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U.S. State Department Under Secretary for Public Affairs, Victoria Nuland, speaks during a joint statement with Colombian National Police Director Gen. Jorge Luis Vargas, not in picture, in Bogota, Colombia, Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2022. (AP Photo/Fernando Vergara)

Following high-level security talks held in Colombia last week, Washingtons Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland, alleged that foreign actors are attempting to subvert that countrys upcoming elections. She vowed that the US military and intelligence apparatus would work with its Colombian counterparts to assure a free and fair election here; a Colombian election for Colombians.

We must safeguard it against outside actors interested in manipulating elections, as they have tried to do in other parts of the world, Nuland told reporters.

Polls have placed Senator Gustavo Petro, a former member of the M-19 guerrilla movement, which traded the armed struggle for bourgeois politics, as the clear front-runner in the presidential race. Approval ratings for incumbent President Ivn Duque, Washingtons closest ally in the region, and for his far-right party stand in the low teens.

Accompanied by Pentagon and US intelligence officials, Nuland was in Bogota for the US-Colombia High-Level Strategic Security Dialogue, a mechanism created in 2012 to better coordinate the actions of Colombias right-wing government with the counterrevolutionary operations of US imperialism in the Western hemisphere.

While Nuland did not directly name the malign external actors who are supposedly plotting to interfere with Colombian votes by propagating lies and stories that are not of Colombian origin, she and her aides, along with Duques far-right regime in Bogota, left no room for doubt that their target was Russia.

Just days before Nuland set off for Colombia, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Brian Nichols, who was part of the mission to Bogota, told a US Congressional panel that Russian efforts to destabilize our hemisphere or to inject conflict from Ukraine to the Western Hemisphere [are] unacceptable, and we will work with our partners throughout the hemisphere to prevent that.

Nichols warning followed a statement by Russian Vice Chancellor Sergei Ryabkov that Moscow would not rule out deployment of military assets to Cuba and Venezuela if the US and NATO continued their buildup on Russias western borders.

Washingtons efforts to line up Latin American governments against Russia over the Ukraine crisis have yielded spotty results. Argentine President Alberto Fernandez traveled to Moscow at the beginning of this month for meetings with President Vladimir Putin, while Brazils fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro embraced Putin at the Kremlin on February 16, the very day that US intelligence sources had claimed Russia would invade Ukraine. Bolsonaro used the occasion to declare Brazil in solidarity with Russia.

In Colombia, however, Washingtons anti-Russia campaign has been greeted with open arms. It dovetails with the anti-Russian propaganda of the Duque government itself, which claimed implausibly that the mass strikes and protests that swept the country last spring had been fueled by Russian social media propaganda.

More recently, Duques Minister of Defense, Diego Molano, chargedwithout providing a shred of evidencethat the Venezuelan National Armed Forces (FAN) were being mobilized on Colombias border with the support and technical assistance of Russia and Iran.

In an interview with Colombias BluRadio, Nuland echoed the false charges of the Duque government. We are concerned that the Russians seem to be increasingly active in these border regions and these are the same border regions where we are seeing violent actors, we are seeing drug trafficking, we are seeing criminality, we are seeing money laundering these kinds of things, she said. So what exactly is Russia doing there and, more importantly, what can the United States do together with Colombia to harden those borders and ensure that any negative activity remains on the Venezuelan side?

Aside for the completely unsubstantiated character of the fantastic charge that Russia has any presence whatsoever on the Colombia-Venezuela border, the claim that sealing this frontier would protect Colombia from negative activity spilling over from Venezuela is preposterous.

Colombia is responsible for an estimated 70 percent of the worlds cocaine supply, and top government officials are deeply involved in drug trafficking. Just days before Nulands arrival in Bogota, a top Colombian Army general was relieved of his command for connections to traffickers, while the former commander of the armed forces, a close ally of Duque popularly known as the godfather, was formally accused of using the military to protect the interests of a cocaine cartel.

Duque, besieged by crises and widely hated in his own country, appeared buoyed by his meetings with Nuland. He boasted that his government and Washington would be sharing intelligence information, national security information, where any foreign influence, or attempted influence, can be identified in our electoral process.

