UK government in crisis over back-to-work drive

Steve James

Boris Johnson’s government is deeply split over how quickly it can shift from a policy of containing the COVID-19 pandemic, which has so far cost over 16,500 lives in Britain, to a full-scale return to work.

Big business and the banks, having fleeced the working class of at least £135 billion on a government bailout, is clamouring to restart the extraction of profit from the working class. Currently, a 35 percent drop in gross domestic product is anticipated if the lockdown lasts until June. Clawing this back from the working class is now British capitalism’s primary objective.

The difficulty the Conservative government faces is the overwhelming opposition to such a move by the working class. Politico reported that a government source stated, “There is a Fleet Street desire for us to lay out exit strategies, but it is not where the public are. The public are seeing death numbers and thinking we’ve got to do everything we can to stop the spread of the virus.”

Having openly declared a policy of “herd immunity” and then been belatedly forced to impose a lockdown due to widespread public anger, Johnson and his ministers are weakened and deeply discredited. This has been made worse by their inability to reverse the impact of their earlier policy—exemplified by the absence of testing, an inability to provide even medical staff with personal protective equipment (PPE) and leaving the old and infirm to die in care homes along with thousands more who never see a hospital before succumbing to the disease.

This has led to the grotesque spectacle of Johnson himself, his special adviser Dominic Cummings and Health Secretary Matt Hancock, all with blood on their hands, urging their fellow criminals, including Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove, Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Cabinet Secretary Sir Mark Sedwill, to put the brakes on plans to end the lockdown within weeks.

Johnson is also concerned that too early a reduction in restrictions would cause a second peak in COVID-19 cases, which, because of the exponential nature of the virus transmission, could “do the most damage to health and the most damage to the economy.”

The dispute is framed for public consumption on the R-number—the reproduction rate of the virus—with Gove and Sunak wanting to contemplate lifting restrictions as soon as the R number falls below 1, meaning the number of total infections falling. Gove told the cabinet, “I’ve come to the view that we need to run this hot.”

These divisions are being played out in the pro-Tory media. Last weekend’s Sunday Times article, “38 DAYS when Britain sleepwalked into carnage” by the Insight team, exposed Johnson and his government’s extraordinary complacency and incompetence.

On January 24, Hancock at the first emergency Cobra (Cabinet Office Briefing Room A) meeting described the threat from coronavirus to public health as “low.” This was despite a L ancet editorial that day warning of a pandemic comparable to the 1918 Spanish flu. The meeting lasted only an hour. Boris Johnson was not even present, choosing instead to attend a Chinese New Year event.

Over the next five weeks, Johnson missed four further Cobra meetings. His spokesman claimed Britain was “well prepared for any new diseases.” An unnamed senior adviser told Insight, “Boris didn’t chair any meetings. He liked his country breaks. He didn’t work weekends.”

Rather than being “well prepared,” Britain was badly equipped for a pandemic. Stockpiles of personal protective equipment (PPE) had dwindled and expired. Key worker training had been neglected. Repeated warnings of mass casualties were ignored. The Sunday Times’s source reported members of the pandemic advisory group would joke “‘Haha let’s hope we don’t get a pandemic,’ because there wasn’t a single area of practice that was being nurtured for us to meet basic requirements for [a] pandemic, never mind do it well.”

Even when the scale of the looming disaster began to dawn on the government, almost nothing was done. The source continued “Almost every plan we had was not activated in February.” No testing was done in February, no PPE were ordered, indeed some existing stocks were exported.

A health department “insider” concluded, “We were doomed by our incompetence, our hubris and our austerity.”

The result of this policy is now being played out. This weekend saw reports of hospitals on the brink of exhausting their supplies of PPE and of oxygen. Last Friday, Public Health England changed its advice to medical staff, suggesting that full-length gowns offering a high level of safety from infection could be replaced with “disposable plastic aprons.” Alternatively, hospitals should ration supplies of “fluid-repellent gowns” to the most “aerosol-generating procedures and surgery.” Some 84 tonnes of gowns were reported to be either en route, held up, or due to arrive from Turkey.

Currently, the government admits to around 50 deaths of National Health Service (NHS) staff. Nursing Notes has logged double that figure when careworkers are included.

The Tory-supporting Daily Telegraph highlighted the government and health authorities’ failure to respond to Exercise Cygnus in 2016, which warned of catastrophic NHS failings in the event of a respiratory flu-type pandemic and 750,000 deaths.

With the government in deep crisis, new Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer has stepped forwards as a potential saviour. Backed by the public service trade unions, Starmer has already repaid the confidence placed in him by big business as a reliable replacement for Jeremy Corbyn. Writing to then-acting Prime Minister Dominic Raab last week, Starmer confirmed “the Labour Party’s intention to work constructively with the government on managing this crisis and helping to protect people’s lives and livelihoods.”

Starmer outlined his central concern. “Overcoming this crisis requires taking the British public with you. Millions of people have...exceeded government assumptions about their willingness to make sacrifices and stay at home.”

Starmer stopped short of openly proposing a government of national unity but has operated as if this was already in place ever since. Starmer has requested the government set out its criteria for ending the lockdown as soon as possible, including outlining which sectors of the economy will be started first. He made a vague reference to the need for increased testing but made no mention of any figure beyond the government’s own hopelessly inadequate figure of 25,000 daily by mid-April.

