Over the past two years, grocery store closures have rolled across the U.S. like an epidemic. In particular, these closures have occurred in working-class communities, especially where most residents are Black or Brown. 

Whether it is Kroger, Aldi, Stop and Shop, etc., huge grocery store magnates are closing stores that serve working-class neighborhoods. Corporate public relations departments and their allies in the media tell us that the reason for these closures is shoplifting or a shortage of workers. 

In reality, these stores close because of corporate greed. There is no better demonstration of this reality than the recently announced closure of a Price Rite Marketplace in the heart of southwest Baltimore. Price Rite is part of the giant Wakefern Food conglomeration that includes ShopRite, Fresh Grocer, Dearborn Market, Fairway Market, and more. Wakefern is one of the top 25 grocery retailers in the U.S., with 365 supermarkets, and is the largest private employer in New Jersey, with 40,200 employees. 

This particular Price Rite store has been a staple in the Baltimore “Pigtown” neighborhood for over two decades. The Pigtown Price Rite is the only full grocery store easily accessible to those living in Pigtown and all the southwest Baltimore neighborhoods. 

The recently announced Price Rite closure has sent a wave of shock and concern through the surrounding community. For years, this store has been the only source of fresh produce and meat in the area. Without it, the evolution of southwest Baltimore into a food desert is tragically complete. 

Further compounding the injustice, the Giant grocery store chain announced the opening of a new location in the Locust Point neighborhood of Baltimore. Locust Point is a rapidly gentrifying majority-white middle-class neighborhood just east of Pigtown. While Locust Point is not geographically distant from Pigtown, because of economic segregation, it might as well be. 

Due to the lack of public transportation and racist wealth inequality, overpriced grocery stores in the heart of gentrifying neighborhoods are just not an option for the working-class Black and Brown communities in west Baltimore. 

As if the closure itself wasn’t bad enough, it seems unlikely that a different store will replace the Price Rite due to greedy developers. Several months ago, the Carlyle Development Group purchased the shopping center where the Pigtown Price Rite is currently located from the Baltimore City Government for an unbelievably low price. After the market announced its closure, the Carlyle Development Group made it clear that it would not seek to rent to another grocery store. 

Their reason? Private medical practices and laboratories have a higher profit margin than grocery stores; working-class communities be damned. 

The recent closure of the Pigtown Price Rite is one development in a broader trend in the capitalist market. Grocery store magnates have strategically decided to abandon working-class neighborhoods for wealthier, usually white, areas. 

For example, when workers at the Kroger-owned Ralph’s supermarket in South Central Los Angeles demanded hero pay for hours worked at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, what was the store’s reaction? Well, Kroger decided to close that store, much like the Price Rite development in Baltimore, which deepened the food desert crisis in South Central Los Angeles. 

The developers don’t care about people. The grocery store chains don’t care about people. The politicians in their pockets don’t care, either. The capitalists only care about their bottom line.  

We must fight back against these racist and anti-worker closures that cost the community healthy food access and jobs. The only people helped by these closures are millionaire and billionaire investors.

Los Angeles – Striking University of California workers – 48,000 strong — rallied throughout the state on Monday, Nov. 28. This highly exploited workforce is represented by Auto Workers Local 2865. This is the biggest strike in 2022 and the biggest-ever strike by UC workers.  

Workers are demanding higher wages, improved parental leave and childcare support, reduced housing costs, and support for international scholars. The strikers are “graduate student workers,” who work for extremely low wages and provide important services for corporations and the general public. 

The carrot dangling in front of them is the hope that they will eventually land a tenured position. In recent decades tenure and decent wages for educators have been attacked in the entire range of jobs in the education system from public schools to elite private universities. 

During the rally at the University of California Los Angeles, Struggle-La Lucha spoke with striker Bineh Ndefru.

SLL: Can you tell us what a victory in this strike might mean for you personally? 

Bineh Ndefru: I’m in my fifth year, so a win probably wouldn’t go into effect in time to impact me. But for those newer to the system, it would mean people not having to go through their savings like I had to. 

I’ve had to borrow money while being a worker for the university. I’ve been paid $1,800 per month and had to pay $1,600 for rent in university housing. So basically, I’ve been living on $200 a month. That’s a very common story for all of us. 

It would’ve changed my life a lot. For a lot of people, it would mean maybe visiting their families more often, or having the ability to maybe have some downtime. Some students actually have had to live out of their cars because of the high price of housing in Los Angeles. 

On top of all that, I’ve even had issues with the university not paying me on time, which is not uncommon. 

SLL: Can you explain what kind of work and research are done by UC student-workers? 

BN: My lab is pretty unique in a way, and there’s a variety. For instance, PG&E [giant California utility company] has funded some of our grants to study how to prevent wildfires caused by their equipment. 

The California Energy Commission had us study statewide infrastructure projects, so it’s contributing to a lot of the risk assessments that benefit California, like earthquake assessments and that sort of thing. 

Anyone in this crowd is probably working on amazing research projects that are benefitting the city, the state, and even the whole world in different ways. We bring a lot of value not just to the university but to the community surrounding us as well.

Solidarity with UC workers!

Do ‘excessive’ wage rises lead to rising inflation and thus drive economies into a wage-price spiral?  Back in 1865, at the International Working Men’s Association, Marx debated with IWMA Council member Thomas Weston.  Weston, a leader of the carpenter’s union, argued that asking for increased wages was futile because all that would happen would be that employers would put up their prices to maintain their profits, and so inflation would quickly eat into purchasing power; real wages would stagnate, and workers would be back to square one because of a wage-price spiral.

