29 May 2019

Dressbarn to close all its stores as US “retail apocalypse” exceeds 2018 closures

Anthony Bertolt

Last week, parent company Ascena Retail Group, which also owns Ann Taylor, Loft and Lane Bryant stores, announced the closure of all 650 of its Dressbarn retail stores. Ascena also recently sold its Maurices clothing chain for a sale price of $200 million cash to the UK-based private equity firm OpCapita, portending further closures.
In a statement last Monday, Steven Taylor, the chief financial officer of Dressbarn, said that the chain had “not been operating at an acceptable level of profitability in today’s retail environment,” alluding to the increasing dominance of online marketing and retail. Although a final date how not been set for the store closures, Taylor said that the company will finish operations within the next 6 to 12 months.
Competition from online giants like Amazon has fed into mass store closures, putting pressure on major retailers to shift from already low paying jobs to more labor-intensive and exploitative distribution center jobs.
Approximately 6,800 workers will be thrown out of work by the liquidation of Dressbarn, all of whom the company insists will be offered timely information about their store closings and options for financial support.
However, the reality for the vast majority of these workers is that the store closures mean that they will be either unemployed or forced to take even lower paying work to meet their basic needs as clothing retailers like Ascena Retail Group look for ways to compete with major corporations like Amazon and Walmart.
Retail workers are already among the lowest paid workers in the United States. According to reports by employees to indeed.com, associates at Dressbarn earn as little as $8.95 an hour to $12 an hour for an assistant store manager. Meanwhile Ascena CEO Gary Muto’s total compensation was nearly $6 million in 2018, including a base pay of more than $1 million.
The recent wave of retail closures, dubbed the “retail apocalypse,” has intensified this year with the number of closings exceeding 7000 before Dressbarn’s announcement, surpassing the number of closures in all of 2018. According to Coresight Research, there were 5864 retail closures in 2018, which included all of the remaining Toys R Us stores, along with other major retail stores like Sears and Kmart. The record for number store closures announced in a single year was 2017 with 8,139.
These closures have hit areas in the Midwest and Northeast US particularly hard. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, retail employment in these areas has fallen by more than ten percent between January 2007 and February 2019.
Along with Dressbarn, other major retail chains that have announced large closures across the United States in 2019 include:
* Payless ShoeSource announced that it will close all 2589 of its stores after a second bankruptcy filing, including 248 stores in Canada.
* Gymboree Group, which owns both Gymboree and Crazy 8 stores, announced in January that it would close all 800 of its stores and shut down its website.
* Foot Locker, despite reporting a record earnings report, announced that it will close 165 stores.
* Gap announced that it will close 200 stores this year to focus more on its online store, which now accounts for 40 percent of its revenue.
* Charlotte Russe has announced that it will close all 500 of its stores after it announced the closure of 94 of its stores and could not find a buyer for those that remained open.
* Dollar Tree which, owns the Family Dollar chain, announced that it will shut down about 390 Family Dollar stores.
* Sears announced in February that it would downsize its stores by 1275, keeping 425 stores in operation after filing for bankruptcy.
At the rate retail store closures have been announced, this year will soon surpass the record set in 2017. Since the 2008 financial crisis, major retail companies have been subject to buyouts, acquisitions and mergers as retailers have been forced into bankruptcy by Wall Street. According to the real estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield, more than 9,000 stores are predicted to close in 2019 and 12,000 will follow in 2020.

Rumored deal between Fiat-Chrysler and Renault foreshadows mass layoffs

Tom Hall

Fiat-Chrysler (FCA) and French automaker Renault are in advanced talks to establish a corporate alliance, the financial press reported over the weekend. An announcement of the deal could come as soon as today.
The talks have reportedly developed very rapidly in recent days, and it is unclear as of this writing what form the deal will ultimately take. Reports have ranged from an alliance involving a share swap to a full merger. Bloomberg News reports that the deal is an “operational tie-up … that could lead to a full merger.” “At a minimum,” according to the New York Times, “the two sides have agreed to share technology, intellectual property, supply chains and plants to develop and manufacture vehicles, these people said.”
Whatever ultimately emerges from the discussions, if a deal is made there can be no doubt that the net impact for the workers at both companies will be massive layoffs and plant closures, as such a move would be aimed at eliminating redundancies and excess capacity across both companies in order to boost profits at each.
Automotive News speculated that the deal could help FCA consolidate its less profitable European operations, which accounts for one-third of its workforce even though almost all of the firm’s profits are made in North America. “Renault, which is 15 percent owned by the French government, counts on Europe for almost half its sales,” the industry website said. Meanwhile, the deal would give Renault greater access to the lucrative North American market.
The deal is part of a global restructuring of the auto industry amid growing signs a world-wide recession. The auto industry in particular is facing declining demand for new vehicles and rising capital costs associated with emerging technologies such as electric vehicles and self-driving cars. Analysts have pointed out that one of the advantages of the deal for FCA would be access to Renault’s research in electric vehicles, which FCA has been slow to adopt.
Wall Street and other financial institutions are demanding consolidation of the giant automakers and a further massacre of jobs. In January, VW and Ford announced a global alliance to jointly build pickup trucks and commercial vehicles, and last month Bloomberg News posted an article, titled “The Auto Industry Is Overdue a Bout of Mega-Mergers.”
US auto assembly and parts producers are now cutting jobs at the highest rate since the 2009 financial crisis, when both Chrysler and GM filed for bankruptcy, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The auto industry in the US announced nearly 20,000 layoffs through April, more than three times the figure at the same point last year. This figure does not include Ford’s 7,000 salaried job cuts announced earlier in May.
FCA carried out thousands of layoffs at its North American facilities over the last three months, with many more rumored to be on the way. In March, the company announced the elimination of an entire shift of 1,500 workers at its Windsor Assembly plant in Canada and laid off 1,400 workers on the third shift at its Belvidere plant in northwestern Illinois via a robocall.
It is currently unknown how the rumored deal with Fiat-Chrysler will impact the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance. This “strategic partnership,” taken as a single entity, would be the largest automaker in the world, although the three companies are considered distinct entities which own stock in each other.
Insiders have suggested that FCA may eventually join the alliance, but the fact that Renault has apparently been negotiating with Fiat-Chrysler without the involvement of its alliance partners points to a serious deterioration in the relationship between the constituent companies within the Alliance.
The Alliance was founded in 1999 by Renault and Nissan, at a time when the Japanese automaker was on the verge of bankruptcy, with Mitsubishi joining in 2016. Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn, who later was installed as Nissan CEO in 2001, returned Nissan to profitability after laying off 21,000 workers and closing five factories, for which he was named “Businessman of the Year” by Forbes in 2002.
Although Nissan is by far the largest company in the Alliance by sales volume, Renault effectively wields control by virtue of its ownership of a 43 percent voting stake in Nissan, while Nissan holds only a 15 percent non-voting stake in Renault. This unequal relationship has been a source of friction for years.
The arrest of Ghosn last November in Japan on financial misconduct charges has placed the future of the Alliance in question, as well as contributing to a plunge in Nissan’s profits by 45 percent. The charges, while credible, arose out of deep factional divisions among top Alliance executives, especially between Nissan and Renault.
At issue is Renault’s push for greater consolidation of the Alliance, including a proposed scheme which would have effectively given Ghosn personal control, including giving himself the ability to set his own compensation without board oversight. The revival of this proposal last spring, after being rebuffed in 2017, coincided with the beginning of a secret investigation by Nissan executives into potential misconduct by Ghosn.
Ghosn had also been pushing for a full merger between Renault and Nissan, which was bitterly resisted by Nissan executives. While merger talks are currently on hold, the proposed deal with Fiat-Chrysler could be a way of putting pressure on Nissan’s board of directors, some analysts speculate.
The announcement of the impending deal between FCA and Renault, as well as the massive job-cutting by the other US automakers, occurs in the run up to the mid-September expiration of the four-year labor agreements with the United Auto Workers union, which cover 155,000 GM, Ford and FCA workers in the US. Corporate management is confident that the UAW, which accepted millions in bribes to force through concessions in previous contracts, will continue its role as the bought agents of the bosses. However, the auto companies and the UAW face an increasingly rebellious mood among autoworkers, who are determined to win back everything that has been taken from them over the past four decades.
By carrying through plant closures, layoffs, mergers and other measures directed at increasing the exploitation of its workforce in advance of the contract negotiations, the automakers are attempting to present the workers with a fait accompli, shifting the narrative away from pay and hiring increases towards determining what will be cut and when.
However, the conditions exist for a powerful counter-offensive by the autoworkers. Autoworkers must take the conduct of the struggle into their own hands by forming rank-and-file factories committees, independent the unions. The fact that the assault on jobs and living standards is taking place internationally underscores the need for US workers to unite with workers in Europe, Asia, Latin America and throughout the world to fight the global corporations.

