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Le guerre divampano dal Sudan all’Ucraina. Cresce di conseguenza la spesa militare mondiale. L’Europa ha speso nel 2022 in armi e operazioni militari il 13% in più rispetto al 2021, registrando il più forte aumento da 30 anni a questa …
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Jim Larkin in a November 8, 1919 mug shot taken at the time of his arrest for “criminal anarchism” in New York state. (In Revolutionary Radicalism: Its History, Purpose and Tactics (Albany, NY: J.B. Lyon Co., 1920) via Wikimedia Commons)
The Irish syndicalist trade-union leader James Larkin was one of the towering figures of the radical workers’ movement in the early twentieth century. He achieved fame — in the words of Lenin — as “a remarkable speaker and a man of seething energy” who “performed miracles amongst the unskilled workers.”
Larkin led celebrated struggles in Belfast and Dublin during the run-up to World War I. He formed the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU) as well as an armed workers’ militia, the Irish Citizen Army, and spent time in prison for his militancy.
However, after he helped found the Communist Party in the United States and was jailed once more for doing so, Larkin became the subject of fierce criticism from communists during the late 1920s for failing to build a revolutionary workers’ party in Ireland. “The first and most pressing duty of communists,” one British party member wrote in 1929, “is to expose Larkin and drive him out of the working-class movement.”
Negativity toward Larkin still dominates the narrative. Historian Emmet O’Connor subtitled his 2015 biography of Larkin “Hero or Wrecker?”, and came down firmly on the latter side of the argument.
This article will ask whether Larkin deserves all the blame that has been heaped upon him. I will use evidence from the Moscow archives of the Communist International, the Comintern, to argue that much of the onus for the failures normally ascribed to Larkin must at least be shared with the Comintern itself, and with the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), whose “Colonial Department” oversaw Comintern Irish policy.
The 1920s were difficult years in Ireland. The country had just experienced two and a half years of armed insurrection against British rule, followed by a bloody civil war. The most right-wing elements in the national movement triumphed over their opponents and ruthlessly went on the attack against workers’ wages and conditions. There was virtually no resistance to this offensive from the reformist labor leaders who backed the newly established “Free State.” Ireland’s workers were roundly defeated and demoralized.
The Irish syndicalist trade union leader James Larkin was one of the towering figures of the radical workers’ movement in the early twentieth century.
Internationally, matters were no better. In the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks were in retreat. Their 1917 revolution hadn’t spread to the industrialized West, and with the defeat of the German communist uprising in late 1923, the notion that Russia could go it alone, building “socialism in one country,” gained traction among the growing Soviet bureaucracy, with Joseph Stalin at its head. This perspective became more national and self-serving than international, marking a sharp break from the Bolshevik tradition pursued by Lenin.
This was the world to which Larkin returned from his American prison cell. Almost immediately, he was at war with the renegades at the head of his old union, the ITGWU, grouped around the leadership of William O’Brien. In 1924, when Larkin was attending a Comintern congress in Moscow, where he was elected to its executive, his militant supporters formed a breakaway union, the Workers’ Union of Ireland (WUI), after ITGWU bosses had deployed armed soldiers against them.
At the time, Comintern policy was against breakaway unions. However, Larkin took charge of the WUI on his return to Ireland, and the Comintern accepted it into its trade-union wing, the Red International of Labor Unions (RILU). The split in the Irish labor movement persisted for decades, but in the immediate aftermath, it poisoned relations between Larkin and his political mentors, the CPGB.
From the outset, as Comintern documents reveal, the CPGB took an entirely hostile attitude toward the WUI. Citing Comintern policy, it refused support to the WUI during its sometimes life-and-death industrial battles, and even demanded that the Comintern compel Larkin to disband the new union and seek readmission to the treacherous ITGWU. This was something that neither he nor his followers could ever agree to.
While the British communists blamed the split on Larkin’s ego, he believed that they had betrayed him. Larkin felt that they lacked a proper understanding of the Irish situation and were acting toward him in an overbearing, “imperialistic” manner.
This hostility between Larkin and the British communists was never overcome, but Larkin was not alone in his criticism of their attitude. The Indian communist leader, M. N. Roy, also denounced the CPGB’s imperial hauteur, while other communists from colonial countries, including Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh, found a similar inclination prevalent in the upper echelons of the Comintern itself by the mid-1920s.
The Comintern had tasked Larkin with building a mass-based workers’ party in Ireland, and the CPGB sent one of its leading figures, Bob Stewart, to guide his work. In May 1925, Stewart came close to getting a party off the ground, but abandoned the plan at the last minute when Larkin withheld his imprimatur.
The Comintern had tasked Jim Larkin with building a mass-based workers’ party in Ireland.
This is an event that has gone down in communist history as Larkin’s moment of treachery. In his memoirs, Stewart made no reference to any of Larkin’s serious concerns about how the CPGB and Comintern had acted toward him in the past, offering the following conclusion instead:
Big Jim would never accept the democracy of a disciplined Marxist party. He always had to be at the centre of the stage. . . . and to join a party where the emphasis is put on collective work was not for him.
