The Myth of a New “Cold War” Between the U.S. and China/Russia

Jeff Mackler

AUKUS, or the new and secretly negotiated $66 billion nuclear-powered submarine agreement between Australia, the United Kingdom and the U.S., has momentarily ruffled some political feathers around the world, particularly in France and China. Without consulting with France or its military-industrial corporations, AUKUS principals cancelled France’s huge contract with Australia to construct some dozen now deemed  “obsolete” diesel-powered submarines over the course of a decade. The $66 billion deal was transferred to U.S. and UK corporations, including Lockheed Martin, which contracted to build nuclear-powered but not nuclear-armed submarines. The former require qualitatively less refueling and thus facilitate Australian patrolling of the vast Pacific region in tandem with the already present U.S. Pacific fleet.

Outraged French President Emmanuel Macron denounced the Biden-approved agreement as blatant “Trumpism” and withdrew the French ambassador to the U.S., the first and only such termination of diplomatic relations with France in some 250 years. “Trumpism” has in recent years come to be defined as “America First” or “MAGA,” Make America Great Again, including the imposition of U.S. tariffs not only against China but against Western European nations and Canada. At the time Democrats and leading U.S. corporate think tanks, including the Council on Foreign Relations, pilloried Trump’s tariffs but the Biden administrations has largely maintained them all and indeed, expanded their scope and impact. No doubt, there are always major divisions within the U.S. ruling class – not to mention among and between their international counterparts – when their base economic interests are in conflict.

Pivot to Asia

The corporate media has characterized the AUKUS deal as new evidence of a U.S. “pivot to Asia,” and a new Cold War against China, if not a U.S. abandonment of NATO and a tilt to deepened economic and military relations with Boris Johnson’s UK, whose Brexit the U.S. supported while the main NATO nations, Germany, and France, especially, opposed it.

Behind the hoopla about a “new Cold War” however, is the unrelenting economic competition between the leading world capitalist-imperialist nations marked especially by the two major contenders, the declining and still leading U.S. imperialism and the rising imperialist giant, China. The former has military hegemony, with U.S. bases around the world aimed and maintaining and advancing U.S. imperial interests. The monopolized U.S. military-industrial complex also guarantees super profits. War is always good for, indeed necessary for, capitalist profits! China has but a single military base outside its borders, but its ever-modernizing industrial and financial capacities, including its Belt and Road infrastructure initiative and its founding of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), in 2001, bitterly opposed by the U.S., make Chinese capital more attractive to poor nations previously unable to secure loans at rates less than U.S.-dominated financial institutions.

Today, the SCO includes eight member states, China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, as well as four “Observer States” interested in acceding to full membership (Afghanistan, Belarus, Iran, and Mongolia) and six “Dialogue Partners” (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Turkey). No doubt a serious U.S. “pivot to Asia” to challenge China’s increasing influence over capital markets and advantageous investment opportunities will include more than the future construction of a fleet of Australian submarines!

No serious player in the world capitalist system today acts on the premise that China is anything resembling a socialist society, its ruling Chinese Communist Party notwithstanding. Neither France nor Germany today favor a new “cold war” with China. Indeed, Germany’s trade with China surpasses its trade with the U.S. and all other nations, and France is not far behind. Both are heavily dependent on Russian fossil fuel imports and on exports to China’s burgeoning internal market for industrial and major consumer commodities aimed at China’s 400 million “middle class” consumers. Both opposed U.S. efforts to block new Russian pipelines from the East, preferring cheap Russian fossil fuel, Russia’s primary export, to the more costly distantly-shipped U.S. variant.

New Cold War or imperialist rivalry?

Few, if any, serious political thinkers believe that today’s so-called Cold War between the U.S. and China-Russia is in any way analogous to the post-WWII period. In that era the Soviet Union (in 1917) and its subsequent Eastern European allies, along with China, and later Cuba and Vietnam, had broken with capitalist exploitation, abolished private property and established nationalized and planned economies that prioritized human needs, not capitalist profits. They all established a state monopoly of foreign trade that blocked the penetration of their economies from cheaper U.S. and European goods that undermined their own development. These accomplishments were based on popular social revolutions that defeated wartime fascist/capitalist-led governments in Eastern Europe. Pro-Soviet Communist Parties in Western Europe led in the resistance to Hitler’s occupation when the French and Italian (Vichy and Mussolini) governments welcomed and allied with Hitler’s onslaught and wartime occupation. The Vietnamese defeated both the French imperialist efforts to retain their former colony and the U.S. ten-year genocidal war that murdered four million Vietnamese in that U.S. horror for U.S. neo-colonial domination.

The post WWII Eastern European pro-Soviet governments facilitated the construction of socialist-oriented societies characterized by a generalized social equality, including free education and health care for all and broad investments in housing and cultural endeavors. These combined to rip a huge section of the world out of the U.S.-dominated and exploitative capitalist orbit. The new workers’ states additionally threatened the imperialist world by providing a modicum of support to various anti-colonial national liberation movements around the world, usually to keep imperialist colonizers at bay, but insufficient to definitively break from capitalist rule. Indeed, the Stalinist policy toward various national liberation movements most often consisted in using these just struggles for self-determination and freedom as “bargaining chips” with imperialism to secure secretly negotiated deals with the U.S. and other imperialist powers to limit aid in return for concessions to the various Russian and Eastern European Stalinist bureaucrats, for whom the maintenance of their privilege superseded their interest in advancing socialist revolutions. The new East European workers’ states – however much they were bureaucratically deformed by their Stalinist leaderships, and devoid of even a semblance of workers’ democracy, were nevertheless the central reason for the U.S. imperialist-orchestrated Cold War, that focused on the near-total exclusion of these new societies from the world capitalist economy, including from all international financial and banking institutions. Their encirclement by military blocs, including NATO and SEATO (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization), with the future prospect of restoring capitalism, was their central objective.  In time, this included the establishment of 1,100 U.S. military bases in some 100 countries, all aimed at preserving and extending U.S. economic, political and military hegemony around the world and at bringing down the workers’ states, whose rapid economic growth and broad social welfare measures initially posed a serious alternative to the West.

