From the September 2006 issue of the Industrial Worker, paper of the Industrial Workers of the World.

The International (originally L’Internationale) is perhaps the most dangerous song in the world and just may be the most well known. Whistle or hum the tune in any country around the globe and eventually someone will recognize it.



It has become the anthem of all those seeking a fundamental change in society. Many have been jailed, even executed, for the mere singing of it. During the filming of the movie ‘Dr. Zhivago,’ cast members sang it on the movie site in Spain. The song had been banned by the fascist Franco regime. When the police heard the song in the distance they thought a rebellion was at hand, thinking it signalled the death of the fascist Generalissimo.

Debout! les damnes de la terre! Debout! les forcat de la faim!

With those forceful first words, Eugene Pottier, an elected member of the Paris Commune of 1870-71, member of the Federation of Artists and of the International Workingmen’s Association wrote the poem that would soon become the international battle cry of the world’s working class. They are words of condemnation against every injustice and the exploitation of capitalism.



The literal translation of those first two lines: Arise, you condemned of the earth! Arise, you imprisoned in hunger!



England’s socialists translated these words as: Arise! ye starvelings from your slumbers; Arise! ye criminals of want.



In the United States the radical publishing company Charles Kerr Publishers gave us the following translation: Arise, ye prisoners of starvation! Arise, ye wretched of the earth!



For over one hundred years The International has been our song of continuing struggle, the call to the final battle, of radically remaking the world, and a song of hope. Workers have sung it at rallies, on picket lines, on the streets and barricades in times of revolution.



Interestingly, various competing factions of those considered “the Left” (anarchists, IWWs, Trotskyists, social democrats, Leninists) have endorsed their own versions, made known in the chorus.



The Charles Kerr version of the chorus read: ‘Tis the final conflict; Let each stand in his place. The International Shall be the human race.



Note that at the time of the translation in the late 19th century, it calls for each to stand in “his” place, denoting the worker as male.



The “International” in the original song refers to the International Workingmen’s Association (the so-called First International), which ended in bitter internal disputes.

 The Second International, dominated by the orthodox Marxism of the German Social Democratic Party was fractured by the First World War and disputed positions toward the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The Third International was dominated by the official Leninism of the USSR until it was officially dissolved. A Fourth International was proclaimed by the competing adherents of the Trotskyite movement and a current Socialist International exists as successor to the Second representing social democratic parties.



You can sometimes identify the various movements and factions competing for the allegiance of the working class by the words they sing to the last two lines of the chorus. The Industrial Workers of the World handed down two versions. In the 1923 edition of its Little Red Songbook, “Songs of the workers to fan the flames of discontent,” the last lines read: “The International Union Shall be the human race”.



 Later editions of the songbook noted a clearer reference to the concept of organising all workers in one monumental industrial union for industrial democracy: “The IndustrialUnion Shall be the human race.”



I came across an old version sung by workers influenced by the Communist Party of Canada circa 1934: “The International soviets Shall be the human race.”



Trotskyites often sang the following words, denoting their acceptance of the supposedly vanguard role of a Leninist political party: “The International Party Shall be the human race.”



In a version learned from the former Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (now Democratic Socialists of America), I was given this version: “The international working class Shall free the human race.”



It’s a rather good version, at least noting that a true International organization does not exist with the astute recognition that only the actions of the world’s working class can indeed free the human race.



But even here there are slight differences. Some would sing, “The international working class shall free the human race” while others sang “The international working class shall be the human race.” By merely changing “be” to “free” the entire meaning of the chorus is changed. It is one thing that workers worldwide fight for human emancipation, it is another thing to say that the working class will become the people. The latter denotes that everyone will, after the revolution, become working class – anathema to those who wish to abolish the working class and all classes.



Yet The International has remained apart of the history of the world’s working class for over 130 years. Millions of workers have rallied to it and its singing has given them courage and hope. Ruling powers fear it, prohibit it and discourage it.



Sadly, just as those who consider themselves part of anti-capitalist Left have eschewed any notion of fundamentally breaking with capitalism through the “abolition of wage labour,” they have forgotten the words to this song. Occasionally it is sung at May Day rallies (hummed by those who do not know its words, tangentially knowing that the song is somehow “revolutionary” and “important”).



Many have criticised the lyrics of the song as outdated and stilted, reflecting a language of a past century. England’s Billy Bragg rewrote a new version for that very reason. His chorus reads: So come brothers and sisters, For the struggle carries on, The internationale Unites the world in song, So comrades come rally, For this is the time and place, The international ideal, Unites the human race.



