3/3/2022 There’s No Sugarcoating Hershey’s Abuse of Workers and Union-Busting Tactics. By: Sonali KolhatkarRead NowHershey factory workers in Virginia are sick of company abuses and are voting to join a union. But their union-busting employer has other plans. There is a bittersweet battle taking place in Stuarts Draft, Virginia. Workers at the Hershey Company’s second-largest factory, located in the small town of about 12,000, are seeking to unionize. In response, the nation’s largest candy manufacturer is throwing the full force of the standard corporate union-busting playbook at them. The Virginia Hershey manufacturing plant employs about 1,300 people, none of whom are sharing in the bounty of the company’s record profits reaped during a pandemic where Americans ate their weight in candy through numerous lockdowns. Nearly two years ago, Virginia’s former governor, Ralph Northam, a Democrat, approved the granting of about $1.6 million in tax dollars to expand Hershey’s Stuarts Draft factory. Fawning over the project, Northam said, “As we work to accelerate Virginia’s economic recovery, existing corporate partners like The Hershey Company are leading the way with new hiring and investment.” He continued, “We thank Hershey for its continued confidence in Virginia and its people.” Brian Ball, Virginia’s secretary of commerce at the time, was even more ingratiating than Northam, saying, “we stand ready to do what we can to ensure the company’s Stuarts Draft operation continues to thrive.” As a result of its investment, the company became eligible for tax breaks and credits in the state. More than a year after Northam’s decision to invest public funds into the Virginia factory, the company posted significant profits, boasting in a press release about “stronger than anticipated consumer demand, an improved tax outlook and optimized brand investment, which, collectively, are expected to more than offset higher supply chain costs and inflation.” Months later, Hershey raised the prices of its products, in line with the increasingly common practice by corporations to squeeze greater profits from consumers and then blame “inflation” for the higher price tags. If taking advantage of public funding while hiking prices for consumers wasn’t enough, Hershey now stands accused of mistreating workers, some of whom are speaking out about grueling work hours, company surveillance, and harsh retaliation. They even refer to the factory as the “Hershey Prison.” One woman named Janice Taylor told the labor media outlet More Perfect Union that she was required to work for 72 days consecutively. She said, “I was exhausted both physically and mentally.” Taylor and others also detailed how Hershey has created a two-tier system at the factory where newer workers are paid less and have significantly fewer benefits. Employees of the Hershey factory in Stuarts Draft are also making themselves heard by leaving reviews on Indeed.com complaining that people have to work “so many hours [that] everybody walks around like zombies.” One worker writes that they had to miss their daughter’s graduation because the company would not give them two hours off to attend. Another explains, “Most weeks you work 7 days and it’s hard to get a day off. Really hard if you have a family.” And another says, “You don’t get to have a life… [it’s] work until you drop.” It’s no wonder the Hershey workers in Stuarts Draft voted on a plan in January to hold union elections to join the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM). Ballots were mailed out in late February, and results are expected to be announced in late March. According to the Guardian, Hershey is “publicly opposing the effort, encouraging workers to vote against it and hiring the union-busting Labor Relations Institute to hold captive audience meetings with workers.” The company is so proud of its Stuarts Draft factory being a non-union workplace that it touts this fact in its job listings, such as this one for an accountant position which starts off saying, “The Hershey Company Stuarts Draft plant is a Non-Union plant producing products… in a high-speed complex environment.” The company’s opposition to the union drive is puzzling considering that since 1938, workers at Hershey’s original Pennsylvania factory have been unionized under the same union, BCTGM Local 464. But Hershey opposes its Virginia workers from having similar labor rights. The company even created a website to fool workers into believing that their interests are the same as the company’s shareholders, board executives, and upper management. On WeAreHersheySD.com, Stuarts Draft-based employees can read about why the BCTGM—the same union that their colleagues in Pennsylvania are members of—is not good enough for them. “An old adage reminds us to ‘choose our friends wisely,’” says the company on its anti-union website, suggesting that a corporate employer whose goal is to suck as much labor from its workers in exchange for as little compensation as possible is a better friend to workers than a union could be. A more honest rejoinder would be, “Corporations are required to maximize shareholder profits—even at the expense of workers’ well-being.” Hershey’s effort to create a fake culture of corporate allegiance