In the immediate wake of these talks, Duque flew to Europe where he presented the same narrative about election interference before the European Parliament and held meetings at the Brussels headquarters of NATO. He vowed that Colombia, the only Latin American country to be named a global partner of the US-led alliance, would defend Ukraines right to join NATO, blindly following its patron Washington down the path to World War III.

The United States is an unlikely guarantor of election integrity in Latin America, and Under Secretary Nuland an equally improbable champion of democracy. The CIA has interfered in countless Latin American elections and engineered coups throughout the continent to overthrow elected governments out of favor with US imperialism.

As for Nuland, she is infamous for her role in preparing the 2014 fascist-led coup that overthrew the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovich Ukraine, installing a pro-Western regime.

In 2013, Nuland bragged that Washington had invested over $5 billion in the Ukrainian opposition, and in 2014, she was recorded on a telephone call with the US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, selecting the head of a post-coup government and discussing US collaboration with neo-fascist forces like the Svoboda party.

Nulands mission to Bogota and unsubstantiated claims of Russian election meddlingrecycling similarly fabricated claims of the Democratic Party about the 2016 election in the UShas all the earmarks of an operation along the lines of the one she organized in Ukraine.

It provides Duque and the Colombian right Washingtons validation of a pretext for abrogating the presidential election set for this May and preventing the victory of Gustavo Petro.

Petro, the former mayor of Bogota, has done everything in his power to prove his reliability to Colombias ruling elite, eschewing any association with socialism and leftism and running as the anti-corruption, pro-ecology candidate. Nonetheless, his victory would call into question Colombias unconditional diplomatic and military alignment with US imperialism in Latin America.

Under Plan Colombia, inaugurated under the Democratic administration of President Bill Clinton in 1999, the US poured some $10 billion into Colombia between 2000 and 2016 to fund a brutal counterinsurgency campaign waged in the name of a war on drugs. These vast sums secured the allegiance of the Colombian military and successive right-wing governments to Washington. They also bought the Pentagon access to bases on Colombian soil and the use of the country as a launching pad for coup attempts against the government of neighboring Venezuela.

US imperialism will hardly be indifferent to these arrangements being upended by the votes of the Colombian people.

While in Colombia, Nuland handed over a check for $8 million to the Colombian National Police, supposedly to finance human rights training. Established in the 1950s, the National Police has operated under the direction of the Colombian Defense Ministry as a counterinsurgency force to combat left-wing guerrillas and social opposition. During the mass protests and strikes last year, it was responsible for the killing of scores of workers and youth, and the torture, beating, sexual assault and extra-legal imprisonment of many more.

Nuland hailed this repressive force as the backbone of our cooperation to strengthen Colombias democracy, protecting its citizens from all forms of malign influence and activity.

This tribute echoes the language used in the days when Washington extolled the torture regimes of Pinochet in Chile, Videla in Argentina and Mdici in Brazil as bastions of the Free World against the malign influence of socialism.

The threat that, as US imperialism prepares for world war, Washington will resurrect the methods of fascist-military coups in Latin America is very real.

The only answer to this danger lies in the building of a mass political movement of the Colombian working class, independent of all the bourgeois parties, including Petro and his Historic Pact coalition, and unified with workers across Latin America and internationally in the fight for socialism.

new wsws title from Mehring Books

The New York Times 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History

A left-wing, socialist critique of the 1619 Project with essays, lectures, and interviews with leading historians of American history.

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Victoria Nuland in Colombia: Is Washington plotting another coup? - WSWS

Britains government has finalised its living with COVID strategy. Speaking to parliament yesterday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson made clear this should properly be called a plan for workers dying with COVID. He announced:

Every word uttered in defence of this murderous policy is based on a lie. Johnson told the BBC on Sunday, We are now one step closer towards a return to normality and finally giving people back their freedoms while continuing to protect ourselves and others.

The Conservative governments strategy is based on the removal of all protections and will not lead to normality.

Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (SAGE) member Professor Robert West told Times Radio that the government had decided to abdicate its own responsibility for looking after its population, adding, It looks as though what the Government has said is that it accepts that the country is going to have to live with somewhere between 20,000 and 80,000 COVID deaths a year and isnt really going to do anything about it.