This may have been partially correct, but it was very far from the whole story. Larkin himself never spoke publicly about the matter, but he made his views clear in a letter to Comintern president, Grigory Zinoviev:
A Party cannot be brought about simply by drafting a decree in a room. . . . but people come along and dare to venture that at a certain hour or on a certain day a certain event will take place. Like some of the old astrologers or alchemists they want to write a formula and then make a hocus-pocus and, lo and behold, we have pure metal. . . . We believe that a natural birth resulting from the necessities of the time is the appropriate way [and] our immediate needs require what may be called local tactics beyond world tactics.
Stewart’s mission had been to launch an Irish party at the very time when Stalin’s power was growing. Under Stalin’s authority, communist parties throughout Europe and the wider world were being beaten into shape to ensure unquestioning support for “socialism in one country.” Larkin’s resistance to being sucked into this process, evident in his assertion of the rights of a national section against central diktat, remained instinctive, however, and was never intellectualized.
In the meantime, relations with the CPGB took another nosedive. The Comintern had ordered the CPGB to mount a campaign in the UK for the withdrawal of British-based trade unions from Ireland. These unions were generally pro-empire, and their members frequently scabbed during WUI strikes.
However, the CPGB point-blank refused to implement Comintern policy — in sharp contrast to its adherence to the line on breakaway unions. Now it argued that implementing the new policy would jeopardize its own influence within the unions.
For Larkin, the CPGB’s open defiance became a major grievance, and the Comintern’s failure to force the British party to obey orders deepened his alienation from the Moscow center. This all made the task of the next Comintern agent to arrive in Ireland, the Norwegian communist Christian Hilt, infinitely more difficult.
Hilt arrived in the summer of 1927, with Irish parliamentary elections due to be held in September. On Comintern instructions, Hilt — supported in person by the CPGB’s Jack Murphy — insisted that Larkin stand. Larkin himself argued that this was a waste of resources because, as an undischarged bankrupt, he wouldn’t be able to enter parliament even if he was elected. “I was against fighting, but I was overlooked,” he later complained. “Moscow had determined that we should proceed, and as orders were orders, we obeyed.”
Larkin’s primary objective in the 1927 election was to see the right-wing Labour Party defeated.
In the election, Larkin’s primary objective was to see the right-wing Labour Party defeated. To this end — and in keeping with the Comintern’s then-policy of forming blocs with bourgeois nationalist movements — he allied with Éamon de Valera, leader of the nationalist Fianna Fáil party. Several prominent British communists came to help in the campaign, but they followed their own agenda, urging workers to vote Labour. Larkin complained bitterly about the CPGB’s disruptive interference — and the Norwegian, Hilt, agreed with him.
Despite the confusion caused by British meddling, Larkin was elected but, as he had predicted, was unable to take his seat. As he saw it, he had been forced, against his will, into a very costly, exhausting, and ultimately futile campaign by people who thought they knew better than he did about how to conduct the struggle in Ireland. Yet the Comintern perceived this as an opportunity to capitalize on Larkin’s reemergence into the limelight, and it dispatched another agent, Jack Leckie, with instructions to immediately form an Irish workers’ party.
Leckie’s Moscow handlers had promised that £150,000 (in today’s money) would be waiting for him in Dublin to finance the party and produce a new workers’ paper. Failure to send the cash, he warned them, “would make me appear ridiculous, neutralize my influence, and prevent me carrying out successfully the tasks entrusted to me.” And, he added, it would deepen the rift with Larkin. His warning proved entirely prophetic. There was no money awaiting him, and no explanation for its non-arrival.
A furious row with Larkin ensued. Jack Carney, Larkin’s closest associate, told Leckie that “everyone was becoming embittered” because “the centre continued to make promises which were left unfulfilled.” According to Carney, the problem was exacerbated by “interference from English party representatives [and] the comrades locally were sick and bitterly disappointed with the whole affair.” Leckie packed his bags and left Ireland, furious at the Comintern for letting him down.
In the midst of all these problems, the CPGB and the Comintern had gone behind Larkin’s back to send senior Irish Republican Army (IRA) officers to Moscow in an attempt to win new friends who could help them bypass Larkin. When Larkin found out, he was incensed, as he considered the IRA to be petty-bourgeois terrorists. And worse was to come.
Early in 1928, the Comintern adopted a dramatic change of line. This ushered in an era of ultraleftism in communist politics that owed more to developments within Russia — where Stalin was forcibly collectivizing the land — than it did to the needs of workers internationally.
Under the new “line,” Larkin was ordered not just to form a united front with the IRA, but to wage all-out war against de Valera, his ally of a few months previously, even though de Valera’s politics remained unchanged. But what really irked Larkin was the fact that no Irish representative had participated in shaping the new line in Moscow. Stalin’s Comintern now worked through orders from the top. The end of Larkin’s troubled relationship with Moscow was fast approaching.