among workers using a slick website is an increasingly common tactic, reminiscent of Amazon’s Doitwithoutdues.com and Starbucks’ We Are One Starbucks. Absent from Hershey’s anti-union website is any mention of how Kellogg’s cereal workers, using their collective bargaining power through the BCTGM, recently ended a monthslong strike and won a new five-year contract. Hershey workers in Virginia are fighting to end the same two-tiered system of pay and benefits at their factory that Kellogg union workers successfully ended by going on strike. There are indicators that Hershey is nervous about the union activity. The recent timing of what the company called a “planned retirement” of a plant manager who had reportedly faced numerous complaints from workers led a BCTGM organizer named John Price to infer that “corporate management solicited grievances from workers and forced him to retire.” Price told The News Leader, “The company is in the midst of superficially fixing as many complaints as possible to avoid having to deal with their workers organized as a union.” He alleged that the company may even be “violating the National Labor Relations Act by bribing or buying the potential voter off.” The union efforts at Hershey’s Stuarts Draft, Virginia, factory are part of a growing, nationwide trend among workers that includes big-name companies like Starbucks and Amazon. A successful unionization vote at one Starbucks location in Buffalo, New York, has now sparked similar efforts among more than 70 Starbucks stores in 20 states. Workers in Bessemer, Alabama, are redoing a union vote that Amazon had illegally interfered in as per the National Labor Relations Board. Amazon, which may be the most ruthless anti-union employer in the nation, is continuing to interfere the second time around, indicating its desperation to prevent unions from taking hold. Even museums are seeing union activity around the country, with workers at major art institutions like the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Guggenheim, forming and joining unions. And, in early February, the Biden administration issued a set of recommendations “to promote worker organizing and collective bargaining for federal employees, and for workers employed by public and private-sector employers”—a far cry from the blatantly anti-union posture of Biden’s predecessor. Hershey enjoys a reputation for being a just company. It runs a private school for low-income children in Pennsylvania. Its CEO Michele Buck has boasted about its commitment to sustainability, social responsibility and human rights. In an online talk last year, Buck even said that during the pandemic her company was focused on “the well-being of our employees,” including “their emotional well-being and their economic well-being.” And yet, counter to this sugarcoated reputation, the company has drawn a sharp line when it comes to the collective power of some of its workers to demand dignity, safety, and fairness. AuthorSonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute. This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Archives March 2022
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3/3/2022 How Union Drives in Mexico Help Workers on Both Sides of the Border. By: Tom ConwayRead NowWhat Tom O’Shei remembers most about his visit to Mexico in 2019 is the determination he glimpsed in the hundreds of Mexican workers who paraded through the port city of Lázaro Cárdenas and stopped to pray at a monument honoring a pair of murdered union activists. Although the marchers gathered to remember the past, O’Shei knew their thoughts were also fixed on a future day when they’d win their fight for labor rights and help build a fairer economy across North America. That day is edging closer under the 19-month-old United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which American labor leaders and their allies pushed over the finish line with provisions aimed at ending the exploitation of workers in all three countries. Thousands of workers at a General Motors plant in Silao, a few hundred miles north of Lázaro Cárdenas, voted by a landslide on February 3 to join a real union and fight for decent pay and working conditions. And long-mistreated workers at auto parts manufacturer Tridonex, just across the border from Brownsville, Texas, are scheduled to vote on February 28 on choosing their own union. These are vital, promising steps under the USMCA, which requires Mexico to enforce the labor rights needed to lift up workers there and, in turn, level the playing field for workers north of the border. “I’m sure it’s going to help with other facilities going forward,” explained O’Shei, president of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 135L, who looks for workers at other Mexican plants to emulate the union drives at GM and Tridonex. “They’re no different than us. They want to be able to feed their families.” “When they do well, we do well, because our work is less likely to be outsourced to a country paying its workers a decent wage,” added O’Shei, who represents hundreds of USW members at the Sumitomo plant in Tonawanda, New York, and twice joined USW delegations that traveled to Mexico to stand in solidarity with union supporters there. Under the