Since then, Starmer has formed a political alliance with leading hard-right Tories such as former Brexit Secretary David Davis and former party leader Ian Duncan Smith in championing a “back-to-work” strategy. Working together in intimate discussions with leading business figures, Duncan Smith told the Times we need to “accept and admit we are coming out of lockdown.” The British people, he continued, “need to know that the sun is rising at some point, in an economic sense.”

Starmer was backed yesterday by former Labour Prime Minister and unindicted war criminal Tony Blair, whose Institute for Global Change proposed various “trial and error” models between re-opening as much of the economy as possible and a death rate deemed politically manageable.

The document, “A sustainable exit strategy: managing uncertainty minimising harm,” outlined a “contingent exit plan” that varied between a “hard lockdown” if daily deaths were over 500, a “soft lockdown” if deaths were between 100 and 500, and a “soft open” if deaths were less than 100. Blair wants top business figures from across industry to be bought directly into government to bring their “collective firepower” to bear on determining government policy.

It is a measure of the desperation within ruling circles and their disconnect from popular sentiment that they would entertain the belief that Starmer, Blair and business leaders acting as coronavirus “Tsars” could secure popular support for a policy that will cost so many lives—not just in the inevitable “second wave” spoken of by Johnson, but successive waves of the pandemic. Rather, the conditions are rapidly emerging for an explosion of the class struggle against any government formation that tries to impose the dictates of the corporations and banks.

US farm relief program hands billions to agribusiness while millions lack food

Alex Findijs

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced plans on Friday, April 17, for a farm relief program. Funded largely through the CARES Act, the $19 billion package will be used to funnel funds to corporate farms while providing little assistance for the vast majority of small or working farmers.

Like other government programs to help farmers, most of this money will end up in the hands of agribusiness. The majority of farmland is owned by farms grossing over $500,000 in sales, a figure that demonstrates the demise of the American family farm. In total, $16 billion will be handed directly to farmers, of which $9.6 billion goes to the livestock industry. This funding will be given largely as reimbursements for “losses” and will not be contingent upon providing food to those in need.

The remaining $3 billion will be used to purchase $100 million each of produce, meat and dairy that will be distributed to food banks, nonprofits and community and faith organizations every month. This is a paltry sum, amounting to just 27 cents a day for every food insecure person, a figure that will only decline as America’s now 22 million unemployed seek assistance.

It will also provide funds to distribute 1,000,000 meals a week to children in “a limited number of rural schools.” How this would actually be done given the wide dispersion of such students, many of whom rode buses for an hour or more to reach their schools, is unclear.

This bailout is intended to offset financial losses from the collapse of distribution systems during the pandemic. While grocery stores are having difficulty keeping their shelves stocked, much of the food in the pipeline is packaged in bulk quantities for institutional buyers such as restaurants and schools.

The closure of restaurants, schools and other institutional buyers has resulted in farmers destroying millions of pounds of food as their distribution chains are disrupted. This is not because there is no demand, but because transitioning to retail packaging is too costly. It is cheaper to destroy food than to repackage it and send it elsewhere.

This mass destruction of crops and dairy products comes at a time when millions of Americans have lost their jobs and are now turning to food banks to feed their families. Some food banks are reporting an increase in demand as high as 300 percent. Lines of cars in the thousands have been reported queuing up at food banks across the country.

But even if all the available food was sent to food banks, they lack the necessary resources and equipment to handle such an expansion in supply. A study of food banks in San Diego County, California, found that in 2015 less than half of food banks had enough refrigerator space and only 54 percent had enough freezer space to service people in need. If food banks around the country did not have enough storage space before the pandemic, there is no reason to believe that they are prepared to handle a huge rise in demand or supply.

Feeding America, one of the largest organizations representing food banks, estimates that an additional $1.4 billion is needed to cover the increasing operating costs of food banks, an insignificant amount compared to the $2 trillion granted to bail out the banks and corporations.

Whether or not food banks and charities can handle a massive influx is not issue for the capitalist class and the state that protects it. They do not care whether people receive enough food, as long as the agricultural industry remains profitable and the pretense of aid is maintained.

There is not even mention in the legislation of providing agricultural and food processing workers with aid. Without proper protective equipment, these workers are at great risk, and migrant workers in particular are threatened with destitution without income support.

Farm laborers earn between $15,000 and $24,499 a year, according to official figures, with a quarter living below the poverty line. Already working and living in horrid conditions, these workers face privation during a global health crisis. Suffering similarly horrendous conditions, meat packing workers are kept on the job while the virus is allowed to tear through their plants. It has already taken several lives and infect ed hundreds of workers. These workers need aid far more than the capitalists who exploit them.

The ruling class has made it clear with this relief program that it only cares about protecting profits at the expense of workers. Kenneth Sullivan, CEO of the meatpacker Smithfield Foods, said, “We have to operate these processing plants even when we have COVID. If we don’t, we sadly won’t have food.”

This is a falsehood. Tens of millions of pounds of food are being destroyed while the USDA estimates that 2.4 billion pounds of meat sits in cold storage—enough to cease all meat packaging for several weeks until protective measures are put in place.

An estimated 3.7 million gallons of milk are dumped every day, enough to provide all 37 million food insecure people with two quarts a week. There is plenty of food to last while measures are taken to protect workers, both citizen and immigrant. The claim that workers must die to keep production flowing is a nefarious lie.

What the working class needs is not a haphazard dumping of goods into food banks and charities, but an adequate income so that all working people can afford to buy food, and an adequate supply so that the food is available to those who want it.

This should be combined with a coordinated effort to reorganize food supply chains to meet social needs. The vast resources of the state and private industry must be placed under the control of the working class, with a coordinated and scientific plan for the safe harvesting and distribution of agricultural goods.