Marx responded to Weston’s argument firmly.  His reply, which was eventually published as a pamphlet, Value, Price and Profit, was basically as follows.  First, “wage rises generally happen in the track of previous price rises” – it’s a catch-up response, not due to ‘excessive’ and unrealistic demands for higher wages by workers.  Second, it is not wage rises that cause rising inflation.  Many other things affect price changes, Marx argued: namely, “the amount of production (growth rates – MR), the productive powers of labor (productivity growth – MR), the value of money (money supply growth – MR), fluctuations of market prices (price setting – MR), and different phases of the industrial cycle” (boom or slump – MR).

Moreover, “A general rise in the rate of wages will result in a fall of the general rate of profit, but not affect the prices of commodities.”  In other words, wage rises are much more likely to lower the share of income going to profits and thus eventually lower the profitability of capital.  And that is the reason capitalists and their economist prize-fighters oppose wage rises.  The claim that there is a wage-price spiral and that wage rises cause price rises is an ideological smokescreen to protect profitability.

Was Marx right?  Well, modern mainstream economics has continued to claim that ‘excessive’ wage rises will cause rising inflation and create a wage-price spiral.  Take these following views in the current inflation upsurge.  First, there is the recent statement by Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England. “I’m not saying nobody gets a pay rise, don’t get me wrong. But what I am saying is, we do need to see restraint in pay bargaining, otherwise it will get out of control”.

Or even more explicitly and following the argument of Thomas Weston over 150 years ago, Jason Furman, former economic adviser to U.S. President Obama, put it this way.  “When wages go up, that leads prices to go up. If airline fuel or food ingredients go up in price, then airlines or restaurants raise their prices. Similarly, if wages for flight attendants or servers go up, then they also raise prices. This follows from basic micro & common sense.”

Well, it may follow from “basic micro and commonsense” in mainstream economics.  But it is just plain wrong.  And this week, the IMF has compiled a comprehensive data analysis of the movement of wage and price rises that refutes Bailey and Furman. The IMF “address these questions by creating an empirical definition of a wage-price spiral and applying this on a cross-economy database of past episodes among advanced economies going back to the 1960s.”  So over 60 years and in many countries.

What did the IMF find: “Wage-price spirals, at least defined as a sustained acceleration of prices and wages, are hard to find in the recent historical record. Of the 79 episodes identified with accelerating prices and wages going back to the 1960s, only a minority of them saw further acceleration after eight quarters. Moreover, sustained wage-price acceleration is even harder to find when looking at episodes similar to today, where real wages have significantly fallen. In those cases, nominal wages tended to catch-up to inflation to partially recover real wage losses, and growth rates tended to stabilize at a higher level than before the initial acceleration happened. Wage growth rates were eventually consistent with inflation and labor market tightness observed. This mechanism did not appear to lead to persistent acceleration dynamics that can be characterized as a wage-price spiral.”

And there’s more:  “We define a wage-price spiral as an episode where at least three out of four consecutive quarters saw accelerating consumer prices and rising nominal wages.”  And the IMF finds that “Perhaps surprisingly, only a small minority of such episodes were followed by sustained acceleration in wages and prices. Instead, inflation and nominal wage growth tended to stabilize, leaving real wage growth broadly unchanged. A decomposition of wage dynamics using a wage Phillips curve suggests that nominal wage growth normally stabilizes at levels that are consistent with observed inflation and labor market tightness. When focusing on episodes that mimic the recent pattern of falling real wages and tightening labor markets, declining inflation and nominal wage growth increases tended to follow – thus allowing real wages to catch up.“

What does the IMF conclude?  “We conclude that an acceleration of nominal wages should not necessarily be seen as a sign that a wage-price spiral is taking hold.” In inflationary episodes, wages just try to catch up with prices.  But even then, wage rises do not cause wage price spirals – thus Marx’s view is confirmed.

And if you want immediate proof of this, take this week’s wage settlement between German manufacturing employers and IG Metall union, Germany’s biggest.  Workers will get pay rises well below Germany’s inflation rate, currently at a 70-year high of 11.6%, receiving 5.2% next year and 3.3% in 2024, plus two €1,500 lump sum payments.  Jörg Krämer, chief economist at Commerzbank, said unions and employers had “found a compromise on how to deal with the income losses caused by the sharp rise in the costs of energy imports.” He added: “I would not yet call this a wage-price spiral.”  Indeed not, as even the best-organized workers in Germany will have to accept reductions in their purchasing power over the next two years.

The IMF analysis only confirms plenty of other empirical work previously done.  Indeed, wages as a share of GDP in all the major economies have been falling since the 1980s.  Instead, profit share has risen.  And over the period until 2019, inflation rates remained no more than 2-3% a year.

Also, there appears to be no inverse correlation between changes in wages, prices, and unemployment – this classic Keynesian Phillips curve that claimed this relation has been shown to be false.  Indeed, this was noted in the 1970s when unemployment and prices rose together.  And the latest empirical estimates show the Phillips curve to be broadly flat – in other words, there is no correlation between wages, prices, and unemployment.  No wage-price spiral.

Despite this evidence refuting the wage-price spiral, mainstream economics and the official authorities continue to claim that this is the key risk to sustained inflation.  The reason for doing so is not really because the economic prize-fighters for capitalism believe that wage rises cause inflation.  It is because they want ‘wage restraint’ in the face of spiraling inflation in order to protect and sustain profits.  To this aim, they support central bank interest rate hikes that will accelerate economies into a slump – coming in the next year.