USMCA’s failed predecessor, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), employers shifted a million manufacturing jobs to Mexico to take advantage of the low wages as well as the lack of labor rights, weak safety standards and lax environmental regulation. This race to the bottom decimated northern manufacturing communities while holding Mexican workers in poverty. Workers at the GM plant in Silao, for example, make only a few dollars an hour. The February 2006 explosion at the Pasta de Conchos mine, which killed 65 people, underscored the safety lapses Mexican workers faced under NAFTA, as did the police killings of the two union supporters in Lázaro Cárdenas during a strike that followed the mining tragedy. Mexican workers who tried to organize during the NAFTA era did so at the risk of their lives, and the government forced Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, the president and general secretary of Los Mineros, one of the country’s few real labor unions, into exile in Canada for more than 12 years. “We don’t have to take a beating or see people we know die because they were fighting for representation,” observed O’Shei, marveling at the perseverance of union activists in Mexico. The USMCA requires Mexico to give workers the right to form independent unions, elect their own leaders and vote on real contracts. The changes empower workers—like those at GM and Tridonex—to oust corrupt protection unions that conspired with employers to suppress wages and silence dissent. And the USMCA includes first-of-its-kind enforcement mechanisms to prevent Mexican employers and anti-union thugs from thwarting organizing drives or otherwise violating new labor rights. Last year, for example, the fake union at the GM plant in Silao tampered with ballots during a contract vote to hold on to power. The U.S. government filed a complaint under the USMCA, and Mexican authorities ordered a revote. Workers then rejected the rigged contract by a huge margin. That set the stage for the workers’ vote on February 3 to bring in true representation—the National Independent Union for Workers in the Automotive Industry, or SINTTIA. The AFL-CIO and Mexican labor activists, among other groups, filed their own complaint last year after Tridonex harassed and fired hundreds of workers attempting to organize. The company settled the allegations by agreeing to provide hundreds of thousands of dollars in back pay and setting up a hotline for workers to report labor violations, among other penalties. Finally, on February 28, workers fed up with years of abuse will have the chance to elect a legitimate union and take control of their futures. To sustain the kind of cross-border solidarity pivotal in these cases, the USW regularly sends delegations to Lázaro Cárdenas. In 2019, O’Shei and the other USW representatives marched through the city shoulder to shoulder with Mexican workers, including members of Los Mineros. The American and Mexican workers exchanged T-shirts in an expression of solidarity. And the USW delegation attended a Los Mineros union meeting and other events, where O’Shei met Juan Linares, a union leader, who spent years in prison for refusing to inform on fellow union supporters. “That’s not something a lot of people would do,” O’Shei said. “He’s probably one of the most impressive people I’ve ever met. It’s invigorating to be around people who are so close to their struggle to organize, to see the enthusiasm and love they have for their union.” AuthorTom Conway is the international president of the United Steelworkers Union (USW). This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute. Archives March 2022 3/3/2022 One Theater Company Is Providing the Radical Drama World with a Virtual Stage. By: Aric SleeperRead NowFounded from the spirit of the Occupy Movement, HowlRound Theatre Commons is pioneering new forms of performance. After celebrating more than a decade of giving radical theater artists a platform to virtually showcase their ideas and forge connections, the team at HowlRound Theatre Commons are asking themselves and their contributors how best to play a role in ushering in a “Just Transition” in 2022, and what that looks like for the theater world, as they moves into yet another year where the ongoing pandemic continues to pose new challenges for the theater world. “One thing that’s been [the most] challenging for the theater during the pandemic, apart from the obvious things like all the actual venues being shut down, is that most [people working] in the nonprofit theater field are basically freelancers. The playwrights, actors, directors, designers and technicians have had [to face] employment challenges [during this period],” says HowlRound Cultural Strategist and co-founder Vijay Mathew. “However, one of the positive things [that happened during the pandemic] is that many in the field are turning to online venues like Zoom and are more aware of inclusion practices like sign language interpretation, and that’s new.” Founded in 2011, HowlRound is an online media publishing organization focused on amplifying progressive and disruptive ideas in the theater field and is based out of Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts. The name HowlRound itself is derived