The retooling of currently unused supply chains is a necessary and far from impossible task. Restaurants, schools and hotels must have their cold storage resources reconverted into temporary distribution centers for those in need. One restaurant in Baltimore, Maryland, called La Cuchara, has already repurposed its supply chain to create a makeshift grocery store. The widespread capacity for converting existing resources is apparent.

But such changes must be made to feed the working class, not to benefit the capitalists who would sacrifice millions of workers to the virus to keep their profits flowing.

Oil price contracts take historic plunge into negative territory

Nick Beams

In a day of chaos in the international oil market yesterday, futures contracts expiring today on US-produced West Texas Intermediate crude dropped to as low as -$40.32 per barrel, meaning that producers were paying buyers to take them off their hands.

The price at the close of trading was -$37.63 compared with $18.36 a barrel on Friday. It is the first time in history that oil prices have gone into negative territory.

The reason for the collapse is the lack of storage capacity in the US because of the collapse in demand due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated lockdown measures.

The main US storage facility is at Cushing, Oklahoma, a town of 10,000 people. The storage hub was at 70 percent capacity last week with traders saying it would be filled within two weeks. This prompted the futures selloff because the holder has to deliver 1000 barrels for every contract they hold to Cushing.

Traders in the futures market described the chaos.

Phil Flynn, senior market analyst at Price Futures Group, told the New York Times: “We saw a total collapse in the market. There was everybody selling it into the hole with no buyers. They’re going to have to drive down to a price where someone wants to buy it, and no one wants to buy it.”

The director of energy futures at Mizuho in New York told the Times: “I’m 55 years old, and I worked on the trading floor in college. I’ve been through the first Gulf War, second Gulf War, World Trade Center, dot-com crisis, and nothing came close to this. It could get worse. This situation we are in is that bad.”

In an interview with Bloomberg, Michael Lynch, the president of Strategic Energy and Research, said: “The background psychology right now is just massively bearish. People are concerned that we are going to see so much build-up of inventory that it’s going to be very difficult to fix in the near term and there is going to be a lot of distressed cargoes on the market. People are trying to get rid of the oil and there are no buyers.”

Some futures traders are still betting on a revival and so contracts for June remain positive. But an even bigger crash could be in the making when they become due.

Stephen Schork, the editor of an oil-market newsletter, told the Financial Times: “It just gets uglier from here.”

The rapid rise in US unemployment—22 million workers have applied for jobless benefits in the past month—means that fewer and fewer Americans will be driving in the coming months, pushing down summer demand for petrol, usually the peak period.

“This summer is dead on arrival,” he said. “The biggest demand months are not going to happen.”

Global oil demand, which was 100 million barrels a day in 2019, has now fallen by 30 million barrels due to the pandemic.

Prices for oil deliveries in June remain positive but the most actively traded futures contracts fell by 18 percent yesterday to close at just over $20 per barrel. Back in January they were trading at $65 per barrel.

The price of contracts for Brent crude remains positive because it is stored on tankers which still have a capacity to take additional supplies but it is only a matter of time before this runs out. At the end of March there were 109 million barrels of oil stored on tankers at sea. Last Friday it has risen to 141 million.

The oil price crash has shattered the agreement orchestrated by US president Donald Trump for Russia and Saudi Arabia to cut oil production by 9.7 million barrels a day. Trump claimed the deal would save “thousands of jobs” in the US oil industry. But like so many of the other assertions by the blowhard in the White House this pronouncement has been torn to shreds within a matter of days.

Speaking at a press briefing yesterday, Trump said the administration was looking at increasing the holdings of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. “This is a great time to buy oil,” he said.

The idea was first floated several weeks ago but Congress refused to supply the funds for purchases. Trump said the administration was looking to fill up national petroleum reserves by as much as 75 million barrels and “one way or the other it will be full.”

But such is the extent of the contraction it is doubtful this will halt the slide, any more than the agreement with Russia and Saudi Arabia did.

The crash in the futures market will accelerate the already rapid decline in the physical market where prices are already down by more than 60 percent from the start of the year.

Even before yesterday’s historic events, Bloomberg reported that some buyers in Texas were offering as little as $2 a barrel for some oil streams. “In Asia,” it noted, “bankers are increasingly reluctant to give commodity traders the credit to survive as lenders grow ever more fearful about the risk of a catastrophic default.”

The crash is ripping through the US oil industry. Last week producers shut down 13 percent of oil drilling operations but this has not been sufficient to counter the oversupply.

The shale industry, which produces around 10 million barrels a day, providing what Trump has hailed as “US energy dominance,” now faces a rapid decline, if not a collapse.

And it could have ramifications that reach into financial markets. Much of shale oil production has been financed by high-yield junk bonds and risky leveraged loans, predicated on oil prices of at least $60 per barrel. If major defaults occur this could have large knock-on effects in financial markets and eventually reach the banks.

In the middle of last month, the Financial Times reported that most oil companies, with the exception of Exxon [Mobil] and Chevron were on “life support” and that even with oil prices at $57 a barrel “the US shale industry was already struggling to generate cash and retain investor support in 2019” and 42 companies, with $26 billion in debt, had filed for bankruptcy.

In the month since that report, the situation has become dramatically worse at a speed never seen before in history.