As Jay Powell, head of the U.S. Federal Reserve, put it: “in principle …, by moderating demand, we could … get wages down and then get inflation down without having to slow the economy and have a recession and have unemployment rise materially. So there’s a path to that.”   Even more blatantly, Keynesian guru and FT columnist Martin Wolf demanded: “What [central bankers] have to do is prevent a wage-price spiral, which would destabilize inflation expectations. Monetary policy must be tight enough to achieve this. In other words, it must create/preserve some slack in the labor market.

So the real aim of interest-rate hikes is not to stop a wage-price spiral but to raise unemployment and weaken the bargaining power of labor.  I am reminded of the comment of Alan Budd, then chief economic adviser to British PM Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s: “There may have been people making the actual policy decisions… who never believed for a moment that this was the correct way to bring down inflation. They did, however, see that [monetarism] would be a very, very good way to raise unemployment, and raising unemployment was an extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes.”

“Kyiv Readies for Brutal, Cold, Dark Winter” is a typical headline in the capitalist media these days. The Nov. 21 Associated Press article—reprinted by Voice of America, the official U.S. propaganda outlet—tells of electrical outages caused by Russian missile strikes. 

Other headlines include “A Capital Draped in Darkness” in the New York Times and “Missile Strikes Leave Kyiv in the Dark” in the Atlantic Magazine.

What about the millions of U.S. families facing electric and gas shutoffs by the profit-mad utility monopolies? Twenty million households are behind on their electric bills. 

Just in 2020 and 2021, households had their power shut off 3.6 million times. Each of these shutoffs caused misery for millions of children and their parents.

The actual figure of utility shutoffs is higher. Only 33 states and the District of Columbia require utilities to report disconnections.

Many seniors and disabled people have to juggle to pay their rent, food and prescription medicines. Morgan Magda, who lives in Girard, Ohio, had her gas cut off. 

Her sole source of income is Social Security disability benefits. Millions of workers become disabled because capitalists speed up work to make more profits. Carpal tunnel syndrome can strike workers at both computer keyboards and assembly lines. 

“I’m disabled and have had to live without hot water, a stove to cook on, and now heat. It’s been so hard,” said Magda.

Utility shutoffs can also become a death sentence. A May 15, 1982, fire in Baltimore killed 10 people, including seven children. The fire was caused by a candle the family was forced to use after their electricity was shut off.

The family owed just $808 on their electric bill to Baltimore Gas and Electric, now part of the Exelon Corporation. That works out to $80.80 for every person killed.

A dozen years later, two adults and seven children died in another Baltimore fire on Feb. 26, 1994. Once again, an overturned candle started the inferno after their electricity was shut off. 

Stop the shutoffs!

Last year it was estimated that U.S. households owed $32 billion in unpaid utility bills. President Biden is doing practically nothing to help the millions of families facing life-threatening utility shutoffs.

Yet Biden and Congress have spent $68 billion so far on the war in Ukraine. The White House has just asked Congress for another $37.7 billion. 

This $105.7 billion total is three times what could pay all the unpaid utility bills. 

Capitalists aren’t spending this money—all of it stolen from poor and working people—because they want to help Ukrainians.

Human life is cheap to the wealthy and powerful. For the executives at Baltimore Gas and Electric, each child killed in that May 15, 1982, fire was worth just $80.80. 

Black grandmother Eleanor Bumpers was killed on Oct. 29, 1984, by a New York City cop because she owed $394 in back rent. 

To save a mere $5 million a year, Flint, Michigan, stopped pumping clean water from Lake Huron and instead used water from the Flint River, a virtual sewer. Flint’s children were poisoned while thousands face water shutoffs in Detroit and other cities.

Stop NATO’s war!

Wall Street and European banks are turning Ukraine into their colony. Foreign capitalists are taking over the country’s fertile farmland. A 2021 law is making this theft easier. 

The Russian Federation is now targeting Ukraine’s electrical infrastructure in an attempt to disrupt the massive deliveries of weapons from the U.S. and NATO. The stock price of Lockheed Martin, one of the biggest U.S. war contractors, has gone up $100 per share since the conflict started. 

Russian forces are not carpet-bombing cities like the U.S. did to Baghdad. They’re not dropping napalm to burn children alive like the Pentagon did in Korea, Laos and Vietnam.

The capitalist media sheds phony tears for Ukrainians but it says nothing about the over 14,000 people that were killed by the Kyiv regime’s war on Donbass since 2014. 

Why can’t the White House loosen the economic blockade of Cuba while the socialist country is rebuilding the parts of its electrical grid that were wrecked by Hurricane Ian? 

The Russian Federation is fighting the NATO alliance of big imperialist states. NATO uses a puppet Ukrainian regime that rests upon fascist militias like the Right Sector and Azov Battalion, as well as thousands of foreign mercenaries.

For the brass hats in the Pentagon, the conflict in Ukraine is just the first step of a war to take over the 6.4 million square miles of the Russian Federation.

The working class and all oppressed people need NATO and the U.S. to get out of Ukraine. We need to take over the greedy utilities to guarantee electricity, gas and water for all.

On Nov. 13, the Louisiana Abortion Rights Action Committee (LARAC) made a significant contribution to the movement with their webinar, “Follow the Money: End the Capitalist War on Women.” Since the ultra-right-wing Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, LARAC has led resistance in the streets of New Orleans. Louisiana has one of the strictest abortion bans in the country. 

The webinar addressed how the right-wing movement attacking the reproductive rights of women and other child-bearing people is funded by and serves the interests of the filthy-rich capitalists. This is a fact often left out of the abortion discussion in the mainstream media, where the “debate” is framed in terms of differences in religious views and paints an image of a right-wing movement coming out of nowhere. 

