June 23 2000 |
Victims of the Capitalist System
|
MOST PEOPLE
were horrified when 58 migrants were found dead at Dover in a container meant to convey
tomatoes. But the migrants weren’t just killed by lack of air. They were suffocated
to death as a consequence of the Labour and Tory leaders’ battle to show who can
implement the harshest policies on immigration. |
|
Reports from:
Newcastle, Margate,
and Hinkley and what The
Socialist
says: * Defend the right of asylum * Scrap the Asylum and Immigration Act and all
other racist laws * Stand up to
racism and fascism * Join the fightback
against the job-cutters and service-wreckers *
Build a united community campaign for proper funding of all public services |
|
THE MAIN air
traffic control computer failed on 17 June, leaving thousands of passengers stranded. This
was inconvenient enough for people wanting to travel but it once again exposed New
Labour's privatisation policies. |
|
FIFTY YEARS
ago, on 25 June 1950, the Korean War officially started. It was a “small war”
and practically forgotten though it was much closer to instigating World War Three than
anyone admits. It lasted three years and killed three million Koreans out of a population
of 30 million. Followed by Analysis:
Korea today: Heading for reunification? |
Victims of the Capitalist System
MOST PEOPLE were horrified when 58 migrants were found dead at Dover in a container meant to convey tomatoes. But the migrants weren’t just killed by lack of air.
Brian Debus, chair Hackney UNISON
They were suffocated to death as a consequence of the Labour and Tory leaders’ battle to show who can implement the harshest policies on immigration.
Last week, an Indonesian man took his daughter, who had been attacked, to hospital in Newport, south Wales. He was set upon by a gang of racist thugs in the hospital grounds and kicked to death.
Blair, Straw, Hague and Widdecombe should be put in the dock for creating fertile conditions for such attacks.
Issues of asylum and immigration have been used as a party political football. More detention centres, food vouchers, dispersal - all these policies are designed to deter and scapegoat asylum-seekers.
These people must be desperate to try to reach Britain, which offers only a voucher worth £36.54 and an opportunity to work for six months.
Straw and New Labour have made many of the problems in society worse - jobs are vanishing, services are being privatised or they’re starved of cash. Labour are trying to hide this by scapegoating asylum-seekers.
New Labour backs the exploitative policies of neo-liberalism which create ‘economic migrants’. Since the Berlin wall came down ten years ago, Western capitalism has lost no opportunity of trying to expand its markets.
They say it’s OK for products to be sold world-wide, for information to be transmitted in seconds and finance to ricochet across the globe. But hard luck if you’re a refugee or economic migrant escaping war, starvation, torture, illness and poverty.
Unfortunately, thanks to capitalist politicians, these deaths are unlikely to be the last.
The Socialist says:
Stop Labour and the Tories scapegoating refugees.
Defend the right of asylum.
Scrap Labour’s Asylum and Immigration Act and all other racist laws.
Asylum seekers: "We're not asking for charity"
AT PRESENT, 780 asylum seekers are known to Newcastle city council. Since April, 153 have been dispersed to the city under the new legislation. There are 3,000 asylum seekers in a Tyne and Wearside region with a population of just over a million.
An amendment to the National Assistance Act 1948 removed responsibility for supporting destitute asylum-seekers from council social services.
Now asylum-seekers will get only one offer of accommodation. If they refuse, they’re entitled to no other support. Earlier this year, some councils with a concentration of asylum seekers began dispersal. Kent county council has contracted out to private organisations to house asylum-seekers in the regions.
Many asylum seekers are accommodated in hostels. One hostel that Kent contracted out to is Angel Heights hostel, a former nurse’s home in Newcastle, which houses 250 men from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Kurdistan.
Parvas, a university-qualified engineer, fled Iran after the student protest movement for reform was clamped down upon last year. He told us: "After two months we’ve heard nothing of our cases. Our legal services are in London. We only get £7 a week so we’re deprived of education, sports, transport and activities. Some of us walk for two to three hours to English language classes".
An Iraqi asylum seeker at Angel Heights said: "We don't want United Nations charity. We don't want to be separate from British people. We want jobs, so we can have dignity"
BRITAIN HOSTS less than 1% of the world's 21 million refugees, while out of those who apply for asylum in Britain 54% are eventually given leave to remain.