Medium-term scenarios outlined on February 10 by SAGE in a universally ignored briefing raise even graver concerns. Professor Maggie Rae, President of the Faculty of Public Health, called the ending of free testing incomprehensible. There is no sound scientific or medical basis for the governments policy.

Johnson blurted out his real motivation in his BBC interview. We need people to be much more confident and get back to work We dont need to keep spending at a rate of 2 billion a month [on testing].

The super-rich view any public health response to the pandemic as a state-subsidised interruption of the flow of profits, which must end. Their new normal does not mean doing away with the virus, but with the victims of the virus who will be forcibly exposed to COVID-19 in their workplaces.

The work till you drop drive has reached such a pitch that Britains 95-year-old monarch has been enlisted as the royal face of the campaign. Queen vows to carry on working with Covid, cheered the Daily Telegraph; Queen, 95, hit by Covid but she vows to work on, the Sun; the Mirror reported, Queen gets Covid but she carries on; the Metro ran the inevitable Queen keeps calm and carries on; and the Daily Mail touted Queens Covid example to us all.

The boardrooms and their media outposts have worked themselves into such a frenzy that no one in the corporate media has asked whether risking the life of the head of the British state at a time of extreme political crisis, including within the monarchy, is a good idea.

The second lie is that COVID-19 can now be managed by, in Johnsons words, encouraging personal responsibility. He added cynically, Its very important we should remain careful.

How, exactly? Interviewed on Sky News yesterday, Business Minister Paul Scully said that for people who contracted COVID, like any transmissible illness youd stay at home but itll be down to themselves or down to their employer. In fact, it will be entirely down to their employer with workers doubly pressured by having no access to even limited sickness and self-isolation payments.

Without free testing, moreover, most people will have no way of knowing whether or not they even have a COVID infection. The virus will be allowed to run rampant.

Enter the third lie, that the combination of the Omicron variant and the vaccination programme have ended any serious threat from COVID. The UK is in a different world, Johnson said Sunday. I want to be able to address the problems of the pandemic with a vaccine-led approach.

It is Johnson and his supporters that are living in a different world or trying to sell the myth of one. Omicron is still taking a significant toll on health and lives, with the long-term implications still unknown. Vaccinations, a vital tool in the fight against COVID-19, are being continually undermined by the removal of other public health measures, allowing the virus to circulate and new variants to develop.

As the governments Chief Scientific Officer Sir Patrick Vallance admitted yesterday, there is no guarantee that the next variants will be less severe. We expect there to be further variants and they could be more severe.

More than 1,000 cases of the more transmissible BA.2 subvariant of Omicron had already been detected in the UK by the start of this month. Preliminary results from a study at the University of Tokyo suggest it may be more severe and resistant to treatments. Deltacron, a hybrid of the more deadly Delta and Omicron variants, has also been confirmed in the UK.

Even with additional shots, immunity from vaccination is waning. A recent study of triple-jabbed people by the US Centre for Disease Control found that protection against hospitalisation fell from 91 percent during the first two months to 78 percent after four. For protection against visits to urgent care and emergency departments, it fell from 87 percent to 66 percent. After more than five months, effectiveness fell to 31 percent, though the researchers note the estimate was imprecise because few data were available.

Plans for a fourth jab in the UK, announced by Health Secretary Sajid Javid yesterday, are being limited to people aged 75 and over, the immunosuppressed and residents in old age care homes.

As SAGE advisor Professor West told Times Radio he would be very surprised if the living with COVID strategy would be cost effective, given the economic costs of Long COVID and hospital admissions. But this underestimates the brutality of what is planned.

From the beginning, the governments preferred herd immunity policy has been to trade the lives of the old and the clinically vulnerable off against the profits of the rich. Its attacks on social security payments and underfunding of the National Health Service show it has no intention of caring for the aged and infirm. Seeing them die is seen as a positive boon, as Johnson made clear in October 2020 with his infamous declaration, No more fucking lockdowns. Let the bodies pile high in their thousands!

Johnson is given a free hand to act by the Labour Party and the trade unions. He made his statement to a parliamentary chamber that looked half asleep.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer raised some pro-forma concerns, to be forgotten in a weeks time, advancing Labours obscenely-named plan to live well with COVID, framed as a more responsible version of the governments policy. He said, in reference to testing, If youre 2-1 up with ten minutes to go you dont sub off one of your best defenders.