Global COVID-19 infections, deaths rise amid drive to revive corporate profit-making

Benjamin Mateus

Despite more than four billion people on the planet being in some form of isolation, the number of new cases throughout the world continues to grow at a steady pace of approximately 75,000 per day. The staggering daily death toll of 5,000 to 7,000 is a reminder of the deadly nature of the pandemic that has brought much of the world to a standstill.

Mass grave on Hart Island, New York City’s Potter’s field

Nearly 800,000 cases have been reported in the US, representing 32 percent of all infections internationally. The death toll to date is 42,458, almost 2,000 on Monday alone. The US accounts for a quarter of overall fatalities.

The number of cases in the hot spots of New York and New Jersey continues to steadily increase, with still harrowing fatalities. On Monday, nine states each confirmed over 1,000 new cases. By all accounts, given the still very limited access to testing, the figures for infections and deaths from COVID-19 are underestimates.

This is the public health situation with over 90 percent of the US population under some form of stay-at-home order since President Trump declared a state of emergency over a month ago. The economic and social calamity resulting from these measures to rein in the pandemic is only partially reflected in the record number of people—over 22 million—who have filed for unemployment insurance over the past four weeks. Millions of those laid off have lost their health insurance, and thousands are lining up at food banks in cities across the country to receive food to feed their families.

However, rather than using the vast riches of the country to care for the people, the political establishment, from the fascistic Trump to Congress and both big business parties, to growing numbers of state governors and mayors, is working in concert to force a premature return to work that will only add more human fuel to the viral fire.

There is no evidence, despite the constant media talk of “a turn for the better,” that the pandemic is under control. The bogus “guidelines” for reopening the economy announced by Trump last week mark the end of any pretense of a nationally coordinated effort to contain the disease. In reality, they are a green light to force workers back to work, with no protections in place against the virus, to satisfy corporate America’s demands for fresh profits even at the cost of untold thousands of lives.

Health care facilities in Boston, Detroit, New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles continue to be overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients. There are more than 180 refrigerated trailers stationed behind New York City hospitals to hold corpses under conditions where funeral homes and morgues are beyond capacity. In one instance, more than 20 bodies were piled on the sidewalk of a Brooklyn funeral home. Many of the dead who are not claimed will be buried in mass graves with thousands of forgotten others.

The state of Ohio, with nearly 13,000 cases, made headlines reporting that 73 percent of the inmates at the Marion Correctional Institution were infected with COVID-19. Testing of inmates revealed that 1,950 prisoners were positive for the virus, accounting for 20 percent of all cases in Ohio. Along with these, 154 of the institution’s staff members tested positive.

Michigan has also noted that a significant number of its prisoners and staff tested positive for the coronavirus. However, there is no present policy to track COVID-19 in prison populations. The American Civil Liberties Union Ohio advocacy counsel Claire Chevrier noted in her Twitter account, “This was a policy choice.”

Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker reported that hospitalizations are up seven percent, the majority of cases in the state occurring in Chicago and adjacent counties. The hardest hit areas are the poorest sections of Cook County and South Chicago, including impoverished black and Hispanic sections of the working class.

Massachusetts now ranks third in the number of COVID-19 cases, as new surges are reported in Boston’s poor neighborhoods. The death toll is expected to surpass 2,000 this week. According to Governor Charlie Baker, the hospitals are starting to see the effects of the surge.

Last week in Colorado, the JBS meatpacking plant in Greeley had to close after more than 50 of its employees contracted the coronavirus. The union that represents the 3,000 workers at the plant reported that two workers had died.

In an effort at damage control, Vice President Mike Pence told reporters that his task force would quickly bring in resources for COVID-19 testing. Meanwhile, Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, told CNN, “It will close long enough to test every worker and clear workers to return to work. Those that are cleared are going to return after a short closure…”

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, whose state saw 1,242 new cases yesterday with 94 deaths, announced that he would allow some businesses, including gyms and hair salons, to open again this week, and hospitals could resume elective surgeries on April 24. Similar announcements were made by the governors of Tennessee and Vermont.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis opened the beaches on April 17 for “essential activities.” Democratic Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards, in one of the worst hit states, said he was hoping to lift social distancing restrictions by May 1. Minnesota is allowing recreational activities like golfing, boating and fishing to commence this week.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, whose state has been the epicenter of the pandemic in the US, said, “It’s time to start opening the valve slowly and carefully,” and suggested that upstate New York might reopen sooner than New York City.

In a revealing comment, the Wall Street Journal wrote on Friday that Trump had “asked White House aides for economic response plans that would allow him to take credit for successes while offering enough flexibility to assign fault for any failures to others.”

He plans to starve the states of the resources they need until they allow businesses to reopen, while shifting blame for any repercussions on the states.

Virtually every reputable medical and public health institution has warned that such a reckless course will cost thousands, and perhaps millions, of lives.

An internal document obtained by the Washington Post from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Centers for Disease Control warns that the White House’s plan “would entail a significant risk of a resurgence of the virus.” The memo states, “Inside the White House, it has been clear to officials since last week that there is no longer much of a debate—at least with the president—about starting the reopening process May 1… rather, the debate this week has been over how to implement the return, what data could be used to justify the decision, and how to build public support for it to provide the president maximum political cover…”

Yesterday also saw a new report released by Harvard University in conjunction with multiple affiliated institutions. It states that the United States would need to deliver over five million tests per day by early June, scaling up to 20 million by late July, to sufficiently test two to six percent of the population and provide sufficient capacity to test its essential workers.

