The vast amount of energy that is wasted in pursuit of maximum profits for capitalist corporations is the source of Japan’s energy problems.  The fossil fuel burnt to enhance automotive industry wealth, the electric power consumed in neon signs, electric vending machines, and advertising in all its forms are unfortunately, not what is being emphasized by spokespersons for a growing anti-government movement in Japan. 

On July 16, as many as 170,000 protesters gathered in central Tokyo to demand an end to nuclear power and to protest the government’s recent decision to resume nuclear power plant operations after a two-month total shutdown for a phony safety check. Pointing to a complete lack of meaningful progress in restoring disaster victims’ livelihoods and in decontamination of polluted areas, the demonstrators demanded the resignation of ineffectual prime minister Noda and his New Democratic Party administration. 

The mass movement against the use of nuclear power is growing in Japan in the wake of the nuclear disaster brought on by the earthquakes and tsunami in March 2011. The movement is well on its way to gathering 10 million signatures on a petition calling for the abolition of nuclear power. The working class in Japan knows it cannot trust government bureaucrats or their capitalist masters to safeguard public safety. Many working people know Tokyo Electric Power Company has used gangsters (sokaiya) to intimidate protestors in the past. We in PLP also know that to solve a capitalist created energy crisis, a communist revolution is necessary. 

As victims of the great U.S. war crime, the use of A-bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the workers in Japan understand the horrors of radiation poisoning.

The growing movement reflects a national mood in favor of sweeping social change — a new way of life. Anti-capitalist sentiment is growing, but much like the Occupy movement in the U.S., it lacks the type of clear direction that could be given by a revolutionary communist party.

Japan has been suffering from post-bubble economic stagnation and mass unemployment for more than 20 years. Of course, the U.S. and Europe are heading down the same path after their asset-bubble economy burst. 

The old Japan Communist Party gave up the fight for communism long ago. Instead it mounts electoral campaigns promising, in effect, that if only good, intelligent people, like their candidates, were given the reins of power, then the system could work with a few “scientific-socialist” modifications. The old Socialist Party that once led militant trade union struggles is now defunct. A handful of opportunist quasi-Trotskyite (fake leftists) groups only add to the confusion about Marxism-Leninism.

Of course this general situation is not unique to Japan. There are no shortcuts in the fight for communism — for real revolution. Communism is where workers control production for their needs. The capitalist class is resilient and flexible enough to withstand movements based on misleading slogans like “We are the 99%.”

In Japan like everywhere else, substituting one bourgeois party for another, building one reform movement after another that ignores the control the bosses have over economic resources — the underlying cause of unemployment and pollution — leaves capitalist bosses in power. Workers worldwide will learn this. It is up to us in PLP to help bring this about sooner rather than later.

On June 28 the Supreme Court declared Obama’s health reform, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), constitutional. Many “progressive” voices cheered this as a great victory while the Tea Party “conservatives” screamed that the president’s reform was equivalent to socialism and must be stopped. Other health reformers were quick to point out that the new law, having survived a court challenge, would still not do much. Physicians for a National Health Plan (PNHP), for example, pointed out that this puny reform leaves 26 million uninsured and provides inadequate coverage for millions more. 

What lessons can communists learn from all this noise? Primarily, it is that neither side of this “debate” represents the interests of workers. The Tea Party racists, cackling about the un-constitutionality of the law and calling Obama a socialist are clearly enemies of the working class. But less clear is that liberal politicians like Obama are no better. In more than three years of the Obama presidency the working class has continued to suffer devastating racist attacks, in employment, health care and education.  One cannot ignore the unprecedented campaign of racist deportations that Obama has overseen. For workers, choosing one group of bosses and politicians over another is a lethal mistake.

For communists, the slogan “To each according to need,” has guided us since the days of Karl Marx. In other words, we don’t rely on any politicians, who all serve one section of bosses or another. Their system, capitalism, is not based on the needs of workers. Capitalism always has been, and always will be a system of profit, greed, racism and sexism. Capitalism is a system where workers only have worth as long as they can labor and produce profit for a boss. The principal lesson of Obamacare (as the ACA is called) is that only a system truly based on the needs of workers — communism — will bring us decent health and health care.

PNHP explains why people in the U.S. can’t have the health reform we need: “the ACA perpetuates a dominant role for the private insurance industry. Each year, that industry siphons off hundreds of billions of health care dollars for overhead, profit and the paperwork it demands from doctors and hospitals; it denies care in order to increase insurers’ bottom line; and it obstructs any serious effort to control costs.” 

The PNHP and other liberal critics of Obamacare have shown that eliminating the $400 billion profit and overhead taken by the insurance companies would pay for insuring the rest of the people who need care. They lay it all out at (http://www.pnhp.org/resources/administrative-waste-consumes-31-percent-of-health-spending).