Those leading the militant fightback in Louisiana and elsewhere know better.  

Exposing Louisiana monarchy 

LARAC activists began their exposé at the state level. As Edith Romero of LARAC put it, “It’s important to know who are the people in power.” Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, who is expected to run for governor, has played a major role in attacking abortion rights.

Romero, an immigrant healthcare worker, explained: “Jeff Landry is a very vocal anti-abortion, anti-vaxx, sexist, transphobic, homophobic person … He sued to get rid of Medicaid, depriving 700,000 people of much needed medical services … He sued several times against mask mandates and basic safety policies in Louisiana … He sued to cancel DACA …

“Multiple of his companies hire immigrant workers to pay them less than U.S.-born workers … He is anti-immigrant but needs them for his own benefit. He fought diligently to criminalize abortion and have it as a crime that can be prosecuted.” 

Romero laid out the forces funding Landry’s right-wing politics. His campaign contributors in 2021 include Inwood Petroleum (contributed $80,000); oil and gas company Harvey Gulf International Marine ($50,000); and more. The presentation explained that Landry himself, unsurprisingly, has big stakes in oil and gas companies.

The same capitalists who are profiting by destroying our planet are reaping the benefits of dividing the working class with vicious attacks on women, LGBTQ2S people and people of color. 

Military-industrial complex is anti-women 

LARAC organizer Elena Voisin, a student at Loyola University, explained the role of the military-industrial complex in the anti-women assaults. 

“Just this year, close to $2 trillion was given to the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy … They contract hundreds of billions of dollars to businesses [like Lockheed Martin]. All of this is to create exorbitant profits for them and their government conspirators …  

“Every year these corporations spend hundreds of millions to influence politicians … all to get them to increase the defense budget. And the next year they are given even larger contracts, so the bribes pay off … Not to mention politicians’ personal investments in these corporations …

“How does the government finance this? Taxes and banks. Banks are profiting off wars. The government never has enough reserve funds to finance their wars, so they have to resort to loans … Under the guise of reducing the national debt, they cut social programs … They will cut anything except military spending.”

Webinar host Sally Jane Black—a queer, trans woman worker—added that “the same right-wing organizations pushing this anti-abortion agenda are the ones pushing the military-industrial complex.” 

Indeed, the U.S. imperialists’ military spending is an all-out assault on the working class in this country as well as on those harmed and killed in target countries. 

Voisin explained the mechanisms of “control and suppression” at play here. “Especially without social programs to help, the medical and childcare expenses alone can trap whole families in poverty. There is already little social mobility, but now it’s out of the question … 

“Abortion restrictions are just one part of the super-exploitation of the working class. This exploitation is necessary for the military-industrial complex … The sooner we come together as workers against our common enemies, the sooner we can all be liberated.” 

Roe v. Wade won in the streets

LARAC organizer and hospitality worker Heidi Jordan debunked the view that progressive movements can be successful by playing by the oppressors’ rules. Jordan stated: “Representatives of the oppressor always say, ‘just wait, it’ll change, we’ll change,’ but history has demonstrated over and over again that that’s not true. They placate. They use bribery, flattery, grants, deception and positions.” Jordan explained that when these “soft” tactics fail, the capitalist state does not hesitate to use brutal repression. 

Progressive change does not come down from benevolent rulers. Rather, it is the power of the organized people that forces the rulers to make concessions. Roe v. Wade was won in just such a way, Jordan explained. 

“The struggle for the right to a safe, legal abortion in the 1970s was part of a broader movement for women’s liberation. Roe v. Wade was won in the street, not in the homes of rich women or in the halls of Congress.”

In a sharp rebuke to those who want us to isolate our struggles and to undermine solidarity among all working-class and oppressed people, Jordan cited the historical record, showing how the women’s movement of the 1970s fought on all fronts—for LGBTQ2S rights, against racism, in support of the Black Panther Party, and to end the U.S. imperialists’ war of aggression against Vietnam. 

She explained, furthermore, that this was a global movement. To be effective, today’s struggle must be as broad as its predecessor.

Bringing it all together

Gavrielle Gemma, with LARAC and the NOLA-based Workers Voice Socialist Movement, summed up many aspects of the appeal that LARAC is making. 

“We call it abortion access because even when we had the legal right, we had to defend it with our bodies against attacks,” Gemma said. “We felt that it was very important to expose who are the forces behind and funding these right-wing assaults …The hidden economic hand is left untouched [in the discussions that focus just on elections]. [And there was] $17 billion spent on these recent elections …

“The right-wing didn’t completely create a tsunami against the Democrats … But what we have had is the predominance in the economy of the military, as well as oil and gas, and insurance and banking—these are controlling elements of the capitalist economy, and they are controlling the political situation. These are far-right-wing forces …

“We are the ones that are being targeted by the super-rich … [There   has   been an]   unbelievable accumulation of wealth in fewer and fewer hands. This has gone on through all administrations.”

Gemma made a moving appeal to take the movement to the next level, not relying on official channels—not even those of the supposedly progressive Democratic Party. 

“We should be up there [in Baton Rouge] linking arms at the Louisiana State Capitol when they are back in session in the spring … They are terrified of our unity.”

Washington, D.C. — The Black is Back Coalition led a protest march through the streets of the capital Nov. 5 to denounce the FBI attacks on the leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) in Florida and Missouri. 

The action began at Malcolm X Park, where APSP Chairman Omali Yeshitela addressed the crowd. Yeshitela and his wife Ona Zené Yeshitela were targeted by an FBI raid of their home in St. Louis on July 29 for their opposition to the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine. 