Capitalist restoration in Russia and China

The Stalinist policy of  “peaceful co-existence,” that is, the subordination of support to social revolution around the world to negotiated deals with imperialism, in time and inevitably led to the disintegration of these workers’ states and the restoration of capitalism in the USSR in 1990-91 led by Stalinist bureaucrat head of state, Boris Yeltsin.

The restoration of capitalism in China began a decade earlier, but in a more controlled manner in 1979 led by the new Chinese Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping, who signaled world imperialism that China was more than willing to re-open to imperialist penetration and plunder. Even prior to Deng, the Sino-Soviet “dispute” gave proof that Chinese Maoists were more than willing to side with U.S. imperialism on a world scale, having declared that the USSR was the “main danger.”  This included formal meetings between the Chinese leadership, culminating in the 1972 visit by U.S. President Richard Nixon to China during the Vietnam War when the U.S. was raining death and destruction on that beleaguered country. China’s subsequent recognition – the first in the world – of the 1973 U.S.-orchestrated military coup in Chile, where General Augusto Pinochet slaughtered some 60,000 leftists after overthrowing the Salvador Allende government, and then China’s 1979 U.S.-supported military invasion of Vietnam, signaled the Chinese Stalinist’s capacity for deadly alliances with U.S. imperialism. At that time China supported the genocidal Pol Pot Khmer Rouge government when Vietnam intervened to halt Pol Pot’s systematic murder of millions of Cambodians.

China enters the WTO

Convinced that capitalist restoration in China was on the order of the day in 2001, the U.S. ended all aspects of hostility toward China and presided over China’s admission to the World Trade Organization (WTO). The terms were simple enough; China would allow U.S. corporations to set up shop and employ endless numbers of Chinese workers at near slave wages laboring in state-of-the-art U.S. factories to produce unprecedented numbers of commodities for the U.S. and world marketplace. This super-exploitation of Chinese labor had the effect of temporarily boosting declining U.S. profit rates, closing non-competitive U.S. factories, and freezing or reducing U.S. wage rates – more than a 10-year bonanza for U.S. corporations, which happily shipped back to the U.S. Chinese-made commodities from U.S.-owned factories at near zero tariff rates. Indeed, U.S. tariff rates at some 1.5 percent or zero on most Chinese imports were among the lowest in the world. And why not? Why would corporate America tax Chinese made commodities manufactured by U.S, corporations?

China emerges as chief U.S. rival

In the 20 years since China was admitted to the WTO, China went from operating as one of the world’s lowest technology nations to today, when Chinese technology rivals or exceeds almost all other nations on earth. In the past 20-plus years China was transformed from providing “internal migrant” teenage girls from the countryside, producing garments in prison-like foreign-owned dormitory factories at six cents per hour and seven days a week, to a nation with some of the most modern Chinese-owned factories in the world, producing world-class industrial tools and machinery and state-of-the-art 5G (fifth generation) electronics and telecommunication products.

Super-high-tech 5G Chinese corporations like Huawei are today capable of challenging and exceeding the world’s most sophisticated operations. A 2017 Financial Times survey of the global mobile infrastructure market showed that Huawei had a world market share of 28 percent, with Sweden’s Ericsson at 27 percent, Finland’s Nokia at 23 percent and ZTE, another Chinese firm, at 13 percent. Japan’s Samsung had 3 percent. All the others, including the U.S. corporation, Cisco, had but 6 percent between them.

Chinese imperialism

Capitalist-imperialist China has come a long way since its 2001 entry into the WTO. China stands first in the world in the number of billionaires at 1,058 in 2021 compared to 696 U.S. billionaires. Most revealing, in 2020 the number of Chinese billionaires stood at only 626! As in the U.S., with the likes of billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos approaching trillionaire status via their skyrocketing investment portfolios, China’s super rich similarly use their fortunes in endless speculative ventures on the various Chinese and international stock exchanges.

As in the U.S., China’s super rich are pressed a bit, for public consumption, to “share the wealth,” as with Biden’s new proposals to increase corporate taxation. China’s President Xi Jinping’s recently announced plans to spread “common prosperity,” compelling some of the corporate elite to announce sizeable multi-billion dollar charitable contributions to education and health care – social measures that in China have long been banished as free government-mandated policy.

Chinese tax administrators have similarly pledged to crack down on tax dodgers, fining Zheng Shuang, for example, one of the country’s most popular actresses, $46 million for tax evasion. In China, as it is near official practice in the U.S., the corporate elite are largely free from taxation. A September 20 New York Times headlined story described how “The PwC,” the giant PricewaterhouseCoopers accounting firm, “helped the world’s largest companies avoid taxes.” PwC’s method was simple and described in detail by The Times. They placed PwC employees in various Treasury Department posts, where they concocted specific tax code loopholes for PwC patrons to avoid taxes. That is, they re-wrote and manipulated U.S. tax laws for the benefit of the corporate elite in much the same manner that is the norm with regard to all legislation produced by the U.S. Congress, including the present  “politicking” with President Biden’s ever-changing $3.5 trillion so-called infrastructure package.

China’s capitalist elite

The Chinese Supreme Court, weighed in on Xi’s “wealth sharing” and “common prosperity” rhetoric when it recently declared that the 72-hour work weeks common at many private-sector companies, were illegal. This corporate-enforced  “996 work hour system” derived its name from its requirement that employees work from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm, 6 days per week, that is, 72 hours per week.

Needless to say this massive intensification of labor, deemed by many as a Chinese system of modern-day slavery, along with massive tax evasion and stock market speculation, and the exploitation of workers around the world, accounts for the vast fortunes of the Chinese elite. That China presided over the construction of more coal-fired energy plants abroad than the rest of world combined informs us that here too China’s imperialist system knows no limits. But here too, to counter China’s horrendous reputation as the world’s largest green house gas polluter, President Xi recently announced that China planned to stop construction of all coal-fired plants abroad. Abroad! Yet, China is still constructing massive numbers of coal-fired power plants at home. Xi offered no accounting of either its domestic coal operations or its greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets. In 2020, China said it hoped to reach a “peak in green house emissions” by the end of this decade and reach net-zero emissions by 2060, a deadly scenario akin to world imperialism’s other major polluters, including the Pentagon, among the largest polluters on earth. Further, Xi’s recent UN pledge to end coal-fired plant production abroad, no doubt to burnish China’s image as COP26 UN climate talks begin in Glasgow in November, was not without its ambiguities. Was China ending the physical construction of coal plants abroad, but providing the financing for such construction? Would private Chinese companies be allowed to build coal plants abroad?