PUTTING ASYLUM seekers in large hostels in cities with a low population of ethnic minorities leaves many vulnerable to attack. Dimitre lives in a Newcastle hostel for homeless people on a tower block complex with eight other Czech Roma families. He feels authorities are slow to tackle racial attacks.
He said: "My wife was coming back from the shop and a man spat at her. The next day graffiti appeared on our door threatening to kill us. There was a picture of a head with a hole in it. Every time the graffiti is cleaned, new graffiti reappears.
“We want to leave this place. We were told our children cannot go to school because they live in emergency accommodation".
Stand up to the Fascists
IT TOOK just 15 minutes for the police to quick-march 30 or so National Front (NF) fascist thugs up Margate seafront on Saturday. About 50 anti-fascists were hugely outnumbered by the police, who completely fenced off the march route, effectively closing the seafront for the day.
By a Kent anti-fascist
So we had to protest from the sidelines. Day trippers and local shopkeepers were angry that the seafront was closed again, the third time in three weeks for such a pathetic display.
Local people are really pissed off with the NF marches; at present they’re having nothing to do with them. Passive opposition to the NF was reflected in our paper sales before the march, many people signed our petition against the march with conviction.
I didn't hear any comments on bogus refugees, maybe people are put off these ideas because it's the NF to the fore in scapegoating refugees in Margate.
Three people joined YRE and took leaflets for friends. Police and locals gave the impression that if the National Front were allowed to march this time they wouldn't be back. Sadly that won't be the case.
Unless there is local opposition to these marches they will be back, maybe wanting police protection for meetings, rallies, paper sales, etc. Two anti-fascists were arrested.
Hinkley
THIS SATURDAY, Socialist Party members and other anti-fascists are holding a protest and leafleting event in Hinckley, Leicestershire.
The fascist NF have made threats against the Unity against Prejudice (UAP) campaign and also Socialist Party members Steve Score and Josie Nicholls.
UAP, a broad campaign set up after the Leicester Mardi Gras Gay Pride festival was cancelled due to right-wing threats of violence, is holding a march and festival against prejudice on 29 July in Leicester.
The NF threaten a counter demo and say they "cannot guarantee the safety" of UAP marchers/ festival goers!
One organisation supporting the event is Leicester City NUT branch. In their recent newsletter to members, they acknowledge the role that Socialist Party members have played.
"A colleague, who was a leading campaigner against the secondary review (school closures), a member of Wycliffe Action Group and supported the NUT's campaign against the EAZ (Education Action Zone) in Leicester, has been threatened by the NF. He has been told that he is on a 'top ten' NF hit list"
UAP have also had donations and support from two UNISON branches, Leicester University students union and Leicester College students union.
The Leics NF are getting far too confident. We’re not prepared to let them intimidate anyone. The few members they have appear to be in Hinckley, the PO Box they use is in Hinckley. We plan to enlist Hinckley people’s support to isolate these Nazis.
The Socialist says:
§ Defend the right of asylum.
§ Scrap the Asylum and Immigration Act and all other racist laws.
§ Stand up to racism and fascism.
§ Join the fightback against the job-cutters and service-wreckers.
§ Bulld a united community campaign for proper funding of all public services.
Labour’s sell-off madness
THE MAIN air traffic control computer failed on 17 June, leaving thousands of passengers stranded. This was inconvenient enough for people wanting to travel but it once again exposed New Labour's privatisation policies.
The National Air Traffic Services (NATS) computer at West Drayton, west London, controls most aircraft entering UK airspace. The system is outdated and its replacement is at least five years behind schedule. The replacement centre at Swanwick, Hampshire, was due to open in November 1996. After numerous technical problems it is now scheduled to open sometime this winter. But it is already too small. As a British Airways worker told The Socialist:
"It's real Joe 90 stuff they've got over there [West Drayton], it's massively outdated. The new computer system has already failed and they haven't been able to get it on line yet. But even if they had got it on line when they intended to, it's already under capacity."
But the worst part about this fiasco is New Labour's mad dash to have the first privatised air traffic control service in the world. They want to introduce a Public Private Partnership (PPP) scheme which will involve selling off at least 46% of NATS to a private company and 5% to its employees. They claim this is the only way they can raise enough money for the future expansion of the service.