Since April 6, the US has performed only some 150,000 tests per day, despite the repeated boasting by the White House that it has conducted millions of tests. The shortfall in testing is multifaceted—supply chain issues, inadequate testing centers, non-validated tests, a shortage of the necessary reagents for PCR testing and appropriate swabs. Additionally, because the tests were permitted for public use by the FDA under emergency measures, they have yet to be validated, and many in the health community have voiced concerns over false-negative tests.

At Monday’s White House Press conference, Lieutenant General Todd T. Semonite, commanding general of the US Army Corps of Engineers, gave a briefing on the building of field hospitals at various locations around the country, such as McCormick Place in Chicago, Miami Beach Convention Center, Colorado Convention Center, TCF Center in Detroit and Javits Center in New York. These are densely populated urban centers.

Many of these hospitals stand ready and empty. It is clear that the government is preparing for the second wave of casualties. The director-general of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said on Monday, “The worst is yet to come.”

Meanwhile, much of the focus of the media and the political establishment is on the completion of negotiations to push through yet another round of bipartisan corporate bailouts, in the form of an additional $450 billion centered on the cynically misnamed “Paycheck Protection Program.”

With each passing day it becomes clearer to millions of workers in the US and around the world that there is a total divergence in interests between the great bulk of humanity and the tiny, parasitic elite that dominates the world economy and its political establishments. The struggle to put an end to capitalism and establish socialism is literally a matter of life and death.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of economic nationalism

Nick Beams

The coronavirus pandemic and its economic consequences have revealed, in the living experience of billions of people the world over, the internal rot and decay of the capitalist system, together with its patent absurdities.

One only need point, by way of example, to the fact that the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, the richest man on the planet, has increased his fortune by $24 billion since the start of the year to more than $138 billion, while nurses and health workers in the US and around the world are battling the virus without the necessary protective equipment.

A container ship from Horizon Lines Inc. is unloaded at the Port of Tacoma Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2008, in Tacoma, Wash. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

Other examples abound, such as the fact that health authorities and states in the US have been forced to fight against each other in the capitalist “free market” to secure necessary equipment and supplies, or that thousands are queuing at food banks in the US, while dairy farmers pour milk away and agricultural producers plough their crops into the ground.

While exposing such contradictions, covered over in the now bygone era of so-called “normal times,” the pandemic has also revealed those fundamental truths that have long formed the basis of the fight for genuine socialism.

First and foremost, it has made clear that the tiny minority of corporate and financial oligarchs, and the profit system over which they preside, stand as an obstacle to the rational organisation and scientific planning of the economy and society necessary to deal with the threat to human life. This is an obstacle that must be removed.

However, it would be a mistake to see this immense social problem as applying only to the extraordinary state of affairs produced by the pandemic. It has a far broader reach.

The proponents of a return to work, irrespective of the health dangers posed to workers, maintain that a continued lockdown means more economic stress and worsening poverty, as well as health and psychological problems. Such problems, however, could be rapidly resolved through the expropriation of the vast fortunes of the Bezoses of the world, to provide a living income to all, while dealing with the health crisis.

As the World Socialist Web Site perspective of Saturday 18 April explained, if the wealth of the 250 billionaires in the United States, with a collective net worth of close to $9 trillion, were expropriated and distributed evenly among the 100 million poorest households, it would provide each one with a monthly income of $5,000 for 18 months.

Moreover, the problems described by the return-to-work advocates as a product of the lockdown, are actually those of daily life, created by the “normal” operations of the capitalist system. And they will be massively intensified in the wake of the pandemic as the ruling classes seek to pump value, extracted from the working class, into the mountain of fictitious capital created as a result of the bailout of the corporations and the financial system.

Every day workers have their health impaired by the relentless worsening of conditions. Every day they work under the threat they could be thrown out of work and reduced to poverty, as the result of some “restructuring” operation.

Every day they face the prospect that, as a result of gyrations in the global financial system and the actions of speculators, they could be thrown onto the scrapheap, have their pension, superannuation, or 401(k) plans slashed, their mortgage repayments increased and so on—changes that can devastate their lives in the blink of an eye.

In other words, the madness made manifest by the pandemic is only a particularly egregious expression of the daily functioning of a malignant social and economic order.

Just as the pandemic has laid bare the absurdities, irrationalities and destructive consequences of the profit system, so it has revealed the reactionary character of the political structures on which the accumulation of private profit is based—i.e., the nation-state system.

By its very nature, the pandemic has revealed, both from a health and an economic standpoint, the necessity of international collaboration and co-operation.

There is no national solution to the health dangers posed by the virus—it requires a planned global response. An individual nation may bring the virus under control within its confines, but then be confronted with the danger of a “second wave” of infections, due to its continued spread in other parts of the world. The virus does not have a passport, nor does it recognise immigration and border controls.

This pandemic has delivered a major shock to the world. But it has been a trigger event for the crisis, the conditions for which had been developing over a considerable period. It is no more the underlying cause of the present crisis than was the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which triggered the outbreak of World War I, the fundamental reason for the conflict.

The pandemic has not only triggered the crisis. It has been the accelerant for processes already well advanced before it arrived on the scene. One of these is the growth of national divisions and conflicts.

Long before the denunciations of China, now pouring forth from the Trump administration and its allies around the world over the virus outbreak, the US intelligence and military apparatus, backed by the political establishment—Democrat and Republican—together with powerful sections of the mass media, had designated China as a threat to the “national security” of the US.

In the strategic planning documents of the US military machine, the “war on terror” was replaced by an insistence that it was now necessary to prepare for an era of “great power competition,” in which China was designated the chief danger to US economic and military hegemony.