from the term used for audio feedback. “Like when you put a microphone next to a speaker,” says Mathew. “We are creating a feedback loop for the field of theater. Artists input their voices into the platform, and they become amplified, louder and louder.” HowlRound was formed in the midst of the Occupy Movement, and in the same spirit, according to Mathew. At that time, theater artists like Mathew began to realize that the nonprofit theater world had become a reflection of commercial theater in the worst way—with the wealthiest theaters getting wealthier, and the poorer becoming poorer—and there wasn’t an online venue yet for those in the theater field to address the systemic issues inherent in both these extremes. “In the United States, the nonprofit theater movement took off in the early 1960s with pro-social aims and missions, but through time and inertia, the nonprofit theater began to resemble commercial, Broadway theater. Because there was a lack of diversity, it became a monoculture,” says Mathew. “Nonprofit theater may have started with the intention of being a people’s theater, but it always remained an elite endeavor in wealthy cities with wealthy donors. HowlRound was built as a reaction to that and was set up to be countercultural.” Once HowlRound was established, and more people in the field began contributing their voices to it, more people started joining the cast of contributors at HowlRound, and after more than a decade since its inception, the online platform continues to grow. Mathew has watched HowlRound have a slow and steady effect on the theater field at large, but he has learned over the years that bringing attention to problematic systemic issues and progressive ideas is a gradual process. “For many years, the biggest topics [in the theater world] have been [about] gender and gender diversity, and race and race representation, and specifically how [these topics] manifest themselves in theater through casting,” says Mathew. “Also, just the embedded politics of what a rehearsal room looks like and the power distribution there.” One of the inherent problems with the dominant power structure in the U.S. theater world, according to Mathew, is that it comes from the structure of Shakespearean theater, which evolved into what is known as the traditional theater model. When the playwrights and their script are the generative and primary authority in theater, the power structure of a production becomes hierarchical and standardized. “Outside of the United States, playwright-driven theater is the minority form of theater,” says Mathew. “The traditional theater model makes it easy for nonprofit theater to become commodified and could almost [lead to nonprofit theater being] considered a bush league for commercial theater or television writing. In a sense, the U.S theater is just a development ground for Hollywood.” The flipside of traditional, script-driven theater is called ensemble theater or devised theater. In ensemble theater, there may or may not even be a script, and members of the production could have numerous titles or responsibilities. Ensemble theater is more prevalent in Europe and manifests in forms like circus or street theater. “These first nonprofit institutions in the 1960s in the U.S. were set up to do classic plays and not any other kinds of theater,” says Mathew. “So from then on, anyone who wants to be a theater artist has these set paths before them where they have to choose one specialization like playwright or actor. Wherever you are in the U.S., whether in Seattle or Miami, theater is standardized, and there’s not much diversity.” HowlRound works with theater artists to compose essays and livestreams about radical topics in the theater world, or cultural issues in general like climate change and racial discrimination. They also offer virtual workshops and events like the upcoming Comedy Carnaval produced by the Latinx Theatre Commons. “The Latinx Theatre Commons is a program that is specifically about changing the narrative in U.S. theater about who is making theater and where it’s coming from,” says Mathew. “[The Latinx Theatre Commons] use HowlRound to organize conferences and festivals hosted by various organizations that are part of the commons, and it’s been really impactful for bringing awareness to the rich diversity of Latinx theater artists who’ve been historically ignored by the white-dominated nonprofit theater world.” Essentially, HowlRound is an open-source project for theater, similar to what Mozilla is to Firefox for software development. Mathew sees HowlRound’s structure as a replicable model for other sectors. “I think the commons-based, peer-produced media publishing model exists elsewhere, and is quite common, but I don’t know of any other platforms like ours in the arts,” says Mathew. With accelerated crises on the horizon, whether it be social, medical or environmental, Mathew hopes that the community he and his colleagues have built will help shine a light on concepts like commoning and the solidarity economy movement, and inspire more people to envision alternate forms of social organization moving forward. “My hope is that theater artists with our focus and skillset will be able to provoke people’s imaginations about new ways