Ruling conservatives, social democrats collapse in EU elections

Alex Lantier

The European elections ended yesterday, after every state in the 28-member European Union (EU) elected its representatives to the European parliament on one day between Thursday and Sunday. The result was a dramatic defeat for the conservative and social democratic parties that governed Western Europe for decades and built the EU with the Maastricht Treaty adopted in 1992, after the Stalinist restoration of capitalism in Eastern Europe.
In Germany, France, Britain and other countries across Europe, these parties that once formed a duopoly dominating the parliament failed to win 50 percent of the vote combined. Most voters voted for other parties. Voters also punished, in addition to the conservatives and social democrats, petty-bourgeois populist parties tied to the trade unions, who have opposed growing social protest against the EU.
These parties are hemorrhaging support, as a wave of strikes and protests oppose policies of austerity, militarism and police repression that millions of workers identify with the EU. Mass strikes against EU-dictated wage freezes have gone forward in Berlin and other regions of Germany, Portugal and Belgium, amid “yellow vest” protests against French President Emmanuel Macron. At the same time, protests are mounting across Eastern Europe, with the Polish national teachers strike and protests against Hungary’s “slave law” mandating unpaid overtime.
Mounting opposition in the working class can find no expression within the political establishment, however. Some Green parties, who are closely linked to the social democrats, won increased support in elections that unfolded immediately after mass youth protests against climate change. Across much of Europe, however, the prime beneficiaries of the discrediting of the EU and the traditional ruling parties were far right parties.
In Germany, the EU’s economic powerhouse and largest country by population, the conservative Christian Democratic Union-Christian Social Union (CDU-CSU) won 28 percent of the vote and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) 15.5 percent—down 7 and 11.8 percent, respectively. The national CDU-CSU-SPD “Grand Coalition” government now has only 43.8 percent of the vote. The Left Party fell 2 percent to 5.4 percent, while the Greens and the neo-fascist Alternative for Germany both rose to 22 percent and 10.5 percent, respectively.
German youth massively turned against the ruling parties: among under-30s, 13 percent voted for the CDU-CSU and 10 percent voted for the SPD, while 33 percent voted for the Greens.
Marine Le Pen’s neo-fascist National Rally (RN) again won the European elections after its 2014 victory at 23.3 percent, narrowly beating Macron’s Republic on the March (LRM) at 22.1 percent. The Greens took third with 13.1 percent. The Gaullist The Republicans (LR) and the Socialist Party (PS), France’s traditional parties of rule since the May 1968 general strike, fell to a humiliating 8.4 percent and 6.6 percent, respectively, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Unsubmissive France (LFI), which won 20 percent of the 2017 presidential vote, took only 6.6 percent.
While LFI was hammered for not supporting the “yellow vest” protests against the bitterly unpopular Macron, and by the defection to the RN of LFI member Andréa Kotarac, the RN tried to claim the mantle of “best opponent” of Macron. RN election list leader Jordan Bardella called for “dramatically reorienting” economic policy and new attacks on immigrants. Both Bardella and Le Pen called for new French legislative elections.
With almost all results counted in the UK, Nigel Farage’s far-right Brexit Party emerged victorious at 31.6 percent, with the Liberal Democrats (20.3 percent) beating the traditional ruling parties, Labour and Conservatives, into third and fifth place with 14.1 and 9.1 percent, respectively. The Green Party beat the Tories on 12.1 percent of the vote.
The Brexit Party carried large swathes of the Tory rural vote, resulting in the worst vote in the party’s 185 year-history, but also made headway in cities in pro-Brexit northern England and in Cardiff. Farage took almost all the vote of his former UK Independence Party, which won the last EU elections. Labour lost pro-Remain votes to the Liberal Democrats, who even took Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s Islington district of London. Labour also lost votes to the pro-Remain Greens. In London as a whole, the Brexit Party was beaten into third place by the Lib-Dems and Labour. 
In Scotland, Labour was wiped out by a sweeping victory for the Scottish National Party.
In Belgium, a collapse of the New Flemish Alliance (NVA) and a surge of the fascistic Flemish Interest (VB) put the two parties in the lead, at 13.5 and 11.5 percent respectively, ahead of the Francophone Socialist Party (PS, 10.5 percent). The French and Flemish wings of the Green party combined won 15 percent. With general elections unfolding in parallel with the European elections, it appears that the so-called “sanitary cordon” agreement between the other bourgeois parties not to include the VB in a Belgian national government may collapse.
In some countries—including Austria, Spain and the Netherlands—one or the other traditional ruling party eked out an electoral victory. In Austria, where the far-right Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) faced a scandal as a video exposed its leader and Austrian Vice Chancellor Heinz Christian Strache seeking corrupt deals with individuals he believed to represent a Russian oligarch, Chancellor Sebastian Kurz’s Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) won 35 percent of the vote. The social democrats (SPÖ) won 24 percent and the FPÖ fell around 7 percent to 17.5 percent.
In the Netherlands, after bitter debates between Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD, 15 percent) and Thierry Baudet’s far right Forum for Democracy (11 percent), the Labor Party (PvdA) won a surprise first place finish, though with only 18 percent of the vote.
In Spain, the European election results largely mirrored the recent general elections, which saw a substantial turn-out of voters for the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) to block the rise of the fascistic Vox party. The PSOE took 30 percent, the right wing Popular Party (PP) and Citizens 19.5 percent and 14 percent, and the Podemos-led alliance 11 percent. Vox received six percent of the vote. This represented a significant fall for the alliance led by Podemos, the Spanish ally of the German Left Party and LFI, whose component parts had won 18 percent in the last EU elections.
In Greece, the right-wing New Democracy took 34 percent of the vote, beating the pro-austerity Syriza (“Coalition of the Radical Left”) government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras into second place with 27 percent of the vote.
Across much of Europe, however, far-right parties solidified their hold over bourgeois politics. The far right Lega party of Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini led with 30 percent of the vote. The Democratic Party (PD) with 22 percent narrowly edged out the Five Star Movement (M5S, 21 percent), while Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (FI) fell to only 10 percent. There was speculation that Salvini could push for new elections in order to throw the M5S out of government and install a one-party Lega government in Italy.
Far right parties advanced in several Eastern European countries. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party winning a 56 percent majority, relegating the social democrats to 10 percent and the fascistic Jobbik party to 9 percent. In Poland, the ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS) won 43 percent of the vote, beating the European Coalition at 38.4 percent.
The EU elections are further confirmation that while working people across Europe are increasingly entering into struggle—driven by anger at social inequality, militarism and attacks on democratic rights—the ruling elite is relentlessly shifting to the right. For now, a mass-fascist movement like those of the 20th century has not developed. But facing growing social anger, the ruling class is pouring hundreds of billions of euros into the armed forces, carrying out violent crackdowns like Macron’s attack on the “yellow vests” and building a vast network of prison camps for immigrants.
The differences between the traditional pro-EU parties and the far right parties on these issues are almost entirely tactical matters of foreign policy, over whether the EU could be an effective vehicle for building a common European armed forces to threaten America, Russia and China. This found consummate expression in French Defense Minister Florence Parly’s call for an EU army and a vote for Macron’s party “if you don’t want a defenseless Europe.” Predictably, the turn far to the right by the entire ruling class has again allowed the far right to pose as populist opponents of the EU.
It cannot be fought by a turn to pro-EU parties like the Greens, a coalition of pro-capitalist parties across Europe who are the undeserving beneficiaries of mass social anger against the reactionary policies pursued over decades by the conservatives and social democrats. Their pro-imperialist politics are epitomized by the record of the German Greens, the largest Green party in the continent. Having shed their pacifist pretensions and backed NATO’s Balkan wars in the 1990s, they entered into coalition with the SPD in the 2000s to ram through the hated Hartz IV austerity laws.
They are just as distant from and hostile to growing workers struggles as the scoundrels such as the German Left Party, LFI, Corbyn, Podemos or Syriza, which have done everything in their power to disorient or suppress growing working class struggles.
The decisive question now facing workers and youth across Europe, faced with the imperviousness of the financial aristocracy to all social protest, and its ruthless policy of police-state repression, is a turn to revolutionary struggle.
The turn now is to the struggles of the working class and the fight to unify them across Europe and internationally on a common socialist revolutionary perspective and leadership. It was for this purpose that the International Committee of the Fourth International’s European sections intervened in the election campaign, including running candidates of the German Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei, to launch the struggle to build the ICFI in countries across Europe.