Stalin’s Comintern now worked through orders from the top. The end of Larkin’s troubled relationship with Moscow was fast approaching.
The immediate issue that led him to finally sever ties was the arrival in Ireland of the Soviet company, Russian Oil Products (ROP). Larkin saw this as an opportunity to showcase the superiority of socialist enterprise over the capitalist variety. Instead, ROP acted like the worst capitalists, offering wages below union rates, and employing workers who had scabbed during WUI strikes.
Larkin complained bitterly about this to Moscow, but he got no satisfaction. This was simply the final straw. In the summer of 1928, Larkin resigned his seat on the Comintern executive, while the WUI disaffiliated from RILU. His four-year association with Soviet Russia was over.
Larkin wasn’t the only former syndicalist-turned-Bolshevik who broke away at the time. Alfred Rosmer and Pierre Monatte in France, James P. Cannon in the United States, the Russian Victor Serge, and the Catalan Andreu Nin all split from the Comintern. While they expressed opposition to Stalin and support for Leon Trotsky, Larkin remained silent on the struggle within the Soviet communist movement.
Yet it was no coincidence that his growing disillusionment coincided with Stalin’s rise, and it was hardly surprising that claims of Trotskyist sympathies were leveled in his direction. Jack Carney’s response to these allegations is illuminating:
I would rather be a Trotskyite and be wrong than be right among those at the centre who play fast and loose. We have paid a bitter price for our affiliation with the centre and the centre in return has acted worse than any group of social democrats. Someday they will receive a kick in the unreasoning end of their anatomy.
While Larkin wasn’t a Trotskyist, he was always more syndicalist than Bolshevik, with little inclination to submit to strict party discipline. But the purpose of the discipline to which he was expected to submit can’t be separated from the process. In the era of “socialism in one country,” as the Comintern was reshaped to do Stalin’s bidding, Larkin’s instinctive resistance turned to disillusionment, and finally to divorce.
The domestic context in which Larkin was operating also shaped his despondency. As the great American novelist James T. Farrell noted:
After defeat, the Irish labor movement needed someone to lead it who could remould a defeated class. Larkin was a great and courageous agitator, but not a leader of a defeated army.
Yet if Larkin wouldn’t do Moscow’s bidding, others would. Several young Irish workers, among them Larkin’s son and namesake, James Larkin Jr, were selected to attend the Lenin International School in Moscow, where the next generation of leaders of the world’s communist parties were trained. Their daily lessons began with instruction on the “errors” of Trotsky and the infallibility of Stalin.
At the end of their studies, the Irish students returned home to organize the party that Larkin had failed to deliver. This was to be an organization that would faithfully follow the line from Moscow, even when such loyalty was damaging to the party’s own prospects and to the cause of socialism in general.
In the meantime, Larkin himself retreated both personally and politically. Disenchanted and world-weary, he moved further and further away from the cause that had once inspired and impelled him. He ended his political career as a member of parliament for the same Irish Labour Party whose betrayal of the working class he had once railed against with such passion and zeal. It was a sad finale for the greatest labor leader Ireland has ever known.
China has resumed construction work on a military base in the United Arab Emirates in defiance of displeasure by the United States, leaked intelligence documents have revealed.
The suspected Chinese military facility near Abu Dhabi is part of plans to create a global network of military facilities at ports across the Middle East, south-east Asia, and Africa by 2030.
The post TAKEOVER? China resumes construction of military base in UAE, US losing clout appeared first on World Israel News.
On Saturday, April 22nd, 2023, tragedy struck when Jacob Charles Lewis, aged 20, was killed in a tragic and unexpected accident. It was only a few hours prior when Jacob was enjoying the best day of his life with his older sister, April Elizabeth Lewis Bancroft, age 26, at the Taylor Swift concert at NRG Stadium in Houston, Texas.
On their way home, their car broke down on the freeway, and Jacob was pushing it to the exit when he was hit by a suspected drunk driver.
Sadly, he was pronounced dead at the scene.
The driver responsible for the crash has been charged with a felony for driving under the influence and failing to stop and render aid.
The loving legacy of Lewis is being honored in the most heartwarming way imaginable. Members of Swift’s fan base banded together in his memory.
What began as a GoFundMe donation page organized by Lewis’s sister, April Bancroft, rapidly brought in over $125,000 from more than 8,000 devoted supporters.
Most contributions numbered $13, chosen in recognition of the treasured Swiftie “lucky number” 13.
In honor of their cherished son, the Lewises have created a scholarship fund for theater students in their home city of Katy, Texas. Jacob was involved in musical theater from as early as 6th grade, appearing in upwards of three or four plays every year.
April Bancroft told CNN that her brother “was able to shine and spread happiness to everyone he met.” Despite their sadness, the Lewises take comfort in the fact that Jacob and April were able to share this experience and that others have stepped in to guide the young family during this rough time. The money donated will help to honor Jacob’s memory and encourage future theater students in the region.
