Theresa May has been talking tough about Russia since the poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia with a nerve agent, mobilising support from the USA and the EU. 23 Russian diplomats were quickly expelled from the UK. When we remember that this is the same Mrs May who, as home secretary, refused an enquiry into the murder of Litvinenko by 2 Russian agents until 2014, because of fears that this would worsen relations with Russia, it is impossible to believe that her present response is guided by indignation at an attempted murder by a foreign power on British soil. Rather we must look first and foremost at the imperialist relations and tensions between the powers concerned.
There have also been wider international ramifications of the conflict with first the USA, France and Germany expressing support for the UK and more recently over two dozen countries, including the USA, much of the EU, NATO, Canada and Australia, joining in the diplomatic expulsions of suspected spies. The expulsion of 60 Russians from the USA is greater than any similar expulsions during the Cold War. These actions, like those of the Britain and Russia, must be seen in terms of the imperialist relations of the powers concerned. We should also note that several EU countries, including Austria, Greece and Portugal, declined to expel Russians, that the expulsions were questioned by some politicians in Italy and Czech Republic, and that Trump failed to mention this event in his tweets, even while the Russians were being expelled.
If there is such an escalation between Russia and GB and many “Western” countries behind the latter, it is not an isolated clash, but is part of a sharpening of imperialist tensions world wide, where there are a number of increasingly chaotic confrontations, with a growing involvement of the bigger imperialist sharks (US, China, Russia) as well as more regional rivals (such as Saudi Arabia and Iran in the Middle East). Even though at first sight it might leave the impression that this is a remake of the Cold War, when two blocs were confronting each other, in reality in the present phase, , imperialist tensions are no longer marked by antagonisms between blocs, but by a more centrifugal tendency towards every man for himself, even though there is a growing polarisation between China and the US, and between Russia and a number of Western powers.
Declining powers
What is most obvious about both Britain and Russia is that they are powers in decline, although they are both nuclear powers, reflecting their former strength. In little over 100 years Britain has declined from imperialist top dog, first of all seeing its industrial strength overtaken, falling into debt to the USA in World War 2, and subsequently losing an empire it could no longer control. Its weakened state has been highlighted, and accelerated, by the disastrous Brexit decision. Russia became leader of an imperialist bloc by conquering much of Eastern Europe in WW2, a status it maintained throughout the Cold War. However its economy was too weak to sustain the arms race against the USA and it lost its empire in 1989 and then much of the former territory of the USSR. It now functions as a kleptocracy, with a great degree of melding between Mafia gangs and the state apparatus[1]. While it will never regain its former strength, it has recovered sufficiently to play a destabilising role in many areas, such as maintaining a toe-hold in Syria by supporting the Assad government militarily, invading Crimea, meddling in Ukraine, and engaging in cyber attacks and vote meddling elsewhere. The latter question of using on-line resources to influence elections, of course, is not limited to Russia as the recent allegations against Cambridge Analytica illustrate.
The collapse of the Russian imperialist bloc nearly 30 years ago ushered in a period of instability, not least in foreign relations. The USA was left as, and remains, the only superpower, but the collapse of the other superpower meant that many of its allies and clients were no longer in immediate need of its protection from the rival bloc and could play a more independent role. This was illustrated when NATO powers supported different states in the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, or when France and Germany openly opposed the second Gulf War in 2003. The greatest gains have been made by China, which has taken no part in the diplomatic spat between Russia and Britain.
The use of Novichok
The use of Novichok, a nerve agent developed 500 miles from Moscow, implies that it was intended that the attack should be seen as the work of Russia. Along with the British government, the EU has thus concluded that it is “highly likely” that it was done by Russia. For Lithuanian foreign minister Linas Linkevicius, Britain is being tested, “Russia is always looking for weak points, and may feel the UK does not feel very strong… The Russian assumption may be that in the process of Brexit, the UK is weaker…” (The Guardian, 16.3.18). They may also be testing NATO, already weakened by some of Trump’s less than enthusiastic statements about it and by conflicts within the alliance, as between the USA and Turkey over Kurdish fighters in Syria. We can certainly have no doubt that Russia is monitoring the response, noting how NATO, the EU and other countries have made statements in support of Britain, and which countries have followed that up with diplomatic expulsions, and which have not. They will also have noted that, in spite of the US expulsion of 60 Russian spies or diplomats, Tillerson was sacked by Trump shortly after a speech condemning Russia for the attack in Salisbury. In any case, divisions inside the US bourgeoisie are plain for all to see after 15 months of the Trump presidency and the Russiagate investigation.
Putin is, as ever, playing the strong leader, recently announcing new missiles that can get through the USA’s defences, essentially claiming to have a first strike capacity, shortly before his re-election. His response to this event projects the same strong nationalist message, standing up for Russia against the allegation of use of a nerve agent, for which there is no definitive proof, matching the initial 23 expulsions from the UK, and then adding to this by banning the British Council from Russia. This certainly did him no harm in the presidential election, not that his success was ever in doubt after the most likely rival was banned and the ballot boxes stuffed. Russia has continued in the same vein since, matching all the expulsions from countries around the world and then adding some more for Britain.
How the UK has been able to orchestrate an international response
It’s also true that the British government has turned these events to its advantage as much as it can. From a situation of looking weak, divided and indecisive over Brexit negotiations, Theresa May and her government have been able to project an image of not just the government but Parliament and the whole country united behind their strong response to an outrage committed on British soil. Statements of support, first by USA, France and Germany, and then by NATO and the EU, as well as the international wave of diplomatic expulsions, have added to this. We have even seen Jeremy Corbyn castigated for reminding the government not to rush to judgement before the police investigation has taken place, despite the fact he fully supported the actual measures taken by the government. For a large part of the bourgeoisie, this was too much opposition in words, even when there was none at all in policy!
Unfortunately for Mrs May and her government, none of this changes the very real weaknesses and divisions in the British bourgeoisie that have been highlighted and worsened by Brexit. The international response she has orchestrated from countries that have previously ignored many murders on foreign soil says much more about the need to counter Russian destabilisation than her leadership or powers of persuasion. Condemnation of Russia is simply hypocrisy on the part of countries that carry out their own murders on foreign soil, as with the drone strikes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.. However, weeks before announcing the expulsion of diplomats in support of Britain, at the time of its first statement with France and Germany, the USA imposed sanctions on 19 Russians over cyber attacks on critical infrastructure and meddling in the election of Trump. Russia is also suspected of trying to influence the Brexit referendum.