Activists then marched through the streets of D.C. to the White House. Marching down 14th Street, they greeted shoppers and sidewalk diners with several chants, including: “Fist up, fight back, stop the FBI attack” and “Two, four, six, eight, tell the people who we hate – FBI, CIA, the whole damn state!”

Upon reaching the White House, the crowd listened to other speakers, including Pam Africa, who offered solidarity from political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. Brother Lee Patterson also read a solidarity statement from the Socialist Unity Party defending the APSP against the FBI attacks – part of the continuing war on Black Liberation organizations since the 1960s.

SLL photos: Bayani and Andre Powell

Billionaire bigot Elon Musk’s chaotic takeover of Twitter, with more than half of the company’s 7,500 workers fired and locked out, along with Facebook/Meta’s subsequent announcement of mass layoffs, highlights the urgent need for worker-community control of these communication platforms relied on by billions of people worldwide.

Musk’s family fortune originated with the stolen labor power of South African mineworkers under apartheid and expanded through the union-busting Tesla auto company and military contractors Starlink and Space X. He’s now thrown open Twitter’s doors to fascist groups and far-right provocateurs after completing his $44-billion buyout Oct. 27. 

Among those terminated were the entire team of content moderators responsible for addressing incidents of hate speech and threats against people of color, women, trans people, and the queer community. 

Twitter’s protections were always inadequate and poorly enforced. But all of the measures forced on the company in the wake of the Black Lives uprising and the Jan. 6, 2020, attack on the Capitol have been swept away.

However, Twitter’s “warnings” targeting media and officials from countries targeted by U.S. imperialism – including Cuba, Iran, China and Russia – remain firmly intact.

Attack on workers

Business Insider reported: “Five of those laid off filed a class-action lawsuit against Twitter on Nov. 3, accusing Twitter of breach of contract and violating the WARN Act, which requires companies to alert workers prior to mass layoffs.

“An emergency motion added to the lawsuit on Wednesday alleged that, by promising that the workers would get at least a severance package if laid off after the acquisition, Twitter ‘had persuaded employees not to seek or obtain employment elsewhere during the uncertain time period prior to Musk’s purchase of the company.’

“After Musk’s plans to buy Twitter were first announced in April, ‘many Twitter employees’ asked management about the changes that this would bring to the company, ‘in particular about mass layoffs,’ the former workers said.”

Those who initiated the lawsuit were among the first fired by Musk. But overnight on Nov. 3-4, up to 3,700 more Twitter workers found out that their jobs were gone – not from an official announcement, but because they were locked out of their Slack accounts and other company platforms.

The ripple effects have just begun.

“After laying off half its staff earlier this month, Twitter on Saturday [Nov. 12] started culling its vast ranks of contract staff, sources confirmed to Axios.

“Like many companies, Twitter’s staff is made up of a mix of full-time employees as well as contract workers who work for a third party. Twitter has cut an unspecified number of contractors in various fields, including content moderation, sources confirmed. …

“Some contractors, meanwhile, are concerned about getting paid for the last two weeks as a number of contractors ended up on teams with no full-time Twitter employees, leaving no one to sign off on their time cards, sources tell Axios.”

Tech industry mass layoffs

Musk’s theatrics have gotten the lion’s share of headlines, but the entire tech industry is in the midst of a deep crisis that it is taking out on the backs of its workers and users dependent on their platforms.

“Tens of thousands of tech workers have been laid off within days, as tech giants including Meta, Twitter, Salesforce and others shed headcount going into the final stretch of the year,” CNBC reported Nov. 10. “At least 20,300 U.S. tech workers were let go from their jobs in November, and more than 100,000 since the beginning of the year, according to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks layoffs in the field.”

On Nov. 9, Meta – the parent company of Facebook, the world’s largest social media platform with 2.9 billion users, Instagram and WhatsApp – announced more than 11,000 layoffs, about 13% of its global workforce. 

Facebook has been losing ground to Twitter, TikTok, and other social media platforms. Mark Zuckerberg, chairman, and CEO of Meta, sunk enormous amounts of capital into developing virtual reality software that has been ridiculed for being inferior to widely-available VR gaming systems.

On Nov. 14, the New York Times broke the news that Amazon plans 10,000 layoffs, or 3% of its global workforce, in “Amazon’s devices organization, including the voice-assistant Alexa, as well as at its retail division and in human resources.”

Although known primarily as the world’s biggest online store and for the sweatshop conditions of its warehouse and delivery workers, Amazon has its hands in many pots – from grocery chain Whole Foods to the robotics industry to a major social media platform, Twitch. AWS (Amazon Web Services) has tens of billions in contracts with the Pentagon and the National Security Agency.

“As per [a] Bloomberg report, Amazon became the world’s first public company to lose a trillion dollars in market value as a combination of rising inflation, tightening monetary policies and disappointing earnings updates triggered a historic selloff in the stock this year,” Mint reported.

Ride-share app company Lyft plans to cut 13% of its workforce. And the list goes on.

Tech workers aren’t the only ones who will be affected. The ripple effects will hit manufacturing, delivery, restaurant and healthcare workers, to name just a few, as the U.S. economy spirals toward a new capitalist recession.

Workers, communities unite!

Already some of Musk’s schemes have laughingly backfired – such as his plan to do away with the Twitter verification system for public figures and companies by charging $8 a month for a “blue check” verification. 

Within hours of implementing the system, Twitter was flooded with bogus “verified” accounts, such as one for pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. The company’s stock crashed after a parody account tweeted that the company would hereafter make its lifesaving insulin free. (Insulin should, of course, be free.)