The immense love and support pouring in from Swift’s fan base are a testament to the strength of the “Swifties.” As April Bancroft put it, “If there are ever going to be a group of people who will get together and make something like this happen, it’s the Taylor Swift fans.” Although the family still carries immense sadness, they’ve expressed their most profound gratitude for the generosity and kind words for Jacob.
Who is Harlan Crow? Prior to ProPublica’s bombshell investigation into his financial relationship with Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, few had heard the name outside of Republican political circles and elite conservative think tanks. Yet for a period of more than twenty years, the Dallas real estate mogul subsidized Thomas’s luxury vacations across the globe: […]
Palestinians walk next to a mural of Khalida Jarrar on April 20, 2015 in Gaza City. (Momen Faiz / NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Khalida Jarrar is one of the most celebrated — and targeted — leaders of the Palestinian liberation movement. A dedicated socialist and feminist, her organizing has taken many different forms over the decades, and has come at great personal cost.
Jarrar was elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) in 2006 and chaired the PLC’s Prisoner Commission. Prior to her election, Jarrar served as the director of Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association.
Jarrar has been arrested by the state of Israel four times for her activism. The first time was on March 8, 1989 for her participation in International Women’s Day demonstrations.
In 2014, Israel issued a military order to expel Jarrar from Ramallah. Soldiers surrounded her family home and attempted to transfer her to Jericho, where she would be placed under supervision. Jarrar refused to sign the order and appealed the decision. She won, but was later arrested in April 2015. She served six months without charges or trial under administrative detention, a procedure under Israel’s separate military court system for Palestinians. Jarrar was eventually charged with “membership in an illegal organization” (Israel designates all Palestinian political parties illegal) and “incitement.” She was released after fifteen months in June 2016.
In July 2017, Jarrar was leading efforts to bring Israel before the International Criminal Court when she was arrested again. She was held on secret evidence and her administrative detention was renewed several times until her release in February 2019.
Eight months later, in October 2019, she was arrested again and charged with “holding a position in an illegal association.” While in jail, Jarrar launched a program to teach Palestinian women in Israeli prisons and allow them to receive university credits for their studies. Despite Israel’s attempts to ban the initiative, several women have been awarded degrees, and the initiative continues today. In July 2021, Jarar’s daughter Suha unexpectedly passed away at the age of thirty-one. Despite international outcry, Israel refused to allow Jarrar to attend the funeral.
Jarrar was finally released in September 2021. To date, she has spent over sixty-three combined months behind bars. Since her release, she has accepted a position at Birzeit University, where she researches the historic role of female Palestinian political prisoners.
For Jacobin, Jarrar’s son-in-law James Hutt sat down with her at her home in Ramallah to talk to her about the current upsurge in resistance, the challenges facing the liberation movement, and what she believes comes next.
James Hutt
For months now, the West Bank has seemed like it’s about to erupt. I’ve heard Palestinians use the expression that “the situation is like hot metal.” There’s been a wave of Palestinian resistance, especially in the face of escalating Israeli violence. Some people have described it like the months that precipitated the second intifada. How do you understand the current moment?
Khalida Jarrar
There are daily invasions by the Israeli army into Palestinian towns. There are daily mass arrests. Daily, we wake up to news of Israel killing people. Besides that, the West Bank is full of checkpoints and we’re witnessing the Israeli army assassinating more and more people at the checkpoints. They have invaded Jericho many times recently, especially after their raid on the nearby Aqabat Jaber refugee camp, where soldiers demolished many houses and assassinated five people. If Israel thinks these people did anything wrong it could have arrested them, like normal. Instead, it is aiming to kill. Shooting people has become very easy now for the Israeli army.
Israel has started to demolish houses in huge numbers. It has always done it, but now in such large numbers that it’s clearly a new policy. It wants to remove Palestinians from Masafer Yatta and East Jerusalem, for example. [Israeli minister of national security] Itamar Ben-Gvir personally ordered the demolition of a building in Jerusalem that’s home to one hundred Palestinians. On the other side, the Israeli bureaucracy uses the excuse that these homes have been built thirty years ago and don’t have licenses. Of course not. Israel will not give licenses to Palestinians to build or to fix their homes inside Jerusalem.
There are daily invasions by the Israeli army into Palestinian towns. There are daily mass arrests. Daily, we wake up to news of Israel killing people.
The more dangerous element is the settlers, who are of course under the protection of the soldiers. I think the settlers in the West Bank and Jerusalem number around one million people now. The roads are full of settlers. Their settlements are not little villages or towns either, they are full cities. The settlers have weapons. They attack Palestinians. They steal their olives and cut down their trees. They close the roads and throw stones at cars with white West Bank license plates. They kill people.
There is an escalation of the violence with this new fascist government. All Israeli governments violate the rights of Palestinians by arresting and killing people, but we look at this new government and see people like [Israeli minister of finance] Bezalel Smotrich or Ben-Gvir, who was convicted of terrorism against Palestinians by Israeli police. Now he’s not just part of the Israeli government — he’s the minister for national security.