Germany continues deportations to Afghanistan

Marianne Arens 

On Tuesday evening another 26 Afghans were forcibly deported from Germany to Kabul on a charter flight. A total of 591 people have now been sent back to war-torn Afghanistan since December 2016. Tuesday evening’s was the 24th such flight.
Protesters at a demonstration in defense of refugees
This latest deportation, just four days before the European elections, exposes the hypocrisy of all those politicians who promise a “humane” and “social” Europe. The very same politicians are responsible for the detention and forced deportation of people who have sought protection from persecution, war and social upheaval and are now forced to return to the source of their misery.
The Bavarian Refugee Council has uncovered new cases documenting the brutal actions of the German authorities.
Among the victims is a family from Nuremberg—mother, daughter and twin sons—who were deported to Iran. The husband remained in Germany due to missing documentation. His children had attended school for some time in Germany and were about to graduate from high school or middle school. Repeatedly, entire families have been apprehended in the middle of the night and deported.
Just a few days before the latest deportation, the Council of Europe’s anti-torture committee criticised the fact that victims had been mistreated during a previous deportation flight directly under the eyes of observers. One man was squeezed by his genitals to make him docile, and was then restrained with a choke strangle.
Another man, fearing deportation, had jumped out of a window and broken a lumbar vertebra. He was nevertheless deported. He was only able to withstand the flight lying down and in great pain. The anti-torture committee also criticised conditions in the Bavarian correctional facility, Eichstätt, which had been recently transformed into a so-called departure custody facility.
The response of the government to this criticism has been to step up and accelerate its incarceration and deportation practices.
This was clear last week when the Bundestag debated interior minister Horst Seehofer’s “Orderly return law”. The legislation, which is described as a “get out” or “foreigners out” law, facilitates and accelerates deportations. It treats asylum seekers de facto as criminals and plans to house “refugees required to leave” in regular prisons.
The same parties in Germany which claim to oppose the rise of the extreme right in Europe are in practice implementing the policies of the far-right Alternative for Germany. This is true not only for the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Christian Social Union (CSU), but in particular for the Social Democratic Party (SPD) as well. In the parliamentary debate, SPD spokesman Helge Lind openly admitted he saw “no alternative” to Seehofer’s law. The German justice minister, Katarina Barley, lead candidate of the SPD for the European elections, approved the bill a month ago in the cabinet. So much for the SPD’s claims in the election campaign, that it favoured “a social Europe” and was the party that “had fought the right wing since its inception.”
Barley sits in a government that has deported nearly 24,000 people from Germany in 2018 and more than 5,600 in the first quarter of this year. The majority of those affected are secretly deported to Kosovo or other ex-Yugoslav countries, Turkey, the Middle East, Iraq, Iran, Georgia, Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan or Nigeria, or even to other EU countries where they had first been registered.
There is broad agreement with the anti-refugee policy of the grand coalition by those parties which criticised the law in the parliamentary debate, i.e., the Greens and the Left Party. In those German states where they govern together with the SPD and the CDU, or even appoint the prime minister (the Greens in Baden-Württemberg, the Left Party in Thuringia), they deport as readily as the governing parties.
For almost a year, the anti-refugee and xenophobic policies of individual EU states has become the official guideline for the entire EU. With its decision of June 30, 2018, the EU effectively ceased all efforts to rescue refugees from drowning, and has expressly prevented private maritime rescue—with catastrophic consequences.
Less than two weeks ago, about 65 people drowned off the coast of Tunisia when their boat capsized in high waves. Only 16 survived and were rescued by fishermen from the water. It was the worst accident for months on this dangerous escape route.
The Mediterranean is increasingly becoming a mass grave. The mass drowning in Tunisia on May 10, brings the number of people who have drowned in the Mediterranean this year to over 500. According to the IOM (International Organization for Migration), there have been 18,426 deaths in the Mediterranean region since the beginning of 2014. This is an average of more than nine people per day.
The UN Refugee Council noted that the risk of perishing on the Libya-Italy route has increased significantly. In the first four months of this year, a fourth of all those attempting to reach Europe drowned, declared UNHCR Special Envoy for the Mediterranean, Vincent Cochetel. “If we do not act now,” he added, “then we’ll almost certainly face more tragic cases in the coming weeks and months.”
The EU, however, refuses to lift a finger to assist refugees from Libya. The only chance of rescue is offered by private NGOs, and these volunteer and donor-based organisations face almost insurmountable legal hurdles and harassment.
“Sea-Watch 3”, which rescued 65 refugees from a rubber dinghy, was forced to stay at sea for four days, before it could land the remaining 47 victims on the Italian island of Lampedusa on May 19 (18 sick and dehydrated migrants, including several children, had previously been evacuated). Although the organisation did not break any law, its ship has now been confiscated by the Italian judiciary.
The EU is pursuing a refugee policy based on the motto: “Let them all drown.” The banner of the Sea-Watch group on demonstrations held against nationalism last Sunday read: “This EU kills.”
In 1940, in its World War II manifesto, the Fourth International wrote a sentence that applies fully to the current situation: “Amid the vast expanses of land and the marvels of technology, which has also conquered the skies for man as well as the earth, the bourgeoisie has managed to convert our planet into a foul prison.”
But what is the answer? For the bourgeoisie, the answer is clear: it is arming state forces to the teeth and basing itself on the most reactionary forces in Germany—the AfD and other fascist organisations.
The working class has to give its own answer. It must unite worldwide and take up the fight for a socialist programme. In Europe, it must fight against the bankrupt EU and for the United Socialist States of Europe.
This is the only way to ensure that the Bundeswehr and all European troops withdraw from the Middle East and Africa, that every human being has the right to live and work in the country of their choice, and that the billions of euros squandered for building an EU army and Frontex is spent to fulfil the social and cultural needs of the population as a whole.

