LIKE most publications, the Morning Star relies heavily on Adobe software. We crop, edit and process photographs in Adobe Photoshop, design graphics with Adobe Illustrator, lay out pages on Adobe InDesign and convert them to PDFs, another Adobe creation, to send to our printers at Watford and Oldham.

The software world has changed in recent years, with Adobe switching from “Creative Suites” which customers bought, providing permanent licences for the use of an array of programmes, to the “Creative Cloud” through which software is effectively leased. Previously, customers would receive updates to the software package they had bought until it was replaced by the next one (Creative Suite 3 by CS4, CS4 by CS5, and so on). If you had an old version, you wouldn’t receive updates and it would gradually become more problematic to use as bugs were not fixed and incompatibility with more modern systems grew. 

Six years ago Adobe announced it would no longer release suites at all, with users instead leasing Creative Cloud licences that are updated without the purchase of new packages. The Morning Star, perennially strapped for cash, of course continued to use its last version of Creative Suite (CS4), living with the fact that the software would no longer be updated. But this did mean incremental updates of either our software or hardware became impossible. When a computer broke and was replaced with a newer one, we found old software ran erratically or not at all on the newer machine. Problems connected with this for a time caused serious malfunctions affecting the generation of our e-edition, which many frustrated Star readers will remember all too well.

Why the lecture on software? Partly because it helps explain the £90,000 90th anniversary appeal, which got off to such a great start last month with other £20,000 raised from 114 individual donors. New hardware is one big part of what we are raising the money for, since our decade-old iMacs are stuttering towards their doom, but the new machines will not run our antiquated CS4 software, meaning we also need to switch to Creative Cloud. Instead of a one-off purchase this will be an ongoing cost, estimated in our planning documents at about £7,000 a year — which may not sound huge, but every little doesn’t help at a loss-making paper like the Morning Star. The changing nature of the software market reduces the independence of operations like ours, tying us into ongoing payments, an issue in the immediate term which will only be resolved by increasing sales of our newspaper and e-edition and raising income.

But that loss of independence can have more sinister consequences — as this week’s news from Adobe makes clear. On Tuesday, the software giant sent a notice to its customers in Venezuela, telling them their accounts would be deactivated. This is to comply with the punitive sanctions applied by Donald Trump’s US administration in an effort to derail the Venezuelan economy and break its socialist government: “The US government issued Executive Order 13884, the practical effect of which is to prohibit almost all transactions and services between US companies, entities, and individuals in Venezuela. To remain compliant with this order, Adobe is deactivating all accounts in Venezuela,” the firm explained.

Initially Adobe even said sanctions prevented it from refunding customers — “we are unable to issue refunds. Executive order 13884 orders the cessation of all activity with the entities including no sales, service, support, refunds, credits, etc.” It has since backtracked on that particular outrage, saying those who have bought its products directly will indeed receive refunds. But the service is still being withdrawn, and with software now leased from Creative Cloud having bought a product no longer means you can keep access to it. Adobe’s customers in Venezuela have until October 28 to download any content stored in their accounts. Then they will lose all access.

The US and its allies, including our own government in Britain, like to talk of the “rules-based international order.” This has long been a sick joke. The chief US prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials of nazi war criminals following World War II noted that starting a war of aggression is “the supreme crime.” There is now almost no-one who would dispute that the US-British invasion of Iraq was a war of aggression, since it was not a response to any plausible threat or action by Iraq itself. George W Bush’s government also rolled out a global “extraordinary rendition” (kidnapping) and torture programme in which the Tony Blair government was more deeply implicated than has ever been admitted. In the Barack Obama era the US military embraced the new art of murder by robotic drones, the killing of human beings — targets and, often, whoever happens to be in their vicinity, including children — far from any battlefield, often in countries with which the US is not even at war. 

Countries deemed antagonistic to the US, such as Russia or Iran, are often accused of undermining “the rules-based international order.” Sometimes these accusations are nonsense and sometimes they carry some weight. But there is no question that the most frequent and flagrant violations of international law are those of the United States and its allies.

That includes sanctions. As UN special rapporteur Idriss Jazairy stated in January, “coercion, whether military or economic, must never be used to seek a change in government in a sovereign state. The use of sanctions by outside powers to overthrow an elected government is in violation of all norms of international law.” Sanctions on Venezuela are clearly aimed at removing the elected Nicolas Maduro government — few Western politicians even deny this.

A glance at what those sanctions have meant in practice further explodes the myth of that “rules-based international order” supposedly policed by law-abiding liberal capitalist democracies like the US and Britain. Venezuelan assets worth billions of pounds are seized. It is refused permission to withdraw its own gold from the Bank of England. Losses from the closure of Venezuelan bank accounts is estimated at over £23 billion. “We cannot borrow money. We cannot use our own money,” as Venezuela’s ambassador to Britain Rocio Maneiro told me and Morning Star international editor Steve Sweeney last month. 

Venezuela Solidarity Campaign secretary Francisco Dominguez says the withdrawal of Adobe Creative Cloud is “yet another sanction against the legitimate government that will affect ordinary Venezuelans who have billions of computer files in PDF format. This reveals both that US imperialism is failing in its ‘regime change’ efforts, thus it is resorting to ever more extreme measures. It is lamentable that the EU also applies sanctions to Venezuela.”

The sanctions that have done the most obvious damage are of course those affecting the import of food and medicine. The US-based Centre for Economic and Policy Research estimated in April that sanctions had caused 40,000 deaths in Venezuela; the number will have risen since. In that context it might seem absurd to worry about the loss of PDFs. But software is used for basic, vital purposes all the time. Venezuelan publishers and NGOs will be affected, but so will the planning of services including education, healthcare and others. 

Adobe states baldly that it is attempting to comply with US government decrees. It makes no attempt to justify the decrees, and adopts an apologetic tone to the betrayed customers. When contacted by the Morning Star, it merely observed that “we understand the difficulty this has caused and are currently evaluating our existing offerings to ensure we remain compliant with the recent US executive order regarding Venezuela.” But this whole sorry tale illustrates the lawlessness of an international order dominated by the United States — and how the ownership and control of technology by a handful of “master of the universe” corporations leaves ordinary people ever more powerless to resist. It’s time we did things differently.