As a result of Musk’s verification scheme and the proliferation of hate speech, advertising giant Omicron – representing huge brands like McDonald’s and Apple – urged its clients to pause Twitter advertising, Reuters reports. So far, General Motors, Volkswagen, and United Airlines are among the companies that have pulled their advertising. 

Social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube (owned by Google) have become the most important form of communication for billions of people worldwide. Workers, their families, and oppressed communities – especially young people – rely on them not only to stay in touch with each other but often as their main source of news and information.

The current wave of union organizing efforts at Starbucks, Amazon, and other giant chains has used Twitter and other social media to build public support and spread the word to workers around the country. Likewise, Black and Brown-led groups and antifascists have used them to get out the word about right-wing attacks and to organize resistance.

Elon Musk has made a special target of oppressed communities on Twitter, such as the trans, nonbinary, gender-nonconforming, and intersex community. For years, many vulnerable and isolated groups and individuals have used the platform to build community and seek support and affirmation. Musk has blamed them and “civil rights groups” for the hit to Twitter advertising revenue since his takeover.

The impact goes far beyond U.S. shores. The importance of these platforms for the world’s population is reflected in the emphasis Washington has put on appointing censorship boards to silence the voices of media and organizations critical of U.S. sanctions and military adventures worldwide.

Elon Musk’s takeover and impending mass layoffs across the tech industry show that it is long past time that Twitter, Facebook and similar platforms were made publicly owned utilities under the control of their workers and the communities they serve, here and worldwide. Let’s raise the demand: social media by and for the people!

Nov. 10 — After the midterm elections, it looks like the Democrats may keep running the U.S. Senate. The Republicans may take over the House of Representatives by a small margin.

Meanwhile, Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier continue to be unjustly imprisoned. These two political prisoners have each spent more than 40 years in jail after being framed. 

At thousands of food banks across the United States, people will stand in line—sometimes for hours—in order to feed their families. In states that provide deposits on cans and bottles, seniors will collect them in order to eat or pay their rent. Capitalist elections won’t change this misery.

Big capitalists are the real winner of U.S. elections. Over $16.7 billion was spent on them. 

Some 465 billionaires dumped $881 million into the midterms. This dough could house thousands of homeless children. For the super-rich it’s just chump change.

While people voted for candidates, money bags were buying their employees. That’s if they don’t run for office themselves, like the billionaire Democrat J.B. Pritzker, who got re-elected as Illinois governor.

Real-estate tycoon Rick Caruso is dipping into his $4 billion stash to become mayor of Los Angeles. He’s trying to defeat congresswoman Karen Bass, who if elected would be the first Black woman mayor of the metropolis.

Despite most of the polls predicting a Republican sweep of the elections, poor and working people said no. They voted in 2020 for an end to over 40 years of political reaction and cutbacks.

President Biden deserves none of the credit for limiting Republican gains. It was hundreds of thousands of volunteers operating out of Black churches and union halls that defeated Donald Trump’s clones.

Biden could immediately free 78-year-old American Indian Movement leader Leonard Peltier, who has spent 46 years in jail. With another pen, he could largely normalize relations with Cuba. 

The man in the White House refuses to do either. Biden and Congress instead have shoveled over $70 billion into a war against the Russian Federation that could lead to World War III.

A sewer of hate

It’s good that the midterm elections are over. They featured a gusher of racism and bigotry that poisoned millions.

Immigrants with their children seeking asylum were described as invaders.

It was racism that Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson used to narrowly defeat the Black Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes. In a debate, Johnson claimed Barnes “incited” the anti-racist uprising in Kenosha following the police shooting of Jacob Blake. 

Some of Johnson’s ads featured pictures of Barnes that darkened his skin. Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers attacked Johnson’s racism. 

While the white Democratic governor was re-elected by an 89,000-vote margin, Mandela Barnes narrowly lost by 27,000 votes.

It was bigotry that re-elected Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis with a 1.5 million vote landslide. Voter suppression also helped.

DeSantis spent years attacking Black history—calling it “critical race theory”—and forbade school discussion of gender and sexuality with a “don’t say gay” law.

Most heartbreaking and dangerous was DeSantis forbidding medical and gender-affirming care for transgender youth.

Fox News and the New York Post propelled Trump-supporting Congressman Lee Zeldin’s campaign to be New York governor. Zeldin got 47% of the vote on a lock-em-up, pro-cop and jail-the-poor platform.

Zeldin promised that he would fire Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, the first Black person to be elected to that post.

A special target of Zeldin was bail reform, which was enacted after the innocent Black youth Kalief Browder committed suicide. Browder spent three years in jail because he couldn’t afford cash bail.

Rick Caruso’s drive to become Los Angeles mayor was also a law-and-order campaign that featured attacks on homeless people. That doesn’t prevent the pop singer Katy Perry from supporting this billionaire bigot. 

Organize to fight back!

Even in conservative states where the working class is more suppressed, people will vote for progressive issues.

Voters in Kentucky voted against adding an anti-abortion amendment to the state constitution. In South Dakota, voters passed a referendum to expand Medicaid that will cover 40,000 more poor people. 

Many people will feel relieved that some of the worst bigots were defeated in the midterms. But the election results will be used to try to push through more cutbacks, including cuts in social security and Medicare.

That’s what happened after the Republicans won control of Congress in 1994. Then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich wanted to take thousands of Black children away from their parents and put them in orphanages.

It was 2 million Black people coming to the 1995 Million Man March, followed by another 2 million Black people in the 1997 Million Woman March, that stopped Gingrich. Not Democratic President Bill Clinton, who wanted to go along with Gingrich’s reactionary program.

