Health care workers take action to preserve lives as COVID-19 spreads throughout Africa

Stephan McCoy

With infections passing the 600,000 mark, strikes and walkouts by health care workers have taken place across Africa over the shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) and a lack of medical resources to combat COVID-19.

Health care systems are buckling due to government underfunding and corruption.

Although the number of coronavirus cases appears comparatively low, the disease is spreading rapidly. The number of infections is now in excess of 663,107, with South Africa recording 324,221 cases and 4,669 deaths, Egypt 84,843 cases and 4,067 deaths, Nigeria 34,259 cases and 760 deaths, Ghana 26,125 cases and 139 deaths, Algeria 21,355 cases and 1,052 deaths, Morocco 16,545 cases and 263 deaths, and Cameroon 15,173 cases and 359 deaths.

From the onset of the pandemic, health care workers sounded the alarm over the lack of staff and beds, as well as ventilators and ICU beds.

Covid-19 patients are being treated with oxygen at the Tshwane District Hospital in Pretoria, South Africa, Friday July 10, 2020. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)

Wide swathes of the continent have virtually no public health infrastructure to cope with the pandemic, making it certain that the number of infections is much higher than official reports indicate. Even under “normal” conditions, World Bank figures show that Africa requires 25 percent of global health care spending but has resources comparable to just 1 percent of worldwide health budgets. Although the African Union members committed at the turn of the century to spend 15 percent of their budgets on health care, two decades later hardly any country has made it past 10 percent, and many remain well below this utterly inadequate figure.

There are on average just five hospital beds per 1 million inhabitants in Africa, compared to 4,000 in Europe. Malawi has just 25 intensive care beds for 17 million inhabitants, while Zimbabwe’s main hospital in Harare has none. Even in comparatively well-developed South Africa, there are just 0.9 physicians per 1,000 inhabitants, well below European and American averages.

A total of 10 out of Africa’s 55 countries have no ventilators, while many others have a handful of units. There are just four ventilators in South Sudan (population 11 million), three in the Central African Republic (population 5 million), and six in Liberia (population 5 million).

The absence of effective public health infrastructure, the lack of testing facilities and the terrible social conditions mean that the official COVID-19 figures grossly underestimate the spread of the disease, especially among the working class and poor. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned that up to 10 million people will be infected over the next three to six months and 300,000 people will die on the African continent. And that is based on the assumption that the authorities put in place some mitigation measures. If mitigation measures are not taken, the WHO warns deaths could rise into the millions.

With little in the way of health care for any other than the most privileged layers, most African governments moved swiftly to impose lockdowns and curfews, often imposed with brute force by the police and in South Africa by the military. They have caused severe hardship and economic distress, threatening millions with starvation under conditions where there is no social safety net.

According to a weeks-long BBC investigation into hospitals in South Africa, exhausted doctors and nurses have been overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients and the health service is near collapse. Bereft of resources and with many staff themselves sick, nurses are forced to act as cleaners, while surgeons wash their own hospital laundry.

There are reports of nurses at clinics where COVID-19 cases have occurred being forced to continue working while awaiting their test results, potentially infecting hundreds of their colleagues and patients.

It is under these conditions that health care workers across the continent are going on strike or threatening strike action, mounting protests to oppose a non-existent and inadequate health care system, unsafe working conditions and growing inequality.

While strikes have taken place in Kenya, Ghana and Sierra Leone, with protests in Lesotho and Malawi, South Africa has seen by far the largest number of strikes and walkouts, where the government plans to cut nurses’ wages as part of a broader plan to cut the public sector wage bill before turning to the IMF for a loan.

• In March, health care workers at Laetitia Bam Day Hospital in KwaNobuhle, Uitenhage, in the Eastern Cape, went on strike over the appalling state of the hospital after planned refurbishment was suspended. The $240 million refurbishments were to install air-cooling and ventilation systems necessary to stop the spread of disease.
• In Limpopo, nurses demanded the removal of the “incompetent” health minister, citing the shortage of nurses and midwives, dangerous working conditions, and the need to end casual labour.
• Nurses protesting the lack of safety equipment outside the Bongani Regional Hospital in Welkom, Free State, were shot by armed police using rubber bullets and stun grenades, resulting in two nurses being hospitalised.
• At Greys Hospital, Pietermaritzburg, management threatened to fire ambulance workers for refusing to attend a COVID-19 infected patient on March 23 without PPE, then served them with letters informing them of disciplinary hearings.
• In Port Elizabeth, nurses at Veeplaas Clinic stopped work after a colleague tested positive, while at Dora Nginza Hospital in Zwide Township, nurses walked out in protest over the lack of PPE and demanded the hospital be closed and deep cleaned.
• In the Eastern Cape, Glen Grey hospital nurses refused to treat 16 patients because they were not provided with PPE.
• In May, numerous demonstrations and walkouts took place over the lack of PPE and dreadful working conditions, including demonstrations by nurses at the Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto and paramedics in the Emergency Medical Services at Khayelitsha District Hospital in Cape Town, and a walkout by doctors and nurses at the Mpilisweni Hospital in Sterkspruit, Eastern Cape, the second such action over the lack of PPE, with doctors threatening to quit their jobs because they were not being provided with financial assistance for housing as promised.
• In June, in Cape Town, nurses picketed outside the Tygerberg Hospital over unsafe working conditions, community health workers at a hospital in Khayelitsha took action demanding PPE, and health care workers protested outside the city’s False Bay Hospital holding up signs saying, “Protect us so we can protect patients” and “The workload is killing us.” There was a one-day nationwide stoppage by 28,000 community health care workers over the issue.
• In July, health care workers at the Albert Luthuli Central Hospital in Durban demonstrated after more than 100 tested positive for COVID-19, calling for PPE, more staff, a danger allowance, and tests for all, and for a nursing manager to be removed.

