Unity-Struggle-Unity Press

27/09/2023

Think you're middle class? You're wrong!

Read "There is no middle class!"

The fact of the matter is simply this: no one is middle class.

18/09/2023

https://clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org/2023-09-18-rico-arrests-declaration-of-war/

The vile compound of Cop City has been the subject of numerous articles at the Red Clarion in the past, and the state of Georgia’s lawfare against the Stop Cop City activists is on the record. They began by arresting protestors and spread to bail organizers over the course of the summer. This September, the state of Georgia has crossed the final Rubicon and declared itself in open war against all socialists of every stripe. An indictment under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, otherwise known as RICO, was filed in the state’s court naming not one, not ten, not thirty, but sixty RICO defendants in the Stop Cop City movement.
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The curtain is finally being lowered on the state’s pretense of impartiality. It doesn’t mediate class conflicts — the state is, itself, the most powerful weapon in the corner of the wealthy capitalists. It’s in the deep fascist strongholds of Georgia and the South, where the neoliberal project was long ago rejected for a return to the naked rule of the bullet and the baton, that the most depraved exhibition of power is now being displayed. It won’t remain in the South — it will crawl across the U.S. Empire, county by county and city by city, one by one letting the local pigs off their leashes, turning them free on the people, calling us out as enemies by name. If the police succeed in building Cop City in Atlanta, it won’t be long until similar facilities are built across the United States.

There can be no more half-measures. The state of Georgia isn’t fooling around.

12/09/2023

https://clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org/2023-09-12-detaining-migrants-depress-wages/

During this summer’s record heat wave in the middle of the blazing Sonoran Desert, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have detained at least 50 asylum seekers. Border Patrol encloses the people they catch in outdoor yards of gravel surrounded by barbed wire fences. If the migrants are lucky, they have a piece of cardboard on which to sleep. This grotesque scene is not an anomaly; it is a continuation and expansion of federal policies that weaponize the environment to “manage” undocumented migration for profit.

Immigration doesn’t just affect migrants – their struggle impacts the entire working class. Cde. Rabbit explains how immigration is tied to wages, and the awful conditions migrants face…

30/08/2023

https://clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org/2023-08-29-maui-fires/

Make no mistake about it: this is a man-made disaster. While the wind may be responsible for igniting the fuse, it is the actions of men that laid the powder.

Wildfires have not always been endemic to this former wetland environment. This is the terraforming of colonizers.

30/08/2023

https://clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org/2023-08-29-no-reform-for-rikers/

There are no rich people on Rikers Island. It is a depot of the poor and desperate. This fortress-city houses some estimated 10,000 people, most of them held pretrial, still presumed legally innocent, on bonds they cannot post. This tomb of the living is in a city governed by a Democratic mayor, with an overwhelmingly Democratic council, that sits within a firmly Democratic state, overseen by Democratic politicians. Support for these inhumane institutions like Rikers can be found anywhere in the political spectrum of the U.S. state; on the center-left among the Democrats and on the right among the Republicans, there is bilateral approval for the dehumanizing concentration camps that we call prisons.

There are no rich people on Rikers Island. It is a factory of misery; it is capitalism’s real face.

25/08/2023

The form and structure of the study group provide fertile ground for cultivating the growth of a radical political movement. In a society that is so hostile to radical egalitarian politics, the study group is a venue for making connections with other people who are working for the same end. The connective power of the internet is fantastic and is particularly important for comrades who have circumstances that preclude them from participating in-person. However, it is also important to physically come together with people in a local community, reaching out to break down the walls of isolation that capital so implacably builds.

Forming or joining a study group brings to bear the power of the social on our political education. Cde. Vinz introduces why study groups are an important foundation of revolutionary movements.