According to Credit Suisse Research Institute, China’s top 1 percent own nearly 31 percent of the country’s wealth, up from 21 percent in 2000. In the U.S. the top 1 percent own some 35 percent.

In 2016-17, monopoly capitalist-imperialist China, the world largest industrial producer, consumed 59 percent of the worlds’ total supply of cement, 47 per cent of its aluminum, 56 percent of nickel, 50 percent of coal, 50 percent of copper, 50 percent of steel, 27 percent of gold, 14 percent of oil, 31 percent of rice, 47 percent of pork, 23 percent of corn, and 83 percent of cotton. A large portion of all these commodities is supplied by Africa, Asia and Latin America, with whom China maintains classical imperialist relations centered on the massive extraction of surplus value, that is, super profits for Chinese capitalists.

China’s largest four banks, among the largest, if not the largest in the world, are significant shareholders-partners with major U.S. banks operating in China including CitiBank, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase. All these U.S. mega banks operate in China under Chinese law, with Chinese capitalist hands in the till. How could it be otherwise?

Chinese “shadow banks,” private institutions operating with the barest of government regulation, are akin to their U.S. counterparts in leveraging massive debt in real estate speculation that today threatens to bring on a crash similar to the U.S. 2008-09 banking/real estate catastrophe.

Inter-imperialist competition

To conclude, there is no ”new Cold War” emerging between the U.S. and China, but rather the classic intensification of inter-imperialist competition and rivalry between the major world economic powers with the less powerful imperialist states, whose interests are continually undermined by their “bettors,” ever pressed to take sides in increasingly fruitless efforts to maintain their own interests and profits. No doubt, Chinese diplomats bitterly denounced the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine deal, even though the planned subs are not scheduled to hit the high seas for perhaps a decade. AUKUS notwithstanding, the ever-deepening inter-imperialist competition for world markets, resources and the “right” to oppress and exploit poor nations and working people everywhere is the driving force behind the ever-deepening crises that humanity faces.

Globalized and predatory capitalism and its imperial superpowers have no solutions other than at the expense of the vast majority. Endless wars, bloated military budgets [wherein monopolized corporations reap super profit for manufacturing ever sophisticated instruments of death and destruction] racism, sexism and LGBTQI discrimination are all capitalism’s calling cards. The same is the case with fossil fuel-induced global warming and the resulting catastrophic climate horrors as well the current and future deadly pandemics. All are inherent in the capitalist-imperialist system.

Afghanistan’s Impoverished People Live Amid Enormous Riches

Vijay Prashad

On September 25, 2021, Afghanistan’s Economy Minister Qari Din Mohammad Hanif said that his government does not want “help and cooperation from the world like the previous government. The old system was supported by the international community for 20 years but still failed.” It is fair to say that Hanif has no experience in running a complex economy, since he has spent most of his career doing political and diplomatic work for the Taliban (both in Afghanistan and in Qatar). However, during the first Taliban government from 1996 to 2001, Hanif was the planning minister and in that position, dealt with economic affairs.

Hanif is right to point out that the governments of Presidents Hamid Karzai (2001-2014) and Ashraf Ghani (2014-2021), despite receiving billions of dollars in economic aid, failed to address the basic needs of the Afghan population. At the end of their rule—and 20 years of U.S. occupation—one in three people are facing hunger, 72 percent of the population lingers below the poverty line and 65 percent of the people have no access to electricity. No amount of bluster from the Western capitals can obscure the plain fact that support from the “international community” resulted in virtually no economic and social development in the country.

Poor North

Hanif, who is the only member of Afghanistan’s new cabinet who is from the country’s Tajik ethnic minority, comes from the northeastern Afghan province of Badakhshan. The northeastern provinces in Afghanistan are Tajik-dominated areas, and Badakhshan was the base from which the Northern Alliance swiftly moved under U.S. air cover to launch an attack against the Taliban in 2001. In early August 2021, the Taliban swept through these districts. “Why would we defend a government in Kabul that did nothing for us?” said a former official in Karzai’s government who lives in Badakhshan capital, Fayzabad.

Between 2009 and 2011, 80 percent of USAID funds that came into Afghanistan went to areas of the south and east, which had been the natural base of the Taliban. Even this money, a U.S. Senate report noted, went toward “short-term stabilization programs instead of longer-term development projects.” In 2014, Haji Abdul Wadood, then governor of the Argo district in Badakhshan, told Reuters, “Nobody has given money to spend on developmental projects. We do not have resources to spend in our district, our province is a remote one and attracts less attention.”

Hanif’s home province of Badakhshan—and its neighboring areas—suffer from great poverty, the rates upwards of 60 percent. When he talks about failure, Hanif has his home province in mind.

For thousands of years, the province of Badakhshan has been home to mines for gemstones such as lapis lazuli. In 2010, a U.S. military report estimated that there was at least $1 trillion worth of precious metals in Afghanistan; later that year, Afghanistan’s then Minister of Mines Wahidullah Shahrani told BBC radio that the actual figure could be three times as much. The impoverished north might not be so poor after all.

Thieves in the North

With opium production contributing a large chunk of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, it is often a focus of global media coverage on the country’s economy and has partly financed the terrible wars that have wracked the country for the past several years. The gems of Badakhshan, meanwhile, provided the financing for Ahmad Shah Massoud’s Jamiat-e Islami faction in the 1980s; after 1992, when Massoud became the defense minister in Kabul, he made an alliance with a Polish company—Intercommerce—to sell the gems for an estimated $200 million per year. When the Taliban ejected Massoud from power, he returned to the Panjshir Valley and used the Badakhshan, Takhar, and Panjshir gems to finance his anti-Taliban resistance.

When the Northern Alliance—which included Massoud’s faction—came to power under U.S. bombardment in 2001, these mines became the property of the Northern Alliance commanders. Men such as Haji Abdul Malek, Zekria Sawda and Zulmai Mujadidi—all Northern Alliance politicians—controlled the mines. Mujadidi’s brother Asadullah Mujadidi was the militia commander of the Mining Protection Force, which protected the mines for these new elites.