The UK is not 2-1 up, it is 180,000 lives down.

Trades Union Congress General Secretary Frances OGrady agreed with Johnson, that We are all looking forward to getting on with our lives, before appealing to his criminal government to put the country and public health first by maintaining free tests and improving sick pay. This is something neither she nor any union leader has any intention of fighting for.

Johnsons announcement applies specifically to England, with the devolved governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland following their own timescales. But whatever political points they try to score today over the Tories, they will follow suit in short order, as they have done throughout the pandemic.

At home with the pandemic and abroad with the war plans against Russia, the Johnson government and its supporters are dragging the working class over the precipice. Workers must urgently organise a joint fight against COVID-19 and the danger of war on the only possible basisthe struggle for international socialism.

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Johnson government adopts dying with COVID strategy for the UK - WSWS

The British royal family has been cultivated for centuries as a constitutional monarchy, providing a critical pillar and head of the bourgeois state. As such, a major royal crisis always indicates a sharpening crisis of bourgeois rule.

It is not accidental that the current royal debacle centred on Prince Andrew unfolds under conditions of factional warfare within the Conservative Party, the pre-eminent parliamentary vehicle of the bourgeoisie, and another over the leadership of the Metropolitan Police, Britains largest force.

Prince Andrews settlement of up to 12 million to Virginia Giuffre was intended to draw a line under his connection with the sex trafficking of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. But it has only bought a brief period of silence from Giuffre, who has agreed not to tell her story until after the queens Platinum Jubilee celebrations this summer.

The 95-year-old Queen Elizabeth II, who has just been reported as infected with COVID-19, was looking to restore some stability to the institution, making efforts to minimise the possible reign of the heir to the throne, Prince Charles. Her illness points not only to the lie that the pandemic is over, but also emphasises the precarious position of the monarchy as an institution. Her successor Charles is widely seen as a pampered buffoon, whose ecological posturing cannot hide a sense of entitlement built on a declared belief in the feudal Divine Right of Kings that led his namesake, Charles I, to lose his head.

The settlement not only failed to lift the taint of scandal from Andrew, but also triggered questions about who will be footing the bill. Reports are that the queen and Charles have made bridging loans, under conditions where nearly a fifth of British workers are already living in poverty.

The royal family have sought to distance themselves from Andrew, the queens second son, but the rot is widespread. A charity set up by Charles is enmeshed in a police inquiry into cash for honours also involving Charless younger son, Prince Harry. Harrys own ongoing dispute with the monarchy has now reached a court appeal over allowing him to provide his own private security during visits to Britain.

Giuffre accused Andrew of sexually abusing her when she was 17 years old. The princes statement admitted no liability but announced a substantial donation to her charity for the victims of sex trafficking. This led to the filing of a stipulated dismissal of the suit against him, keeping Andrew off the stand over details of his interactions with Giuffre at Epsteins properties in 2000-2001, again covering up Epsteins activities.

Andrew had sought to have the case dismissed, claiming no recollection of meeting Giuffre and suggesting a widely circulated photograph of them together was faked. His attempts at public rebuttal backfired spectacularly.

A BBC interview, intended to clear his name, generated ridicule and criticism. Andrew told journalist Emily Maitlis, If push came to shove and the legal advice was to do so, then I would be duty bound to testify or give a statement under oath.

He evidently did not expect to be held to that. As soon as it became clear he could not prevent the case proceeding, Andrew moved to an out-of-court settlement. He has been spared a court appearance, but he will not be returning to royal duty. He was stripped of royal titles and patronages last month.

His settlement statement referred cynically to a commitment to fight against the evils of sex trafficking, in response to which lawyer Nick Goldstone told the Telegraph Andrew is toxic, and this settlement will not have changed the verdict of the court of public opinion.

Andrew expected his defence to be accepted on the basis of privilege alone, which proved a wild misjudgement. Robert Lewis, attorney for another of Epsteins victims, attributed the delay in settling the case to Andrews arrogance. Epstein, Maxwell, Andrew, the Catholic Church, said Lewis, all think the law on some level applies only to everybody else.

A monarchy that used to provide bourgeois rule with an appearance of stability in times of crisis is now itself in freefall.