21/08/2023

On Monday, May 14, 2023, San Francisco district attorney Brooke Jenkins, who has a history of dropping charges against police, announced that she was declining to prosecute the Walgreens rent-a-cop Michael Anthony for the murder of Banko Brown on April 27.

https://clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org/2023-08-21-brooke-jenkins-eotp

15/08/2023

https://clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org/2023-08-15-marion-record-owner-killed/

“They showed up like the Gestapo.” So says Eric Meyer, son of Joan Meyer, co-owner of the Marion County Record. The Marion, Kansas police executed systematic raids on Friday, August 11, targeting the Record’s offices, the home of its two co-owners, Joan and Eric Meyer, and the home of a reporter. These raids, conducted with the authorization of local judge Laura Viar, violate federal law. The narrowly-tailored harassment, designed to silence the newspaper, left the Meyers in a state of shock — particularly Joan, who worked on the Record for more than 50 years. Joan, 98, died on Saturday afternoon. According to her son, she was unable to eat or sleep as a result of the hours-long raid, and was killed by the shock.

“They showed up like the Gestapo.” So says Eric Meyer, son of Joan Meyer, co-owner of the Marion County Record.

14/08/2023

It’s not enough to merely join a union. Labor bureaucrats claim that business unionism gets the goods, but in fact it’s nothing more than begging for crumbs.

Cde. Editor J. Katsfoter performs a deep dive into the history of business unionism in the U.S. Empire, and its implications for struggle today.

08/08/2023

https://clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org/our-little-hitler-our-rfk/

The 2024 U.S. presidential elections are coming. Every four years, the ruling classes of the U.S. Empire determine their general strategy and tactics by selecting, through an arcane and elitist process, the chief executive officer of the empire. Normally, the bourgeois political parties engage in a brutal, backbiting process of glad-handing to cut down the competition to a single candidate who will represent that clique of the bourgeoisie and their political apparatus. However, from time to time misalignments and malfunctions within those parties result in a breakdown of this normal process, subdividing the bourgeoisie, the political class, or both, into a majority group and a minority group — shattering their very weak political discipline. This threatens the legitimacy of the bourgeois state in the eyes of the other classes and sometimes allows the other party, the one which is not suffering a crisis of discipline, to carry the day. Throughout its history, the U.S. Empire has usually had a fairly united ruling class. Elections to the presidency have, going back to the foundation of the settler-republic, mostly been uncontested or held between candidates with only superficially different platforms. Throughout the 20th century, contested elections became more common, and have finally culminated in the series of crises that erupted in 2016 and continuously plague the bourgeois state today. We expect these crises to continue into 2024.

Our paper has already covered the candidacy of Cornel West, a liberal on the left wing of the major parties who is masquerading as a socialist. Today we will address our homegrown American Hi**erite, Robert F. Kennedy Junior. This towering clay-faced gargoyle straight from central casting has arisen to represent the disaffected but unconscious labor aristocracy and petit-bourgeoisie. He is the vomit, the detritus, thrown up by the impending collapse of the political system, by its failure to address the most pressing needs of the great masses of people, by its tottering illegitimacy, and by the two-party system’s failure to suppress the roughly one-quarter of each party’s constituency who despise their own party’s political orthodoxy.

Should RFK’s candidacy fuse with the bourgeois monster, the extreme right head of the fascist hydra that is even now stirring and drawing up plots to become the only head of that horrific abomination, he will graduate from a historical curiosity, a Hi**er-in-miniature, to a full fledged fascist demagogue. As his campaign continues, he professes a more-and-more open dedication to N**i ideology — on July 28 of this year, his official Twitter account tweeted out that he had tried to seek Secret Service protection: “Typical turnaround time for pro forma protection requests from presidential candidates is 14-days. After 88-days of no response and after several follow-ups by our campaign, the Biden Administration just denied our request.” This, of course, is a reference to the popular white supremacist “numerical code” 1488, which is short for the 14 words (“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”) and the 8th letter of the alphabet (“H”) twice, for “Heil Hi**er.” It should universally raise alarm when a potential presidential candidate openly employs the slogan of David Lane, who was one of America’s most infamous and successful Ne***zi terrorists.

