

The Green Party and its activists need to be part of the effort towards a nationwide party for the working class.

The Green Party has made some important contributions to the struggle against the Democrats’ lesser-evil politics. It has raised demands in the interests of workers, against corporate domination, against the war, and against climate change. One outstanding example is Gayle McLaughlin, who as Green Party mayor of the California city of Richmond, invited the fury of Wall Street banks with her valiant fight on behalf of ‘underwater’ homeowners.

But the party for the left, for the American working class, needs to go beyond the electoral arena and lead struggles and movements of low-wage workers, people of color and women. The Green Party has not often sought to do that. The problem is that if a party does not do that, it leaves the various social movements open to misleaders who channel the energy back towards the Democratic Party.

“In Socialist Alternative,” Sawant said, “any elected representative who runs has to pledge to only take the average worker’s wage. The City Council pays me nearly $120,000. I take home $40,000 after taxes. The rest goes into a solidarity fund. This idea should also be taken up in some form by the new party.”

“A campaign cannot be an end in itself,” she said. “If you take office you have to be accountable to the members of the party. You have to have actual meetings. People say they are Democrats, but when was the last time they were invited to a meeting and asked to vote on the policies to be taken up by the Democratic Party? The Democratic Party is utterly undemocratic—the party members and activists have essentially zero say over what their elected officials do once in power.”

A new party, she said, is essential if the corporate coup is to be reversed. And it needs to be formed soon.

“While young radicals correctly see the need for mass action, some have not yet made the vital link between mass movements and the need for alternative political structures,” she said. “We cannot get rid of capitalism without building a mass political organization as a tool to do that.”

“If a genuine alternative is not built,” Sawant said, “the Democratic establishment will continue to co-opt generation after generation of young people who are concerned about the need to fight the Republicans. Even the most radical youths end up implicitly defending capitalism when they accept the parameters of lesser evilism, as so many did with supporting Obama in 2008 and 2012.”

She contends that the end of the Cold War has left younger generations freer to explore and hear radical alternatives.

“Something important has changed,” she said. “The hostility to socialist ideas is not present now because we have a majority of young Americans who are experiencing the deep failures of capitalism. Red-baiting does not work on them. As a socialist, I have never experienced any hostility, except from the Establishment. This does not necessarily mean all those people who support us are socialist. But it means people are infuriated about income inequality, about the pillaging by the big banks. They are burning at the entrenched racial injustice in America. They want a solution to climate change. They are looking for something radically different.”

The call for a national party is, in the end, a call to educate. It is a call to put forth a program that offers an alternative to global capitalism. And it is a call to empower the citizenry to break the corporate stranglehold to make this alternative possible.

“We must convince people that we need an alternative and we must convince them about what that alternative is,” Sawant said. “We need to stand up for the hundreds of millions of lives devastated by global capitalism. The abuses we saw in 2008 will happen over and over again as long as capitalism survives. And it is our job to break the cycle of capitalist exploitation of people and the ecosystem and save ourselves. This will only come about if we organize mass movements, if we build a radical political party and if we refuse to accept a system designed to subject the immense majority to misery so that a minority can pile up untold wealth.”

The Realpolitik Of Revolution

William T. Hathaway

What will it take to end this ghastly cycle of violence and bring lasting peace, not just end this current war but create a peaceful society in which humanity lives cooperatively and harmoniously? The socialist answer is we must overthrow capitalism, a system that inevitably generates conflict and inequality. And overthrowing it will require a revolution.

What will it take to make a revolution? The socialist answer is the majority of people must realize that capitalism can't provide them a decent life. Then a militant party based in the international working class must lead them in transferring the means of production -- the natural resources, factories, banks, and major corporations -- from private into public ownership.

In the past decade progress has been accelerating for both of these conditions. Global capitalism is lurching from one crisis to another, and the ruling class is resorting to desperate measures to keep it alive, including war abroad and repression at home. More and more people are seeing how their and their children's lives are being degraded to keep corporate profits rolling in. Skepticism about the official reasons for the current war is growing, as are distrust and dislike of governments and corporations. On the Left, the debate about proper theory and practice has sharpened, and the differences among parties have become clearer.

But we're a long way from revolution. Most people in the wealthy countries still believe that reforms within the system can reverse capitalism's decline. Most in the poor countries are still caught within authoritarian social and religious structures that hinder them from mobilizing. The Left is still unable to unite around a revolutionary program.

The Western ruling class is gambling that war and repression can delay their demise. They could be right. It is possible that by massively increasing their barbarism, they can continue their domination of Mideast oil and crush dissent at home. Capitalists have resorted to fascism before when they were in deep trouble, and they're willing to do it again.

If they succeed in tightening their grip on us and the world, they may be able to squeeze out another hundred years of profits. This would indeed be a dismal century for humanity and our environment, far worse than now. Their next wars will be against their rivals in Russia and China. The capitalist imperative -- for individuals, corporations, and nations -- is dominate or go under. In this phase of global consolidation the battle becomes all consuming. Lasting peace is impossible under capitalism.

But if they lose the current war, they'll lose their favorable oil leases and they won't be able to build the Afghan pipeline, both of which they need to maintain their economic advantage and high profits. They'll also lose access to consumer and labor markets in many Muslim countries.

These losses will precipitate a crisis more severe than any we've seen yet. Then the only way for Western capitalists to keep extracting profits will be to crack down even harder on their workers. When that happens and the workers start fighting back, we'll have the objective conditions for revolution. And if the working class has militant, non-reformist leadership, we'll eventually win. Then the international Left can build socialism and put an end to dominator systems such as capitalism and fundamentalism.

All this depends, though, on the defeat of NATO in the Mideast. That is a prerequisite for revolution in the foreseeable future.

How can NATO be defeated? Of the many Muslim groups that oppose Western domination, only the fundamentalists are willing to die in sufficient numbers to drive out imperialism. Repulsive and reactionary as they are, the fanatics of ISIS, al Qaeda, and Taliban have the strength of arms and faith to defeat NATO's military, economic, and cultural invasion of their areas. None of the other groups comes close to being able to do this.

The prospect of their winning sends a shiver of dread through us because they are indeed brutal and intolerant. But in the West tolerance is disappearing as governments curtail civil liberties and criminalize dissent, primarily as proactive preparation against the coming revolutions in their own countries. And the West is far more brutal. The fundamentalists are killing hundreds, but NATO and its proxies are killing hundreds of thousands, and in much more horrible ways. Beheading is mercifully quick compared to the slow agony of burns and shrapnel. These deaths don't make the news because that would shatter the propaganda myth necessary to drum up war fever. The varieties of violence that NATO is inflicting on these countries are much more destructive than those of the fundamentalists. WE are the top terrorist. But the mainstream media's demonization campaign prevents us from perceiving that.

The West started this war in order to continue its control of Mideast resources. The so-called terrorists are people driven to drastic means to defend their homeland from multi-pronged foreign aggression. Their brutality comes from decades of being brutalized. Despite media lies to the contrary, Muslim countries have on balance been far more peaceful than Christian countries. They're not trying to conquer us, we're trying to conquer them, to control them through puppet governments. They're fighting to throw us out, not by winning big battles but by wearing us down militarily and financially through prolonged guerrilla warfare as the Vietnamese did.

What can we as socialists do?

We can accept the lesser evil of a fundamentalist victory without rejoicing in it, and we can help progressive groups in the Mideast -- socialists, women, trade unionists -- to build underground organizations that can withstand fundamentalist oppression and eventually defeat it. Most of all we can prepare the working class for the coming revolution.