For many years I remained faithful to the original (with small changes) simply because it is a part of working-class fighting history. And I say shame to those who consider themselves revolutionaries who do not know the words. Songs and poetry are action. You cannot change the world if you are afraid to sing.



So, to this end, I offer a new version of the first verse that hopefully remains faithful to the message of Pottier’s original (utilising in part the work of others). It is not there to replace the original, but to make all consider what we are fighting for:

“Arise you workers from all nations, For history has but one demand, The world youâve built by your own labour, Can be yours at your command.”

The old ways now must be abandoned, So let us rise to Freedom’s call, To raise this earth on new foundations, And fight to build a world for all.

“It’s the final battle, Let each stand in place. The international working class, Shall free the human race.”

Len Wallace

Len Wallace, a long-standing member of the Socialist Party of Canada and activist in the Industrial Workers of the World.

Here is his own rendition of the International

 The 27th Conference of Parties to the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP27 has ended with the organisers predictably hailing it as a success, while more sober observers point to its failure.

The Paris pledge to not let global warming exceed 1.5C  is no more.  After all the years of climate negotiations, eliminating the primary cause of global heating, fossil fuels were seldom mentioned. The world should be weaning itself off its fossil fuel addiction but Cop27 has shown it is politically impossible, national self-interest was prioritised and prevailed.

A proposal for a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty to keep remaining coal, oil and gas reserves untouched went no-where.  There was no commitment to phase-out all fossil fuels. Even a modest World Health Organization endorsed  ban on fossil fuel advertising was not taken up.

The climate impact ( “loss and damage”) fund is being acclaimed as progress, but remains voluntary. There is no agreement 

 on how much money should be paid in, by whom, and on what basis. 

Prof Daniela Schmidt from Bristol University put it: “Our current emission trajectories commit us to further warming and to higher risks. The recent months have shown us the impacts climate change is having now with millions of people displaced by floods and loss of life due to heat and drought,” she continued. “The sense of urgency which these events created regrettably have not translated into action at the COP27.”

COP27 has been described as a fossil fuel trade show with Saudi Arabia for instance, advertising its untested carbon cap and capture policy.

UK’s negotiator Alok Sharma, confessed, “I’m incredibly disappointed that we weren’t able to go further.” 

France’s Energy Minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher said that the deal was not as ambitious as France would have liked, with “no progress” made on efforts to reduce emissions.

Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock expressed frustration that the emissions cut and phasing out of fossil fuels were “stonewalled by a number of large emitters and oil producers.”

Norway’s Climate Minister Espen Barth Eide said “It doesn’t raise ambition at all.”

Maldives Environment Minister Aminath Shauna said she was “disheartened” more progress was not made on cutting emissions.

European Union’s climate chief, Frans Timmermans, says there is a “yawning gap” between climate policies and climate science adding that the mitigation programme agreement allows for some parties to “hide from their commitments”. He continued, “...what we have in front of us is not enough of a step forward for people and planet…Too many parties are not ready to make progress in the fight against the climate crisis…Some are afraid of the transition ahead and the cost of change.”

Mary Robinson, chair of the Elders Group of former world leaders, ex-president of Ireland and twice a UN climate envoy, said: “The world remains on the brink of climate catastrophe. Progress made has been too slow...”

Laurence Tubiana, one of the architects of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, now chief executive of the European Climate Foundation pointed out, “The influence of the fossil fuel industry was found across the board. This Cop has weakened requirements around countries making new and more ambitious commitments [on cutting emissions]. The text makes no mention of phasing out fossil fuels, and scant reference to the 1.5C target.” Tubiana added, “The Egyptian presidency produced a text that clearly protects oil and gas petro-states and the fossil fuel industries.

UN Secretary General António Guterres said the world “still needs a giant leap on climate ambition” as the planet is “still in the emergency room”. Sharma echoed the medical analogy, “I said in Glasgow that the pulse of 1.5C was weak. Unfortunately, it remains on life support.”

Guterres also said, “A fund for loss and damage is essential – but it’s not an answer if the climate crisis washes a small island state off the map – or turns an entire African country to desert.”

Will next year’s COP28 be any different? It is being held United Arab Emirate’s Dubai, a country which has grown wealthy largely from oil. It is among the countries with the highest per capita greenhouse gas emissions globally. The Climate Action Tracker website rates the UAE’s targets and policies as “highly insufficient” and says the country is on track for emissions to increase by at least 30% above 2010 levels by 2030, despite targets to reduce them.

The term “carbon bombs”, coined by a team of scientists in a study published in May 2021, refers to the largest fossil fuel extraction projects in the world. “These are all coal, oil and gas infrastructures that could emit more than one billion tonnes of CO2 over their lifetime,” says Kjell Kühne, the study’s lead author.