UK Prime Minister May to quit as Conservative leader June 7

Chris Marsden

UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s resignation announcement as leader of the Conservative Party, effective June 7, will unleash a vicious campaign to replace her. Whoever wins in July—current favourite Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Jeremy Hunt, Dominic Raab or someone now seen as less likely—will steer the government still further to the right.
This will not only place it on a collision course with the European Union—Johnson made his pitch for the party’s hard-Brexit vote by declaring that the UK would leave the EU on October 31, with or without a deal. It signals a coming conflict with the working class.
When May delivered her farewell speech outside 10 Downing Street, the only tears shed were her own—in a nauseating display of thwarted ambition and self-pity.
She came to lead the country in 2016 as a hated figure and leaves it as a despised political failure.
As Britain’s longest serving Home Secretary under David Cameron, she was adored by the party’s most xenophobic right-wingers. She is associated with the promise to reduce net migration by two thirds and to create a “really hostile environment for illegal immigration.”
Theresa May (Credit: C-Span)
This involved refusing to accept an EU quota of refugees from war-zones, restricting the right of migrants to bring in their spouses and children and blatantly criminal acts against individual asylum seekers for which she faced the threat of fines and imprisonment for contempt of court in June 2012.
The most grotesque examples of her “hostile environment” policy was to commission a campaign involving lorries driving through immigrant areas with billboards warning, “Go home or face arrest.” Its legacy included the death of members of the Windrush Generation of Afro-Caribbean British citizens among more than 80 wrongly deported to the West Indies.
This made her an acceptable compromise leader, as a supporter of remaining in the EU, after Cameron was forced to resign in July 2016 following the referendum vote to leave the EU.
The poison chalice she took up was to seek a “soft-Brexit”, involving continued tariff-free access to the vital Single European Market, when this involved compromises with Brussels that were unacceptable to the dominant Euro-sceptic Tory right and, from 2017, also her confidence and supply partners in the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).
May’s premiership was short-lived—less than three years. It would have been shorter still had May not been able to count on what has turned out to be her one political asset—Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the Labour Party and of Her Majesty’s Opposition.
Corbyn had everything going for him that May did not. She was elected by 199 Tory MPs. He was elected party leader in 2015 by an overwhelming majority of hundreds of thousands of Labour members and supporters. In 2016, his right-wing MPs tried to depose him by a vote of no confidence, on the basis that he had not campaigned to stay in the EU with the necessary enthusiasm! He won again in September that year by a still larger majority.
In June 2017, a snap general election called by May was held. She hoped to strengthen her hand by exploiting the constant offensive by Labour’s right-wing and the media against Corbyn. This ended in disaster, as Labour’s vote increased massively. The Tories were reduced to a minority, reliant on 10 DUP MPs and with May even more surely a political hostage to her hard-Brexit critics and opponents.
Corbyn rescued May again and again. He did so by betraying the mandate of those who twice elected him to drive out the Blairites, break with their warmongering and take the fight to the hated Tory government. If May’s period in office is a slow-motion train crash, Corbyn’s is a series of ignominious retreats before his political opponents, ceding everything without a fight, along with constant efforts to suppress the class struggle and keep social and political discontent confined to support for his own parliamentary manoeuvres.
Since May began the process of withdrawing from the EU in March 2017, she has unsuccessfully put the Brexit deal she negotiated with the EU before parliament on three occasions—including a defeat by the largest majority in history by a government in January. She faced a no confidence vote by her own MPs in December 2018 and a parliamentary vote of no confidence in January 2019 and has been living under an axe since her third Brexit deal defeat in March—after promising to step down as prime minister if her deal was passed, without success.
Corbyn’s response to all of this was to spend his every waking moment trying to keep his own fractious party together—especially by a policy of “constructive ambiguity” on whether Labour would support the second referendum to overturn Brexit favoured by the Blairites. Even this did not stop seven Blairites from defecting under Chukka Umunna to align with a handful of pro-EU Tories in the misnamed “Change UK”.
More important still, Corbyn assumed the mantle of statesman and guarantor of the national interest, while Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell became his emissary to the City of London, promising that a Labour government would do the bidding of big business.
This reached its nadir, after Corbyn agreed to what became six long weeks of negotiations with May on securing a Brexit deal that could win majority support, when there was never any chance of such an outcome. Part of the deal was that Corbyn ended all calls for a general election.
The result, as always, was to exclude the working class from political life and give free rein to a government that was dead on its feet. The talks ended on May 16. Eight days later May was weeping on the steps of Number 10 Downing Street.
Even now, Corbyn refuses to do anything that could be interpreted as irresponsible by Britain’s boardrooms and banks.
"Whoever becomes the new Conservative leader must let the people decide our country's future, through an immediate general election,” he declared. This is a new definition of immediate! A general election only after two months in which the Tories have been allowed to regroup, and only then if this is acceptable to the new leader of the party.
May’s resignation speech was a calculated insult, beginning with her ludicrous claim to have “striven to make the United Kingdom a country that works not just for a privileged few, but for everyone.” May was “bringing an end to austerity” and helping “more people than ever [to] enjoy the security of a job” with her “decent, moderate and patriotic Conservative government.”
She even had the gall to cite her record on education, the National Health Service and in launching the inquiry into the Grenfell Tower inferno as a “search for the truth” even as the guilty continue to walk free.
Speaking for the families of the 72 who lost their lives, Grenfell United replied, “It’s hard to think of a greater injustice in recent years than Grenfell.”
This week, UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty Philip Alston issued his final report comparing the UK to a giant Victorian workhouse—with close to 40 percent of children predicted to be living in poverty by 2021, one fifth of the population (14 million) living in poverty, over 1.5 million destitute and a further 2.5 million on incomes no more than 10 percent above the poverty line. The week also saw British Steel Limited going into liquidation, threatening 25,000 jobs in total; 1,000 jobs lost at Jamie Oliver’s collapsed restaurant chain; and confirmation that Honda in Swindon will close in 2021 with 3,500 redundancies.
May’s imminent downfall must spur on all those workers and young people who want to fight these attacks to reject the soporifics of Corbyn and his allies in the trade union bureaucracy, and wage an independent class struggle in alliance with their fellow workers throughout Europe and internationally for socialism.