In 2012, Afghanistan’s then Mining Minister Wahidullah Shahrani revealed the extent of corruption in the deals, which he had made clear to the U.S. Embassy in 2009. Shahrani’s attempt at transparency, however, was understood inside Afghanistan as a mechanism to delegitimize Afghan mining concerns and push through a new law that would allow international mining companies more freedom of access to the country’s resources. Various international entities—including Centar (United Kingdom) and the Polish billionaire Jan Kulczyk—attempted to access the gold, copper and gemstone mines of the province; Centar formed an alliance with the Afghanistan Gold and Minerals Company, headed by former Urban Development Minister Sadat Naderi. The consortium’s mining equipment has now been seized by the Taliban. Earlier this year, Shahrani was sentenced to 13 months’ jail time by the Afghan Supreme Court for misuse of authority.

What Will the Taliban Do?

Hanif has an impossible agenda. The IMF has suspended funds for Afghanistan, and the U.S. government continues to block access to the nearly $10 billion of Afghan external reserves held in the United States. Some humanitarian aid has now entered the country, but it will not be sufficient. The Taliban’s harsh social policy—particularly against women—will discourage many aid groups from returning to the country.

Officials at the Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB), the country’s central bank, tell me that the options before the government are minimal. Institutional control over the mining wealth has not been established. “What deals were cut profited a few individuals and not the country as a whole,” said one official. One major deal to develop the Mes Aynak copper mine made with the Metallurgical Corporation of China and with Jiangxi Copper has been sitting idle since 2008.

At the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) meeting in mid-September, Tajikistan’s President Emomali Rahmon spoke about the need to prevent terrorist groups from moving across the Afghan borders to disrupt Central Asia and western China. Rahmon positioned himself as a defender of the Tajik peoples, although poverty of the Tajik communities on both sides of the border should be as much a focus of attention as upholding the rights of the Tajiks as a minority in Afghanistan.

There is no public indication from the SCO that it would prevent not only cross-border terrorism, but also cross-border smuggling. The largest quantities of heroin and opium from northern Afghanistan go to Tajikistan; untold sums of money are made in the illegal movement of minerals, gemstones, and metals out of Afghanistan. Hanif has not raised this point directly, but officials at DAB say that unless Afghanistan better commandeers its own resources, something it has failed to do over the past two decades, the country will not be able to improve the living conditions of its people.

Wave of school occupations in Greece demanding safe classrooms and opposing attacks on education

Robert Stevens

A wave of school occupations has broken out in Greece to demand safe classrooms, and to protest attacks on education by the New Democracy government.

Occupations have taken place at many high schools and especially in lyceums in the most populated area of the country—Attica, which includes the capital, Athens, and other town and cities on the mainland and islands including Thessaloniki, Patras, Volos, Lamia, Chania, Heraklion and Rethymno.

Students are demanding smaller classes and an end to the 50%+1 protocol under which schools will only close classes if a there is one person more than half the class who has COVID. They insist on free and frequent rapid tests in schools for all children, and not just self-tests, and recruitment of the necessary cleaning staff. Students also demand the recruitment of more teachers.

Students hold up a protest banner outside the town hall in Petroupoli district in northwestern Athens on September 24, 2021. It reads, "50+1 sardines in boxes you are making making profits on the backs of children" (Credit: Dimitris Giannitsis/Facebook)

A central demand is for the abolition of the minimum admission system for university qualification. This was passed by the right-wing government in February and establishes a minimum entry requirement for university and a maximum graduation term. It requires students on most courses to complete their degrees within six years.

As in all countries, children have been sent back into school with hardly a mitigation measure to prevent them getting COVID. The TOC newspaper’s web site reported Wednesday that 4,026 cases, almost a third (29 percent) of all new cases recorded in Greece for the week September 20-26, were aged 4-18 years. This was an increase of 21 percent among that age group in just one week.

A statement published Saturday by the Athens Students' Coordinating Committee, which has organised many of the protests, denounced government lies that pupils would return to safe classrooms. “The first weeks of school operation have proven that the government's big words that 'schools will operate normally this year' are fairy tales.” The statement added, “You have returned us to an oppressive stressful school. We are running from school to tutorials, from tutoring to studying to make up for the huge gaps we all have.”

In the summer Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ government passed a law under which the country’s 180,000 schoolteachers can be required to hold all classes online, from pre-school nurseries to sixth forms preparing for university entrance exams. Refusal to participate can lead to teachers and pupils, many of whom do not have the necessary equipment, being victimised. This law is now being used against schoolchildren and teachers who are supporting the occupations and are being deemed absent from class.

The statement continued, “You have chosen to gamble again with life and our right to education! Get ready to face us again this year! Let's go! The government thinks it has found a new ‘trick’ to terrorize us: Running webex [the digital platform set up for remote learning] when a school is being occupied. (By the way, you didn't care about running webex so much last year when students didn't have microphones, cameras, etc., nor do they care about students getting sick with Covid now…”

The organisation has called national protest for October 11. It said in reference to the suppression by the government against a mass movement of pupils occupying school nationally a year ago to oppose unsafe classrooms, “Let us remind you that last year you brought us prosecutors, police, threw chemicals at us, arrested students and still didn't stop us.”

The statement called for “parents and teachers to fight together! Student Councils, Parents’ Associations and Associations of Teachers”.

There is widespread support for the students’ fight among teachers. At a General Assembly of the OLME teachers trade union on September 25, as the occupations were escalating, delegates voted to back the student occupations. Expressing the sympathy of rank and file- teachers, by 92 percent they ratified a proposal to strike, or abstain from tele-education, where there are already student occupations underway. By the same margin, they voted in opposition to the Ministry of Education’s stipulation that teachers be assessed for their performance.

Local OLME teacher delegates voting to support the school occupations (Credit: Panos Doulas/Facebook page “COVID-19 Solidarity”–Menoume energoi–We will stay active)

Occupations began Friday and by Tuesday had spread throughout the country. On Tuesday, ERT reported that 19 schools were occupied in Thessaloniki.