But NATS makes a surplus at the moment. The £30 million-£100 million required investment per year, estimated by the IPMS, the union representing 3,500 air traffic controllers, is a relatively small amount when compared to what the government is prepared to hand out to big business. They're happy to underwrite a loan of £1.2 billion for the Channel Tunnel Express Link and have loaned £520 million to British Aerospace, for example.
When the privatisation bill was going through its committee stage it was revealed that the government will only end up with a 25% shareholding. This is privatisation without the smokescreen of 'partnership'.
§ No to air traffic control privatisation. Develop the system as a public service, under democratic working-class control.
§ Nationalise the air transport industry. With democratic control and planning the surplus can be used to develop a safe, efficient air travel and air traffic control system.
Korean war 1950-1953
When the cold war caught fire
FIFTY YEARS ago, on 25 June 1950, the Korean War officially started. It was a “small war” and practically forgotten though it was much closer to instigating World War Three than anyone admits. It lasted three years and killed three million Koreans out of a population of 30 million.
Geoff Jones
Korea had been a unified, independent nation for nearly 1,000 years. But when imperialism expanded in Asia at the end of the nineteenth century, its independence ended. Japan invaded and colonised Korea in 1910.
Koreans resisted Japanese rule from the first, including an uprising in 1919 in which 7,000 Koreans were killed. As normal in colonial states, the small upper class of landlords and bureaucrats worked along with the Japanese rulers. The opposition was left wing and included a Communist guerrilla army from 1932.
The collapse of Japanese imperialism in 1945 left a vacuum. The Russian Army entered Korea from the north and the US from the south. Arbitrarily, the US and USSR divided up the country along the 38th parallel of latitude.
After World War Two, a ‘cold war’ developed worldwide, reflecting the antagonism between capitalist states, led by US imperialism and those with state-owned economies, especially the bureaucratic Stalinist Soviet Union.
Under the Russian army’s wing, a Communist government was set up under Kim Il Sung, who had led the guerrilla war against Japan. The Communists took control with popular support but began building a bureaucratic state in the image of Stalin’s Russia.
But Kim Il Sung was not prepared at that stage to be Moscow’s puppet. A guerrilla leader like Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh or Yugoslavia’s Tito, this Korean patriot aimed to play off Mao against Stalin, especially after the victory of the Chinese revolution. Russian troops trained the Korean People’s Army (KPA) but were withdrawn in 1948.
In the south the US faced a problem. The old ruling landlord class had collaborated with the Japanese and were generally hated. All over the country left-wing ‘peoples committees’ had sprung up, aiming to expropriate the landlords.
The capitalist class had to rely on dictatorship to defend their system. The US had to ship in Syngman Rhee, a ‘safe’ leader who’d lived in the USA for 40 years. Nevertheless, uprisings against landlordism took place continually in the south.
These were put down by the police force who’d collaborated with the Japanese, the US-trained Republic of Korea (ROK) Army with US army ‘advisers’ and fascist gangs who came south to escape the Communists. Any opposition was put down with the utmost brutality, even sickening some US advisors.
Both left and right were united on one thing - hatred of partition. The ROK army leaders talked continuously about invading the North, but Kim Il Sung’s army struck first.
ON 25 June, the KPA drove south, welcomed by most Koreans. The ROK Army collapsed and US soldiers and marines found themselves retreating desperately to the south-east.
Finally, having captured four-fifths of the South, the KPA ran out of steam and US forces managed to stabilise themselves around the port of Pusan, in an area less than 100 kilometres square.
The invasion came at a useful time for US capitalism. A section of the capitalist class had not come to terms with the Chinese Red Army’s victory and the summary ejection of their puppet Chiang Kai-shek from China in 1949.
The attack could be portrayed as another step in Stalin's master plan to conquer South-east Asia (In fact, Kim Il Sung probably moved without Stalin’s knowledge or even against his wishes). It was possible to whip up an anti-Communist witch-hunt in the USA and push through military expansion which meant lucrative contracts.