The overthrow and then execution of Charles I in 1649 marked the birth of bourgeois rule out of feudalism. The restoration of his son Charles II as constitutional monarch eleven years later was aimed at safeguarding the worlds first state based on bourgeois rule through a political compromise enshrining the hereditary principle on which both the old feudal aristocracy and the newly emerging capitalist class, in their own way, depended against the re-emergence of popular opposition.

The monarchy became the most bourgeois institution imaginable: the head of state during the explosive growth of the British Empire, a symbol of the nation in two world wars, and later a tool of global realpolitik in the complex relations with US imperialism, Britains other imperialist rivals and the newly independent states across the Commonwealth. Elizabeth has done the bourgeoisie sterling service in this regard.

But the declining international position of the British bourgeoisie has gone hand in hand with an embrace of the naked speculation of financial parasitism. The monarchy has tried to court this layer, while being forced to streamline its own activities in line with its social decline.

Charless former wife, Diana, Princess of Wales, blazed the trail in forming close links with the yuppie layers of the super-rich who emerged with the speculative boom of the 1980s. Following her acrimonious divorce, she aimed to shift the succession to her son William, second in line to the throne, rather than Charles.

William, groomed as a popular traditionalist who combines Elizabeths sense of duty with his mothers facility with the newer layers of the elite and her popular touch, has stepped into this role. He is the great white hope of the monarchy, provided any reign of Charles III can be kept as brief as possible.

Faced with an efficiency drive to keep the monarchy functional as a pillar of state, those royals outside the line of succession, like Andrew, deeply resent not being as rich as the people they are courting. The richest royal, the queen, does not even make the top 300 wealthy individuals in the UK.

But the lifestyles of the lesser royals are no less lavish for that and are a major focus of public anger and loathing. Questions over how Andrew will scrabble together his 12 million come at a time when an estimated half a million people are being driven into poverty by the cut of just 20 a week from the Universal Credit social security benefit.

Andrews own courting of financial layers was seen in the sale in 2007 of his former home to Timor Kulibayev, son-in-law of the president of Kazakhstan. The country house in Berkshire was sold for 15 million, 3 million above the asking price. Kulibayevs spokesman insisted this was a commercial arms length transaction using entirely legitimate funds.

But Andrew is now down to his last chalet as he sells off his assets. This is on the market for 17 million but is understood to be heavily mortgaged and unlikely to cover the costs of his settlement. Meanwhile, rising fuel prices this April are expected to see one fifth of British households experiencing fuel poverty.

Charless charity, the Princes Foundation, is meanwhile being investigated over allegations that it helped secure a CBE award and British citizenship for one of its donors, billionaire Saudi businessman Mahfouz Marei Mubarak bin Mahfouz.

Mahfouz also donated to a charity run by Harry, Charless younger son. Harry and his wife Meghan Markle have been a consistent PR thorn in the side for the Windsors. Similarly groomed to make the family appear modern, they calculated that, being some way from the line of succession, they could make considerably more money based in the US as free market operators with royal associations.

There is an air of desperation among royalists. After Andrews settlement and the Princes Foundation investigation, the Sun reported Elizabeths now clearly postponed return to public activity with the headline, Thank God for the Queen. But what do they have beyond that?

The pivotal places of Charles I and II at critical moments of bourgeois rule are knownwhat place is left for Charles III? The crisis of the monarchy points to the festering rottenness of bourgeois rule. It is falling to pieces, with a ruling class in crisis escalating its social plunder and devastation. It must be swept away. That is the task of the working class in the struggle for socialism.

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Prince Andrew and a monarchy in crisis - World Socialist Web Site - WSWS

Comrade Jim Lawrence died in hospice January 25 in Dayton, Ohio, after months of declining health. He was 83 years old. He is survived by wife of 59 years, Lois, son David, daughter Tanza, four grandchildren and two great grandchildren.

Jim dedicated the greater part of his adult life to the fight for socialism. All who met him were impressed by his commitment to principles, his deep interest in culture and history, and his immense confidence in the revolutionary capacity of the working class.

He was won to the program of Trotskyism in the early 1970s, and he played an important role in developing a base of support for the movement among a key section of industrial workers. The experiences gained in this period played an important role in the subsequent political development of the American and world Trotskyist movement, the International Committee of the Fourth International.