We previously covered the candidacy of Cornel West, a liberal on the left wing of the major parties who is masquerading as a socialist. Today we examine our homegrown American Hi**erite, Robert F. …

31/07/2023

Of course Dr. West is not “correct” in any of his policies or positions. But if those policies and positions become topics of widespread discussion among the intermediate working masses, this will present an opportunity for Communists to explain the correct positions — so long as we: 1) are not seen as unduly pessimistic, 2) maintain operational and formal integrity apart from any campaign, and 3) maintain, at every turn, a commitment to a maximum program and never stray from explaining the necessity of revolution. It is not, therefore, that Dr. West can lead the masses. It is, rather, that Dr. West can be instructive for the masses. Through Dr. West, Communists can teach and help the proletariat and working classes to achieve that basic consciousness which they currently lack in the United States: consciousness of their class-in-itself, of their shared commonalities, of their shared economic, social, and political interests. Were our movement more developed, Dr. West would represent a regressive element that we would otherwise clearly shun, and clearly demarcate ourselves from. As it is, should a genuine connection between Dr. West and the masses manifest, and we have little reason to believe it will not, we should be prepared to make use of that connection and publicly state our agreement such as it is with his program. We should be preparing for the hour that Dr. West betrays the people or is betrayed by the bourgeois political class and be ready to make use of it to further help instruct the people.

It is not that Dr. West can lead the masses. It is, rather, that Dr. West can be instructive for the masses; through him, we can teach.

30/07/2023

Of the five demands made by the membership, not one has been fulfilled in full. Not one has been fulfilled to the degree that we might consider a good faith effort. Those demands that were addressed at all were given the barest of attention, the most filthy of fig leaves so UPS might sneer that they’ve addressed the issue. Paper protections that require cutting through reams of red tape are not protections at all. Wages have been increased overall by about $6 across the board, far short of the minimum $25 an hour demand. Part-time employees haven’t been made full-time employees.

Yes, the labor aristocrats in charge of the Teamsters negotiating team secured a contract that seems slightly more favorable to the bargaining unit. However, inflation of consumer goods, caused by the state’s manipulation of the currency to keep huge corporations like UPS from collapsing during the COVID-19 crash, means that money today is worth 20% less than it was in 2018, when the last contract was signed. Put this in perspective: to keep pace with inflation, the old $21 an hour starting wage would have had to increase to $25.20 an hour.

So, under this new contract, UPS would actually reduce the wages of the Teamsters, relative to their wage-power in 2018. Even in the most generous terms, we can’t consider this a “win.” At most, this is a cleverly disguised betrayal.

Union members, do not listen to the union bureaucrats when they tell you they secured a win for you. They have, instead, dressed up a loss. UPS plans to phase out as much of its human workforce as possible, as quickly as possible, in order to reap the temporary reward of increased automation before its competitors can take the field with their drones. This contract reduces wages, makes meaningless alterations to the process for taking off overtime, and does nothing to address the issues you have told the union are important.

Under this contract, UPS would reduce the wages of the Teamsters, relative to their wage-power in 2018. Vote NO on the tentative agreement.

30/07/2023

https://clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org/2023-07-30-macron-new-imperialism/

The President of France, Emanuel Macron, denounced the “new imperialism” of China and the U.S. Empire in an address during the first official visit of a French head of state to Vanuatu on Thursday, July 27. Macron’s comments referred to the emerging cold war between the People’s Republic of China and the United States-led Western world-imperialist axis.

What imperialism could the president of the colonialist Republic of France possibly denounce?

The French president isn’t serious about countering imperialism; he is its agent. Rather, his statements should be taken for what they are: dancing to the tune of the U.S.

22/07/2023

Guest contributor Peter Goselin argues that the U.S. Left should rally around Dr. Cornel West's 2024 presidential run, because "only a broad, multi-racial, working-class" united front can defeat the rise of fascism.

P. D. Goselin was pretty certain it would be a mistake to spend energy on presidential campaigns next year — until Dr. West championed a united front.