More important is the fact that Russian support for Assad in Syria, rapprochement with Turkey against Kurds there, and its support for Iran, have weakened the USA in that region, which in turn has increased Putin’s aggressive policies. Russia also has common interests with China, a much more important imperialist competitor, in Syria and Iran, and against Japan and the US. However, these can only lead to unstable and temporary alliances since the two powers are rivals in the Indian subcontinent and in Asia over the New Silk Road. Also it is unlikely Russia will easily tolerate the reversal of roles with China, which it dominated for much of the Cold War. Russia remains a nuisance that the USA and much of Europe would like to put in its place, but after its collapse nearly 30 years ago it can no longer build a solid alliance around itself. It is even possible there are some in the US (in the Trump camp for example) who would like to use it against China.
Russia’s defenders
Corbyn essentially agreed that it was most likely Russia was behind the poisoning in Salisbury, and supported the measures taken, and is therefore not one of Moscow’s open defenders. However, in demanding that the government not rush to judgement and in pointing to donations to the Tory Party by various Russian oligarchs he echoed the themes of some of those who really are defending Russia - a stance that that may be tolerated, even useful, in a back bencher with no hope of office, but not in a leader of the opposition who may be seen as PM in waiting. This has been too much for many in the Parliamentary Labour Party, who have been reminded why they – and the central parts of the British bourgeoisie – don’t trust him, particularly on foreign policy, and he has come under renewed pressure after a period of truce since the last election. Apart from direct criticism of his Commons performance on the Skripal case, they have used the issue of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party and particularly among Corbyn supporters in Momentum to put pressure on the leader[2] Anti-semitism is certainly a reality in the Labour Party and the capitalist left, as we argued in an article on ICC online during the last furore in the Labour Party[3]. However, the fact that it is being raised so loudly today when little has really changed suggests that it is being honed as a weapon against Corbyn.
For an outright defence of Russia, we can refer to John Pilger, who wrote an article in the Off-Guardian that demands Russia be given ‘due process’ before it is condemned[4]. In an interview with Russia Today he went further and argued that Russia has demonstrated that it has destroyed all its chemical weapons, that Porton Down is not far from Salisbury, and that the Skripal case is a drama carefully constructed by Britain[5]. Essentially giving the Russian line, in other words.
We cannot trust any of the protestations of innocence, neither the claim that Russia has destroyed all its chemical weapons, nor the denial that the nerve agent used could have come from Porton Down. The UK government is just as capable of cynical extra-judicial murder as the Russian government or the mafia. And since we have no access to proof all we can rely on is an analysis of the imperialist interests of the various players in the situation. In the present situation of weakness of the UK and NATO it seems that Russia had the most to gain by probing weaknesses and divisions. It is also consistent with its role as a force for destabilisation. At the same it is possible to say that if the Russian state did order this assassination, it has not turned out particularly well for it so far, since it has not resulted in increased divisions among its main rivals.
Socialist Worker, on the other hand, echoes Jeremy Corbyn on donations, “The Russians are coming and have bought the Tories”, noting that this includes oligarchs who are both pro and anti-Putin[6], and call for a rejection of “Tory’s warmongering”[7].
Let us be quite clear, Britain, Russia and all states today are capitalist and imperialist, and so they are all capable of warmongering when this is in their national interest. There is nothing specifically “Tory” about warmongering. Russia was at war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and is at war in Syria today. The Labour Party supported the Falklands War in the 1980s and went to war in Iraq in 2003 (while the SWP called for the defence of Iraq “against imperialism”). In fact, since the Russian revolution degenerated, and was defeated, there has been absolutely nothing ‘anti-imperialist’ about the country, not in the 1930s, not in World War 2, not in the Cold War, and not today. To put about the idea that only the Tories who are warmongers is to disarm the working class in front of all the other bourgeois political ideologues who are also warmongers.
Alex 2.4.18
[1] Asked in a TV interview whether it is fair to call Russia a mafia state, former British “man in Moscow” Sir Andrew Wood said: “Yeah, I think it’s a bit unfair….on the mafia.” https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/mar/26/russian-spy-assassi... [2]
“My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all”.
The celebrated cosmologist Stephen Hawking died on March 14 in Cambridge. He was one of the greatest specialists in black holes. Along with his theoretical discoveries, from the explanation of the very existence of black holes – which the scientific community had been sceptical about up until the 1960s – to the “Hawking radiation” (according to this hypothesis, black holes emit a “black body” radiation), he became known around the world for trying to make the scientific mysteries of the universe more accessible to the general public. His 1988 book A Brief History of Time became a best seller and still enraptures all those who want to understand the beauties of the Milky Way.
But Stephen Hawking had also, since the age of 21, fought against motor neurone disease, a terrible affliction which usually leads to complete paralysis and death in a few years. And yet this illness played a huge role in his way of perceiving the world and his place within humanity. In his 2013 autobiography, My Brief History, he tells us
“Not knowing what was going to happen to me or how rapidly the disease would progress, I was at a loose end. The doctors told me to go back to Cambridge and carry on with the research I had just started in general relativity and cosmology. But I was not making progress because I didn’t have much mathematical background – and anyway, it was hard to focus when I might not live long enough to finish my PhD. I felt somewhat of a tragic character. I took to listening to Wagner….
My dreams at that time, however, were rather disturbed. Before my condition was diagnosed, I had been very bored with life. There had not seemed anything worth doing. But shortly after I came out of the hospital, I dreamed that I was going to be executed. I suddenly realised that there were a lot of worthwhile things I could do if I was reprieved. Another dream I had several times was that I would sacrifice my life to save others. After all, if I was going to die anyway, I might as well do some good”
Stephen Hawking is saying something fundamental here. At 21 the doctors gave him at best no more than a few years to live. He could then have burned the candle at both ends, thinking only of himself and the immediate moment – which was a bit like the way he had been living when he was a student in good health. But he chose another path: that of linking himself to a greater whole, humanity and its future: “I might as well do some good”. For him, the “good” was taking part in the general development of science and of our knowledge of the world.