And they had their man in place. General Douglas MacArthur saw himself as US imperialism’s viceroy in South East Asia. Installed in Tokyo as the power behind the Japanese Emperor, he had impeccable anti-left credentials, first seeing ‘action’ using tanks and machine guns to crush unemployed ex-soldiers marching in Washington.
MacArthur demanded action. A massive US task force was assembled. The United Nations was completely under the control of the US State Department, so the task force fought under the UN flag with small forces from Britain, France and other states (all paid for by the USA).
A breakout from Pusan in September, coupled with a huge landing at Inchon on the west coast, pushed back the exhausted, over-stretched KPA.
US politicians suggested halting at the 38th parallel, but MacArthur’s forces swept up the peninsula, over the 38th parallel and overran most of the People’s Republic as far as the Chinese border.
In their wake a ‘civil administration’ was set up comprising the most vicious Korean anti-communists. Mass murder and torture were commonplace atrocities, ignored by the US.
MacArthur believed the war was won and the KPA destroyed. In fact, most of the army had vanished into the hills, guerrilla fashion. But MacArthur insisted on pushing right up to the Yalu river, the border with China, aiming to create a wasteland up to the border destroying ‘every installation, factory, city and village’ over thousands of square kilometres.
NOW THE Chinese government, which had remained neutral, entered the war. And the Soviet Union moved fighter aircraft into north-east China to defend North Korea and China from massive US air bombardments.
Late in November 1950 the Chinese and KPA attacked, chopping the US and their allies to pieces and forcing them to run southwards again. Would the June events be repeated with the US forces thrown into the sea this time?
The US government panicked and started to talk about using nuclear weapons. Atomic bombs were shipped to aircraft carriers off the Korean coast and MacArthur demanded the right to use them whenever he thought fit. He wanted all-out war with China, including invasion from Taiwan and using nuclear weapons on the Chinese mainland. In spring 1951, nuclear weapons were ready in Okinawa.
Finally, US President Truman, balancing US capitalism’s short-term and long term interests, decided that MacArthur had to go. Not only was the man desperate to spread the war to China, he might start a crusade against ‘World Communism’ on his own.
An invasion of China using nuclear weapons would have made it impossible for the USSR to stand aside. Truman didn’t want the responsibility of starting World War Three. MacArthur was sacked, returning to a hero’s welcome in the USA.
Of course MacArthur’s removal did not signify a softening of the US attitude. The new army commander, Van Fleet got the job because he’d just crushed the partisans in Greece. The fighting see-sawed across the 38th parallel.
North Korean and Chinese forces captured Seoul in May. An army based on workers’ democracy could have mobilised workers and peasants to defend their gains. The Stalinists by contrast lost Seoul again in June.
By July, the front had solidified back close to the 38th parallel to become a static trench battleground like World War One with massive offensives losing thousands of lives for tiny gains. Armistice negotiations started in July.
Fighting continued for two more years while the US carpet-bombed North Korea. An armistice was finally signed in July 1953 - 60,000 US and Allied troops had been killed, possibly a million Chinese, but also a tenth of Korea’s population (as great a proportion as the USSR lost in World War Two).
THE KOREAN war demonstrated many of US imperialism’s ugliest sides. There was endemic racism, with Koreans on both sides considered sub-human ‘slopes’ or ‘geeks’. Though ironically, the intervention in Korea saw the abolition of the colour bar in the US Army.
There was a belief that the KPA and Chinese Red Army were so primitive that they could only succeed by ‘human wave’ attacks. They made the unpleasant discovery that the USSR made tanks and fighter planes as good as, or better than, those made in the ’free world’.
US forces casually accepted massacres and atrocities committed by their own side; they blacklisted and smeared journalists courageous enough to expose them. Any lessons learned had to be relearned in the blood of Vietnamese civilians and US soldiers 20 years later in Vietnam.
After three years of bloodletting, Korea’s arbitrary division into two states was frozen. In the north, US bombing created a state of desperate poverty, which strengthened the hold of the Communist Party under Kim Il Sung to produce a bureaucratised state without a vestige of democracy.
In the South, an equally vicious, undemocratic regime, first under the US-backed Syngman Rhee, later under a succession of generals, was bolstered by massive subsidies and other aid from US capitalism. Eventually one of the world’s more powerful capitalist states emerged, the home of multinational firms like Hyundai.