of organizing and collaborating with each other and constructing society in a new way,” says Mathew. AuthorAric Sleeper is an independent journalist whose work, which covers topics including labor, drug reform, food and more, has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle and other publications local to California’s Central Coast. In addition to his role as a community reporter, he has served as a government analyst and bookseller. This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Archives March 2022 Towards the end of the first chapter of Das Kapital, after having established the validity of the labor theory of value, Marx has a section on the “Fetishism of Commodities”. To understand this section is to understand the whole first chapter and also to see why socialism is necessary. This article is an attempt to explain the meaning of this section and to apply its lessons to our times. A commodity looks simple enough, says the bourgeois economist. Most bourgeois economists say it is any object with a use value that somebody wants and is willing to pay for and its value is determined by supply and demand. Nothing drives such a common sense economist more to distraction than reading Karl Marx who says a commodity is "a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties." What can Marx mean? Economics is a science, even a mathematical science, what has it got to do with metaphysics and theology? Take a wooden table, says Marx. It is just wood that human labor has turned into a table and taken to market. Wood + Labor = Table. Where is the mystery? When it gets to the market the table finds itself in the company of the stool and the chair. All three have use values, are made of the same wood, and may be in equal supply and equal demand-- yet each has its own different price. Why these different prices? Same wood, same demand, same supply. They are all the products of human labor. What is the difference between them that justifies different prices? The prices are reflections of the underlying values of the products. Could the values be different? What does Marx say determines value? It is the different quantities of socially necessary labor time embodied in the commodities. The table, the stool, and the chair are three "things" that are related to each other as the embodiment of the social relations and necessary labor of human beings that created them. Human social relations have been objectified as the relations between non human things. The chair is more valuable than the table but the reason is now hidden away from the perception of people. "A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing," Marx writes, "simply because in it the social character of men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relations of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour." To find an analogy Marx tells us we have to turn to the "mist-enveloped regions of the religious world." In that world the inventions of the human mind take on an independent existence and humans begin to interact with their own fantastical creations as if they were really independently existing objective things. This is similar to the Fetishism of Commodities. All the commodities we see about us are part of the sum total of all the socially produced objects and services created by human labor in our society. People all over the world are making things which are traded, shipped, sold, resold, etc. But their use values cannot be realized until they are sold--i.e., exchanged, especially exchanged for money. But why are some more expensive than others? Why do some have more value than others? Supply and demand has a role to play in setting price but it merely causes price to fluctuate around value. The fact that we know that value results from the socially necessary labor time spent in making commodities "by no means," Marx says, "dissipates the mist through which the social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves." This is because we are so use to how the market operates under capitalism, how prices fluctuate, commodities rise and fall in prices, the working people naturally just think the values (which they don't differentiate from prices) are products of the natural world, that is, are functions of the things for sale or barter themselves. This is why "supply and demand" seems to be the basis of the value of things. They don't see it's all really the result of the socially necessary labor time expended in the labor process that is the determining factor in value This leads Marx to say , "The determination of the magnitude of value by labor time therefore is a secret, hidden under the apparent fluctuations in the relative values of commodities." We are reminded that to understand the real nature of a social formation we have to reverse our knowledge of its historical development. We begin with the full fledged capitalist system and we try to figure why the prices of things are the way they are. Looking at the mature system we don't really see its primitive origins. In the same way a religious person looking at a human being fails to see an ape in the background. This leads Marx to say of his own theory, "When I state that coats and boots stand in a relation to linen, because it