Trade war had been launched through the imposition of tariffs and China’s plan for economic and technological development had been declared an existential threat to US national security, accompanied by a series of bans on Chinese telecom companies and the launching of a global campaign by the US to have its allies exclude the Chinese company, Huawei, from the development of 5G networks.

While the US, at least to this point, is the main proponent of economic nationalism, under the “America First” doctrine of the Trump administration, the same tendencies are reflected everywhere.

The European Union is riven with divisions and conflicts, the most prominent of which has been Brexit. The EU is split over an economic response to the pandemic, with Germany striving to maintain its dominance over the bloc, as leading figures in the political establishment insist it must play a greater role in global affairs.

As a result of the pandemic, voices are being raised that the disruption of global supply chains, caused by the spread of the virus, along with lockdowns, have revealed problems in economic globalisation, meaning that each country must look to the protection of its “own” economy.

US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross set the tone back in January, when he declared that supply chain disruptions in China, resulting from the virus outbreak, would encourage US firms to shift their operations back to American soil.

The Japanese government of Shinzo Abe has set aside $2.2 billion from its economic stimulus package to assist manufacturers to shift production out of China.

A New York Times article by Neil Irwin on April 16, entitled “It’s the end of the world economy as we know it,” cited remarks by Elizabeth Economy, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who said there was a “rethink” underway over how much each country wanted to be reliant on another.

While this was not the end of globalisation, she raised, the pandemic had accelerated thinking in the Trump administration that there are “critical technologies, critical resources, reserve manufacturing capacity that we want here in the US in case of crisis.”

The article noted that France’s finance minister has directed French companies to re-evaluate their supply chains, to become less dependent on China and other Asian nations.

In the US, where anti-China outbursts are escalating daily, the South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham has even suggested the US should punish China over COVID-19 by cancelling its holdings of US Treasury bonds.

A gauge of the speed of these processes can be obtained by contrasting the situation that now prevails with what occurred in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008.

In April 2009, leaders of the G20 met in London to commit themselves to a co-ordinated response, vowing that never again would they go down the road of the protectionist measures that had played such a disastrous role in the Great Depression, helping to create the conditions for World War II.

For a time, the commitment to “resist protectionism” was a regular feature of statements by all international economic bodies, such as the G20 and G7. Now even the phrase has disappeared, under conditions where all the institutions established in the post-war period to regulate the post-war affairs of global capitalism—the World Trade Organisation, the G7, the International Monetary Fund, the World Health Organisation—are torn by conflicts or in an advanced state of decay.

The significance of these developments can only be understood within their broader historical context.

In the 19th century, the development of capitalism and the productive forces of mankind were aided by the formation of national states, such as the unification of Germany in 1871, the establishment of the Italian nation-state and the American civil war, which laid the political foundations for the development of the United States as an economic powerhouse.

But the advance of the productive forces did not stop at national borders. It spread globally in the last quarter of the 19th century and the opening decade of the 20th. This vast economic development, however, brought to the surface a central contradiction in the global capitalist system—one that has bedevilled it ever since—between the development of a global economy and the division of the world into rival nation-states and great powers.

This conflict exploded in the form of World War I, as each capitalist government sought to resolve it, as Leon Trotsky noted, “not through the intelligent, organised co-operation of all of humanity’s producers, but through the exploitation of the world’s economic system by the capitalist class of the victorious country.”

The Russian Revolution of October 1917—the overthrow of capitalism by the working class—pointed to the only way out. It was conceived and fought for by Lenin and the leadership of the Bolshevik Party as the opening shot of the world socialist revolution, that is, the taking of political power by the international working class, as the pre-condition for the reconstruction of the global economy on socialist foundations—the necessary next stage in the historical development of mankind.

The war resolved nothing. Economic nationalism intensified over the succeeding two decades, leading to the outbreak of an even more devastating world war in 1939.

In the last days of World War II and its immediate aftermath, the leaders of world imperialism recognised that a new international economic order and monetary system had to be constructed, because any return to the conditions of the 1930s would bring socialist revolution, including in the US.

There was an attempt to overcome the contradiction between the development of a global economy and the division of the world into rival nation-states and great powers, through the development of a new world trading and monetary system based on the economic might of the major imperialist power, the United States. This was the foundation of the Bretton Woods monetary system established in 1944, in which the US dollar, backed by gold, became the preeminent international currency.

But this system failed to provide a lasting solution. It only temporarily, in historical terms, ameliorated it. The essential contradiction re-emerged, because the very economic expansion it had produced undermined the foundation on which it was based—the economic superiority of the US over its rivals.

The beginning of the end of that dominance announced its arrival with the decision by US President Nixon, on August 15, 1971, to remove the gold backing from the US dollar. The relative weakening of the US vis-à-vis its economic rivals meant it could no longer maintain the system it had created.

The historic economic decline of the US has continued apace in the period since. From the economic powerhouse of world capitalism, it has become the centre of capitalist rot and decay, manifested, above all, in the process of financialisation—the complete divorce of wealth accumulation from the underlying process of production—and the making of profit, not through industrial development, as once took place, but by means of parasitism and speculation.

That rot erupted to the surface in the 2008 financial crisis and has now exploded in even more grotesque forms in the wake of the pandemic—exemplified in the present rise of the stock market as tens of thousands die.

However, US imperialism has no intention of fading from the scene. Rather, confronted by rivals on every front—China, Germany, the European Union and Japan—and seeing enemies everywhere, it is determined to maintain its position by all means necessary, including war.