TOC reported, “In Veria [in northern Greece], the 1st 2nd and 4th Lyceum, the 1st, 2nd, 4th and 5th Gymnasium are closed due to occupation, while for a short time the students of the Music School and the 3rd Lyceum of Veria were also occupied.”

“Many secondary schools in the Peloponnese are under occupation. Already in Tripoli… the 1st Gymnasium - Lyceum, the 2nd Gymnasium—Lyceum, the 3rd Lyceum, the 4th Lyceum and the EpAL [Vocational Lyceum] of Tripoli are under occupation.”

The website reported that “the 3rd high school of Sparta is under occupation since today, Monday 29 September.”

In Corinthia, the Gymnasium and Lyceum at three schools, Zeugolati, Vrachati and Velos were occupied.

Between Friday evening and Monday morning 24 schools were occupied in Epirus. TOC reported, “According to the data available so far, eleven schools in Arta, seven in Giannina, two in Preveza and four in Thesprotia are under occupation.” It noted that in Giannina, “The students are raising demands related to pandemic measures and issues related to school infrastructure.”

TOC also reported that in the Magnesia region of Greece, of which Volos is the capital, eight schools were occupied, “with students raising many issues, mainly about the coronavirus measures.”

In the regional unit of Phthiotis in central Greece, pupils at the 7th Gymnasium of Lamia began occupying on Tuesday morning. The presented demands including that self tests be available for all and that masks must be used. TOC reported that “they demand that the class be closed when a student becomes ill…”

Many schools on Greece’s islands were occupied, with at least seven under occupation in Corfu. In Crete, data from the Department of secondary of education confirmed that the occupation had hit 14 schools in Heraklion. The goodnet web site reported that schools occupied included, “1st, 2nd ,4th middle School, high School, Panormos, high School of the Diocese, the high school Spili, high school Anogia, —1st, 2nd, 3rd ,4th YELL county, the Experimental secondary school, Music School, the 1st and 2nd EPAL.”

The occupations to demand safe classrooms, in the middle of a pandemic in which the youngest in society are being infected on mass are part of a growing movement internationally against the homicidal policies of the ruling elite. It is significant that these demands are being made alongside ones to demand more spending on education and on the recruitment of teachers.

Asylum seekers being held in conditions akin to detention centres in UK

Barry Mason

A recently published report condemns the conditions of asylum seekers herded into temporary accommodation in Britain during the COVID-19 pandemic. It compared accommodation in hotels to detention centres.

The report was produced by academics at Napier University in Edinburgh in cooperation with Glasgow-based Migrants Organising for Rights and Empowerment (MORE). Its aims included documenting the experiences of asylum seekers in Glasgow and the impact of their relocation. It found that putting asylum seekers in temporary accommodation had increased the risk of them contracting COVID-19.

Border force officials stand up as people thought to be migrants who made the crossing from France are brought into port after being picked up in the Channel by a British border force vessel in Dover, south east England, Thursday, July 22, 2021. AP Photo/Matt Dunham)

The report’s interim findings included:

“The relocation of our participants to hotel-type accommodation during the pandemic had a negative impact on their health and wellbeing, as individuals were faced with a number of restrictions such as losing their cash payments, being unable to cook their own food, having their mobility restricted, being unable to visit friends or have visitors.

“Far from offering a ‘safe environment’ during COVID-19, our participants experienced these forms of temporary accommodation as unsafe and often as detention-like paces.

“Relocations to temporary or contingency forms of accommodation took place with little consideration of people’s needs and with no consultation with asylum seekers themselves. In some cases, individuals were even threatened with deportation by the accommodation provider’s staff if they resisted the move.”

From the start of the pandemic in March 2020 until October that year the Home Office increased its use of hotel accommodation for asylum seekers around eight-fold, from 1,200 to 9,500. The Napier university team spoke to around 50 asylum seekers in Glasgow.

The report details the intolerable situation many were forced into. It notes that a “key policy change that took place during the pandemic was the withdrawal of financial support for those asylum seekers living in hotel-type accommodation throughout the UK. While asylum seekers usually receive £39.63 per week, the financial support was stopped for those who were moved to hotels during the pandemic. This was based on the grounds that for those moving to full-board accommodation, the basic necessities such as food and toiletries would be provided so there was no need to give cash payments.” This “policy decision was widely criticised for leading to the deterioration of asylum seekers’ mental health and wellbeing, and its lawfulness was challenged in court by legal firms representing asylum seekers.”

Other asylum seekers were sent into a “Mothers and Baby Unit” in Glasgow, opened in October 2020. The report notes that “at the heat of the second wave… In January 2021, the Unit housed around 25 asylum-seeking women with babies or who were pregnant. Previously used for accommodating young people experiencing or at risk of homelessness, the facility was refurbished by Mears in 2020, turning it into 37 self-contained bedsits.” It was criticised for its unsuitability and cramped conditions.

One woman, Miriam, was being sent to the Mothers and Baby Unit. As she was collecting her belongings, including some food, she was told, “You are a destitute, you an asylum seeker. You're not supposed to have all these things”. She asked a driver what would happen if she refused to go into the unit. The driver replied, “it's your right if you can refuse, you can refuse. But you should know that if you refuse [the] Home Office can also decide to deport you”.

Beginning in April last year, as the COVID-19 pandemic began to explode, several hundred asylum seekers in Glasgow were removed from temporary flats and put in five hotels around the city. Mostly men there were also pregnant women.

In June last year an asylum seeker, Badreddin Abadlla Adam, was shot dead by police after he stabbed six people including three fellow asylum seekers. The Sudanese man had been put in the Park Inn hotel, Glasgow. Forced to self-isolate in his room because of suspected COVID-19, his mental health quickly deteriorated. A friend explained to Sky News, “Because of bad food [at the hotel] this man [Badreddin] started to suffer from abdominal disturbances and vomit every time. The people thought he was affected by coronavirus and detained him in his room for one month which affected his mental health badly.”

Similar conditions were detailed in a Refugee Council report in April this year. It was based on interviews with around 400 asylum seekers in Hull, Leeds, London and Rotherham.

The Refugee Council said that its “staff have been extremely concerned about gaps in support for people, and have often had to step in to provide basics like shoes and coats and make sure that people receive the food they need. People’s mental and physical health has declined, and they have spoken about their feelings of isolation and abandonment.”