Ben-Gvir has threatened more laws against prisoners and wants to bring in capital punishment. As minister, he announced his support for and gave a gift to a soldier who killed a Palestinian civilian in Shuafat refugee camp. The soldier beat the man and shot him at point blank. Ben-Gvir is not a civilian or even just a settler. He is an Israeli cabinet minister. Ben-Gvir told the soldier that he appreciated what he did and the world kept silent. [Since this interview, Israel has approved a new national guard under Ben-Gvir’s command that will focus on “Arab unrest.”]
On top of the escalation of violence and the continuous violations, there is high unemployment and poverty. That’s linked to how Israel is stealing money from the Palestinian Authority (PA). According to the Paris Agreement, Israel collects trade revenues and taxes that it is supposed to give back to the PA. However, Israel has started confiscating millions of shekels each month, which affects the budget of the PA and its programs. Palestine is also an agricultural country. Israel doesn’t allow people to dig for water or plant their lands. Palestinians have no access to land in Area C, which is 68 percent of the West Bank, so they can’t build or plant on their lands in that area. On the other side, there’s no right for Palestinians to have their own factories or their own economy. Our economy is tied to the Israeli economy and the Paris Agreement keeps squeezing us.
So you have a rise in poverty, in human rights violations, in killings, and in the expansion of Israeli settlements. Palestinians have nothing to do but resist this occupation, because there is no hope for them while the occupation exists. We are learning now that the majority of Palestinian youth are resisting in their own way. There is now widespread collective resistance, and we notice this new phenomenon of young Palestinians undertaking armed resistance on their own, because they see and they live the daily violations; because there is no hope for them. The occupation kills everything for Palestinians, it kills hope, it kills the future. So what can they do? Besides that, there is no punishment for Israel for violating human rights and international humanitarian conventions. We can’t see any punishment. We only see the opposite: the punishment of Palestinians seeking their liberty and justice.
James Hutt
Where do you think it will go? Will it lead to a new intifada?
Khalida Jarrar
Look, there are elements you need for an intifada. You need collective leadership and mass organization, for example. What I see is that there is a continuous resistance. Whether it will lead to an intifada or armed struggle, I don’t know. But the situation is very critical. The occupation keeps increasing the violence, so the Palestinian people will resist. I’m sorry to say it too, but the Palestinian people are not armed. Who is armed are the Israeli soldiers. They have tanks, weapons, and aircraft. They have an army. Palestinians have very little to resist with. But the spirit of refusal you can find in the Palestinian people. So what will be the name of this moment? I can’t say if it’ll be an intifada because it requires many elements that are not found today, but there is a continuous resistance that is developing. To what? The future will answer.
There is a continuous resistance. Whether it will lead to an intifada or armed struggle, I don’t know. But the situation is very critical.
James Hutt
How would you describe the current state of the Palestinian liberation movement?
Khalida Jarrar
The internal divisions have badly affected the liberation movement, especially between Fatah and Hamas. They are the two biggest parties and they are satisfied with the current situation, with Hamas in control of Gaza and Fatah somewhat in control of the West Bank and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). But the majority of people want elections, which would change that. Elections are one part of the approach we need as a people. The other is a minimum agreement between all parties to work together. But the internal divisions and the private interests of each of the parties means they are more inclined to delay elections.
We haven’t had elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council since 2006.But the majority of people want change. Palestinians need to elect their leadership. It’s going to take popular pressure to make that happen.
There have been many agreements between the parties to hold elections. The last ones were supposed to be in 2021 but they didn’t happen. The president [Mahmoud Abbas] canceled them on the excuse that we couldn’t hold elections without the Palestinians in Jerusalem, whom Israel would not allow to participate. But it’s an excuse. Of course the West Bank could have elections without Jerusalem. And if we believe in a genuine democratic approach then we will find ways to include them and do it in Jerusalem.
Palestinians need to elect their leadership. It’s going to take popular pressure to make that happen.
The other question is that the liberation movement has moved toward what’s called state-building, which has different aims and activities than liberation. Part of the movement thinks about establishing an independent state and thought it could do it through the Oslo Accords, but it found out after twenty-five years that it’s just a slogan.
But now we see popular resistance from the people that will maybe force the liberation movement to adjust. It might force the parties and its leaders to evaluate and evolve, and to actually implement the national demands of Palestinians, which are: self-determination, the right of return for refugees, and an end to the occupation. So we need to switch from the aim of building a state and return to focus on liberation, and, in my opinion, it should be a democratic approach. Besides the national struggle we also have a democratic struggle, which includes social justice and equality between men and women. This is the content of liberation we need as a Palestinian people.
James Hutt
Speaking of divisions and agreements between Palestinian parties, I want to ask you about the Prisoners’ Document from 2006. That document seems like the closest the various parties have come to achieving a unified vision for a long time. Do you see anything new like that coming?