The source of the great problems confronting humanity is not economic globalisation and the integration of economic and social life on a world scale.

Globalisation of production, in and of itself, represents an important advance. It raises the productivity of labour—the material foundation for all economic advancement—to new levels. Furthermore, the vast and complex systems of planning and communication, by which transnational corporations carry out their economic activities, lay the material foundation for a higher form of society, a planned international socialist economy, consciously controlled and democratically regulated by the world’s producers—the international working class.

In 1934, as war clouds were once again gathering, Trotsky warned that the call by fascist and nationalist regimes for a return to the “national hearth” had profound significance.

While the prospect of harmonious national economic development on the basis of capitalist property was a complete fiction, it had a menacing political reality. It signified the drive by the major powers to gather together all the economic resources of the nation in preparation for war. That war erupted just five years later, with even more devastating consequences than the first imperialist conflagration.

Today, the promotion of economic nationalism—now being accelerated as a result of the pandemic—has the same reactionary content.

The problems confronting mankind do not arise from economic globalisation as such, but are rooted in the deepening contradiction between this progressive development and the reactionary social and political order, based on private profit and the division of the world into rival nation-states and great powers, within which it is encased.

The productive forces, created by the labour of the international working class, must therefore be liberated from these reactionary fetters. That path was charted in the opening shot of the world socialist revolution in October 1917. It is the path to which the international working class must now return, as the only way forward out of the present crisis.

COVID-19: A Gendered Reading of a Pandemic

Akanksha Khullar 


The gender-disaggregated data available so far for COVID-19 demonstrates an almost equal number of confirmed cases between men and women. However, mortality rates are higher among men (2.8 per cent) than women (1.7 per cent). Purely from the perspective of a physical illness, the virus appears to affect women less severely than men. However, emergencies such as this one do not function in a vacuum; i.e. they do not have health implications alone. Their negative socio-economic impacts could exacerbate pre-existing inequalities and create new ones. And, although these impacts are serious for all, they are likely to affect women more.

Labour in the Health SectorFor instance, COVID-19’s disproportionate effects on women draws from the fact that a majority of healthcare workers across the globe are women. With healthcare workers at the forefront of combating the pandemic, they are at a greater risk than most of contracting the illness. To illustrate, Spain now has 40,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases, of which 5400—nearly 14 per cent—are medical professionals. In Italy, 9 per cent of the total cases have occurred among health workers, and about 3,300 doctors and nurses have been affected in China.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), women account for about 70 per cent of workers in the health and social care sector. This means relatively more female medical professionals are being exposed to the virus on a day-to-day basis in comparison to their male counterparts. The worldwide shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) such as masks, gloves, and sanitisers, worsens this scenario.

Division of Labour in HouseholdsThe state-imposed lockdowns being adopted across the world too have a gender dimension, which comes into sharper focus in traditional households where women already shoulder a substantial proportion of the domestic workload. Could this workload increase?

Even more developed countries with relatively greater gender parity struggle to put women at an equal footing owing to still predominant gender stereotypes and discriminatory social norms. Resultantly, it is women who have predominantly tended to carry out household work, including caregiving duties. According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), globally, women carry out 76 per cent of the total amount of unpaid caregiving responsibilities, which is over three times more than men.

Subsequently, with restrictions on movement, shutting down of businesses and schools, and with every member of the family being at home—the burden of these unpaid and household responsibilities could likely continue to fall more heavily on women, particularly in traditional households. This is especially problematic for women who also have professional responsibilities and are working from home due to lockdowns.

Gender-Based ViolenceProlonged quarantine measures could be a serious catalyst for escalation in domestic violence, placing victims at potentially far greater risk than before. According to the WHO, one in three women in the world experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetimes. Based on the probability of these lockdowns impacting businesses and increasing financial difficulties, which could be accompanied by spikes in alcohol consumption, anxiety, and depression—all considered triggers for violence against women—a resultant escalation in gender-based domestic violence could be anticipated.

This has already been documented in India: since the countrywide lockdown began, there was a two-fold increase in gender-based violence, with 257 complaints registered in the final week of March 2020 (23 March-1 April) alone. In Spain, calls to the domestic violence hotline have increased by 18 per cent, and a state-run hotline website recorded a 270 per cent increase in the number of sexual violence cases. This trend is visible globally.

Divisions of Labour in the WorkplaceEconomic repercussions of pandemics are well understood. Research suggests that women are more vulnerable to being laid off in such an environment. In the current situation, informal and part-time jobs are at the greatest risk of suspensions. In both developed and developing economies, many informal sector jobs are mostly undertaken by women. For instance, in South Asia, over 80 per cent of women in non-agricultural jobs are in informal employment; in sub-Saharan Africa, 74 per cent; and in Latin America and the Caribbean, 54 per cent. Even in the formal economy, many industries that are directly affected by the lockdowns—such as travel, tourism, F&B, food production etc—have high female labour participation.

Clearly, women are at a greater disadvantage in an already negative economic environment. This could be further exacerbated in any economic crisis precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. A fact sheet published by Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development demonstrates how, among other things, jobs created during and after an economic crisis are mostly built for, and offered to, men.

ConclusionOverall, it is evident that the multi-dimensional socio-economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic has a sizable gendered dimension. Consequently, gender-responsive policies will be necessary for mitigating the effects of the pandemic in a sustainable and equitable manner.