After nearly two decades of phenomenal economic growth - and a generation of bloody totalitarian dictatorship, South Korea’s working class began to raise its head. Demanding basic democratic rights, working-class trade unions begun to shake the cosy ‘client’ state.
Especially after the economic collapse and crisis of 1997-98, the social issues came to the fore again in the south. But 50 years after the Korean war started, the slogan of ‘unification’ still has power, north and south.
BRITAIN SENT some 12,000 badly equipped troops to fight for the USA, including conscripts. Nearly 700 were killed. One veteran remembered: “When replacements arrived, the first thing we told them was to find a dead GI, to get his boots.”
But the major effect on Britain was to give the death blow to the 1945 Labour government. Cabinet right-wingers demanded a massive rearmament programme, cutting back spending on social services and imposing charges on NHS users, causing leading left-winger Aneurin Bevan to resign as Minister for Health.
The broken-backed Labour government was defeated in 1951, ushering in 13 years of Tory rule.
Analysis: Korea today: Heading for reunification?
IN THE rush to stem the tide of revolution which swept the Korean peninsula once the Japanese surrendered in mid-August 1945, 'an imaginary line' was agreed by the US and the USSR which severed the living body of Korea for over 50 years.
Elizabeth Clarke
Last week’s meeting in Pyongyang, capital of North Korea, between the two heads of state presiding over totally different and antagonistic social systems was unprecedented.
Half a million people lined the route. In the South, a carnival of rejoicing on the streets continued throughout the talks. Millions of Koreans believed their long-cherished hopes of reunification would now soon be realised.
North of the demilitarised zone, there has developed an extraordinarily deformed 'workers' state' that the world's press call the last redoubt of Stalinism. This state-owned planned economy initially grew faster than that run by Washington-installed dictators in the South.
Now, North Korea not only does not figure in the world's top 500 economic entities, but is suffering from the collapse of support from both the USSR and China. As many as two million people could have died from starvation in the late 1990s.
The South, under US patronage and heavy state control, began its climb towards the top ten industrialised nations in the 1960s and made it to eleventh position. But the crash and crisis of 1997 gave its vastly over-indebted and over-extended economy a nasty jolt.
So-called recovery has left a swathe of unemployed and the majority of Koreans with a reduced level of income. The problems of the giant chaebol conglomerates are by no means over and in recent weeks new industrial and social struggles have broken out.
“Sunshine policy”
MANY ATTEMPTS have been made to get talks going that could lead to an easing of relations but have broken down.
Kim Dae-jung has adopted a 'sunshine policy' towards the North. Whereas his predecessor seemed to ignore their plight hoping for a collapse into the arms of the capitalist South.
Now, with the big chaebol conglomerates and the state itself still heavily indebted the South’s capitalist government does not relish the idea of carrying the whole burden. Recent estimates for 'rebuilding' the North take the cost to over $1,000 billion.
Aid will undoubtedly come from elsewhere, but the prospects for rapid development and 'equalisation' are dim. The average per capita income of the 23 million people in the North is $57 while in the South it is $8,600.
Undoubtedly, cheap labour can mean big profits, but there have to be markets for the goods. The production of steel, cars, ships etc. in the North comes up against the problem of glutted markets internationally. There have been some inroads organised by the heads of the biggest chaebol but they and foreign capitalist investors are treading warily; not least because of the possibility of a violent response to Jong-il’s moves from within the million-strong military.
He and the ruling clique are no doubt preparing to become fully-fledged capitalist 'entrepreneurs'. Little is known, however, of the outlook of workers and young people in the North but a struggle for the establishment of basic democratic rights must be on the agenda.
Marxist socialists are for land, industry and finance to remain state property but for the state itself and the plan to be under the control of elected committees like those thrown up in 1945.
Only through an appeal for workers to struggle in the South and elsewhere in the region for democratic socialist alternatives to capitalism, can the economy of the peninsula really develop.
Marxists would respect the wishes of each population through a democratic vote on the right to develop separately or together - in some kind of federation or otherwise. The main task is to unify a struggle for genuine socialism and a unification based on the wishes of the long-suffering people rather than the politicians and ruling elites.