Biden’s Labor Secretary Marty Walsh has already threatened railroad workers with congressional action if they go on strike. All workers have the right to strike!

We need to continue organizing. Social Security needs to be expanded. The minimum monthly benefit should be raised to $2,600. 

Whoever is in the White House, police will continue to kill an average of three people a day across the United States. It was Joe Biden, as a U.S. senator, who helped pass the mass incarceration laws in the 1990s. 

We need to bring people in prison home to their families. Workers at Amazon, Starbucks and every other workplace need union wages, protection and benefits.

Using the excuse of a looming recession, the billionaires will demand more cutbacks. The only answer is more fightback.

Even though Veterans Day is a federal holiday, only 19 percent of workers employed by private business get the day off. Originally called Armistice Day, it marks the end of World War I “at the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month” of 1918.

Twenty million people were killed during this imperialist war, half of whom were civilians. It was waged between colonial powers that had enslaved hundreds of millions in Africa, Asia and the Americas.

Lenin, the leader of the socialist Bolshevik Revolution, called it a “war between the biggest slaveowners for preserving and fortifying slavery.”

The Belgian King Leopold II had killed as many as 15 million Africans in Congo for rubber profits. British capitalists made fortunes from famines in India and occupied a quarter of the planet. Fresh from genocidal wars against Indigenous nations, the U.S. army had killed a million Filipina/os fighting for independence.

Another 50 million people died in the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic that may have started at U.S. Army bases in Kansas.

Around 117,000 U.S. GIs died in the war. Three months after the U.S. entered the conflict, at least 100 Black people were murdered in East St. Louis, Ill., by white racist mobs.

Black soldiers returning from combat were among those killed in the race riots that swept U.S. cities in 1919. But World War I was swell for U.S. big business.

According to Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler in his book “War is a Racket,” “at least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.”

This was back in 1918, when the dollar was worth 16 times as much as it is now.

The du Ponts weren’t even mentioned in “The History of Great American Fortunes” by Gustavus Myers, which was published in 1909. The family’s vast profits from selling explosives during World War I catapulted them into the superrich.

Besides their chemical empire, the du Ponts controlled General Motors, which had been the world’s largest corporation, for decades.

Never forget Nat Turner

So why should poor and working people commemorate Nov. 11? Because on Nov. 11, 1831, the liberator Nat Turner was executed.

Turner led a revolt of enslaved Africans in Virginia that terrified all the slave owners. Beginning on Aug. 21, 1831, Black people marched from plantation to plantation in Southampton County fighting for liberation. Black Panther Field Marshal George Jackson was murdered 140 years later on Aug. 21, 1971, in California’s San Quentin prison.

The reaction of slave masters was merciless. They thought they were facing another Haitian Revolution.

Soldiers and sailors were mobilized to crush the rebellion. Militia members were sent from both Virginia and North Carolina.

The Rev. G.W. Powell said there were “thousands of troops searching in every direction,” with many Black people killed. The editor of the Richmond Whig newspaper admitted that “men were tortured to death, burned, maimed and subjected to nameless atrocities.” (“Before the Mayflower, A History of Black America” by Lerone Bennett Jr.)

Nat Turner was captured but never flinched. He was executed in Jerusalem, Va. It’s named after the eternal capital of Palestine, also known as Al-Quds.

The slave masters called Nat Turner a “terrorist.” That’s the same term used today to smear Palestinian freedom fighters.

Hanged for the eight-hour day

Labor leaders George Engel, Adolph Fischer, Albert Parsons and August Spies were hanged in Chicago’s Cook County Jail on Nov. 11, 1887. Twenty-three-year-old Louis Lingg was also slated to be executed, but he was either murdered or committed suicide the day before.

These martyrs died for the eight-hour work day. Most workers in those days worked 10 or 12 hours a day, sometimes even longer.

On May 1, 1886, hundreds of thousands of workers across the U.S. went on strike to demand an eight-hour work day. Capitalists were terrified. Workers marched from factory to factory urging employees to strike.

Chicago was the center of this movement. Chicago police fired on striking workers at the McCormick reaper works — which later became part of International Harvester — on May 3, killing at least two.

The next day, a protest meeting was called at Chicago’s Haymarket Square. Police attacked the crowd, and someone threw a bomb at the cops. Eight policemen died as well as possibly some protesters.

The ruling class went berserk. Police arrested hundreds, but the bomber, who may have been a provocateur, was never found.

Instead, well-known labor leaders were put on trial for their lives because they supposedly incited the bombing. Years later, Illinois Gov. John Peter Altgeld courageously pardoned those who had been jailed.

Four of the five Haymarket Martyrs were immigrants. All were labeled anarchists. Trump wants us to hate immigrants while he calls anti-racist protesters “anarchists.”

As he was about to be hanged, Albert Parsons declared, “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.”

Lucy Parsons, a Black woman who was Albert Parsons’ partner, continued fighting for the working class until she died in a house fire in 1942. Chicago police said that she was “more dangerous than a thousand rioters.” Lucy Parsons’ books and papers were confiscated by the FBI.

May 1 became the international holiday of the working class. In Mexico, it’s known as the Day of the Chicago Martyrs.

Long live the People’s Republic of Angola!

The People’s Republic of Angola was born on Nov. 11, 1975. Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, along with his employees Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and White House occupant Gerald Ford, sought to kill it. They had the Nazi armies of then-apartheid South Africa invade the African country.

Angola’s independence was historical justice that resonated around the world. Four million Angolans had been kidnapped in a slave trade that lasted four centuries. Brazil’s sugar plantations were fed by Angolan slave pens.