In the conclusion to his autobiography, he explains the moral and intellectual flowering produced by the feeling of being a link in a very long chain, by having contributed the best of his capacities to the good of all:
“When I was twenty-one and contracted motor neurone disease, I felt it was very unfair. Why should this happen to me? At the time, I thought my life was over and that I would never realise the potential I felt I had. But now, fifty years later, I can be quietly satisfied with my life…I have travelled widely. I visited the Soviet Union seven times…I have also visited Japan six times, China three times, and every continent, including Antarctica, with the exception of Australia…My early work showed that classical general relativity broke down at singularities in the Big Bang and black holes. My later work has shown how quantum theory can predict what happens at the beginning and end of time. It has been a glorious time to be alive and doing research in theoretical physics. I am happy if I have added something to our understanding of the universe”
Today, the whole of humanity seems to be suffering from a deep and potentially fatal malady: it no longer believes in its future. More exactly, the working class has forgotten what it is and what it is capable of. It has lost the perspective of a new world, which it alone can bring into being. This perspective has been trapped in the present, where minds are more and more infected by the spirit of every man for himself, by irrationality and fear. Stephen Hawking’s spirit should be an inspiration to us: even in the face of the worst, of imminent death, he rejected the egoistic illusions of the present instant and instead projected himself into the future of humanity through his scientific research.
Today however it is necessary to go beyond all individual solutions. While science contains within itself the potential for “doing good” for all, it is up to the proletariat, the revolutionary class, through organisation, solidarity and consciousness, to lead humanity out of its prehistory by freeing it from the yoke of capitalist exploitation. However great the scientific discoveries of the future, only the international victory of the proletariat can achieve the flowering of humanity.
Sousso, 18.4.18
A leaflet currently being distributed by our section in France to the strikes and demonstrations taking place there.
In the hospitals, at Air France, in the supermarkets of Carrefour, in the care homes, in the universities, on the railways…strike days have been multiplying for several weeks now. There’s no doubt that president Macron and his government are hitting us hard. Yesterday it was the ‘Labour Law’, today the reform of the SNCF[1], tomorrow a new generalised attack on pensions. Everywhere and for all workers and their families: falling wages and social benefits, job cuts and speed ups, flexibility and precarious jobs, impoverishment of those who have retired, hassling of the unemployed.
THE WHOLE WORKING CLASS IS UNDER ATTACK!
How can we respond to this new degradation of our living conditions? How can we organise ourselves? How can we develop our unity and solidarity?
Can we push the government back?
Over the last 15 years, the only time the ruling class, its government and its democratic state have really been forced to retreat was at the time of the movement against the CPE[2] in the spring of 2006. Why? This social movement, initiated by students conscious of being the precariously employed workers of the future, developed in a spontaneous way, its mobilisations based on solidarity between working class generations. The young people involved rediscovered the vital importance of sovereign, autonomous general assemblies. As a result of many animated debates, it became aware that its fight was not a particular one but belonged to the whole working class. This is why the students in struggle opened their assemblies to high school students, the unemployed, to workers and to pensioners. At each demonstration, the numbers marching became more and more impressive. At each demonstration, other sectors of the working class joined the movement. The slogans that flourished at the time revealed this quest for unity: “Jeunes lardons, vieux croûtons, la même salade”, “Students, high school pupils, unemployed, semi-employed, public and private, the same struggle against unemployment and casualisation!” The movement of the students against precarious employment began to win over workers from the private sector, forcing the Villepin government to withdraw the CPE legislation.
This is what scared the bourgeoisie in 2006: the extension of the struggle, solidarity across the whole working class, all the generations together. The trend towards the students – many of whom had no choice but to take on part time jobs to support their studies - taking control of their struggle, the massive general assemblies, the slogans putting forward the unity of the working class, the challenging of the unions – this was what constituted the strength of the exploited class.
A huge offensive of the ruling class aimed at derailing social discontent
Is the present social movement inspired by this victory in 2006, by what forms our strength, our unity in the struggle? They certainly want us to believe this. The mass meetings of the railway workers in the train stations are well covered by the media. The trade unions present themselves as being “united”, “militant”, and even “imaginative” (the great discovery of the “go-slow strike”!). They promise us victory, even a “new May 68”.
Is this the reality? No! Because behind the façade of “trade union unity” there hide the worst sectional and corporatist divisions. The strikes are isolated from each other. Each sector puts forward its particular slogans and its own days of action.
Because behind the “inventiveness” of the unions in the go-slows lies the poison of division. The aim of the unions is to make this strike on the railways unpopular, to set workers against each other, in the end to exasperate those who can’t get to work or get home in the evening “all because of the rail strike”. It’s the old tactic of blocking any solidarity with the strikers who are “creating chaos” (as president Macron put it soon after coming to power and who is now insisting that “people should not be taken hostage”).
Because behind the “solidarity funds” set up by the unions there hides an attack on real workers’ solidarity. Active solidarity in the struggle is replaced by a Platonic support based on collecting funds for a long drawn out go-slow.
Finally, because behind the “militancy” of the unions lies the reality of a powerless, exhausting movement, totally isolated from the rest of their class, the rail workers are threatened not only with a considerable loss of wages but above all with the demoralisation of defeat.
A classic ploy: push a key sector into struggle in order to defeat it on its own
Faced with growing social discontent, the bourgeoisie has isolated a key, symbolic sector, the railway workers, to inflict a defeat that is visible to everyone and thus to spread its message: struggle gets you nowhere; struggle doesn’t pay.
This is a trap that has been used many times before, dividing the workers sector by sector and exhausting their fighting spirit in order to push through the attacks and “reforms” of the government and the bosses.
Remember the rail strikes of 1986-7. After several weeks of paralysis in the transport sector, the workers, isolated and imprisoned in their own sector by the unions, went back to work without winning anything.
Remember the strikes and demonstrations in 2003 in the public education sector. For several long weeks, the teachers were in struggle. But these mobilisations, instead of acting as a locomotive for a wider struggle, remained totally isolated because they were rigidly contained by the unions. A crushing defeat followed, allowing the Raffarin government to claim cynically that “It’s not the street that governs!”.
Today, the same trap is being set. What the ruling class wants is to prevent this very strong social discontent against Macron’s “reforms” from exploding. What it wants is to stifle this anger so that it can push through all the reforms and attacks planned by the Macron presidency.
We need to discuss the lessons of the past to prepare the struggles of the future
It has to be clear that allowing the unions to run our struggles can only lead to defeat. We need o discuss and reflect about the dirty work of the unions, these professional dividers who are united against us using the legitimate anger of the railway workers. We need to denounce their anti-working class practices, their duplicity and their complicity with the bosses and the government.