Khalida Jarrar
We have many agreements, but the main two agreements that answer the whole question and all differences between the political parties are the Prisoners’ Document and the Cairo Agreement in 2005, which was agreed upon by all parties to reform the PLO. The starting point, in my opinion, has to be the PLO, not the PA. Why? Because we are Palestinians living in the West Bank, in Gaza, in Jerusalem, and inside lands taken by Israel in 1948, with the majority of the Palestinians who are refugees. If we believe that all Palestinians should share in evaluating the political process and electing a new leadership, it should be a shared process with all Palestinian people.
The starting point is the national council related to the PLO. But it needs more pressure because everyone from the two big parties is satisfied with the status quo. Without reforming the PLO, democratizing it, and making it representative of Palestinian people all over the world, including the occupied territories, I think the liberation movement will continue to be weak.
James Hutt
Why do you think the Prisoners’ Document failed to achieve its ends? What else is needed now?
Khalida Jarrar
The document didn’t fail, but there’s no ability to implement it. The problem is not with the agreement but the implementation of it. And implementing any of the agreements, including the Prisoners’ Document, depends on convincing the big parties that we should actually do it and not just keep organizing for new agreements. The last meeting was in Algeria and nothing happened. They signed, took a photo and celebrated, and nothing happened on the ground. We don’t need new agreements; we need strength to implement the agreements that all parties have already signed.
James Hutt
Do you think the vision of liberation has changed since that point in 2006 to now, in this current context? Is the strategy fundamentally different now?
Khalida Jarrar
I don’t think it has changed. We have the same aims since the Nakba. The national demands haven’t changed. The main goal for the liberation movement is to put an end to the occupation, the right to self-determination, and the right of return. The point is how you implement these national demands and how you agree to continue as a movement. What has changed is the situation within Palestine. Now there is a gap between the people and the leadership. The majority of people are not convinced of what the leadership does. There is no way to fix this relationship except through elections, and there are no elections, so it’s a complicated issue. It’s a matter of internal struggle. It might take time, but the situation and this kind of occupation will not give us, as Palestinians, anything. They want to kick us out or kill us and put an end to any type of self-determination. This means we will continue to balance between struggling against the occupation and reforming our internal situation as a people.
We don’t need new agreements; we need strength to implement the agreements that all parties have already signed.
James Hutt
The last couple years, we’ve seen increased collaboration between Israel and the PA, with the PA even playing an active role in the repression of its own people. How much of a barrier to liberation is the PA and what needs to change?
Khalida Jarrar
When talking about the PA, you are talking about a government that has an agreement with Israel. The majority of Palestinians are against these agreements. I’m talking about the Oslo Agreement, the Paris Agreement, the Camp David agreement, and the White River Agreement — all kinds of agreements. These agreements make the national authority responsible for implementing them, so the PA has to do security coordination with Israel. However, the majority of people and the majority of political parties reject that.
In January, after the massacre in Jenin refugee camp, the Central Council of the PLO took the decision to end the PA’s security coordination with Israel, but the PA continues to do it. Now there is a huge gap between the people and the PA, and an open question about what the PA is for. Is it the authority’s role to squeeze people or to help people? Should it at least address the issues of daily life, like education and health care? Should it be reformed? Should it be related to the PLO? Should it be dissolved? Or, should we change its role to just overseeing daily life and not interfering in political or security issues? Does the PA make it easier or more difficult for the liberation movement?
Answering these questions should come from the people. You need a forum to discuss this, which should be the national council. We can elect new members. We can elect people in areas where we can hold elections and agree upon areas where we can’t. Let’s start meeting — not just to elect new leaders, but to evaluate the political process and to answer questions like these about the relationship to the PA.
James Hutt
Where are the leftist parties in all this? Why do you think they have not been more popular or more successful?
Khalida Jarrar
The majority of the leftists parties are weak except for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which is the largest left party, but if you compare it to Fatah or Hamas you can see there’s a huge difference.
Why are they weak? It’s related to many elements, both external and internal. Externally, it’s like the situation of all leftist parties all over the world. Internally, it’s because you cannot differentiate some political parties from the PA and Fatah, for example. Many people don’t see that the leftist parties are different. So one of the aims is to unify the leftist parties, but we also need to evaluate and agree on political, ideological, and social goals. Maybe social and democratic terms we agree on, but politically there are still many differences between the leftist parties. There have been many attempts to unify them that still haven’t succeeded. Maybe the way to unify is on the ground, through resisting and struggling for different issues together.
James Hutt
How influential is socialism in Palestine today? How much is it guiding people, especially this new generation of youth?
Khalida Jarrar
Part of our analysis about why there are internal divisions, about why the liberation movement is divided, is because there is also a class struggle. There is a class that developed out of the Oslo Agreement that has no interest in liberation. It’s a very small class but it controls a lot of things. Socialism from my point of view is part of the solution. The socialist movement is very weak in Palestine at the moment. But when you talk about social justice, for example, or the democratic struggle, that provides an answer for the future of all Palestinians. Right now, the PA relies on the free market, and it will not solve unemployment or any of the social problems. It’s trying to implement neoliberalism, which won’t help the internal situation.