18/07/2023

https://clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org/2023-07-11-scotus-affirmative-action/

The conservative majority on the US Supreme Court has ruled that colleges and universities may not “consider race” in their admissions policies, effectively demolishing affirmative action. While the Supreme Court tries to disguise its decision as a blow against discrimination, it is really another powerful legal shove designed to protect white supremacy. It also puts the reality of much of US “anti-discrimination” law under the spotlight, revealing it for what it is: a mechanism for rationalizing anti-Black racism.

Although a raft of anti-racist legislation was passed by the federal government in the period of Reconstruction immediately following the Civil War, most of those laws were then ignored for almost a century. The federal government could have, but chose not to use these laws to fight the exploitation of Black sharecroppers, the passage of Jim Crow laws by the states, and the rise of the K*K and other white supremacist vigilante groups. It was only the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s and the Black Power Movement of the 1960’s that, through mass political action that went far beyond mobilizing to vote for this or that candidate, forced the US government to effect formal changes to federal and state laws that protected race segregation.

Read Peter Goselin's piece, republished at the Red Clarion

The Supreme Court’s ruling allows institutions to discriminate against Black applicants who are “merely as good as” their white counterparts.

18/07/2023

https://clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org/2023-07-15-drug-shortages-profit-motive/

Cisplatin is as close to a “wonder drug” as we’re likely to see in our lifetimes. Before it was used to treat testicular cancer, the survival rate was lower than 10%. After its introduction, 95% of patients were treated successfully. Cisplatin treatment more than doubles the response rate for ovarian cancer. It has important applications in head, neck and lung cancer treatments. Incredibly, this extremely powerful drug is also relatively cheap to produce; doses cost the manufacturer roughly $10 per vial.

Why, then, with a drug so powerful, effective, and cheap to produce, are 90% of cancer treatment centers in the U.S. are facing critical shortages of cisplatin and other common cancer drugs? In some centers oncologists are being forced to triage their patients to save supplies; only those most likely to be fully cured are given these life saving drugs. Those who don’t make it onto the triage list are left with alternative treatments that are either less safe, less effective, or considerably more expensive.

But none of this is new. This is the latest instance of an ongoing drug shortage crisis that has been happening for decades.

A report from 2011 detailed the rising number of drug shortages going back to the 1980s and intensifying in the mid-2000s. “The number of drug shortages has been rapidly escalating in recent years; ASHP/UUHC reported 70 in 2006, 129 in 2007, 149 in 2008, and 166 in 2009.”

In 2018, things had not gotten better. The Drug Shortages Task Force Public Meeting produced a report that year detailing still rampant, life threatening drug shortages: Drug Shortages: Root Causes and Potential Solutions.

In April of this very year shortages included those powerful cancer drugs — and there were other shortages reported for over 300 drugs.

The only true solution to the problem of drug shortages, one that does not rely on market Band-aids, is to move healthcare from a for-profit system to a for-need system, and the only way to do that…

15/07/2023

https://clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org/2023-07-14-mmiw-and-the-class-struggle-in-canada/

It has been over a year since partial remains of Rebecca Contois, a woman from Ojijaako-ziibiing (also rendered O-Chi-Chak-Ko-Sipi), an Ojibwe community at Crane River, Manitoba, were discovered in the Brady Landfill near Winnipeg, Manitoba, in so-called Canada. The bodies of two other Indigenous women from the Ojibwe–Dakota Gaa-ginooshkodeyaag, or Long Plain First Nation, Marcedes Myran and Morgan Harris, remain missing, but are presumed by police to have been discarded in the Prairie Green landfill near Stony Mountain, Manitoba. The body of a fourth, unidentified victim, referred to as Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe, or Buffalo Woman, remains missing altogether. These women, and possibly others, were butchered by settler and fascist terrorist Jeremy Skibicki, whose spree of murders is only the latest genocidal violence against Indigenous women in the centuries-old Canadian apartheid project. Realistically, they are only the latest confirmed victims, and there are countless other Indigenous people across Canada experiencing settler violence as we write these words.