Born in Dayton, Ohio, during the last years of the Great Depression, Jim was one of seven children. His father worked at a foundry in Dayton making parts for the auto companies, in particular, General Motors which played a central role in the citys economy.

Jim said his father considered himself a socialist and held a local union post in the Stalinist-dominated United Electrical Workers at his factory. Jim thought his father likely was a member or supporter of the Communist Party, although his father never talked about it. From his father, Jim said he gained an understanding that there was an alternative to capitalism.

According to Jim, two of his uncles had been recruited by strikebreakers at Ford during the 1941 strike for UAW recognition. However, his uncles quickly realized they were being used and along with other black workers joined forces with the strikers, ensuring the victory of the union.

During his youth, Jim saw scenes of militant industrial struggles in Dayton, including the Univis Lens strike in 1948, led by the UE. It developed into a mass confrontation with strikebreakers. Ohio Governor Thomas Herbert eventually deployed National Guard troops, backed by tanks and armored vehicles, in an attempt to break the picket lines. The sight of soldiers in the street evoked mass popular outrage, eventually forcing the withdrawal of the Guard units.

After he graduated from high school in 1957, Jim went into the US Army. When he was discharged, he obtained a job at the foundry where his father worked. Jim told the story about how the local union had sent him in to integrate a section of the plant that was all white at the time. He later said he initially had trouble due to the racial backwardness of some of the workers, but one white worker befriended him and told the others to stop. He said that this experience helped to show him that class solidarity could overcome racial divisions.

In 1966, Jim went to work at the General Motors Delco Moraine brake plant in Dayton. He participated in the 1970 nationwide strike against GM that lasted 58 days, the last contract in which the United Auto Workers achieved any significant gains.

This was a period when masses of students and young workers were being radicalized by the experience of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement. It was also a period of enormous class battles.

Jim met the Workers League, the forerunner of the Socialist Equality Party (US), in 1972. Supporters of the Workers League were distributing copies of the partys newspaper, the Bulletin.

He recounted that he obtained a copy of a Workers League pamphlet, Where Wallace Really Stands by David North, which explained the position of George Wallace, the notorious Alabama segregationist and racist who was seeking the 1972 Democratic nomination for US president. The exposure of the right-wing nature of the Democratic Party impressed Jim, and he decided to attend his first Workers League meeting.

Jim later said that the Workers League was the only political tendency that could explain the role of Stalinism, the political vehicle of a privileged and nationalist bureaucracy that had usurped power in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and advanced the anti-Marxist theory of socialism in one country. In the 1930s, the Stalinist bureaucracy carried out a wave of political genocide, murdering hundreds of thousands of socialists, targeted above all at the supporters of Leon Trotsky, culminating in the assassination of Trotsky himself in August 1940.

I found out that the Stalinists were the murderers of the leaders of the October Revolution, Jim explained. They did more to discredit socialism than any capitalist could ever do. He paid specific tribute to longtime Workers League member Lou Renfrow, who served as his political mentor.

The Workers League also clarified Jim on the role of the Pabloite renegades from Trotskyism, such as the Socialist Workers Party, who promoted various forms of identity politics, including feminism and black nationalism to confuse and divide the working class. Early on, he developed an abiding hostility to all forms of nationalism and racialist politics.

Jim and other supporters of the Workers League established a faction of the Trade Union Alliance for a Labor Party (TUALP) at the Delco Moraine plant, which won wide support through its exposure of the collaborationist policies of the UAW.

At that time, the unions in the United States still had the loyalty of millions of the more politically active and advanced workers and played a significant role in the life of the working class. The Workers League advanced the demand for a Labor Party based on the trade unions as a means of imbuing the militant movement of the working class with a political and socialist perspective by raising the necessity for the workers to rebel against the pro-capitalist trade union bureaucracy and its political alliance with the Democratic Party.

In that period, UAW conventions, though even then tightly controlled, still provided a certain forum for debate over substantive issues. The Workers League would have a large literature table at Cobo Hall in Detroit during the UAW Constitutional Convention, which generally attracted large numbers of delegates. Bulletin reporters were able to circulate among the delegates on the convention floor and hand out leaflets explaining the partys policies. The Workers League was even able to solicit signatures to demand the arrest of the killers of Tom Henehan, a Workers League Political Committee member gunned down at a party event in New York City in 1977.