What they don’t talk about is why such a logical and well-documented change is impossible under developing fascism,  a period that, among other things, includes the intensification of the disciplining of the working class. What this means is that workers, while suffering greater attacks, become politically aligned with bosses. The rulers primarily use racism and nationalism to convince workers to stand behind “their” bosses and politicians. U.S. bosses require this political allegiance from workers because the bosses need to defend themselves against increased attacks from their capitalist rivals.

 Rather than improving access to care for ordinary working-class people, all over the world health care systems are privatizing, eliminating access by people with limited income. In Sweden, a country that comes to mind when someone says “socialized medicine,” the first private, for-profit medical service in decades started in the 1990s. According to a study by Ake Bergmark of Mid Sweden University, “In 2000, St Görans’ Hospital in Stockholm … became the first general emergency hospital in Sweden to be transferred into private ownership.” Privatization in the United Kingdom, begun under the Thatcher administration in the 1980s, has continued with public medical facilities in Britain increasingly suffering neglect and under-funding. Similar “market reforms” of public health care are seen across Europe. Professor Howard Waitzkin of the University of New Mexico has documented the dismantling of public hospital and health systems in several countries in Latin America under pressure from the International Monetary Fund controlled by the U.S.

The most dramatic fall in mortality rates ever witnessed in a large country occurred in China in the generation following the communist-led revolution there in 1949. The leading slogan in medicine, as in other spheres at that time, was “Serve the people.” Perhaps most shocking to people who still associate the word “socialism” with China is the current complete dominance of market forces in Chinese medical care.  

Now, in a large new provincial children’s hospital in Lanzhou, China, visitors were taken aback to see a giant electronic display in the main lobby listing the exorbitant prices for medical services. In the newborn intensive care units of China, according to an article by Huanhuan Wang published this year in the U.S. journal Pediatrics, about two-thirds of the infants who die from respiratory failure do so because their parents could no longer afford the cost of the breathing machines that were keeping them alive. Clearly the slogan leading development in recent years is the one coined by the pro-capitalist Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s: “To get rich is glorious.”  

With these worldwide trends of privatization and “market reforms” at work, is it realistic to think that increased access to good medical care (or to education, transportation, housing or employment) is in the cards? Reforms that created the modern welfare state, with its government-supported services to improve the living standards of workers, did not come about because of some kind-hearted politicians. These reforms in Western Europe and other rich capitalist countries resulted from workers’ class struggle and consequent ruling classes’ fears of the possibility of revolution. They were afraid that their workers would follow the lead of the Soviet working class and seize power by force. 

Sweden did not invent socialized medicine. The Soviet Union was the first country to make medical care a right of every worker, a revolutionary innovation that was launched when workers took power in 1917 and which was largely in place with a vast network of health care facilities by the early 1930s, as described in detail by Newsholm and Kingsbury in their 1933 book, Red Medicine (available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/newsholme/1933/red-medicine/index.htm).

Today, living conditions are worsening for working-class families around the world as the Great Recession deepens and fascist conditions intensify. Obamacare will have virtually no impact on this reality. Not every working man, woman and child has the promise of a healthy and productive life because some silver-tongued capitalist politician gives the perfect speech or because some billionaire makes a “gift” to charity of the money he stole from workers.

This new world will be created only after we workers fight a long and bloody revolution to take power away from the exploiters who rule the world today. Can this happen? It was already begun twice in the last century. There is no reason our Party can’t learn why those revolutions reverted back to capitalism. PLP can lead a revolution for workers’ power in the years ahead that answers the working class’s needs.

As imperialist rulers in the U.S. face sharpening global competition, especially as they shift to prepare for a potential war with China, they must deal with two related problems. The first is a military that is both expensive and inadequate. The second is a working class short on patriotism and reluctant to enlist in the bosses’ warmongering quest to maintain their world empire.

Speaking for the dominant, finance-capital wing of the U.S. ruling class, Barack Obama’s military and national security advisors have devised a scheme that combines a revived draft, forced labor at low wages, and rabid union-busting. Taken as a whole, it would lower workers’ living standards while depositing even more profits into the banks and biggest corporations. Thomas Ricks, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), presented such a plan last week on the New York Times op-ed page (7/10/12). Ricks would present high school graduates with three options:

• Eighteen months in the military with low pay but “excellent” post-service benefits, including free college tuition [for those who survive a war];

    • Civilian national service for a slightly longer period with similar low pay and future benefits;

   • An opt-out for those willing to forfeit virtually all federal assistance for the rest of their lives. 