Millions of Brazilians have Angola in their blood. So do some African Americans.

The largest prison in the U.S. is in Angola, La. The sugar plantation which became the core of the prison was named Angola because that’s where the enslaved Africans working there came from.

Today, thousands of slaves work on the Angola prison’s 18,000 acres. The “Angola 3” — Herman Wallace, Robert King Wilkerson and Albert Woodfox — spent decades in solitary confinement on frame-up charges of killing a prison guard before being freed.

Their real crime was forming a chapter of the Black Panther Party. Herman Wallace died of liver cancer a few days after being released.

Five hundred years of Portuguese colonialism in Angola were 500 years of resistance. The founding of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) in 1956 was a decisive step. Forced labor was halted only after 50,000 Angolans were killed during the 1961 revolts.

When South Africa invaded Angola, Cuba came to Africa’s assistance. As the Pan African educator and organizer Elombe Brath said, “When Africa called, Cuba answered.” Two thousand Cuban soldiers died fighting alongside their African comrades.

The initial defeat of South Africa helped inspire the Soweto Uprising on June 16, 1976. The total defeat of the apartheid army at Cuito Cuanavale in 1988 led to Nelson Mandela walking out of prison two years later.

So let us remember Nat Turner and the Haymarket Martyrs while celebrating Angola’s independence. And be prepared to stop any new wars for the rich.

Whatever happens in the midterm elections, a mudslide of racist and bigoted filth is pouring down from the heights of capitalist society. Teaching Black history is under attack by labeling it Critical Race Theory.

Using an increase in street crime — the result of a massive increase in poverty and homelessness — politicians are encouraging more police brutality and killings.

A special target has been transgender people, particularly transgender youth. The measures in Florida forbidding transgender youth from receiving gender-affirming care guarantee more deaths.

This wholesale hate campaign is the reaction of banksters and billionaires to the Black Lives Matter movement, the largest series of protests in U.S. history.

The 26 million people who took to the streets in 2020 forced the ruling class to discuss the deadly racist violence of the police. The conviction of the Minneapolis cops who killed George Floyd was one of the few actual concessions made to oppressed people.

It was only because of an uprising in Minneapolis that any justice was administered to these killers in uniform. It took a mobilization in Georgia to send the murderers of Ahmaud Arbery to jail.

Now, as reflected in the Wall Street Journal, most capitalists want to take back the primarily verbal concessions that were made concerning police violence.

They don’t want their politicians to kneel in imitation of the courageous Colin Kaepernick. Billionaires want their elected flunkies to kneel before them. None of the football clubs’ super-rich owners are willing to hire Colin Kaepernick.

Capitalists form public opinion

The tiny percentage of society that consists of the big capitalist families is dragging millions of others behind them, including many workers. There’s nothing new in this.

Almost 180 years ago, Karl Marx wrote that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch,” meaning the time period, “the ruling ideas.” The not-so-dead hand of slavery continues to brainwash millions of white people.

It takes an upsurge of millions for people to break with the lies of the master class. That’s a reason why Black Lives Matter is so hated by the wealthy and powerful. It reached into small, largely white towns that had never seen a protest before.

That movement, like any upsurge, has receded for the time being. Voters are subjected to billions of dollars of TV ads. More selective are Facebook and other social media posts that attempt to target individual voters.

The effect of this media barrage can be seen in Wisconsin. The Trump campaign in 2020 flooded the state with racist ads attacking the demonstrations in Kenosha following the police shooting of Jacob Blake. Trump lost Wisconsin by only 20,000 votes.

Two years later, the Republican candidates for governor and U.S. senate are again flooding the state with racist ads attacking the Kenosha anti-racist uprising.

A special target has been the liberalized bail laws instituted in New York state and some other places. The eighth amendment to the U.S. Constitution declares that “excessive bail shall not be required.”

Any bail that’s unaffordable to poor people is excessive and amounts to ransom. In Arizona, 80% of jail inmates haven’t been convicted of anything. Their real crime is being poor.

The Black youth Kalief Browder spent three years in New York City’s Rikers Island prison because his family couldn’t afford to bail him out.

He spent 700 days in solitary confinement before his charges were dropped. Then, on June 6, 2015, Kalief Browder hanged himself in his family home.

This tragedy doesn’t prevent Lee Zeldin, the New York Republican candidate, from demanding the new bail laws be repealed.

We must struggle

The capitalist offensive can also be seen in the union representation elections conducted by the National Labor Relations Board. The tremendous victory by the Amazon Labor Union at a Staten Island, New York, warehouse in April took the establishment by surprise.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s executive chairman whose fortune exceeds $120 billion, counterattacked. Amazon is spending untold millions for union busting. The union victory in Staten Island has not yet been repeated.

Despite workers at over 200 Starbucks locations voting for union representation, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz refuses to discuss a union contract.

Frederick Engels — the co-worker of Karl Marx — described capitalist elections as a barometer of the consciousness of the working class.

For millions of people, the 2020 elections represented a break with more than 40 years of reaction and increased racism. But President Biden has given little in the way of help to poor and working people.

The White House and Congress can find $70 billion for the war against Russia, yet it can’t house the homeless. Inflation is cutting families’ income while corporations declare record profits. People line up at food banks.

Reactionary and bigoted politicians feed off this increased misery. The only way forward is more struggle in the streets and workplaces.

Capitalists want to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid while jacking up the retirement age to 70. We won’t let them!

The future can be seen in thousands of railroad workers who’ve had enough and may go on strike. As dangerous as the election of Trump-supporting candidates are, the future is more struggle.