Incoming Ukrainian president moves to dissolves parliament

Jason Melanovski 

During his inaugural speech Monday, the newly elected Ukrainian president, comedian Volodmyr Zelensky, called for the dissolution of the parliament, the Verkhovna Rada. He announced plans for new elections for July 21, which were originally scheduled for October. Zelensky also proposed major changes to electoral laws.
The new president’s effort to sack the Ukrainian parliament is an authoritarian move aimed at settling political scores with opponents within Ukraine’s oligarchy. Snap elections would allow him to quickly consolidate power and take advantage of his overwhelming defeat of former President Petro Poroshenko.
Zelensky’s newly created Servant of the People Party, which currently has no members in the widely unpopular Verkhovna Rada, is leading parliamentary opinion polls with support of around 40 percent.
It is unclear whether Zelensky has the constitutional authority to dissolve parliament. He is supported by leading political forces in the country, with some politicians allied with former presidents Petro Poroshenko and Yulia Tymoshenko declaring they backed the move. Ukraine’s far right groups, Svoboda and the Azov-Battalion affiliated National Corps—which receive financing from Zelensky-allied billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky—assembled and lit flares in front of the Parliament building to demand that the body accede to the new president.
However, on Wednesday, Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada, far-right politician Andriy Parubiy, declared Zelensky’s move illegal and said he would lead a challenge to it in the constitutional court. Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman, whose resignation Zelensky has demanded, also opposes the dissolution of the Verkhovna Rada. He announced plans to form his own party to take part in the upcoming parliamentary elections.
Since defeating the widely-despised Poroshenko by 73 percent to 24 percent of the vote last month, it has become clear Zelensky’s victory is a changing of the guard among the super wealthy oligarchy that has ruled Ukraine since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
During his inaugural address, the new president—who is closely tied to oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky—ousted the Poroshenko-allied defense minister, head of the state security service and inspector general. Zelensky did not demand the resignation of Arsen Avakov, the head of Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, who is supported by Kolomoisky and has links to groups affiliated with Ukraine’s far-right Azov Battalion.
Earlier in May, Kolomoisky called for Avakov’s continued presence in a Zelensky administration stating, “I believe this has been the most successful and professional government minister over the past five years. And the least scandalous one, practically not scandalous at all.”
During Avakov’s time in office Ukraine has experienced a wave of far-right attacks on minorities and journalists, such as the burning of a Roma encampment in Kiev and the acid attack murder of journalist Kateryna Handziuk in Kherson. Perpetrators have rarely been brought to justice by the country’s police, which Avakov heads, and suspects are often released without serious investigation.
With Zelensky’s election, oligarchs who had fallen out with Poroshenko and fled the country, have been given the green light to return to Ukraine and cash in on the change in leadership in Kiev.
Kolomoisky is an example. After initially supporting Poroshenko, known as the “chocolate king” for his control over the sweets industry, he became locked in a dispute with the Ukrainian government over the embezzlement of $5 billion from the country’s PrivatBank. Kolomoisky fled to Israel, but maintained control over Ukraine’s 1+1 television station, which prominently featured Zelensky’s comedies. A court case just prior to Zelensky’s election went in Kolomoisky’s favor, and he has recently returned to the country to retake control of his vast business empire.
Gas oligarch and parliament member Oleksandr Onyshchenko, who traded corruption accusations with Poroshenko in 2016 and later fled the country, also backed Zelensky and has announced plans to return to Ukraine.
Former Georgian President and CIA-stooge Mikheil Saakashvili has asked Zelensky to return his Ukrainian citizenship, which was revoked by Poroshenko after he served as a government official in Odessa and then fell out of the regime’s favor.
Reports have surfaced suggesting Zelensky may name former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko to the premiership. Tymoshenko, who earned the nickname “gas princess” after getting rich in the energy industry in the early 2000s, has called for a “scorched earth” policy against Ukraine’s predominately Russian-speaking eastern regions. She is an ardent supporter of the country’s ascension to NATO.
Interior Minister Arsen Avakov has also been rumored to be a possible candidate for prime minister.
Despite Zelensky’s Jewish background and identity as a Russian-speaker, he has not shied away from decking himself out in the wares of Ukrainian nationalism, sporting a traditional Ukrainian necklace and grasping a royal-like scepter during his inaugural speech.
Zelensky concluded his remarks with the slogan “Glory to Ukraine,” which was first used by Ukraine’s far-right OUN and UPA military forces that carried out war crimes against Jews during World War II, with the backing of Nazi Germany.
In an interview prior to his election, Zelensky stated that he accepted fascist Stepan Bandera as “hero of Ukraine” for certain regions of the country.
Zelensky will continue implementing the brutal austerity policies imposed on Ukraine by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). A meeting is scheduled between the new government and the agency next week.
IMF investigators have been in Kiev recently to determine whether the country is on the “correct path” to receive another $1.3 billion in funds. Under the current $3.9 billion IMF agreement signed in December 2018, Ukraine must significantly raise what it charges the population for gas. Initial price hikes left several Ukrainian cities effectively without heat this past winter.

Amid worsening trade war, Chinese president calls for new “Long March”