The council added, “Many people are lacking adequate clothing and footwear, often having arrived in the UK with just the clothes they are wearing. The Home Office does not provide clothing for people seeking asylum and the Refugee Council routinely works with people whose only footwear has been a pair of worn flip flops. Having such unsuitable footwear means people are unable to leave the hotel for exercise or to access services which are typically a fair walking distance from the hotels.”

Hotels are not the only inappropriate accommodation being used for asylum seekers. It is now a year since the former Napier barracks in Kent were first used to house asylum seekers. It was the scene of protest and a fire.

Marking the anniversary of its opening, Steve Valdez Symonds, the UK Refugee and Migrant Rights director for Amnesty International told the Evening Standard on September 21, “Over the past year, the squalid detention-like conditions at Napier Barracks have spread Covid-19, renewed or exacerbated psychological traumas and generally punished people for doing no more than exercise their right to seek asylum in the UK.

“The barracks are now a byword for the cruel injustice of the Government’s attempts to shirk responsibility for providing a fair, humane and properly-run asylum system.”

The recent influx of refugees from Afghanistan have not fared much better. Speaking before a Home Affairs Committee meeting of MPs in parliament on September 22 Matthew Rycroft, Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, said 7,000 Afghan refugees were in hotel accommodation including 70 unaccompanied children. The government could not rule out them still being in hotels at Christmas, with Rycroft’s deputy, Tricia Hayes, telling MPs vaguely, “While at the minute we cannot put a date on when we are going to get people out of hotels, we all want to do it as quickly as possible.”

The use of hotels and other large facilities to accommodate asylum seekers is being used by far right and fascist forces to harass and abuse them. A Freedom of Information response by the Guardian newspaper from the UK Home Office showed 70 racist incidents at hotels and barracks housing asylum seekers in an 18-month period up to the end of July.

The Tory government is moving to make the situation for asylum seekers even more intolerable. Its Nationality and Border Bill currently going through parliament having passed two readings, includes proposals to set up offshore “accommodation and reception centres” in Africa and mainland Europe. It would also make it illegal for asylum seekers to enter the UK without prior permission. Those entering without permission, which would be the case for the majority of those coming to the UK, could face the threat of up to four years in jail followed by deportation. The United Nations refugee organisation, UNHCR, said in a September 23 statement that the proposals “would break international law.”

Balkans school reopenings and low vaccination rate drive latest wave of coronavirus infections

Markus Salzmann

COVID-19 infections and deaths have returned to record-high levels in Romania, Bulgaria, and other Balkan countries following the reopening of schools.

Since the pandemic began, more than 1 million of Romania’s 19.4 million residents have contracted the virus, and 36,230 have died. Last Wednesday alone, there were 130 deaths. Between the second and third waves, that number had fallen to two on some days.

The number of new daily infections on Friday returned to the level of last December, i.e., 7,676. Officials say it could rise to 20,000 by early October. At the same time, the number of unreported cases is enormous. According to estimates by the health organization MedLife, infection figures are five to seven times higher than the officially reported numbers.

As of last Wednesday, only 32 intensive care beds were still available in the entire country, but these beds could not be used because of a lack of properly trained staff.

The reason for the dramatic increase in infections is the opening up of schools after the summer vacation, combined with the country’s low vaccination rate of just 30 percent. Even now, 40 percent of medical staff and teachers are not vaccinated. After schools were closed for extended periods last year, unrestricted face-to-face classes resumed on September 13. Now schools have become hotspots of transmission. According to the Ministry of Education’s figures, which are likely to be a significant underestimation, 3,362 students and preschoolers and 1,200 school employees have been infected.

Experts have long warned against opening up schools, predicting a rapid rise in infection and death rates. “Schools act as an accelerant for transmission in communities. It’s like driving in first gear in the community and then immediately shifting into fifth gear when children attend school,” explained health expert Razvan Chereches.

While universities are partially switching back to online lectures, all of Romania’s political parties—government and opposition—have agreed to keep schools open in the interest of the economy. In light of the possibility of new elections, all of the parties have stated that there will be no lockdown or the reimplementation of the protective measures introduced last year. Following the loss of its majority, the country’s right-wing government led by Florin Citu is expected to call for a new election.

COVID-19 infections are also rising sharply in neighbouring Bulgaria. Last week, 516 people died as a result of the disease, the highest number this year. Of the country’s 7 million inhabitants, almost half a million have become infected, 20,350 have died, and more than 4,700 people are currently in hospital, with around 400 in intensive care. The situation is extremely tense because the Bulgarian health care system was in a disastrous state even prior to the pandemic. Since then, the situation has only worsened.

Last week alone, 152 new infections were reported among medical staff. This means that 14,287 employees in this sector have now been infected. Information on how many have died is not available. In schools, the situation is similarly devastating. As with medical staff, only 30 percent of teachers have been vaccinated against COVID-19. According to the Ministry of Education, one in five teachers has already been infected with the virus.

When schools opened on September 15, just 2 percent of students had been vaccinated. The spread of the virus in schools was directly enabled by the government. Education Minister Nikolay Denkov explicitly allowed celebrations in schools when classes began, and the country’s interim government is doing nothing to increase vaccination rates. In mid-August, just 15 percent of the population had been vaccinated, and even now Bulgaria is at the bottom of the list in Europe for vaccination rates.

In November, following yet another failure to form a government, the third parliamentary election this year is expected to take place. All of the parties are united in opposing any new measures to contain the pandemic.

In Kosovo, with a population of 1.9 million, a total of 16,000 infections and 2,931 deaths have been reported, although the number of unreported cases is likely to be many times higher. The country’s clinics have been at the edge of their capacity in recent weeks. A nurse at Pristina University Hospital told Radio Free Europe it was no longer possible to care for patients with one nurse responsible for 20 people. Patients often had to be cared for by relatives, which further increased infections in the clinics.

The small country’s criminal governments have completely neglected the health care system. A paltry 3.5 percent of gross domestic product is spent on it annually, according to 2019 figures. As is the case in many other Balkan and Eastern European countries, a majority of doctors, nurses and other health professionals have long since migrated to other European countries, because local wages are not enough to survive on.