Ricks thinks his plan could alleviate the so-called “Vietnam Syndrome,” which has made workers unwilling to sacrifice themselves in the next U.S. conflict after the Vietnam War slaughtered 3.8 million Vietnamese and 58,000 GIs. (This “syndrome” is in fact a healthy, working-class aversion to furnishing the imperialists with cannon fodder.) He also hopes that forced, low-paid labor on a massive scale can help revive the U.S. capitalists’ profit rate, which is plunging next to their Chinese archrivals. 

Details of Ricks’ plan are even more ominous than his core proposals. Beyond enlarging the U.S. military, he would make it more deadly. Draftees would remain stateside, freeing up the hardened, presumably more committed volunteer force for combat overseas. Of course, conscripts won to the Pentagon’s “killer elite” brainwashing “could move into the professional force and receive weapons training.” 

National Service = Civilian Government Slavery

Those who don’t choose the actual army could wind up “teaching in low-income areas, cleaning parks, rebuilding crumbling infrastructure” — all jobs that are now predominantly unionized in schools, parks and construction. Ricks’ union-busting scheme would create a mass army of scabs and wipe out union workers’ hard-earned gains for the benefit of U.S. bosses.

Like Scott Walker and Andrew Cuomo, the governors of Wisconsin and New York, Ricks targets workers he labels as “overpaid” public employees. All three ruling-class mouthpieces blame state and municipal workers for draining U.S. capitalists’ profit margins and tying up funds better spent on imperialist wars.

“Imagine,” gushes Ricks, “how much could be saved if a few hundred New York City school custodians were 19, energetic and making $15,000 plus room and board.” They’d replace older workers who might earn three or four times that amount plus health benefits, vacations, and sick pay — won through decades of hard struggle — and who could now join the army of the unemployed. In addition, Ricks says, “much of the labor currently contracted out to the private sector could be performed by 18-year-olds for much less.”

This overhaul would come down especially hard on black, Latino and immigrant working-class youth who are already at the bottom of the wage scale and suffer double the jobless rates of white workers, or worse. They would be even more super-exploited than they are now.

Ricks’ opt-out clause essentially excommunicates workers who are swayed by the liberal imperialists’ domestic political enemies. It is an implicit jab at libertarians (those opposed to virtually any government control), the Tea Party and others who are less than gung-ho about U.S. intervention abroad. “Those who declined to help Uncle Sam would in return pledge to ask nothing from him — no Medicare, no subsidized college loans and no mortgage guarantees. Those who want minimal government can have it.”

In actuality, the children of the super-rich don’t need these federal government supports. But everyone else would have a gun at their heads: “Choose” the militarized national service/draft, or opt out and get zilch.

Liberal pundits and politicians (like Charles Rangel, the black congressman from Harlem) say an all-encompassing draft would foster class equality in the U.S. They also claim that it would make war less likely by putting the entire population at risk. By giving both rich and poor a stake in future wars, they say, politicians and the wealthy might think twice before endorsing such wars. But the answer for the working class is not uniting with rich kids for an equal opportunity to kill workers and youth in other countries and protect the U.S. rulers’ profits. The answer is working-class unity to wage class war against the capitalist exploiters.

The push for “universal” service hides a darker, militarist motive. The late Charles Moskos, a military sociologist who helped create the fascist Hart-Rudman reports, wrote that a draft “that starts conscription at the top of the social ladder” would “raise acceptance of combat casualties” (United We Serve: National Service and the Future of Citizenship, Brookings Institution Press, 2003). Working-class youth would be more easily persuaded to go off to war in a more egalitarian military — a theory that ignores the fact that the rich have ways of avoiding combat not open to workers.

The payoff for the bosses would be huge. While he avoids mentioning China, a potential World War III foe that has more people of military age than the total U.S. population, Ricks salivates over the prospect of mobilizing an average school graduation army “of about four million.”

While Obama’s CNAS-influenced re-election team is clearly promoting Ricks’ plan, Obama is unlikely to publically endorse it before the election. He knows that Senator John Kerry’s calls for national service cost him public support in the 2004 presidential election. Obama needs to maintain the U.S. rulers’ scam of the “lesser evil” — that no matter how bad things may look under his administration, the Republicans’ Mitt Romney would be worse. But all the “lesser-evil” Democrats elected in the past 50 years, from John F. Kennedy to Bill Clinton, have wound up establishing the very policies for which they bashed their Republican rivals.

In fact, Obama has pushed U.S. imperialism beyond what George W. Bush ever dared. He has expanded the Afghan war by 30,000 additional troops. He has effectively invaded Pakistan with U.S. Army Special Forces, bombings, and CIA drone killings. He has escalated the regional war in the Middle East in Yemen, Somalia and Libya and ratcheted up attacks on Iran while fortifying U.S. bases in and around Iraq. Domestically, Obama has deported far more immigrants than Bush ever dreamed of while expanding government spying on millions in the U.S. He has cynically executed all of these racist, fascist, and murderous policies behind the façade that his Democrats are “the workers’ party.” 