At one convention, Jim Lawrences presence caused a considerable stir. So many delegates knew about his activity at the Delco Moraine plant and wanted to speak with him that the president of his local, Elmo Parrish, became unnerved. He demanded to know why Jim was not at work. Jim coolly explained that he had taken a personal day so that he could observe the proceedings.

Jim attended the February 1973 founding conference of TUALP held in St Louis, along with 275 trade unionists, and made an important contribution to the discussion.

In the April 1974 local union elections at Delco Moraine, TUALP candidates Jim Lawrence and John Austin received 20 percent of the vote for local president and vice president. TUALP supporters also ran for shop chair and five other executive board positions.

In response to the campaign by TUALP, at one point, UAW President Leonard Woodcock came to Dayton to consult with local leaders. The Bulletin reported that Woodcock raved like a madman against the TUALP caucus. The support won by the TUALP candidates produced a red-baiting campaign by the union and local media, with Local 696 President Parrish even threatening to shoot salesmen of the Bulletin outside the plant.

We were told to come down to the union hall for a meeting with Woodcock, but we refused to go unless we could go with a group of workers, Jim recalled. We figured there would be threats. Despite confusion on socialism, workers recognized Jim and other party members as fighters for the working class, and the UAW was never able to victimize or silence them.

In an interview with David North published in the Bulletin prior to the vote, Jim explained, The reason that local officials always try to prevent us from putting our position forward is that these demands serve to expose the existing leadership of the UAW for what they are ...

He continued, The bureaucrats want to lobby Congress, the same people who passed the laws against the trade unions. They do not wish to take up a fight against the system. They want to fight for reforms, when there cannot be reforms. This has the effect of turning the workers to the existing political parties, and this can only lead to defeat. The workers must know what they are going into consciously, that they are going into a class conflict. ... There must be a break from these political parties, and workers must have their own party.

The ruling class responded to the militant class battles of the 1970s and the protracted decline in the global position of American capitalism by launching a counterrevolutionary offensive in the 1980s. Under the Democratic Carter administration, interest rates were driven to record levels in 1979, forcing into bankruptcy wide sections of industry in order to weaken the working class. The offensive intensified under the Republican Reagan administration, which fired and blacklisted the PATCO air traffic controllers in 1981, opening up a period of unbridled unionbusting.

The unions, based on their nationalist and pro-capitalist program, had no answer to these attacks. The AFL-CIO isolated the PATCO strikers and worked to suppress the widespread sentiment for a general strike. The unions betrayed a series of struggles throughout the decade while transforming themselves ever more directly into instruments of corporate management. Conditions of workers were driven backwards, and hundreds of thousands of jobs wiped out.

Throughout this period, Jim circulated the Bulletin in his plant and continued to fight for the partys policies. He also followed with intense interest the struggle waged by the Workers League and its collaborators in the world Trotskyist movement, the International Committee of the Fourth International, against the national opportunism of the British Workers Revolutionary Party. Jim supported the struggle against the WRP in the 1985-86 split, which laid the basis for an immense theoretical and political development of the ICFI.

In the aftermath of the split with the WRP, the Workers League, on the basis of the experiences of the 1980s and a theoretical examination of the significance and implications of globalization, drew the conclusion that the official unions, controlled by a highly privileged layer of upper middle class executives, had undergone a fundamental transformation. They could no longer be characterized as workers organizations, as they worked deliberately and systematically to lower the living standards of the workers they claimed to represent. Based on this assessment, the Workers League withdrew its previous demand for the formation of a Labor Party based on the unions.

In 1996 Jim stood as the Socialist Equality Party candidate for US Congress in Dayton. He used the opportunity to campaign among workers directly based on the partys program, drawing the lessons of the UAWs endless betrayals and its bankrupt policy of support for the Democratic Party as the lesser evil.

That same year, GM workers struck the two Delco Moraine brake plants in Dayton for 17 days, forcing the temporary idling of 75,000 GM workers. The UAW obtained phony promises from GM to preserve jobs at the plant, which along with all other GM plants in the area were eventually closed anyway with the loss of some 20,000 jobs. Today, Delco Moraine, as Jim explained, is just a concrete slab.

