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Workers Vanguard No. 1157 |
21 June 2019
The closing date for news in this issue is 18 June.
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| Workers Vanguard skips alternate issues in June, July and August.
Our next issue will be dated July 26. |
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Trump, Dems Push Anti-China Scare Campaign U.S. Imperialists Ramp Up Trade/Tech War Defend, Extend Gains of 1949 Chinese Revolution! What began in January 2018 with U.S. tariffs against Chinese-made solar panels has since become a wide-ranging campaign to thwart China’s economic and technological rise. In a major escalation, on May 10 President Trump declared a further 25 percent tariff on $200 billion worth of imports from China. Five days later, he issued an executive order effectively banning the Chinese company Huawei, the world’s leader in next-generation 5G telecommunications hardware and second-largest smartphone maker, from the U.S. on the grounds of “national security.” The Commerce Department then barred American companies from selling chips and other goods to Huawei.
Capitalist financiers warn that Trump’s broad use of the tariff weapon—against purported friends as well as declared foes—threatens the supply chains that are crucial in modern manufacturing and might bring on a world recession. For the Republicans and also the Democrats, who have enthusiastically backed the White House against Beijing, this is a small price to pay for squeezing China, the most powerful of the countries in the world today where capitalist rule was overthrown. U.S. companies like shoe manufacturer Steve Madden and camera maker GoPro are shifting production away from China in order to evade import duties. Longshoremen at the Port of Los Angeles, where China represents 60 percent of trade volume, are already handling less cargo.
Chinese negotiators in the last round of trade talks refused to humiliate themselves by meeting Washington’s demands, which included that China’s laws be rewritten to American satisfaction. Trump vows to impose tariffs on another $300 billion worth of Chinese goods if Beijing does not buckle under. Throughout the trade war, the U.S. has pushed the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime to relinquish state control of the economy. That would mean total surrender to the imperialists. As revolutionary Marxists, we say that the working class in the U.S. and internationally has a side in this conflict: with China, a bureaucratically deformed workers state, against imperialism. Down with the anti-China tariffs! (read on)
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The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) is a proletarian, revolutionary and internationalist tendency committed to the task of building Leninist parties as national sections of a democratic-centralist international. Our aim is the achievement of new October Revolutions—nothing else, nothing other, nothing less. The ICL bases itself on Marxist historical, dialectical materialism and seeks in particular to carry forward the international working-class perspectives of Marxism developed in the theory and practice of the Bolshevik leaders V. I. Lenin and L. D. Trotsky and embodied in the decisions of the first four Congresses of the Communist International as well as key documents of the Fourth International such as the Transitional Program (1938) and "War and the Fourth International" (1934). We also look to James P. Cannon, a leader of the early American Communist Party who was won to Trotskyism and went on to become a principal founder of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), working in close collaboration with Leon Trotsky. The origins of the ICL are in the Spartacist League/U.S., which began as the Revolutionary Tendency in the SWP and was bureaucratically expelled in 1963. Our ICL "Declaration of Principles and Some Elements of Program" was modeled on the Declaration of Principles adopted at the 1966 founding conference of the SL/U.S.