The slow-down strikes organised by the big union federations like the CGT, CFDT and FO (while at the same time negotiating behind the workers backs in the government ministries) will not allow for the development of the struggle. On the contrary, they are aimed at sabotaging it. The “stop-start” strike, isolated and “unlimited”, advocated by SUD-Rail is no less pernicious. It cuts off any solidarity and prevents the unification of our struggle. The famous “convergence of struggles”, so dear to “radical” trade unionism, is just another form of corporatism that keeps us isolated from each other. This idea of “convergence”, seen in the practice of simply juxtaposing different marches, is radically different from a real unification. A real unification demands the formation of general assemblies in which everyone can take part, in the workplaces, on the streets, on the public squares, in the neighbourhoods, in the universities.
Contrary to what the unions and the entire bourgeoisie wants us to think, the working class is perfectly capable of taking control of its own struggles without conferring it on “specialists”. All the great experiences of the past are the proof. In May 1968, the workers were capable of struggling massively, spontaneously, opposing the unions and even tearing up their union cards. The students who organised the massive movement against the CPE in 2006 did not allow the unions to confiscate their struggle. In Poland in 1980, the workers of the Gdansk shipyards were able to develop a mass strike which extended across the whole country without any union, with delegates elected and revocable at any moment by general assemblies. Only the working class can defend it own interests against its exploiters.
Today, faced with this new manoeuvre by the bourgeoisie and the its unions to sabotage any sign of struggle and any reflection on the experiences of the past, not only in France but in other countries as well, the most militant and conscious workers need to seek each other out and gather together. They need to discuss, reflect together on the increasingly dramatic situation imposed on us by capitalism. This remains true whatever clique is in power. What future can this system of exploitation offer the workers and their children? Nothing but growing poverty and endless barbarism. How can we fight not only for ourselves but also for future generations?
Questions that can only find practical answers through collective discussion and reflection.
The only possible future for society is in the hands of the working class, a class which has nothing to lose but its chains, and a world to win.
Révolution Internationale. ICC section in France, 19.4.18
[1] French national rail system, which Macron wants to make more “streamlined”
[2] Contrat Première Embauche, First Employment Contract, renamed by some students Contrat Poubelle Embauche, or First Rubbish Contract
This article, written by a close sympathizer in the US, attempts to draw a balance sheet of the recent struggle by teachers and other public sector workers in West Virginia.
For two weeks in late February and early March, public school teachers in the state of West Virginia were on strike. This strike was not a manoeuvre by the state to set the teachers up for a defeat at the hands of the union. On the contrary, the teachers’ anger, resilience, militancy and willingness to buck the established institutional channels for voicing their grievances appear to have taken the bourgeoisie, at both the state and national levels, rather by surprise. Although the strike is now over and the teachers’ have returned to their jobs having won only part of the concessions they sought from the state, this episode marks perhaps the most important development in the class struggle in the US since the mass mobilizations of 2011—in particular the resistance to public sector austerity in Wisconsin and the Occupy Wall Street Movement.
In fact, the West Virginia teachers’ strike is itself a part of a broader movement, both within the United States and internationally, transpiring within education and other parts of the public sector. The mobilisations of US high school students over gun violence, the public sector strikes in France against the Macron government’s “labor market reforms,” and the mobilization of university lecturers and support staff in the UK over attacks on pensions are all part of what appears to be a developing international response to the effects of years of state budget cutting.[1]
The education sector in particular embodies the contradictions inherent in social reproduction under capitalism. While subject to the capitalist logic of productivity and valorization like everything else, the education sector is nevertheless also where the vital social function of training, preparing and disciplining the next generation of workers (the reproduction of labor power at the generational level) takes place. As such, as much as the wages of teachers and the costs of investing in educational infrastructure and services are a burden on state coffers, capitalist society would simply be unable to reproduce itself without a functioning educational system. Moreover, the need for individual national capitals to remain competitive on the international level by developing a workforce with the skills most relevant to the technical development of society mitigates against reducing educational investments below a certain functional level (at least in areas and communities deemed worthy of such investments). This is one of the major functions of state capitalism in decadence—to protect the overall national interest from the most vulgar expressions of capitalism’s logic by directing social resources to areas like education, even when a certain market logic would dictate otherwise, through “redistributive” measures like taxation.
Nevertheless, in the wake of the “Great Recession” that broke out in 2008, the resulting “fiscal crisis” of states and the often ham-fisted attempts of various factions of the bourgeoisie to manage the crisis by cutting the state budget into oblivion, the tension between education as an investment in future productivity and education as a major cost for the state to bear, was often resolved in favor of austerity. In the United States, this process was abetted by the rightward ideological degeneration of the Republican Party, which, especially at the state level, locked in on increasingly maximalist policies of tax cuts to aid wealthy campaign donors and business interests, while reducing state services as close as they could to the minimum functional level, mostly through attacks on public sector workers’ salaries, benefits and working conditions, but also by seeking to eliminate the added costs of the public sector union middle man though various state-level “right-to-work” policies.
While this process found its most extreme expression in “red states” like Kansas, it also took place in more traditionally “blue” and “purple” states in the rust belt, like Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio, particularly in the aftermath of the so-called Republican wave election of 2010, which saw public sector austerity hawks like Scott Walker come to power in Wisconsin. In Michigan—a state whose electoral votes went to Obama twice—the state government became dominated by Republicans and many localities were subject to the cost-cutting whims of “emergency managers” appointed by the Republican Governor, resulting in outrages that shocked the public conscience, like the 2014 Flint water crisis and the Detroit school crisis.
In Wisconsin during the of spring 2011, Walker’s attempts to ram through legislation stripping public employees of their collective bargaining rights was met with an unexpected mobilization of workers, students and concerned citizens, who in the spirit of the then still burning Arab Spring, occupied the state house and walked out of schools in a spirited attempt to obstruct what many perceived to be a right-wing coup. However, these mobilizations were quickly recuperated by the media-state complex, which quickly constructed a narrative that situated them as part of a broader anti-Republican resistance movement, pulling them behind the state Democratic Party and the unions. Tellingly, this movement ended without achieving any tangible concessions from the state, dissolving itself into the failed intra-bourgeois electoral effort to recall Walker from office.
Later that year, the emergence of the Occupy Wall Street Movement—really part of an international reaction to the economic fallout of the Great Recession that included the Indignados movement in Spain—challenged established and official forms of protest with the emergence of the general assembly as a kind of embryonic form of proletarian struggle reflecting a desire to go beyond electoralist, union and leftist forms. Nevertheless, since the crushing of the main centers of the Occupy Movement by state repression and the petering out of its peripheral expressions, the last six years have been marked by stagnation, if not a retreat, in class struggle. The tendency for working class grievances with stagnating or declining living and working conditions to express themselves through the distorted lens of populism, and conversely by the “democratic” resistance to populism, have largely driven the proletariat off its class terrain.