The settler state and its police refuse to search for the bodies of these women. The cracker government gives various excuses — all inadequate — for its inaction, such as the three years it would take to search the landfills, the expense of up to $184 million, the possibility of exposure to toxic chemicals, and the sheer gruesome nature of what may be discovered. One excuse not invoked by the state: the potential to uncover many more corpses than those of the four aforementioned women, which would be a scandal for the police and government. Meanwhile, Manitoba Premier Heather Stefanson bloviates about building a memorial, and about “feasibility studies.”

The settler state and its police refuse to search for the bodies of Indigenous women. The government will always give excuses.

09/07/2023

https://clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org/the-society-behind-the-court-the-federalists-and-the-supreme-courts-fascist-blitzkrieg/

While the entire world burns, overrun with the forest fires and smog of our ongoing capitalist-manufactured ecological catastrophe and economic crisis, the nine highest judges in the country have spent this summer raining their disdain for the working and oppressed people of the U.S. Empire down on our heads. The U.S. ruling class is at war, not only with the Russian Federation over Ukraine (and they are only too happy to profit from that carnage) but with itself. Over what? The right-wing of U.S. political bureaucracy, housed in the Republican Party, and especially its extreme MAGA wing, wish to accelerate the rise of fascism, while the left-wing, housed in the Democratic Party, wish to decelerate this rise, to consolidate the Trump administration’s expansion of fascism while returning political stability to the country. The left-wing of U.S. fascism remembers with fear June 2020 — an empire in flames — and is desperate to stave off the next rebellion; the right-wing of U.S. fascism welcomes it, and is doing everything in its power to push the oppressed masses of the U.S. Empire to the brink.

Having securely captured one branch of the U.S. federal government, the judiciary, headed by the Supreme Court, and having gained partial hegemony in another, Congress, the extreme-right fascists are intensifying their crusade for the absolute, unrestrained tyranny of capital over labor. At present, these extreme-right fascists don’t even conceive of the working class, of us, as a political adversary; we have not yet succeeded in organizing ourselves as a class, into a political party and a political force. Instead, they look to us as their blood bank, a reserve of coal and kindling with which they plan to feed the furnaces of fascist barbarism.

Our American Hi**erites have shifted the front of their war. They are no longer reliant merely on mobilizing the dissatisfaction of petit-bourgeois shop owners, professionals, and reactionary intellectuals to mount frontal assaults on the halls of bourgeois power as they did during Trump’s January 6, 2021 putsch. Rather, they are marshaling their energy and drawing up their strength through legal channels. They have chosen to make use of the most conservative element of the U.S. imperial state: the Supreme Court. These far-right elements have been waging an increasingly open war on their more moderate siblings in office since the early 1990s; with their firm and unshakeable grip on the Supreme Court, they have advanced their agenda out of the board rooms where it was hatched and into the long-lasting world of judicial decision. The Supreme Court has been transformed into a front of attack from the fascist reaction; their strategy has transformed it from merely the last line of defense of the capitalist and into the front line of a fascist war.

This summer, their agents on the Supreme Court of the United States have rolled back the clocks; through that particular sorcery of legal argument, they have undone a century of working class victories and taken us back through the mists of time. This fascist-right Supreme Court has marked out its target clearly: the decisions of the Warren Court, that period of chief justice Warren’s tenure from 1953–1969, which stand as the high-water mark for legal victories in the Civil Rights movement.

The Federalists have patiently built their forces over the last four decades, slowly but surely cementing footholds in the federal judiciary, in preparation for an all-out war of conquest.

07/07/2023

Do Communists want to steal your belongings? Establish a dictatorship? Abolish your family?

Comrade Rachel Nagant of Lavender Guard L.A. clears up 10 of the most common misconceptions of Communism in this highly approachable and accessible article.

https://clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org/10-misconceptions-of-communism/

04/07/2023

No to the Imperialist Ukraine War!