But the Progressive Labor Party says: Evil, yes; lesser, no!

Today our Party can build on working-class revulsion to killing and dying for Uncle Sam/ExxonMobil. By bringing communist politics into the mass organizations where we belong and injecting our ideas into the class struggle, we can win workers and youth to see the fight for communist revolution as the only alternative to the horrors of capitalism. In that way we can build a mass PLP, the essential weapon to destroy the bosses and their profit system and usher in a world run by and for workers.

********

Fascism on the March

Thomas Ricks, whose fascist scheme is outlined on this page, is no lone howling wolf. He speaks for the dominant wing of U.S. capitalists. At the Center for A New American Security (CNAS), he works under the think tank’s president, Nathaniel Fick, and its chairman, Richard Danzig. Fick served as a military adviser to Obama’s 2008 transition team. From 2007 through the 2008 election, Danzig counseled then-Senator Obama on national security issues. Michele Flournoy, CNAS founder, was Obama’s defense undersecretary from 2009 to 2012. Ricks, Fick, Danzig, Flournoy and Obama all, in turn, answer to CNAS’s arch-imperialist donors: Chevron, JP Morgan Chase, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

Why do we call this a fascist scheme? Consider its elements: lowered wages and racist super-exploitation to expand bosses’ profits; driving the unemployed into the military; union-busting and forced labor; increased racist police attacks on black and Latino youth with stop-and-frisk terror, gung-ho patriotic fervor against “foreign enemies.”

All of these have their parallels in the program enforced by Hitler’s Third Reich in the run-up to World War II. Nazi Germany gassed millions in their concentration camp ovens. The U.S. already employs mass incarceration, with black and Latino workers and youth representing 70 percent of those imprisoned in the world’s largest prison system. But history tells us there is no reason to believe that the U.S. capitalists will stop there. They will go to any lengths to meet the challenge of a rising China in a competition for the world’s vital resources, especially oil and gas.

Can World War III be far behind?

ANNABA, ALGERIA, July 12 — A strike by 250 phosphate company workers at the port installations here proves once again that nationalization of industry is just another form of capitalist exploitation and rule.

On June 5, 250 workers shut the Installations Portuaires de Annaba (IPA), a subsidiary of the Ferphos Group — one of many of Algeria’s state-owned companies — and have blocked all exports since.

The workers are making the same demands they advanced in a 2011 strike which saw every company promise broken, including: changes in the wage scale plus a guaranteed bonus and promotions; rectifying working conditions which are endangering workers’ lives due to collapsing tunnels; on-the-job illnesses involving dermatological and respiratory problems; and broken locomotives hauling the phosphate on run-down railroad tracks.

Six IPA strikers told the El Watan newspaper (7/9): “We’ve been on strike for over a month, and no official notice has been taken….Ferphos is a rich company. This wealth profits others and not us poor workers. In addition to the precarious wage situation that we’re locked into, our working conditions are inhumane, worthy of slavery….Are we subhuman? In the eyes of our director…we are subhuman since he has not hesitated to use disrespectful and insulting words about us.”

Algeria’s state-run companies were the product of the overthrow of French colonial rule which ended 50 years ago (depicted in the famous film “Algiers”). While much was made of a national liberation movement freeing workers from the imperialist French bosses, the latter were merely replaced by local bosses who have run these nationalized industries in their own class interests.

In 2011, the Ferphos Group and its holding company had sales of nearly $100 million, from which they netted substantial profits. They made out like bandits by gaining a good share of the market because of the turmoil surrounding their three main Arab Spring rivals, Tunisia, Syria and Egypt. The slowdown of phosphate exports from those three countries — amounting to over six million tons — opened the way for Algerian phosphate.

But, of course, it was not the workers who profited from this, it was the Algerian state capitalists who continued to exploit the working class, leading to their two strikes. So with all the hoopla in the bosses’ media about the Arab Spring “freeing” these workers of dictatorial rule, capitalist exploitation simply continues under the façade of nationalization.

Meanwhile, the union fakers are in cahoots with the bosses, fearing to even publicly back the strike because it might cost them their jobs as “union leaders.” The rank and file can only depend on themselves, not these union traitors.

The only chance of the workers winning some of their immediate demands is by spreading the strike to all of Ferphos Group’s subsidiaries and to all of the workers involved in the industry. Yet the real solution lies not in these nationalist movements nor in clerical rulers (like in Iran) but in a class revolution that destroys the profit system, its bosses who run it and their state apparatus that enforces it. That’s communism, and requires the leadership of a communist party. Reaching these workers with that understanding is a task to which the Progressive Labor Party is dedicated.