Less people are drawn to socialism today because they don’t understand what socialism is. We’ve never had an authority that wants to implement socialism. It’s a neoliberal PA. This is why the majority of problems are getting worse under it. Poverty is increasing. Unemployment is increasing. Inequality is increasing. The PA passes laws not to help the majority of people but to benefit the upper class. The comprador class is a new class, and it creates capitalist monopolies for all sorts of services and industries, like telecommunications. So we fight for the opposite. For example, we advocate for a resistant development, with cooperatives and policies that benefit youth, among others. But it’s all connected. We have a national struggle, a democratic struggle, and a social struggle, and they are all related.
James Hutt
One thing that stands out to me about these new armed resistance groups like the Lion’s Den is that they do not come from within one party. They seem to have members from all of the different parties and from people unaligned with any of them. Is that the sort of unity you’re talking about? And with the rise of groups like the Lion’s Den, do traditional political parties become less relevant?
Khalida Jarrar
The situation in Palestine is that all Palestinian people belong to parties. Not necessarily as members, but all of Palestinian society is politicized, and people are connected to parties in various ways. So underground, there is now a new phenomenon like the Lion’s Den (غرِن الأسود) and others in which people are working together. This gives you an answer. Why are people on the ground unified in struggling against occupation, but the leadership isn’t? Because of its own interests. So one of the problems is leadership. Maybe this is a new way to rebuild the liberation movement from the ground up, to use it to either pressure leadership to be unified or to reform the whole approach of the movement. I believe that the new or maybe the only approach is pressure from the bottom, up. From people working together, succeeding, and maybe this will pressure the leaders to be united, at least.
It’s not just about armed resistance either. There are many types of resistance in which people are unifying on the ground. Another example from a few years ago was when Israel installed metal detectors to restrict access to Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. People organized themselves and worked together. They developed a shared program, and they demonstrated daily and held sit-ins in front of them. Eventually they succeeded and the occupation removed them.
James Hutt
How important is armed resistance as a strategy for liberation?
Khalida Jarrar
Do you want to send me to prison? [laughter] But in general, any people under occupation have the right to struggle and resist in all ways. They have that right under international and humanitarian laws.
James Hutt
Where do you think it will go?
Khalida Jarrar
It’s impossible to say. We can’t predict the future, but what we can do is take this phenomenon and ask how and why it’s established. We notice that it affects different areas and is driven by young people. We notice that it expands, maybe in other names, across the West Bank, and maybe with people who are not directly related to political parties but who are resisting the occupation. We cannot see where it will lead. But like I said, the spirit of refusal is in people now. People are trying to find their own way, refusing to live under this occupation.
James Hutt
Something I don’t think many people in the Global North are aware of is the sheer extent of Israel’s surveillance on Palestinians. There are facial recognition cameras at checkpoints between cities in the West Bank, there are drones patrolling the skies above them, and we’ve learned that Israel can now monitor every single phone call. What is it like organizing when Israel could be watching and listening to almost anything you do?
Khalida Jarrar
That’s a difficult question, both for me to say and for you to publish [laughs]. People here have a secret mechanism they use. I can’t publish that though. But people try not to be watched, for example. It’s more difficult than before. You can’t do things publicly. You can’t use technology. But there are many ways to resist. People are always developing their own ways to organize. If there are violations and punishments from the occupation, that teaches us too. We learn from them and how they operate. We learn from being caught and punished.
James Hutt
How important is prisoner organizing and solidarity efforts in this moment? For the larger movement overall?
Khalida Jarrar
Remember that we are a people living under occupation. Over one million Palestinians have been arrested by Israel since 1967 until now. It’s very rare to find a home here without either prisoners or ex-prisoners in the family. The plight of prisoners is still dear to the people. It’s highly respected. Anything that happens inside prison affects the outside too. Ben-Gvir, for example, has threatened new punishments against prisoners. So prisoners have organized an emergency committee of all parties and made a shared program for struggle. That affects the rest of the people and the shape of the liberation movement.
It’s very rare to find a home here without either prisoners or ex-prisoners in the family.
There is now a question if Ben-Gvir can actually implement his threats. If there is a collective struggle against it, and there will be, it will be difficult for all of the new laws to be implemented. You’re talking about six thousand Palestinian political prisoners inside Israeli jails, and they are organized. When Israeli guards invaded Damon Prison recently and punished the female prisoners there, all prisoners resisted and took action together. They succeed in forcing the guards to back down.
Prisons will be a focus of the coming struggle, and we will see what will happen. It will affect outside also. It might lead to a type of new struggle, one that emerges from inside prison, from the prisoners to outside. They are connected.
James Hutt
You have been imprisoned a number of times by Israel now and have faced severe repression. How have those experiences affected you, your political activities, and your outlook?
Khalida Jarrar
Look, prison will not break people. We are living under occupation. We are convinced that we have a right to represent our people and to be free. Of course, it’s hard because Israel sends people to prison just for talking about its crimes. But it’s very difficult to make people stop. We are guided by the experience of occupied peoples all over the world. No people who have been occupied will continue to be occupied forever.