Peter Symonds

With the Trump administration ratcheting up its economic war against China, President Xi Jinping has called for a new “Long March,” saying the country had to prepare for “difficult situations.” Xi’s comments are another indication that any prospect of an agreement to end the escalating trade conflict is remote.
The Long March refers to the tortuous retreat by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its Red Army during the country’s civil war to escape their encirclement by the Nationalist army of Chiang Kai-shek. The march of 9,000 kilometres through remote and difficult areas of western China began in 1934 and lasted more than a year. According to one estimate, of the 100,000 soldiers who set out, just 7,000 survived the cold, disease and fighting to reach Shaanxi province.
Xi visited the monument at the start of the Long March in Jiangxi province on Monday in a bid to revive the CCP’s image. A week before, the CCP Politburo voted to launch a propaganda campaign to try to convince the public that the party remained true to its original aspirations.
The CCP long ago abandoned any adherence to the Marxist principles of socialist internationalism, basing itself instead on the nationalist Stalinist perspective of “Socialism in One Country.” From the 1970s, moreover, it presided over the restoration of capitalism, leading to a widening gulf between rich and poor, and a CCP apparatus that defends the interests of the super-rich.
Xi has not ruled out further trade talks. He spoke in vague terms and did not name Donald Trump or the United States. Invoking the Long March, however, he said the country “must be conscious of the long-term and complex nature of various unfavourable factors at home and abroad, and properly prepare for various difficult situations.”
Above all, the remarks were aimed at rallying the CCP bureaucracy. China faces global economic and financial instability, aggressive US tariffs and increasingly frequent US naval provocations in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait. Domestically, the regime fears the growing signs of unrest in the working class as the economy continues to slow.
Xi was accompanied on his three-day tour of Jiangxi province by Vice Premier Liu He, China’s chief trade negotiator with the US. The latest talks in Washington broke up on May 10 after Trump imposed tariffs on an additional $200 billion worth of Chinese goods. No date was set for another meeting.
The Trump administration dramatically heightened the economic war last week by barring the use of telecommunications equipment manufactured by the Chinese tech giant Huawei and placing the company on a “restricted entity list,” citing national security concerns. Major American corporations, such as Google, Qualcomm, Broadcom and Intel, joined the embargo, declaring they would no longer allow Huawei access to critical software and hardware components.
The moves against Huawei provoked angry responses in China. On Wednesday, Foreign Minister Wang Yi branded Washington’s actions a “classic case of economic bullying.” He accused the US of wanting to “block the development path of China” and using “unwarranted charges and national power to suppress a private Chinese enterprise like Huawei.”
Wang’s comments go to the heart of the intractable issues in the trade talks. The US is determined to prevent China from becoming an economic challenger in key hi-tech areas and is prepared to use every means to achieve that end. That is why it is accusing China of intellectual property theft and providing illegitimate subsidies to Chinese corporations.
As part of his Jiangxi tour, Xi visited one of China’s rare earth mining and processing facilities, sparking speculation that Beijing could use a ban on rare earth exports to hit back at the US.
Rare earths, while quite abundant, are essential to the production of a wide range of items, including smartphones, lasers, missile systems and superconductors. China accounts for 90 percent of global production and the US depends on China for 80 percent of its rare earth imports.
Xi made no reference to the trade war during his visit to the JL MAG Rare Earth factory in Ganzhou, which specialises in magnetic rare-earth elements. However, the presence of China’s top trade negotiator at his side spoke volumes. In 2010, amid a tense standoff with Japan over disputed islets in the East China Sea, China banned rare earth exports to that country, forcing concessions.
More hawkish voices in China have publicly called for similar measures against the US. The state-owned Global Times hailed Xi’s visit to the factory and declared that US demand for rare earth minerals was “an ace in Beijing’s hand.” The US would require years to rebuild its rare earth industry, enabling China to “control the life-blood of the US high-technology industry” and “win a trade war against the US.”
The South China Morning Post reported on an article last week by Jin Canrong, who suggested that China ban rare earth exports to the US as part of a strategy to counter Washington’s measures. Jin also called for Beijing to consider dumping its holdings of US treasuries, currently estimated at $1.13 trillion. Such a move would not only hit the US financial system but generate financial instability globally. As well, Jin suggested that China close its markets to major American corporations such as General Motors and Apple.
A CNN article entitled “China’s latest trade war card isn’t as strong as Beijing thinks” indicates that the Trump administration and the US military and state apparatus are preparing for such eventualities. China’s ban on exports to Japan in 2010 provoked alarm in Washington and led to a congressional hearing to discuss “China’s monopoly on rare earths: Implications for US foreign and security policy.”
More recently, in February 2018, the US Department of the Interior listed rare earths as a separate category on a draft list of minerals critical for “security and economic prosperity.” The US undoubtedly has increased its stockpiles of rare earths and other vital raw materials and drawn up plans for alternative sources.
Trump’s aggressive moves against Huawei and President Xi’s muted, but nevertheless pointed, response signal a new stage in the descent into trade war. While both sides continue to talk about talking, they are preparing strategies that would lead to spiralling economic warfare and ultimately military conflict.
Speaking at a disarmament forum in Geneva on Wednesday, China’s disarmament ambassador Li Song warned of the dangerous consequences of the “unilateral and bullying practices” of the US. He said treating countries as rivals risked turning them into enemies, even if that was not intended.

Indian big business propels Modi and his Hindu supremacist BJP to a second term

Keith Jones

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have emerged strengthened from the country’s national election.
While final results are still being tabulated, the BJP has increased its share of the popular vote, surpassing 37 percent, and captured more than 300 Lok Sabha seats. This gives it an absolute majority in the lower house of India’s parliament, even without taking into account the 40 or more seats won by its partners in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA).
India’s stock markets, which had soared after exit polls were released last Sunday announcing a BJP victory, again set record highs Thursday as the scale of the BJP/NDA election victory became apparent.
Big business is salivating at the prospect of Modi’s government accelerating pro-investor “reforms” and aggressively asserting India’s great power ambitions amid trade war and surging global geo-political tensions.
So eager was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to solidarize himself with Modi, he congratulated his Indian counterpart on his re-election even before India’s Election Commission had completed tallying the votes in just one of the 543 Lob Sabha constituencies.
In his congratulatory message, US President Donald Trump said Modi’s return to the “helm” means “great things are in store for the US-India partnership.” Continuing down the path blazed by previous Congress Party-led governments, the Modi-led BJP government has transformed India into a veritable frontline state in Washington’s strategic confrontation with China.
In the run up to the election there were numerous signs of mounting social anger and growing working class opposition to the BJP government and, more generally, to the ruinous outcome of three decades of neo-liberal capitalist restructuring. India has become one of the world’s most socially polarized countries. A tiny voracious ruling elite appropriates the fruits of capitalist expansion and condemns more than 800 million people to eke out an existence on the equivalent of little more than US $3 per day.
But the palpable opposition to chronic poverty, agrarian distress, mass joblessness (India’s unemployment rate is at a 45-year high) and the Hindu right’s abuse of Muslims and other minorities could find no positive expression in the politics and parties of the Indian bourgeoisie.
In this there are striking parallels with developments around the world. The working class is moving to the left and as attested in the worldwide upsurge in class struggle—from last December’s plantation workers strike in Sri Lanka and the “Yellow Vest” movement in France, to the worker revolt in the Mexican maquiladora center of Matamoros, the wave of teachers’ strikes in the US, and the mass anti-government protests in Algeria—seeking to assert its interests. But in so far as this opposition has yet to take the form of an independent political movement of the working class striving for workers’ power, extreme right forces in country after country, including Trump in the US, the Lega in Italy, and Brazil’s Bolsonaro, have been able to exploit the mass disaffection with the pro-austerity, pro-war establishment “left” and liberal parties.
Faced with a vile and politically incendiary BJP election campaign, laden with militarist, anti-Pakistan and ant-Muslim rhetoric, the opposition parties cowered and connived, “answering” Modi and BJP President Amit Shah with their own reactionary appeals. When Modi seized on a terrorist attack in disputed Kashmir to foment a war crisis, ordering air strikes deep inside Pakistan and bringing South Asia’s nuclear-armed rivals closer to war than at any time since 1971, the opposition parties fell over one another in proclaiming their support and hailing India’s military.