Prime Minister Albin Kurti had contested the election campaign last winter by rejecting renewed protective measures. A total of 50 children have already had to be hospitalized for a serious course of infection, even though schools were still closed. On Friday, Kosovo’s Health Minister Arben Vitia announced that schools would reopen starting September 27. The government thereby rejected a demand by the state-run National Institute of Public Health to further postpone the start of school.

In Serbia, numbers have risen to the level of the first wave. Of the nearly 7 million residents, 906,000 have been infected so far and over 8,000 have died. Again, the number of unreported cases is likely to be higher.

The WHO representative in Serbia, Marian Ivanusha, commented on the seriousness of the situation, “Every day in Serbia, as many people die as the number of passengers on a bus. If that’s not worrying, I don’t know what is.” While initially the pace of vaccination in Serbia was very high, the government has since halted all efforts to stop the spread of COVID-19. Across Europe, Serbia has the highest rate of new infections.

In Montenegro, the seven-day average reached new records in September. About 500 new infections are reported daily. Again, the country’s clinics are bursting at the seams, with only about 41 percent of the population vaccinated, and the number of severe infections is increasing.

In North Macedonia, a devastating fire disaster at an improvised COVID-19 clinic in September shed light on the dire situation in the country. In the town of Tetovo, a fire killed 14 patients and injured 12, some seriously. According to reports, an exploding oxygen tank may have started the fire. Local media reported that there had already been difficulties with the oxygen tanks and associated equipment last month.

Burning Covid-19 clinic in Tetovo, northern Macedonia (video screenshot)

The makeshift facility, assembled from containers, is one of about a dozen set up to supply clinics that are completely overloaded with coronavirus cases. Here again, less than 30 percent of the population is vaccinated.

The collapse of Germany’s Left Party

Peter Schwarz

The Left Party suffered a devastating defeat in Germany’s September 26 federal election, even though the election was marked by massive social discontent. The vote for the party of outgoing chancellor Angela Merkel, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), plummeted and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) lost more than two million votes.

Compared to the 2017 federal election, the Left Party’s share of the vote almost halved. It lost 4.3 percentage points and only achieved a 4.9 percent score. Its number of seats shrank from 69 to 39, making it by far the smallest parliamentary group in the Bundestag, which has grown to 730 members. If it had not won three directly elected deputies—two in Berlin and one in Leipzig—it would no longer have been represented in the new Bundestag, because it failed to clear the five-percent hurdle required for proportional representation.

The vote losses are spread across all the federal states and affect all the political wings of the Left Party. They are particularly dramatic in the five eastern states, the party’s former strongholds. Here, it averaged only 9.8 percent. Only in Thuringia (11.4) and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania (11.1) did it still achieve double-digit results. In Thuringia, where the Left Party has held the state premiership for seven years with Bodo Ramelow, it was only the fourth-strongest party behind the AfD (24), the Social Democrats (23.4) and the CDU (16.9).

The Left Party also lost massively in the west. In North Rhine-Westphalia, where Sahra Wagenknecht was the lead candidate, it lost 3.8 points to just 3.7 percent.

In the elections to the state parliaments in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the Left Party also suffered losses, although not to the same extent as in the national elections. In Berlin, its result fell by 1.6 points to 14 percent, and in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania by 3.3 points to 9.9 percent.

The collapse of the Left Party is all the more remarkable because the mood in the elections was clearly left-wing. This is shown not only by the massive vote losses of the CDU, its Bavarian sister party the CSU, and the AfD, but also by the polls on the main issues that preoccupied voters. The coronavirus pandemic, climate change and social inequality were consistently at the top of the list.

In Berlin, a referendum held alongside the elections saw 56.4 percent in favour of expropriating large private housing corporations, with only 39 percent voting against. But, although the referendum’s initiators are close to the Left Party, it did not benefit.

The reason for the Left Party’s collapse

The party leadership has no explanation for its collapse in the elections other than superficial speculation. Yet the reason for the Left Party’s fall is obvious. It is due to its right-wing, capitalist policies, which can no longer be disguised with left-wing phrases. After years of experience with its government practices, no one falls for the claim any more that it is a left alternative to the other bourgeois parties.

Already from 2002 to 2011, the alliance of SPD and Left Party that governed Berlin was the nationwide leader in cutting public sector jobs and wages, privatizing hospitals and selling off public housing to speculators. The sharp social contradictions in the capital are a result of these policies.

During the coronavirus pandemic, the Left Party supported the Grand Coalition’s “profits before lives” policy, which has already claimed 94,000 lives and is now leading to a dangerous fourth wave. Bodo Ramelow, the minister-president of Thuringia, the sole state where the Left Party leads the government, has repeatedly led the way in lifting restrictions. As a result, Thuringia has the second highest infection rate in Germany: 6.3 percent of the total population have contracted the virus so far.

The state also ranks high in the deportation of refugees. And it is a stronghold of the AfD, which is led in Thuringia by fascist Björn Höcke and is courted by the Left Party. After an alliance of AfD, CDU and FDP toppled Ramelow in 2019 and he was only returned to office thanks to public protests, he personally helped AfD nominee Michael Kaufmann to the post of vice-president of the state parliament with his own vote.

During the federal election, the right-wing character of the Left Party was visible to everyone. Its entire election campaign was geared toward offering itself as a coalition partner to the SPD and the Greens, the parties of war and welfare cuts. In the midst of the election campaign, it openly declared its support for NATO for the first time and—by abstentions and several votes in favour—supported the war mission of the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) in Afghanistan.

Shortly before the election date, it replaced its election programme with an “immediate programme” that was virtually identical with the positions of the SPD and the Greens on all issues. Many voters preferred to vote for the original instead of the copy. According to broadcaster ARD’s analysis, 590,000 Left Party voters migrated to the SPD and 470,000 to the Greens. 520,000 did not vote at all.

The Left Party is reacting to the election debacle with a further shift to the right. In addition to Ramelow, Dietmar Bartsch, the chair of the Bundestag parliamentary group and others have spoken out in favour of a more prominent role for Sahra Wagenknecht after the election. Ramelow told the newspaper Die Welt: “I always had a good relationship with Sahra Wagenknecht. I think it’s good that she’s back.”