While the emergence of populism has posed new and challenging problems for the main factions of the bourgeoisie in a number of states, it has nevertheless served a perhaps unintended purpose in forming an alternative political option under bourgeois democracy that can recuperate proletarian anger and disgust at the “system.” In the United States, both the Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders campaigns[2] served an important function in 2016 and beyond in appearing to offer an alternative to establishment bourgeois politics that was nevertheless fully within the realm of the electoral circus. Moreover, in the wake of Trump’s victory, a so-called “resistance” movement in both official (the Women’s March of 2016) and unofficial (Antifa, leftist and identity-based movements, etc.) forms, along with the emergence of a perverse media-driven Russophobic and anti-“deplorable” moral panic, have seemingly stunted the emergence of genuinely proletarian actions, based on the defense of workers’ living and working conditions.
However, while it is clear that the conditions of capitalist decomposition and the political effects of populism are still making it very difficult for the proletariat to find its footing on its own class terrain, the West Virginia teachers’ strike nevertheless appears to confirm our analysis that the working class, even in regions dominated by some of the crassest factions of the bourgeoisie, is not yet defeated in the historical sense.
Two weeks in winter: the unfolding of events:
The first thing to say about the West Virginia teachers’ strike is the extent to which it undercuts a certain media-constructed liberal “resistance” narrative that attempts to paint the Trumpian world as a fierce battle between two opposed Americas: an enlightened, educated, diverse, forward-moving coastal and urban metropolitan one and an angry, resentful, ungrateful, racist and xenophobic, mostly white, backward-looking heartland. Having given Trump his largest margin of victory of all states he won in the 2016 election (68.5 to 26.4 percent, with no counties going for Clinton)[3], West Virginia has often been painted by the media as the epicenter of Trumpism—a dark and frightening place metropolitan liberals only venture to when on an anthropological quest to understand the inner workings of their enemy’s mind.
When West Virginia teachers went out on strike on February 22nd, it likely came as a shock to the liberal media establishment who must have assumed the state was one solid block of impenetrable social reaction. For whatever reason, the mainstream national media virtually ignored the strike until it was clear a resolution was imminent. Limited to a few throw-away lines at the bottom of the newscast, there was no coordinated attempt to drum up the strike as some kind of anti-Republican movement, despite the fact that the teachers were confronting a Republican Governor and a Republican controlled legislature led by a particularly obdurate Senate President (Mitch Carmichael) ill-disposed to compromise. Quite clearly, something about the events didn’t fit a certain narrative.
First of all, it is clear that the strike occurred against the initial tepidness of the unions who feared that an illegal strike would result in sanctions against the union and worsen their already tenuous position in the state’s political apparatus. Nevertheless, the teachers walked out anyway, dragging the union bureaucrats behind them, in what many in online alternative media described as a “wildcat strike.”
The grievances that motivated the walk-out were situated firmly on the proletarian class terrain of the defense of living and working conditions. West Virginia public school teachers earned less than teachers in almost all other states (48 out 50) and were facing a serious erosion of their take-home pay as a result of a planned increase in their expected contributions for health care costs. The West Virginia Public Employee Health Insurance Agency (WVPEIA), which provides health coverage to state employees, was facing yet another funding crisis, this time resulting in a possible increase in employee costs of hundreds of dollars a month. When the increased health care costs were factored, the state’s proposed wage increases—originally a 2 percent increase in the first year and then a 1 percent increase in each of the next two—would likely have resulted in a cut in take-home pay for most teachers.
When the strike quickly spread to all of the state’s 55 counties, it began to become clear to more astute members of the state’s ruling class that some contrition would be necessary to contain the anger. Governor Jim Justice—once a Democrat, but now a Republican out of political necessity—met with teachers in an attempt to calm their anger. Contrary to the union’s fears, the Governor wanted to use the carrot more than the stick to end the strike. Nevertheless, any pay increase for the teachers would have to be approved by the state legislature, where more intransigent budget hawks held sway in the Senate. On Wednesday, February 28th, Governor Justice appeared to have negotiated a deal to give teachers a 5 percent raise in the first year in exchange for ending the strike.
Although the House of Delegates approved the deal, the state Senate rejected it, offering a 4 percent raise. The teachers vowed to fight on and continue the illegal strike. In addition to the rejection of the 4 percent wage increase, teachers were angry that there appeared to be no solution to the chronic underfunding of the WVEIA, meaning that the threat of future premium and deductible increases remained patent. In the recounting of one participant, teachers were furious at this lack of action on health insurance and chanted, “Back to the table, back to the table,” at their union reps.[4] Swarms of teachers, parents and students descended on the State Capitol building in Charleston in what looked like a potential repeat of the mobilizations in Madison, WI seven years earlier. Despite the national media’s lack of interest, in West Virginia public opinion appeared to be clearly on the teachers’ side.
However, by now the stage was set for various parts of the state apparatus to engage in a political division of labor to end the strike. Governor Justice, who in the first week of the strike was told by a group of teachers that they couldn’t promise not to shoot him,[5] could now attempt to pass himself off as an honest broker against the unreasonable and intransigent budget hawks in the Senate. The union played its part, sending out a memo on Friday, March 2nd, essentially blaming the continuation of the strike on one man—Senate President Mitch Carmichael. The union thus turned a general mobilization of teachers and support staff across the state against the attacks to their living and working conditions into a quest to petition one man to change his mind—a kind of plea to the Tsar. After putting up a bit of a show on talk radio, Carmichael could only relent and a five percent pay raise for all state employees was signed into law by Governor Justice on Tuesday, March 6th. The union promptly ended a strike it hadn’t called in the first place with a robo-call, instructing the teachers to show up for work the next day.
Victory or Defeat?
Much of the post-strike commentary in leftist and alternative media—but also from elements closer to the proletarian milieu—has centered around analyzing the meaning of this strike in the broader context of US labor relations and assessing the extent to which it should be regarded as a victory or a defeat. On the one hand, the teachers appear to have won a very tangible material gain in forcing the state to grant 5 percent pay raises to all public employees against the initial plans of the state to offer a much more modest increase. On the other hand, the issue of funding for the state employee’s health insurance fund remains unresolved even if there will be no premium hikes or increased deductibles for now. The only concession won on this issue was the formation of a commission, made up of various representatives from government and unions, to study the issue of how the WVPEIA could be placed on a more solid financial footing. Moreover, rumors have been swirling that the state plans to pay for the pay increases by cuts to public welfare programs like Medicaid.