Although scientists keep insisting that the planet needs to move away from its dependence on oil, gas and coal to effectively combat climate change and several countries, cities and NGOs calling for a non-proliferation treaty on fossil fuels multinational corporations are planning to open new gas and oil production sites.

 Qatar Energy, Gazprom, Saudi Aramco, ExxonMobil, Petrobras, Turkmengaz, TotalEnergies, Chevron and Shell  intend projects that alone could put a strain on the effects of global warming.

 The US NGO Oil Change International revealed that new fossil fuel projects approved, or in the process of being approved between 2022 and 2025, could lead to 70 billion tonnes of CO2 being emitted into the atmosphere over the course of their operation.

 Projects approved in 2022 alone are responsible for 11 billion tonnes of CO2, the equivalent of China’s annual emissions. 

One of the projects is TotalEnergies’ oil extraction in Uganda, which is due to be operational by 2025. The French company plans to drill 400 wells and export the oil through the huge EACOP pipeline. These two projects combined will be responsible for emitting more than 34 million tonnes of CO2 per year.

According to the latest IPCC report, to prevent global temperatures from rising above the fateful 1.5°C mark, coal consumption must be reduced by 95 percent, oil by 60 percent and gas by 45 percent by 2050, compared to 2019 levels. In 2021, the International Energy Agency called for an immediate halt to investment in new oil and gas facilities. 

“Unfortunately, fossil fuels still account for 80 percent of the world’s energy mix today. We are not successfully accelerating the energy transition,” says Jean-Marie Bréon, a climatologist at the Climate and Environmental Sciences Laboratory. “And every new fossil fuel project takes us further off course and reduces our chances of staying below 1.5°C.”

“The climate scientists tell us that we only have three years left to reverse the trend, so we have to act now,” says Lucie Pinson, director of the NGO Reclaim Finance and winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize, the so-called Nobel Prize for Ecology. “We know that using all the fossil fuel reserves already in production would take us beyond 1.5°C of warming. Not only must no new gas, oil and coal projects be built, but we must also start phasing out existing sites.”

Kühne identified a total of 425 “carbon bombs” in 48 countries — 195 oil and gas projects and 230 coal mines. The following countries have more than 10: China, Russia, the US, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Australia, India, Qatar, Canada and Iraq. 

“They are single-handedly driving us towards climate disaster,” he says. “Taken to their logical conclusion, they represent twice our global carbon budget.” These include huge coal mining projects in China, oil sands projects in Canada, the Red Hill project in Australia, the Hambach and Garzweiler mines in Germany and the EACOP project in East Africa.

Multinationals opening new gas sites, despite climate change warnings (france24.com)

A lifesaving prostate cancer drug, enzalutamide, brand name Xtandi, costs $189,800 a year in the United States, or up to five times more than its price in other countries.

More than 250,000 new cases of prostate cancer will have been diagnosed in the U.S. over the next 12 months and more than 33,000 men will have died in that time. 

 Discovered by scientists Charles Sawyer and Michael Jung at the University of California, Los Angeles with grants from the NIH and the U.S. Department of Defense, enzalutamide was approved in 2012 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of late-stage prostate cancer. Two companies—Japan-based Astellas and Medivation Inc., a San Francisco biotech firm—developed Xtandi. When Pfizer paid $14 billion to acquire Medivation in 2016, the pharma giant’s then-CEO, Ian Read, said that “the value of Xtandi and its future growth potential was the principal driver” of the deal.

Astellas controls the price of Xtandi and has raised its cost by nearly 90% since 2014. The drug has already generated more than $10 billion in sales from Medicare alone.

Patients Push Biden HHS to Act as Pharma Firm Charges $190K for Lifesaving Prostate Cancer Drug (commondreams.org)

  Wage stagnation for Britain’s workers for two decades. 

The Resolution Foundation said on Friday that the dire economic outlook meant that real wages were not expected to return to 2008 levels until 2027.

 If pay had continued to grow at the same rate as before the financial crisis hit in 2008, then by 2027, workers would be £292 a week – or £15,000 annually – better off.

Hunt’s budget will mean 19 years of wage stagnation, warns thinktank | Autumn statement 2022 | The Guardian

In his statement today the Chancellor has stolen all Labour’s clothes. 

Nearly everybody will be worse off but the less well-off will suffer less. 

What more could Labour have done? 

“Dividend allowances will be cut.

The annual exempt allowance for capital gains tax will also be cut.

The threshold for the 45p additional rate of tax will be cut from £150,000 to £125,140.

Windfall taxes will raise £14bn, including a new temporary 45% levy on electricity producers.