In 2004, the SEP selected Jim to run as its candidate for US Vice President alongside WSWS writer Bill Van Auken. Jim was involved in the drive to place the SEP candidates on the ballot in Ohio, which involved a fight against the unscrupulous actions of Democratic Party state officials in the wholesale disqualification of hundreds of genuine signatures of registered voters based on trivial technicalities.

The 2004 elections were dominated by the expanding imperialist war in Iraq and the ongoing decimation of industrial jobs in the United States, overseen by the UAW and other unions. In a speech given to a meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 2004 Jim explained the role of the unions, The UAW and the AFL-CIO officially adopted the position of corporatism in the 1980s, rejecting the very concept that workers had any interests separate and apart from the corporate bosses. Union officials were put on the boards of directors of corporations like Chrysler, and a myriad of labor-management structures were put into place, allowing the companies to use labor officials to impose speedup and various cost-cutting measures to improve competitiveness.

Hand in hand with management, the UAW and other unions promoted the most poisonous national chauvinism and racism, aimed at convincing American workers that their enemy was not big business but Japanese and European workers who were supposedly stealing American jobs.

What has the promotion of economic nationalism produced? When I first joined the UAW, the union had 2.25 million workers in basic industry. Today it has 638,000 members. Throughout the US, just 8.2 percent of private sector workers belong to unions, and just 2.2 million factory workers belong, down 60 percent from two decades ago.

In 2005, Jim intervened along with other SEP members at a meeting of autoworkers in Kokomo, Indiana, to oppose the massive destruction of jobs at parts maker Delphi. He stressed the need not just for workers to form independent organizations of working class struggle but to build a political leadership based on a socialist and internationalist program.

In his later years, declining health prevented Jim from active participation with the SEP. But he continued to read the WSWS and followed political developments closely. In a video interview in 2018 he made the following appeal to workers and young people:

The policies of the capitalists are such that they are leading us from one war to another war, heading to the destruction of the human race itself. All of this is with the approval of the union bureaucracy everywhere. ... The unions have always been tools of the ruling class. You should not kid yourself. Even in the 1970s the more astute workers understood that if the union bureaucracy was involved in any way, it would be betrayed.

The only way you can free yourself from wage slavery and threat of war is to abolish capitalism. Only the working class has the power to do that.

The working class must be conscious of its power; it is a lot more powerful than the bourgeoisie. But for that it must be organized. The Fourth International has fought for the last 80 years for the interests of the working class. Only the Fourth International has done that. I would ask you to join the Fourth International wherever you live. It is the only way forward for the human race.

To his final days, Comrade Jim remained a committed socialist and fighter for the working class. He will be sorely missed.

Read more from the original source:
Jim Lawrence, American autoworker and longtime Trotskyist, dies at age 83: A life dedicated to the fight for socialism - WSWS

RICHARD LONDON

State College

An accusation that Republicans love to hurl at Democrats is that they are socialists. Do these Republicans understand what American Socialism, also called Democratic Socialism, really is? Are they confusing it with Soviet Socialism, from the old USSR days, or modern socialism in North Korea or Venezuela?

Socialism, or socialization, is any structure whereby a governmental agency (federal, state or local) collects funds from the general public via taxes, and uses the money to provide a service back to the population at little, or no, cost at the time of delivery. The arrangement has been authorized by the people, through their representatives; hence Democratic Socialism.

Everyday examples include public schools and highways (state level), Social Security and Medicare (federal level), and public libraries (local level). Nearly all Republicans embrace, and enjoy, these benefits provided by the socialization mechanism, but decry socialism in general. One wonders why.

Maybe its a knee-jerk reaction to Democratic social issue proposals. Maybe they just dont understand the term. Maybe they do understand, but want to turn public opinion against the proposal by using a loaded term from the past.

The difference between Republicans and progressives is not that the progressives accept socialization and the Republicans reject it, since both do accept it. Both are willing to use the mechanism for education, highways, and libraries, and even for retirement and health insurance plans (at least for the elderly); progressives want to use it for additional things.

Come on, Republicans!

Youre socialists, too.

Admit it.

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