An historic collapse of the Congress Party and the Stalinist CPM and CPI

The Indian elections are an historic repudiation of the Congress Party—the Indian bourgeoisie’s first, and till recently only, “national” party—and of the two Stalinist parliamentary parties, their Left Front electoral bloc, and affiliated trade union apparatuses that have dominated “left” politics in India since independence.
The Congress has won or is leading in 52 seats, which would represent a gain of just eight seats from 2014 when it suffered its worst-ever electoral defeat. The Congress gains were entirely at the expense of the Left Front—principally in Kerala where the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM) leads the government—and the AIADMK, a right-wing regional party that governs Tamil Nadu.
The Congress actually lost seats to the BJP, as the ruling party and its NDA allies swept or won the lion’s share of seats across western and northern India, including in Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Haryana—states with a combined population of almost 800 million—and in the national capital territory, Delhi.
Among the losers was Rahul Gandhi, the Congress Party’s dynastic president. He failed to hold the Nehru-Gandhi family “pocket borough” of Amethi in Uttar Pradesh. But Gandhi will have a seat in the incoming Lok Sabha because he successfully contested a second constituency in Kerala.
The Congress made a calibrated appeal to social discontent, promising to increase the derisory sums India spends on health care and education, and to phase in a “guaranteed annual income” scheme, under which the poorest 20 percent of households would receive 72,000 rupees (about $1,025) annually.
India’s workers and toilers rightly deemed these promises to be simply not credible. The Congress has been issuing pledges to “banish poverty” since long before most Indians were born, while ruthlessly defending the interests of the Indian bourgeoisie. With the shipwreck in 1991 of its state-led capitalist development project—which it cynically had labelled “Congress socialism”—the Congress Party spearheaded the Indian bourgeoisie’s drive to forge a new partnership with imperialism, based on transforming India into a cheap-labour production hub for global capital.
Most of the heavy lifting in initiating and implementing “big bang” reforms—deregulation, privatization, the slashing of corporate taxes, the casualization of work, establishment of Special Economic Zones, etc.—and in forging a “global strategic partnership” with US imperialism was carried out by Congress-led governments from 1991 to 1996 and 2004 to 2014.
The Stalinists have suffered an even more ignominious electoral and political collapse. Their popular support among India’s workers and toilers has hemorrhaged. For decades they politically suppressed the working class—containing and defusing the mass opposition to the economic “reform agenda,” and propping up a succession of right-wing governments at the Centre, most of them Congress-led, that implemented “pro-market” policies and sought closer ties to Washington.
Together, the CPM and the older, smaller Communist Party of India (CPI) have won just five Lok Sabha seats. Moreover, in four of the five they were elected on the coattails of a DMK-Congress electoral alliance in Tamil Nadu.
In the three states traditionally considered the electoral bastions of the Left Front and where the Stalinists have repeatedly led governments—West Bengal, Kerala, and Tripura—they won just 1 seat. In West Bengal, whose state government the CPM led for 34 years ending in 2011, its share of the popular vote fell to single digits. The BJP made a breakthrough in a state where it was till recently a minor player.
One development exemplified the corruption and political rot that prevails in the CPM after decades in which it administered the capitalist state apparatus in West Bengal, and after 1991, implemented what it itself labeled “pro-investor” policies. Much of the CPM apparatus defected to either the state’s current ruling party, the right-wing Trinamool Congress, or the Hindu supremacist BJP. Among the BJP’s 18 victorious candidates in West Bengal was a former CPM state legislator, Khagen Murmu.
In the national election held 15 years ago, the CPM-Left Front, buoyed by a wave of popular opposition to the BJP/NDA’s first-ever full-term national government, emerged as the third largest bloc in parliament, with more than 60 MPs. The CPM promptly put its new-found influence to work corralling various regional and casteist parties behind the Congress, serving as the midwife of the right-wing Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government and its principal parliamentary prop for the first four years of its decade in office.
In 2019, the Stalinists aspired to play the same criminal role. Their response to the dramatic intensification of class struggle, as epitomized by the bourgeoisie’s embrace of Modi and the recent wave of strikes and peasant protests, has been to redouble their efforts to chain the working class to the parties of the bourgeoisie and its state. They waged an “Anybody but BJP” campaign, calling for support to whichever party or alliance in a given state had the best chance of defeating the BJP/NDA. They proclaimed their backing for a faction of the bourgeoisie to form an “alternative secular” government—i.e. another big business government committed to pro-investor reform, the Indo-US alliance, and the rearmament program that has given India the world’s fourth largest military budget.
In the days before the vote count, CPM general secretary Sitaram Yechury was one of a handful of “trusted” leaders who met with Gandhi and his mother and former Congress president Sonia Gandhi, to discuss, if the parliamentary arithmetic permitted, how they would stake their claim to government.
For decades the Stalinist have justified their support for right-wing governments with the claim that this was the only way to block the BJP’s path to power. The end result is that the BJP and Hindu right are a greater menace than ever.
With the working class politically smothered by the Stalinists and prevented from advancing its own socialist solution to the social crisis, the BJP has been able to exploit popular anger and frustration over rampant social inequality and ever-deepening economic insecurity.

A government of crisis and reaction

A mood of apprehension, at least among the more perceptive sections of the ruling elite, overhangs the corporate media and stock market’s celebrations of Modi’s electoral triumph.
Indian and world capitalism are mired in systemic crisis. The Indian press is full of warnings about the multiple problems that beset India’s economy—a banking system weighed down by corporate debts, causing the credit system to seize up; a drop in consumer demand, rooted in a protracted agrarian crisis, years of government austerity and mounting unemployment; and the threat posed by the development of trade war.
The Indian bourgeoisie is playing an especially foul role on the world stage. Through its strategic integration with Washington, New Delhi is encouraging US imperialism’s reckless offensive against Beijing, while leaning on the US to bully and threaten Pakistan and build up India’s nuclear-armed military.
The extreme dangers this poses for the people of India, the region and the world have been starkly demonstrated by the three war crises India has passed through since 2016—two with Pakistan and one with China.
Moreover, as India becomes sucked into the maelstrom of great power conflict, it is facing a host of escalating demands from its ostensible US ally that gravely threaten the Indian bourgeoisie’s economic and strategic interests. These demands include cutting off oil imports from Iran and Venezuela, eliminating what remains of India’s barriers on American trade and investment, and ending or at least dramatically curtailing New Delhi’s strategic partnership with Russia.
As everywhere, the ruling class’ response to the cascade of economic and strategic threats is more aggression—against the working class and rural poor, and against its capitalist rivals.
Modi’s stoking of Hindu communalist reaction has prompted handwringing complaints from sections of the elite who fear he is destabilising and discrediting the Indian state, and could reap a whirlwind. But the demand emanating from corporate boardrooms in India, London and New York is that the BJP government must dramatically accelerate structural changes aimed at intensifying the exploitation of the working class.
“Not only has economic momentum slowed,” declared a Times of India editorial this week, “there are incipient signs of stress on the price front, while global trade wars (perhaps even real wars) are breaking out. Consequently, the next government will have no option but to press the accelerator on reforms.”
The working class—whose specific weight has vastly increased as a result of India’s capitalist development and integration with global capitalism—will come into headlong conflict with the Modi government, and sooner rather than later. The crucial question is to arm it with a socialist internationalist program. The Indian working class must constitute itself as an independent political force in opposition to all factions of the Indian bourgeoisie and its parties, rally the rural poor and all the oppressed behind it in the fight for a workers’ government and socialism, and unify its struggles against austerity, social inequality, and the threat of war with the international working class in a global offensive against capitalism.