The government’s energy price guarantee will be kept for a further 12 months at an average of £3,000 for a typical household, up from £2,500 at present.

New one-off payments of £900 to households on means-tested benefits, £300 to pensioner households, and £150 for individuals on disability benefit.

There will be an additional £1bn funding to enable further extension to household support fund.

Social housing rents will be capped at 7% next year, to avoid rent hikes of up to 11%.

The “national living wage” will rise by 9.7% next year to £10.42 an hour.

Benefits will rise in line with September’s inflation rate, by 10.1%, costing the government £11bn.

The benefit cap will be increased with inflation next year.

The pensions triple lock will be kept.”

Via ALB

A third (1.3 billion tons) of all the food produced is wasted.

It accounts for a tenth of the greenhouse gases that are contributing to global warming, in particular, methane, which is about 80 times more potent than CO2.

That so few countries have so far committed to reducing food waste in national climate targets is symbolic of a lack of “political will,” said Danielle Nierenberg, co-founder of Food Tank, a US-based NGO devoted to sustainable food systems. This is despite the fact it is “low-hanging fruit” when it comes to cutting national emissions.

One major cause of food loss in developing countries is poor preservation due to lack of cold storage for agricultural produce.

 Inadequate refrigeration and an ineffective “cold chain” resulted in the loss of around 526 million tons of food production — or 12% of the food produced globally — in 2017, according to a UNEP and FAO report released this week at COP27.

This is enough extra food to feed around one billion people. 

Some 811 million people currently face hunger globally.

Food waste has actually increased since 2015 in countries like the US, Australia and New Zealand, which already waste the most.

Climate-killing food waste addressed at UN talks – DW – 11/16/2022

 Ukrainian forces have ‘recaptured’ Kherson. This, however, is the result not of a battle for the city but of a decision by the new Russian commander to withdraw from areas west of the River Dnieper. Russian supply lines had become too extended and were too vulnerable to attack. Although the withdrawal was in response to real military achievement on the part of Ukrainian forces, talk of Ukraine ‘winning the war’ bears no relation to reality. On the contrary, Ukraine now faces a sharp deterioration in its position.

During the first stage of the war, now drawing to a close, Ukraine’s impressive performance has been facilitated by the combination of two factors. On the one hand, the old Russian command complacently overestimated Russian superiority, undermined as it was by poor force management, corruption, and low morale, and adopted an overambitious war plan. On the other hand, Ukraine derived enormous benefit from a generous supply of advanced Western weaponry, including ‘game changers’ like  the ‘iconic’ shoulder-fired precision-guided Javelin antitank missile, the 155-millimeter long-range (up to 40 km) M777 howitzer, and the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS). 

This supply is now running down. US stocks have fallen to levels that the Pentagon is determined to reserve for other contingencies, such as war with China or in Korea. New production on the scale needed to support a long conventional proxy war with Russia would take up to four years to develop and require the US economy to be put on a wartime footing. For the time being at least, Ukraine will have to make do with smaller quantities of less powerful weapons – for instance, the 105-millimeter howitzer, with smaller payload and shorter range (11 km).[1]

It no longer seems realistic, if it ever was, for Ukraine to aim at the reconquest of the Donbass, Crimea, or the land bridge connecting the two – areas where powerful Russian forces are concentrated and deeply entrenched. It is these areas that Russia will surely insist on keeping in the ‘realistic’ negotiations for which foreign minister Sergei Lavrov is calling. 

The explosion in Poland – a NATO member state — on November 15 reminds us of the ever-present risk of the war in Ukraine escalating to nuclear Armageddon by accident or mistake. The restrained response of Western leaders is reassuring (NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg has acknowledged that the blast is likely to have been triggered by Ukrainianair defense systems). But the risk cannot be eliminated altogether.[2] Alternatively, prolongation of the war into 2023 may lead to Armageddon by stages, with pressure building up for a ‘no fly zone,’ the open and direct deployment of NATO ground troops (initially, no doubt, as trainers and advisers), and the battlefield use of tactical nuclear weapons.     

Winter is approaching. The weather will impose a pause in hostilities. Let us hope that good sense prevails and the pause will be used to end the war.                

Notes

[1] Natasha Turak, 9/28/22. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/28/the-us-and-europe-are-running-out-of-weapons-to-send-to-ukraine.html

[2] The growing risk of nuclear Armageddon cannot be ignored. Ali Abunimah with Rania Khalek, 10/26/22. https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/growing-risk-nuclear-armageddon-cannot-be-ignored

Stephen Shenfield

War in Ukraine: latest developments – World Socialist Party US (wspus.org)