is the universal incarnation of abstract human labor, the absurdity of the statement is self-evident." This has been remarked upon both by the most astute of thinkers (Bertrand Russell) and the most pedestrian (Ayn Rand). The problem is that the bourgeoisie looks upon a historically transient economic formation, its own, as an eternally existing social order. Of course prices are set by supply and demand. What is that crazy Marx talking about? As the economist Brad Delong said, he had never known anyone who thought that way. Well, let's look at something other than the full blown capitalist system at work. Marx says, "The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labor as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production." Marx gives the example of Robinson Crusoe. He chose Robinson because he was a popular example used in the texts of the day. Robinson has to make everything for himself, obtain his own food, and provide his own shelter. It is pretty obvious that the things that are most important for his survival are those he expends most of his labor time upon and are consequently the most valuable to him. Marx then says we should consider a community of free people working together cooperatively to make all things necessary for their society. Whereas Robinson was just making use values for himself, in this community a social product is being created. The people have to set aside part of the product for future production, but the rest they can consume. How would they divide it in a fair manner? They would divide the product in proportion to the labor time each individual had contributed to the joint production of the social product. This is how barter went on in the Middle Ages. Peasants knew very well how much labor time was involved in making cheese, for example, and in making a pair of shoes . If it took twice as long to make a pound cheese that to make a pair of shoes, you can be sure that no one was going to trade more than a half pound of cheese for his shoes. It is only in the complicated processes of commodity production, especially in capitalism, that the Fetichism of Commodities begins to manifest itself and the true nature of the source of value is lost. People have confused consciousness in our world. Our alienation from our own social product, the effects of commodity fetichism, and the continuing influence of religion all work together to keep us confused and off guard. But seeing what our condition is with respect to such mental blights also tells how far along the road to liberation we are (not far) and how far we have to go (quite a distance I fear). The world, though in a distorted way, is reflected in these distorted forms of consciousness. "The religious world," Marx tells us, "is but the reflex of the real world." And, for our capitalist society where all human relations, and relations of humans with the things they create, are reducible to commodification based on the value of "homogeneous human labor" the best form of religion is Christianity and especially Protestantism (or alternatively, Deism) and maybe for our day we can toss in Secular Humanism. Why is this? Marx says it is because the idea of "abstract man" is the basis of the religious outlook of these systems. A religion based on an abstract view of "human nature" is just the ticket for an economic system that the bourgeoisie says is also based on "human nature." The religion reinforces the basic presuppositions of the capitalist view of abstract man and since Catholicism represents a pre-bourgeois human abstraction more suitable to feudalism it is the Protestant form that is more congruent with bourgeois conceptions. As long as humans are confused and alienated, and ignorant of how capitalism works and are mystified by their relation to the objects of their labor they will never be free, or free from the spell of religion, according to Marx. "The religious reflex of the real world," he writes, can only vanish "when the practical relations of every-day life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible relations with regard to his fellowmen and to Nature." The next two sentences from Marx are extremely important as they explain, in very general terms, the failure of the Russian Revolution and the downfall of the socialist world system. The first sentence describes what the Bolsheviks set out to do in 1917. "The life processes of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan." This is certainly what was attempted-- first by war communism, then the NEP, and then by the five year plans, forced collectivization and industrialization. But why the failure? Where were the "freely associated men?" To pull off this great transformation, the goal of communism, Marx wrote "demands for society a certain material ground-work or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development." In other words, the seizure of power was premature. The material ground-work had not been sufficiently developed. If Lenin represented the negation of the ancien regime, Gorbachev and Yeltsin represented the negation of the negation-- brought about by the failure of that long and painful process of development to properly develop production by freely associated human beings. For all its efforts