This interview is part of a series of interviews with Palestinian left leaders in the West Bank.
An estimated 600,000 people rallied Thursday night outside the Knesset and beyond in favor of judicial reform. Israel National News interviewed some of the demonstrators, asking what motivated them to attend.
The post “WHY ARE YOU HERE?’ Pro-reform demonstators have their say appeared first on World Israel News.
Iran’s foreign minister visited Lebanon over the weekend, where he met with the head of the Hezbollah terror organization and surveyed the southern border with Israel.
The post WATCH: Iranian Foreign Minister scopes out Israel border during visit to Lebanon appeared first on World Israel News.
Desks at a new Meta office space in the Farley Building in New York, US, on September 29, 2021. (Amir Hamja / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
On March 14, Meta announced it was cutting some ten thousand jobs from its workforce. In February, former pandemic darling Zoom made about 1,300 cuts to its employee pool. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, laid off around twelve thousand workers in January. And of course, Elon Musk’s personal decimation of Twitter’s workforce since he took control of the company has been providing content fodder since last year. In general, 2023 has been a bloodbath for workers in tech.
On the surface, this may seem like a straightforward story of once-bullish companies having to make difficult choices in the face of harsh economic realities. But there’s more than meets the eye. Recently some of these newly laid-off employees have come forward to disclose that they had been paid to perform little to no actual work. Instead, they were called to one meeting after another to be kept busy without any tasks assigned to them. Many of them took home six-figure salaries for doing essentially nothing.
Companies strategically made these superfluous hires in order to have a trust fund of talent available in anticipation of future expansion, and also to prevent rival companies from meeting their staffing needs. It’s a blatant case of labor-market manipulation, which in most cases is not favorable to workers.
Big Tech is no stranger to the practice. In 2014, Apple, Adobe, Google, and Intel settled a federal antitrust lawsuit for $415 million after a Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation found that the four companies — along with others like Pixar and Intuit — had formed agreements to not hire each other’s employees.
But the tech industry isn’t alone. In 2021 the DOJ indicted the national dialysis provider DaVita on charges that it conspired with competitors to not recruit each other’s employees. DaVita was acquitted in 2022 after successfully arguing that it’s agreements didn’t prevent competitors from hiring their talent if certain conditions were met and presenting evidence from an economist showing career growth and wages were not stunted, even though testimony from a former employee suggested otherwise. Within firms using a franchise model, non-poaching agreements that outright ban hiring between franchises are still technically legal, hence the outcome in the DaVita case.
This type of labor-market manipulation hits low-wage service-sector workers the hardest. Big Tech’s superfluous hires actually tightened the labor market and increased wages in the tech sector, an unusual instance of industry largesse made possible by abnormally low interest rates. It almost never happens that way, and workers on the lower rungs aren’t so lucky. Non-poaching and non-solicitation agreements between companies create a monopsony in the labor market, driving down wages. Employees are not usually made aware that they exist, and have no opportunity to consent. They also have little legal recourse, as demonstrated by a series of failed lawsuits brought by employees of companies like McDonald’s, Little Caesars, and Domino’s.
An even more depressing truth is that major companies don’t necessarily need to form these types of alliances with each other in order to control the labor market to their own ends. The era of mergers and acquisitions has shrunk the number of employers looking for workers. A 2017 paper looking into monopsony concluded that most labor markets in the United States are highly concentrated, and that this is contributing to the trends of wage stagnation, a decline in workers’ ability to move between jobs and locations, a decline in entrepreneurship, and the erosion of the “job ladder,” since workers have fewer opportunities to seek promotions outside of their current company.
Of course, the most widespread form of labor market manipulation is the preservation of a large reserve army of unemployed workers. In Capital, Karl Marx demonstrates how a reserve of unemployed workers allows capital to keep wages in check, serving the accumulation of profits. The Federal Reserve is open about this strategy, raising interest rates to tame inflation with the explicit goal of driving up unemployment and lowering the cost of labor. The problem for workers is that this tactic lowers wage growth far more than it does inflation. Plus, economic downturns and recessions may inspire larger, more financially stable firms to acquire small firms that are more adversely affected by higher interest rates and lower demand, thus further increasing market concentration among employers. (Ironically, this labor-market manipulation tactic led to the recent Big Tech layoffs, ending the other manipulation tactic of superfluous employment as tech companies’ stream of cheap credit dried up.)
We are frequently assured that supply and demand drive the market’s ability to fairly set wages and prices at an equilibrium. This assumes perfect competition between firms, and that workers have all the information about wages and opportunities within a sector. In the real world, firms have little interest in an unfettered market for labor. They demonstrate as much when they use anticompetitive agreements, concentrate markets through mergers and acquisitions, and promote an anti-worker economic orthodoxy to protect profits.
Capitalists have many strategies for making sure that workers are always where they want them — whether twiddling their thumbs in tech offices, barred from seeking career advancement with a competitor, or lined up at the soup kitchen. When they say they that capitalism runs on a free and voluntary exchange of labor for wages, don’t believe them.