For many in the emerging “social democratic” milieu in the US—expressed mainly through the pages of the increasingly popular journal Jacobin—the teachers’ strike is being regarded as a momentous event that “has the potential to change everything.” One writer, Eric Blanc, claims that this strike was, “the single most important labor victory in the US since at least the early 1970s.”[6] Another writer in Jacobin, Cathy Kunkel, described the strike as a “major victory” in that, “The strike also deepened the political understanding of school employees, as rank-and-file leaders made demands not only about funding, but also about where that funding should come from.” For Kunkel, the demand put forward in the context of the strike to fund the WVPEIA, not through cuts to social programs for the poor, but through a “severance tax” on natural gas extraction, was a major step forward in workers’ political sophistication. This demand was concretized by a Democratic political ally of the strike, State Senator Ojeda, who introduced a bill to “go after” the coal and natural gas industries who have “extracted wealth from West Virginia for decades.”[7]
Closer to the proletarian milieu, the statement “Not All Strikes Are Created Equal” at anticapital0.wordpress.com,[8] made by a politicized former West Virginia public employee, is somewhat less sanguine about the overall significance of the strike. While seeing some promise in the fact that the strike evidenced “impeccable solidarity across jobs, workplaces, geography and social divisions” and in “flaunting the law when the law is in your way,” the statement laments that it is not enough for there to be a strong mobilization in the public sector, and that “we have to confront capital on its explicit terrain—on the terrain of private property.” Contrasting the teachers’ strike with the simultaneous strike at Frontier Communications (which remains isolated), the author argues “a strong fraction of the working class in the public sector is not a substitute for a weak working class in the private sector.”
Moreover, the author suggests that the task force appointed to study the funding issue for the WVPEIA is likely a “sham” and will only lead to more austerity in the form of reduced coverage and higher premiums along with more invasive data collection in the form of “wellness programs.” The statement ends with an unambiguous declaration that “The strike did not end in a workers’ victory.”
The statement published on the International Communist Tendency’s (ICT) website regarding the strike has the somewhat curious title of “West Virginia School Employees Strike Sold Out?”[9] This statement is also much less celebratory and points to the many limitations of this strike in failing to go beyond a kind of shop floor radicalism (walking out without the sanction of the union), which would have meant forming independent assemblies and strike committees. The statement declares, “There is a stark contrast between the ability to organize a walk-out of that size and on the other hand issue instructions to go back to work with a promise and a robocall. (…) If workers can get themselves out on strike, they certainly have the capacity to form a workers’ assembly or strike committee independently of the unions and the feuding clans of the bourgeoisie.” In a sense then, the ICT see this strike as evidence of a certain level of combativity in the class—a kind of raw energy for struggle bursting forth after years of attacks and austerity.
Still, for the ICT this combativity is in and of itself insufficient to push the struggle forward: “However, without the presence of an organization representing all the workers that serves as a pole independent of the unions, the eventual suffocation of the unions and the capitalists is inevitable.” The ICT comrades thus argue against viewing this strike as a victory, “when it is more like a temporary pause than a real gain.”
Nevertheless, it is unclear how the ICT imagines that the strike might have been “sold out.” Sold out by whom? The unions? If the unions are there to “suffocate the struggle,” in what sense can they be said to have sold the strike out?
Clearly, the evaluation of this strike as a victory, defeat or something in between has tremendous import for how one views the prospects for the development of the class struggle in the period ahead, as well as the nature of the tasks facing the working class and revolutionaries. For our part, we agree with Anticapital0.wordpress and the ICT that this strike should not be understood as some kind of profound victory on the material level.
Moreover, we do not think that this strike means some kind of new age of class struggle is about to break out, one that takes place through the established institutions like the unions and their allies in the Democratic Party. Contrary to the views of the newly emerging social democratic milieu, we don’t think that capitalism is capable anymore on the historic level of offering humanity a “new New Deal” that improves the standard of living of the working class in some substantial and permanent way in a society that remains capitalist. On the contrary, this strike shows us that in order to really struggle at all, the working class will increasingly find it necessary to go beyond these outdated forms and push forward demands that the capitalist system is, in the long term, simply unable to meet. In fact, it is only in the realization of the ultimate futility of achieving lasting material victories through the existing institutions that the working class can develop the revolutionary consciousness it needs to go beyond this failing system.
But to return to the current juncture, it remains the case that globally—despite evidence of an increasing will to struggle— that the working class remains very disoriented by a series of blows to its consciousness since the break-up of the blocs at the beginning of the 1990s. The massive ideological campaigns around the so-called “death of communism” (really a particular Stalinist form of state capitalism), the illusions in material prosperity bred by repeated speculative bubbles over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s, the ideological campaigns around the “war on terrorism” after 9/11 etc. have all taken a profound toll on the working class. Even with the reemergence of open economic crisis after 2008, the brutal austerity unleashed on the proletariat has itself been disorienting, accompanied by the twin ideological threats of right-wing populism and the so-called “democratic” resistance to populism.
Moreover, the restructuring of the labor market towards increasingly tenuous jobs and long-term unemployment, along with the looming retirement of the generation of workers who remember the struggles of the 1960s-1980s and the difficulty the younger generations have in integrating themselves into the labor force, have intensified the problem of a fading of “working class identity.” All of this has made the prospect of an emergence of class confrontations more difficult than we have previously imagined.
However, if we highlight all of these difficulties facing the working class today, it is not to throw cold water on events like the West Virginia teachers’ strike. Our goal is not to foster a sense of resignation and despair. Instead, we seek to avoid an immediatist and opportunist reaction that would see us compromise our revolutionary principles by celebrating apparent material “victories,” in an historical context that does not allow them.
For us, the capitalist system has long since passed into an historical phase of decadence in which it is no longer capable of granting any lasting material reforms to the proletariat. As such, it is simply not possible for the working class to win real, tangible, durable, material victories anymore on the level of its living and working conditions. In a sense, every struggle ends in defeat. As Rosa Luxemburg put it in 1919, “Because of the contradiction in the early stages of the revolutionary process between the task being sharply posed and the absence of any preconditions to resolve it, individual battles of the revolution end in formal defeat. But revolution is the only form of ‘war’ – and this is another peculiar law of history – in which the ultimate victory can be prepared only by a series of ‘defeats’.”[10] While Luxemburg was referring here to the revolutionary process underway in Germany at the time, the same logic holds true to the class struggle in general under the conditions of decadence.