Wagenknecht had published the book Die Selbstgerechten (The Self-Righteous) shortly before the start of the election campaign. It is a nationalist diatribe that rails against cosmopolitanism and openness to the world, promotes protectionism and a strong state, and denounces immigrants and refugees for allegedly pushing down wages, and as strike-breakers and elements alien to the German culture.

Participation in the federal government is now no longer an option for the Left Party, as the number of its MPs is not sufficient for an alliance with the SPD and the Greens. But it is pushing all the harder for government participation in the federal states. In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where the SPD previously governed with the CDU, it offered itself to the SPD on election night to help the Social Democrats secure a majority. In Berlin, it wants to continue the coalition with the SPD and the Greens under the right-wing Social Democrat Franziska Giffey.

The bankruptcy of the pseudo-left Marx21 and SAV

The Left Party’s collapse delivers a damning verdict on pseudo-left organizations like Marx21, Socialist Alternative (SAV) and RIO, which for many years have fueled the illusion that the Left Party could be transformed into a socialist party through pressure from within or without.

In reality, the Left Party was a bourgeois party from the beginning. Its origins go back to the Socialist Unity Party (SED), the Stalinist party of state in the former East Germany, which in 1989 supported the reunification of Germany on a capitalist basis. Its perspective at the time was summed up by the last SED prime minister and long-time honorary chairman of its immediate successor, the PDS, Hans Modrow: “In my view, the path to unity was unavoidably necessary and had to be taken with determination,” he wrote in his memoirs.

The PDS held steadfastly to this determination to defend capitalism from then on. It soon became a factor of order again in the East German municipalities and states, suppressing opposition to the disastrous social consequences of capitalist restoration.

In 2007, the PDS merged with the West German Electoral Alternative for Work and Social Justice (WASG) to form the Left Party. The WASG was a rallying point for union bureaucrats, SPD functionaries and pseudo-lefts who feared that the SPD and the unions would lose their control over the working class after the Schröder government’s Agenda 2010 introduced massive attacks on welfare and workers’ rights.

The leaders of the new party were PDS founder Gregor Gysi and Oskar Lafontaine, who had 40 years of experience in the highest SPD positions and state offices. Among other things, he had been mayor of Saarbrücken, minister-president of Saarland, state and federal SPD chairman, SPD candidate for chancellor and federal finance minister under Schröder.

While the old SED cadres in the Left Party made little effort to disguise their right-wing and conservative character, several pseudo-left tendencies made an effort to present it as a left-wing, socialist party.

In the 1990s, Jakob Moneta, Winfried Wolf and other leading representatives of Ernest Mandel’s Pabloite United Secretariat joined the PDS, where they quickly rose to the executive committee or became members of the Bundestag. With the founding of the Left Party they were followed by Marx21 and SAV, whose international roots go back to the “state capitalist” tendency founded by Tony Cliff and the Militant Tendency founded by Ted Grant. Previously they had both moved in the periphery of the SPD.

These pseudo-lefts play a leading role in the party. Janine Wissler, who was a member of Marx21 and its predecessor organisations for 20 years, is co-chair of the Left Party and led it in the election campaign together with Dietmar Bartsch as the top candidate. She has defended the party’s orientation towards government participation and its approval of NATO in numerous talk-show appearances, election campaign speeches and interviews.

The pseudo-lefts have not moved the Left Party to the left, as they promised, they have gone to the right with it. The reason for this is the class character of these tendencies. They do not represent the interests of the working class, but the affluent middle class—academics, trade union and party officials, etc.—who defend the existing social order in order to preserve their privileges.

What attracted them to the Left Party was not its hollow social phrases, but its defence of the bourgeois order and the tens of millions that flow into party coffers each year through parliamentary salaries, campaign expense reimbursements and grants by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.

The pseudo-left’s turn to the right is an international phenomenon. In Greece, Syriza was elected as the governing party in 2015 on a wave of opposition to EU austerity dictates and then implemented a brutal austerity programme. In Spain, Podemos, as a part of the government, supports ruthless sanctions policies, the criminalization of Catalan separatists, and brutal social attacks. In the US, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) operate as a left-wing fig leaf for the Biden administration.

It is therefore consistent that the pseudo-lefts continue to cling to the lie that the Left Party can be transformed into a socialist party. Marx21 has published a long statement “The Left Party: What to do after the election debacle,” which blames “left-blinking Social Democrats and Greens,” the “reformer camp” of the Left Party, Sahra Wagenknecht and many others for the election defeat and calls for a “new start” for the Left in the opposition.

The votes for the SPD and the Greens were “linked to the hope for progressive social and ecological policies,” Marx21 claims. “If they don’t deliver, it will soon become clear that there is still an urgent need for a strong left.” An urgent need to suppress opposition to the government, it should correctly read. Janine Wissler, the very own product of Marx21, is not mentioned in the statement once. You can’t cover your own tracks in a more cowardly fashion than that.

The perspective of the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei

The SGP, unlike the pseudo-left, has always insisted that a socialist movement can only be built in irreconcilable political struggle against the Left Party and the entire social democratic and trade union milieu to which it belongs.

As early as March 2, 1990, when a party congress of the PDS—then still in the GDR—adopted a social democratic programme that rejected class struggle and supported capitalist ownership, we wrote in Neue Arbeiterpresse: “The working class must break with Stalinism in its new form just as decisively as with the Stalinism of [former SED-leaders] Honecker and Krenz. The PDS does not represent their interests, but those of a privileged layer of bureaucrats who now want to make a career in capitalism.”

Since then, we have published hundreds of articles and statements explaining why the struggle for socialism is only possible against Die Linke and requires a break with it. Its fall is therefore to be welcomed. It is the consequence of a sharp class polarisation. Millions of Corona deaths, an unprecedented gap between rich and poor, and the return to militarism, rearmament and war are putting fierce class struggles on the agenda around the world.

The ruling classes are responding by closing ranks, moving further to the right, arming the state apparatus and strengthening fascist forces. This is also true of the Left Party.

The working class is moving in the opposite direction. Signs of resistance are multiplying around the world—strikes against low wages, intolerable working conditions and lay-offs, protests against herd immunity policies in the pandemic, demonstrations against high rents and global warming.