The inter-imperialist brutality in Ukraine drags on today, fully one and a half years after the NATO-provoked invasion launched by the Russian Federation (R.F.). The U.S. Empire went out looking for a fight with the R.F. and used NATO to find one. The ruling class of the U.S. has leveraged this fight to isolate the R.F. and to open new European markets for its liquid petroleum gas by cutting Germany and its allies off from the R.F. supply. The U.S. ruling class has been working to mystify and obfuscate its involvement behind the fascist battalions of the Ukrainian army and the fascists gravitating to the “defense” of Ukraine from all over Europe and the U.S.

https://clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org/2023-07-02-no-to-the-imperialist-ukraine-war/

04/07/2023

No to the Imperialist Ukraine War!

The inter-imperialist brutality in Ukraine drags on today, fully one and a half years after the NATO-provoked invasion launched by the Russian Federation (R.F.). The U.S. Empire went out looking for a fight with the R.F. and used NATO to find one. The ruling class of the U.S. has leveraged this fight to isolate the R.F. and to open new European markets for its liquid petroleum gas by cutting Germany and its allies off from the R.F. supply. The U.S. ruling class has been working to mystify and obfuscate its involvement behind the fascist battalions of the Ukrainian army and the fascists gravitating to the “defense” of Ukraine from all over Europe and the U.S.

Whichever side they fight for, the U.S. ruling class and their pet politicians seem to keep eagerly lining up with various fascists.

04/07/2023

The U.S. State Used COVID to Bilk the Working Class

The pandemic-theater performed in the United States may have initially been designed to actually (poorly) serve the purpose of protecting the population, but it has become little more than an excuse to claim “victory,” to send people back to work, and to perpetuate on us, the working people of the U.S. Empire, a grand and wide-scale theft. COVID has been used, in this sense, as little more than an excuse for the rapacious rulers of the United States Empire to tighten their iron grip on us and squeeze more and more blood from each member of the working class. Different groups among the vampiric ruling classes have sought to capitalize on the crisis in different ways. While the investment monopolists were tinkering with the money supply and throwing good money after bad, into useless “investments,” the lower rungs of the ruling class were stealing directly from the federal government.

https://clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org/2023-07-03-covid-bilk-workers/

On Tuesday, June 27, 2023, French police in Nanterre, a suburb of Paris, murdered Naël Merzouk, a 17-year-old boy of Algerian-Moroccan descent, in cold blood.

04/07/2023

France and the Second Revolution

On Tuesday, June 27, 2023, French police in Nanterre, a suburb of Paris, murdered Naël Merzouk, a 17-year-old boy of Algerian-Moroccan descent, in cold blood. Fully one-quarter of Nanterre’s residents are classified by the French state as “born outside of metropolitan France” — largely migrants from France’s former colonies. The French colonialist empire began in the 16th Century, but faltered when France sold its conquests in North America to the burgeoning United States Empire in the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. A second period of French colonialism began during the reign of the first Napoléon, but really picked up speed and force with the French invasion of Algeria of the 1830’s, a last militarist gasp of the restored but terminally waning Bourbon monarchy. One result of French colonialism was the arrival to metropolitan France of large diaspora communities from its colonies. Nanterre is today home to a large Maghrebi community, primarily originating from Morocco and Algeria.

France is infamous for its frequent, prolonged, and often violent protests and working-class uprisings. In our lifetime, the causes have usually been economic issues, either in the form of planned strikes led by the reactionary trade unions or mass demonstrations exploding spontaneously from the working classes of France. This has been, for nearly a century, the way the French Third Republic has managed to control the powder-keg on which it sits and avert the second great revolution that threatens to blow apart the criminal bourgeois state of France. But it is also true that throughout the last century, the murder of Algerian and Franco-Maghrebi people by the French imperial police has sparked civil unrest and outright attacks on the murderous Parisian regime. These two forces — the economic demands of the French working class and the political demands of the colonized Algerian and Moroccan French — are both fronts in the social revolution. That is, the national self-determination of France’s colonized population represents one front in the struggle, and the economic and political oppression of the French working class represents another. Neither of these fronts can see total victory until they are integrated and led as a single movement. The ultimate victory of either cannot be brought about until the ultimate victory of the social revolution itself.

https://clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org/2023-07-02-france-and-the-second-revolution/