German government steps up military intervention in Mali

Gregor Link

Against a backdrop of growing conflicts between the major world powers in Africa, the German grand coalition government (Christian Democratic Union CDU, Christian Social Union, CSU, and Social Democratic Party, SPD) is preparing a massive military intervention in Mali and the entire Sahel region of North Africa.
The intervention is taking place behind the backs of the population and is part of the German government’s Africa Strategy, aimed at advancing its economic and geo-strategic interests on the continent. By relying on military means German imperialism is returning to the colonial and militaristic traditions which caused immeasurable suffering on the African continent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Two weeks ago, the German parliament (Bundestag) voted by an overwhelming majority to extend the German army (Bundeswehr) missions in Mali, EUTM and MINUSMA, and the involvement of the German navy in the EU mission Atalanta off the Somali coast for another year.
The government has allocated a total of almost 400 million euros for the three operations up until May 2020. In accordance with the two mandates, the Bundeswehr can station a total of up to 1,100 German soldiers in Mali. The West African country has been effectively under joint German and French occupation since 2013.
In contrast to the previous mandate, the German army now has the task of ensuring the “restoration of state authority” in central Mali. Formerly the German intervention was restricted to the north of the country.
The aim of the new mandate is “to ensure the increased presence of armed and security forces to create the conditions for a return of state administrative structures.” This explains the real purpose of the intervention: neo-colonial control and exploitation of the resource-rich country and the police-military repression of growing opposition to the imperialist occupiers and their hated puppet regime in Bamako.
The country’s government is currently experiencing fierce opposition from the working class and the impoverished rural population. At the end of April, the Malian government of Prime Minister Soumeylou Boubèye Maïga was forced to resign following mass protests and strikes.
The trigger for the protests was a massacre in the village of Ogossagou near Burkina Faso, involving the deaths of around 160 people, including women, the elderly and youth. Another 55 people were injured. The protests were directed against the Western occupiers, under whose eyes the massacre had taken place, and against the indifferent reaction of the Malian government. There are now indications that Malian government forces were involved in the massacre. A dozen uniformed persons are alleged to be among the attackers.
The German grand coalition is acquainted with the crimes committed by the Malian troops it has trained. Already last year, the UN Security Council issued a report listing 344 human rights violations involving 475 victims. Malian military and security forces were involved in 58 of these cases. In addition, Minusma has carried out investigations into 44 cases of extrajudicial executions by Malian soldiers. Instead of withdrawing its forces in light of this carnage the German government is expanding its murderous campaign across the entire Sahel region.
The entire parliamentary debate made clear the full extent of the war plans of the German ruling class. In his plea for deployment, the SPD deputy responsible for African affairs, Christoph Matschie, explicitly named the “stabilization” of the Malian government and the enforcement of the “state monopoly on power” as the objectives of the MINUSMA mission. Mali, according to Matschie, is “a state in the Sahel region that has enormous significance for the stability of the entire region.”
The speaker of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, Andreas Nick, also pleaded in his speech for an expansion of the mission across the entire region. The country’s “problems” were by no means limited to Mali but concerned “the entire Sahelian zone.”
Nick continued by noting that during the course of her trip to Africa at the beginning of May, Chancellor Angela Merkel had again emphasised “the importance of the G-5 states of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger for Germany and Europe, as well as the need for action locally.” Now it was important to “enable our partners in the Sahel to assume even more responsibility for providing for their own security. German and European support for the G-5 countries in financing, training and upgrading the “Force Conjointe du G5 Sahel” is an important step in that direction.”
In the course of implementing its war plans in close cooperation with France, the German government is increasingly coming into conflict with US imperialism. Nick expressed his “great” regret that “the granting of a robust UN mandate under Chapter VII for the ‘Force Conjointe’ had so far failed due to US opposition. The declaration of purely financial reasons and the focus on the purely bilateral work of the US in this region,” Nick concluded, “was not easy to understand.”
To put it more directly: following active participation by the German ruling elite in US regime change wars during the last two decades, it is now criticising US imperialism from the right. A “robust deployment under Chapter VII” requires a brutal combat mission and involving the same murderous and illegal practices used in the US-led wars against Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq.
The defence spokesman for the CDU/CSU, Henning Otte, made clear in his speech that the German government is considering the use of combat drones in Mali and the surrounding region: “We want the use of Heron TP (drone) equipment to continue. Training is already taking place and I say very clearly on behalf of the Union: When necessary we also want to be able to support our soldiers by arming them with the Heron.”
The “debate” over German combat missions in the Bundestag made clear the traditions the ruling class is drawing upon. Speaking on behalf of the far right AfD, Rüdiger Lucassen, a former official at the Ministry of Defense, demanded that the real nature of the operation be revealed to the public: “The entire motion is a document aimed at concealment, full of empty phrases at a time when soldiers need clarity. This is dishonest, cowardly, and deeply irresponsible given the fact that you expose our men and women to this danger.”
In fact, there is no lack of clarity regarding the aims or methods employed by the German government in the Sahel region. The plan is to use brutal force to enforce the interests of German imperialism throughout the region and, as an integral component, erect a kind of “death barrier” to block off “Fortress Europe.”
In addition to the direct deployment of German armed forces and the formation of African units such as the “Force Conjointe,” the German missions involves arming the authoritarian regimes of the Sahel.
Handelsblatt reported that Merkel promised the Burkina Faso government 17 to 20 million euros during her trip to Africa. The money is to be spent on “expanding the capacities of the police and gendarmerie” and “advice from the Bundeswehr” on how best to combat “illegal migration.” During her subsequent visit to neighbouring Niger, Merkel praised the country’s government, stating that it had “undertaken a decisive fight to deter illegal migration” and had “done outstanding work” in recent years.
The “outstanding work” cited by Merkel consists of African regimes with the support of the European Union forcing refugees into the desert where many perish horribly through starvation and thirst. According to reports, EU-trained units have not only secured borders but also occupied waterholes in the Sahara. As a result, the UN refugee agency UNHCR reports that more people are now dying in the desert than in the Mediterranean Sea.
In order to advance their inhuman policies, the ruling class is increasingly conducting covert, illegal military operations. German army special forces are stationed in Jordan, Tunisia, Cameroon and Niger, operating in secret and without any parliamentary mandate. Around 20 naval troops have been training local government soldiers in the Tahoua region of Nigeria for a year.
The results of the votes and the contributions by the opposition parties confirm that there is no opposition to the return of German militarism within the ranks of the ruling class. The Greens and the neo-liberal FDP agreed to all of the Bundeswehr operations by a large majority. The far-right AfD voted nearly unanimously for the EU mission, Atalanta.
The Left Party—the only party to vote against all three deployments—is itself deeply integrated into the structures of German imperialism and plays a central role in Africa’s politics. The Left Party spokeswoman for defence, Christine Buchholz (Marx 21), began her speech by referring to her regular troop visits to the Malian front: “I’ve been to Mali four times in recent years—the last time in February—and the situation has worsened from year to year.”
Stefan Liebich, chairman of the Left Party in the Foreign Affairs Committee and a member of influential think tanks such as the Atlantik-Brücke and the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP), criticised the new mandate from the right. “The European Union and the German army train Malian forces but we cannot decide what the Malian army does and how it does it,” he lamented. The current mandate implies “the notion that somehow one is demonstrating responsibility with purely training missions but without actually taking up any responsibility.”