Of course, we are not blind. We recognize that the West Virginia teachers won a 5 percent increase in pay for all state employees and held off any immediate attacks on the level of their health benefits. However, in our view these gains, while real, can only ever be temporary. Under the logic of decadent capital, they will quickly be eaten away: whether it is through inflation, an eventual rise in health care costs, lay-offs, attrition or some other mechanism, the workers simply cannot win durable reforms from a system condemned by its own logic to permanent crisis. We can already see this logic at work in West Virginia with suggestions that the public employee pay raises will be paid for by cuts to social programs. In other words, the teachers may have only won their rises by setting in motion of chain of events that leads to cutting other sectors of the proletariat’s benefits. Even if the “progressive” legislation advocated by Democrats to make the coal and natural gas operators pay to stabilize the WVPEIA is ever adopted, it is nevertheless in the logic of the system that the capitalists will seek to recuperate their increased cost of business by making workers somewhere else in the chain foot the bill.
Even if it is not right to say that the West Virginia teachers won some kind of material victory, it is also not the case that the experience of the strike was without any benefit for the development of a proletarian response to capitalism’s continuing attacks. Contrasting the events in West Virginia with the 2011 uprising in Wisconsin, it is clear that there appears to have been some clear advancement in how the struggle took place. First and foremost, the workers went out on strike against the wishes of the unions. Second, the workers appear to have caught the state-level ruling class rather off guard and forced it to concede to demands it was not initially prepared to grant. [11]
Even if the 5 percent raises will eventually prove fleeting, it is nevertheless important that the teachers were able to force the state to make concessions, in contrast to Wisconsin in 2011 when the state rammed through almost the entirety of its agenda in spite of the mass protests. If the material gains will only be momentary, the sense of collective power that such an action and result portends may not be so temporary. In decadence, the importance of the struggle comes from the lessons learned, the gains in consciousness and the appreciation of the power proletarian solidarity can have when confronting capital and the state. Moreover, as other comrades have remarked, the struggle evidenced the power the working class can have when overcoming barriers of age, seniority and job description as was shown when school support staff, bus drivers. etc. supported the teachers. While much of these less tangible gains will undoubtedly appear to fade as the struggle dies and normalcy returns, the subterranean percolation of ideas born from this experience will hopefully continue and manifest themselves in an even more profound and conscious way in the next struggle.
In this sense, the debate over whether or not this strike was a “victory” or a “defeat” seems to us to somewhat miss the point. On the material level, it is not possible for the working class to win lasting reforms anymore from a decadent capitalist system doomed to permanent crisis—in this sense every struggle that does not generalize into a revolutionary confrontation ends in a defeat. The real question revolutionaries must ask in analyzing such events is to what extent does a particular struggle mark an advance or a retreat in the working class’ level of consciousness and combativity. In this regard, keeping the overall historical context in mind, the West Virginia teachers strike showed important signs of a proletariat that remains undefeated and is looking for ways to struggle on its own terrain despite the political and social headwinds of the period.
Beyond West Virginia: continuing unrest in the education sector
As this article is being written, teachers in several other states are mobilizing. In Kentucky, many teachers have walked off the job in protest to the Governor’s plan to make unwelcome changes to their pensions. In Arizona, teachers are demanding a 20 percent rise in advance of state budget negotiations and are threatening job action if there isn’t a serious effort made to increase education funding. In Oklahoma, teachers are now on strike and staging massive rallies at the state Capitol building, demanding increased funding of education, even as the Republican Governor Mary Fallin has offered up a spending package that purportedly includes an average additional pay increase of $6,100 per teacher. The Oklahoma teachers appear to have the support of the public and many students, parents and otherwise concerned citizens are joining the protests.
While the situation is still fluid and it is not possible to make a definitive analysis of any of these mobilizations here, it is possible to make a few preliminary observations, which suggest that the ruling class is rapidly attempting to co-opt the anger brewing among teachers and other public employees into a broader anti-Republican resistance movement that is firmly situated on intra-bourgeois political terrain. Whereas the West Virginia teachers strike appears to have caught the ruling class, including the unions, off guard, the actions in some of these other states seem to have been anticipated well in advance.[12] While the West Virginia strike was met with something of a media black-out, the mainstream media have been more actively covering these actions in other states and actually promoting them as a kind of “red-state rebellion” against the Republican ideological orthodoxy which has governed in many red-states for the last decade, based on the philosophy that tax cuts always take precedence over investment in public goods. While there are signs of teachers expressing frustration with their unions (particularly in Oklahoma), the unions in these states appear to have much better control of the situation—or at the very least of the narrative.
The bottom line is that while there is undoubtedly some serious frustration and anger among teachers and other public employees, the main factions of the bourgeoisie are now attempting to recuperate the outrage into safer channels and domesticate it into a more comfortable political narrative in advance of the 2018 mid-term elections and the 2020 Presidential Election, in which they will undoubtedly do their utmost to unseat Trump or otherwise hamstring him. They will attempt to make the moral indignation of the teachers and the public at the underfunding of education a theme in a broader campaign to dampen not only Trumpian populism, but also the more extreme ideological factions of the Republican party, whose budget hawkishness has reduced investment in public education below what the main factions of the bourgeoisie might consider sustainable for the national interest. [13]
For the working class, it is important to resist getting dragged behind such a campaign. We should be cognizant that the problem of a lack of investment in education is not limited to so-called “red states.” Only a few months before the outbreak of this round of struggle, there was a minor outrage in the media because public schools in Baltimore, Maryland—often considered the epitome of a “blue state”—having to close due to a lack of heat in school buildings.[14] Moreover, we should remember that blue state Democrats like Corey Booker and even Obama himself have been advocates for charter schools that divert funding from public schools and other education policies that tie funding to “performance”—inevitably meaning that schools in lower income areas suffer. Democratic mayors and governors are no strangers to the politics of demonizing public school teachers—painting them as greedy leeches sucking on the public teat and too often delivering a “failing product.”[15]
While it is critically important for the teachers to avoid getting drawn into some kind of “coalition” political campaign to defend public education itself and remain on the class terrain of defending their living and working conditions, it is also evident that there is a potential for education issues to activate a broader public moral indignation around the increasingly brazen attempts by factions of the state to disinvest in the future generations of humanity due to immediate budgetary or ideological concerns. It is here where the current teachers’ movement could potentially intersect with the public outrage over gun violence in schools. The so-called “March for Life” in response to the massacre of 17 students at Parkland High School in Florida by an emotionally deranged individual, for all its defects and for all its recuperation by the media and celebrity culture, nevertheless touched this same nerve in the populace, increasingly concerned by the decomposition of society into an ever more atrocious spiral of violence, to resist the ever more barbaric ways this process negatively impacts the younger generations, whether by snuffing out their lives in increasingly irrational outbursts of violence or by denying them the effective education they need to compete in the capitalist labor market. [16]
Nevertheless, it is clear from the point of view of revolutionary marxism that these attempts to resist society’s descent into barbarism cannot succeed on their own accord. Expressing a certain human instinct to defend the species’ young and a moral indignation at the increasingly inhuman features of a capitalist system in its period of historical rot, they nevertheless lack the proletarian perspective they need to pose a real alternative to this system. As such, these movements and marches will inevitably end by being recuperated into the state behind this or that faction of the bourgeoisie. In order to transcend the current capitalist system, which is the real author of all this misery, it is critically necessary that the working class develop its own class perspective through struggles on its own class terrain around the defense of its living and working conditions. The West Virginia teachers have shown us that a real, if imperfect in its immaturity, path forward still exists.