Zimbabwe’s Food Crises

Naveed Qazi

Zimbabwe’s food security poses a serious threat to national security, as it can cause civil unrest and general insecurity in the country.

Zimbabwe is facing the worst food shortage in recent memory. Once known as the breadbasket of the continent, the country is now facing its most serious crises. It has resulted in a lot of fear and loss of hope among people. Nearly half of Zimbabwe’s population, some eight million people, face food insecurity, with majority of population concentrated in the rural areas.

According to a report in November 2019, by Hilal Elver, the U.N’s Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Zimbabwe counts amongst the four highest food insecure States, alongside conflict-ravaged countries. In her preliminary findings, she said that the international community should scale up humanitarian aid to eliminate hunger and malnutrition in the country.

Zimbabwe has been ranked 9th by American charity organisation Concern Worldwide among the ‘world’s top ten hungriest countries’ in 2018. The reasons are often attributed to climate change. In the 2018-2019 season, parts of southern Africa, including Zimbabwe, received their lowest rainfall since 1981, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Many smallholder farmers have not had a good harvest for two or more years. Meanwhile, the continued advance of Army Worm, a highly destructive moth larvae, threatens those who have managed to grow maize and other staples.

The country has less than 5 percent access to irrigation facilities. Due to climate change, the ground water levels have also diminished, and temperature has also increased. There has been lack of reliable rainfall in the past five seasons. Food insecurity in urban areas has also been a cause of concern, as a heavy tax system, pervasive corruption, livestock losses, power cuts, recent droughts, high levels of unemployment, conditionalities set by U.S. and E.U., and low wages have affected the households. Businesses are also struggling and thus reducing their workforce.

Add to that, the country is also facing an economic recession with shortages of basics such as fuel and medicines. There were inflationary pressures seen in 2008, when the country stopped pegging its currency at par with the United States dollar. Zimbabwe adopted the use of U.S. dollar after hyperinflation drastically reduced the value of the local currency. However, ‘dollarising’ hit a major bump in 2015, when the dollar started vanishing from the formal banking system. In a bid to end the US dollar shortage, Zimbabwe’s central bank introduced bond notes – a form of surrogate currency that was backed by a $200 million bond facility from the Export-Import Bank. But, black market speculation quickly diminished the bond note’s value, triggering a shortage, which central bank tried to offset by creating electronic notes. It prompted the bank to merge bond notes –both physical and electronic- into Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) dollar, known as Zimdollar. Despite that, the effort has failed after Zimdollar quickly fell prey to black market speculation that sent its value plummeting.

Zimbabwe’s food security poses a serious threat to national security, as it can cause civil unrest and general insecurity in the country. Many people can only afford one meal a day. In Harare, people spend long hours queuing for food, as well in front of banks to get cash, and in shops to obtain cooking gas or water. While the food is readily available in supermarkets, inflation of upto four hundred ninety percent has made the people ‘food insecure’. There are scores of people who have migrated from poor rural areas to cities in search of job opportunities, to improve their access to sufficient and adequate food and other public services. However, they had ended up living in informal settlements that are multiplying in the streets of Harare. With the result, spreadable diseases due to unsafe water and open sewage are increasing.

According to a report in Al Jazeera, “the most vulnerable segments of society, including the elderly, children and women, are forced to rely upon coping mechanisms such as, school dropout, early marriage, and sex trade to obtain food, behavioural patterns that often are accompanied by domestic violence.”

Most of the schools in Harare are no longer able to continue their school feeding programmes. At best, some schools are able to offer one meal a week per classroom. The report, compiled by Unicef and the Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency, shows high levels of privation in rural areas, where 76.3% of children live in abject poverty. Statistics observed by the Guardian ascertain that almost half of these children do not have enough of the right food to eat. Child poverty is more prevalent in Mashonaland Central, Manicaland and Matabeleland North.

According to Reuters, Zimbabwe’s agriculture minister, Perrance Shiri, said that the country has less than 100,000 tonnes of grain in its strategic reserves. The grain reserve has a 500,000-tonne capacity, but has seen a drop after a poor harvest. Zimbabwe consumes 80,000 tonnes of maize every month.

For grain imports, Zimbabwe’s president Emmerson Mnangagwa has introduced measures designed to facilitate an increase in grain importation to alleviate the local shortages.

In January, Zimbabwe permitted the importation of genetically modified grains for the first time in over a decade, with the Grain Millers Association of Zimbabwe acquiring 100,000 tonnes of genetically engineered maize from South Africa and Brasil.

In addition, the government has zero-rated VAT and import duty on all basic commodities, and created a green channel to fast-track essential food consignments, through the land-locked country’s border posts.

Even though these interventions have helped, they have been not enough to deal with the widespread food shortages.

The World Food Programme says it needs a further $200m (£152m) to meet hunger needs in the country. Many consultants and research authors have called on the country to adopt policies such as large scale feeding programmes.

While Zimbabwe bought 100,000 tons of corn and received delivery of it from Tanzania in 2019, it hasn’t been in contact with the country ever since, as Tanzania seems to limit exports to build its own reserves. The World Food Programme has also imported 20,000 tons of corn from South Africa and 50,000 tons from Ukraine and Mexico. The government has not been involved in those shipments.

The irony is that there is also a lot of food wastage in the country. There are piles and piles of vegetable rotting in the food markets, because people do not have enough money to buy. Zimbabwe has also become a matter of concern for under-nutrition levels. The 2018 Barilla report titled Fixing Food, noted that Zimbabwe was one of eleven African countries still lagging behind in “implementing health eating guidelines at national level.”