the socialist world still belonged to that world in which the processes of production had the mastery over human beings and not the other way around. So we must still put up with the Fetichism of Commodities for a while longer. The recent crisis (2008) gives us an opportunity to educate working people about this Fetichism and how to free themselves from it. GM became 70% owned by the government and the UAW will have a stake of about 17.5%. This leaves 12.5% in the hands of the capitalists. The commodities the workers make (cars) don't have a life of their own. Their value is determined by the socially necessary labor time it takes workers to make them. They are extensions of the being of the working people not the capitalists who have proved themselves totally incompetent. The working people of this country far out number the number of monopoly capitalists-- both industrial and financial. The UAW and the AFL-CIO as well other Unions should have seen to it that the government represented the interests of the working class majority. The 87.5% joint Government-worker control of GM should not have been used to put the private interests back in control, but to rationalize the auto industry by means of worker control, eliminate the capitalists and the Fetichism that keeps people thinking private interests have a role to play in production, and lay the groundwork for further nationalizations in the future. What do you think? AuthorThomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association. Archives March 2022 3/3/2022 “Cuba advocates a solution that guarantees the security and sovereignty of all”. By: CubaminrexRead NowStatement from Cuba’s Revolutionary Government The U.S. determination to continue NATO’s progressive expansion toward the Russian Federation’s borders has brought about a scenario with implications of unpredictable scope, which could have been avoided. United States’ and NATO’s military moves toward regions adjacent to the Russian Federation in recent months are well known, and were preceded by the delivery of modern weapons to Ukraine, which together constitute a military siege. It is impossible to make a rigorous and honest examination of the current situation in Ukraine, without carefully assessing the Russian Federation’s just demands of the United States and NATO, and the factors that have led to the use of force and non-observance of legal principles and international norms which Cuba strongly supports and, are, particularly for small countries, an essential resource in resisting hegemony, abuse of power and injustice. Cuba is a country that defends International Law and is committed to the Charter of the United Nations. Cuba will always defend peace and oppose the use of force, and threats to do so, against any state. We deeply regret the loss of innocent civilian lives in Ukraine. The Cuban people have had and continue to have a very close relationship with the Ukrainian people. History will hold the United States accountable for the consequences of an increasingly offensive military doctrine beyond NATO’s borders, which threatens international peace, security and stability. Our concern has grown worse with NATO’s recent decision to activate, for the first time, its Response Force. Ignoring the well-founded claims made by the Russian Federation concerning security guarantees for decades and assuming that Russia would remain defenseless in the face of a direct threat to its national security was a mistake. Russia has the right to defend itself. Peace cannot be achieved by mounting sieges or encircling states. The draft resolution on the situation in Ukraine not adopted by the UN Security Council February 25, which will be submitted to the General Assembly, was not intended as a genuine contribution to resolve the current crisis. On the contrary, it is an unbalanced text, which does not take into account the legitimate concerns of all parties involved. It does not acknowledge either the responsibility of those who instigated or took aggressive action that led to the escalation of this conflict. We call for a serious, constructive and realistic diplomatic solution to the current crisis in Europe, via peaceful means, ensuring the security and sovereignty of all, as well as regional and international peace, stability and security. Cuba rejects hypocrisy and double standards. It should be recalled that in 1999 the United States and NATO launched a major attack on Yugoslavia, a European country that was fragmented with a high cost in human lives, in pursuit of geopolitical objectives, disregarding the UN Charter. The United States and several of its allies have used force on many occasions. They have invaded sovereign states to bring about regime change and interfere in the internal affairs of other nations that do not submit to their interests of domination, defending their territorial integrity and independence. They are also responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, which they label as “collateral damage,” millions of displaced persons and widespread destruction across our planet in their wars of plunder. Havana, February 26, 2022 AuthorThis article was produced by Granma. Archives February 2022 |
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