--Henk
04/03/2018
[1] On France see here: https://libcom.org/forums/news/revolt-france-24032018 [11]. For the UK see:
https://libcom.org/article/lecturers-and-support-staff-rebel-union-pushes-poor-pension-offer [12]
[2] It has been said that the Bernie Sanders campaign was the real gravedigger of the Occupy Movement, recuperating that outburst of grassroots anger into an electoral campaign inside the Democratic Party. Of course, the Democratic Party establishment’s rather rough treatment of the Sanders wing may have lessened the benefit for the bourgeois state.
[4] See: “The Strike is On, An Interview with Jay O’Neal,” https://jacobinmag.com/2018/03/west-virginia-teachers-strike-activist-in... [14]
[10] Rosa Luxemburg, Order Reigns in Berlin (1919). https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1919/01/14.htm [20]
[11] While the breadth of the response to Walkers’ attacks may have caught his administration off guard in 2011, it is nevertheless clear that he was spoiling for a fight, which he didn’t hesitate to exploit the opportunity to prosecute in a way that only solidified his position.
[12] The Oklahoma strike has been discussed as a possibility for well over a month, while in Arizona the threat of a teachers walk-out appears to be being used as a pawn in state budget negotiations. The walk-out in Kentucky appears to have more of a spontaneous character.
[13] See for example: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/04/02/teachers-ar... [21]
[14] See: www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-cold-schools-201... [22]. Maryland is ironically one of the bluest states in Presidential elections, but it currently has a Republican Governor. Of course, public schools in wealthier suburban areas of the state like Montgomery and Howard Counties have not experienced such deprivations.
[15] While it is beyond the scope of this article, it should be remarked that much of the energy of this line of attack against teachers has been made through an attack on teachers’ unions (made by many Democrats, as well as Republicans). Breaking the back of the public employee unions, of which the teachers’ unions are often the largest and most important, was a stated aim of Walker’s maneuvers in 2011. At the time, we argued that such a strategy was likely unsound for the bourgeoisie as a whole in that it threatened to deprive the ruling class of the union buffer between the state and the grassroots anger of the working class. The events in West Virginia appear to demonstrate both the danger to the state of a working class that has lost faith in its union and in the value - to the ruling class - of the union in reasserting control over a struggle and bringing it to a close before it has a chance to spread beyond a particular sector. Nevertheless, it may be too late for the ruling class to learn this lesson as the pending Janus case in the Supreme Court threatens to make the closed shop in the public sector illegal. For their part, the unions have submitted legal briefs arguing that their value to society is in their ability to enforce “no-strike” clauses and laws and defend the terms of the current contract against the rank-and-file who always want more. For our analysis of Wisconsin see here: https://en.internationalism.org/inter/158/editorial [23]
[16] A similar potential might exist around increasing public awareness of the problem of crushing student loan debt that many in the younger generations are obliged to take on in order to get just the bare minimum of a college degree to compete in the labor market. Already, the Trump administration appears to be taking steps towards neutralizing the radicalizing potential of this issue by seeking public comments regarding liberalizing the rules for discharging this debt in bankruptcy. Of course, the capacity of a federal government racked by incompetence and conflicts of interest to effectively address this issue is unclear. What is clear is that the lack of any attempts to address this problem would further fuel the de-legitimizing effects of a system that many are already calling “debt peonage,” and “modern-day serfdom.”
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/uk-russia.jpg
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/mar/26/russian-spy-assassins-the-salisbury-attack-review
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201605/13931/labour-left-and-jewish-problem
[4] https://off-guardian.org/2018/03/22/45682/
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxRiG8vRRBk
[6] https://socialistworker.co.uk/art/46260/The+Troublemaker%3A++The+Russians+are+coming+and+have+bought+the+Tories
[7] https://socialistworker.co.uk/art/46290/Reject+the+Tories+warmongering+over+Russia
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/stephen_hawking.jpg
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/sncf_leaders.jpg
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/wv_teachers.jpg
[11] https://libcom.org/forums/news/revolt-france-24032018
[12] https://libcom.org/article/lecturers-and-support-staff-rebel-union-pushes-poor-pension-offer
[13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_West_Virginia,_2016
[14] https://jacobinmag.com/2018/03/west-virginia-teachers-strike-activist-interview
[15] https://libcom.org/library/no-promises-insurgent-teachers-strike-west-virginia
[16] https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/03/west-virginia-wildcat-strike-militancy-peia
[17] https://www.google.com/search?q=Cathy+Kunkel+Anatomy+of+a+victory%27&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-1
[18] https://anticapital0.wordpress.com/not-all-strikes-are-created-equal/
[19] https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2018-03-11/west-virginia-school-employees-strike-sold-out
[20] https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1919/01/14.htm
[21] https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/04/02/teachers-are-walking-out-in-multiple-states-blame-gop-economics/?utm_term=.701a08a12b15
[22] http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-cold-schools-20180103-story.html
[23] https://en.internationalism.org/inter/158/editorial