Nigeria has seen walkouts by health care workers, including:

• A strike begun at Olabisi Onabanjo University Teaching Hospital in Ogun state by doctors demanding a new minimum wage, hazard allowance and insurance policy that has broadened out into an indefinite strike over government’s failure to fulfil promises on pay arrears and working conditions.
• In Cross River State, doctors went on indefinite strike to oppose the government’s inaction over the coronavirus pandemic.
• In Ekiti State, health care workers went on a three-day warning strike beginning July 6 and July 8 over the failure to implement uniform and hazard allowances.

Zimbabwe has witnessed:

• Strikes by health care workers over the extreme shortage of PPE and the lack of necessary medical equipment to combat the pandemic in public hospitals.
• Demonstrations in March by nurses at Mpilo hospital in Bulawayo over the dreadful working conditions.
• A walkout by the Zimbabwe Hospital Doctors Association over the lack of PPE.
•  wildcat strike by nurses at Beatrice Road Infectious Diseases Hospital over the government’s failure to provide the promised PPE and Z$100-a-day allowance.
•  nationwide and ongoing walkout by doctors and nurses since June over pay, working conditions and the lack of PPE as inflation continued to soar and the currency collapsed against the dollar.
• The arrest of 13 striking workers at the Sally Mugabe Central Hospital in Harare on July 6, as part of the government’s campaign to intimidate nurses, leading to more nurses joining the protests.

As India approaches 1 million COVID-19 cases, Modi government continues to deny community transmission

Wasantha Rupasinghe

Even as India nears the grim milestone of 1 million confirmed COVID-19 infections, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government continue to boast that their efforts to combat the pandemic are proving successful. One of the most grotesque examples of this government propaganda is the repeated declarations from the Health Ministry and India’s top epidemiological institution that no significant community transmission of the potentially lethal virus is occurring in the world’s second most populous country.

Whether government officials care to admit it or not, the reality is the coronavirus is spreading like wildfire in numerous parts of India, and the influx of infected patients is increasingly overwhelming the country’s ramshackle health system.

In terms of COVID-19 cases, India is now the world’s third worst impacted country.

Health workers screen residents for COVID-19 symptoms at Deonar slum in Mumbai, India, Saturday, July 11, 2020. (AP Photo/Rajanish Kakade)

As of Thursday, according to data provided by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, COVID-19 cases reached 968,876. In the preceding 24 hours, 32,695 new infections were registered, the biggest single day spike to date. The death toll meanwhile climbed to 24,915, after another 606 fatalities. New infections have remained above 25,000 per day since July 10, with almost every day producing a new record in coronavirus infections.

While it took India 109 days to reach 100,000 COVID-19 cases, total infections grew nine-fold over the following 57 days, as the government’s removal of lockdown measures went into high gear. Just four days passed before the total of 800,000 cases had reached 900,000.

The official death toll is suspiciously low in comparison to other severely impacted countries. Indian authorities are notorious for under-reporting death figures even in normal times, making it almost certain that the true number of deaths is much higher Even so, India has reported 500 plus deaths every single day since July 11.

Like US President Donald Trump, Modi trumpets on virtually every occasion crude falsehoods about the supposed effectiveness of his government’s response to the pandemic, while showing no concern for the thousands of people who have already lost their lives. India’s prime minister has instead become the principal spokesman for the ruling elite’s criminal “herd immunity” policy, which one government adviser blithely estimated will result in 2 million deaths. To cover up the horrific cost of this policy, which is aimed at prioritising corporate profit over human lives, Modi and his ministers must resort to outright lies. Chief among these is the claim that no community transmission is taking place in India.

After chairing a meeting on COVID-19 last Saturday, Modi declared, “We also highlighted successful initiatives being undertaken across India to ensure the coronavirus is kept under check.”

This was aimed at concealing the fact that the principal purpose of the meeting, which involved Union Home Minister Amit Shah and Health Minister Harsh Vardhan, was to push forward with “reopening” the economy as the virus runs rampant. Rather than outlining new measures to stop the spread of the virus, Modi admonished the public. “We must reiterate,” he declared, “the need to observe personal hygiene and social discipline in public places.”

In other words, while the government throws open all sectors of the economy, forcing tens of millions of poorly paid workers to return to unsafe workplaces, the responsibility for preventing the spread of the virus is being placed on the individual—and this in a country where hundreds of millions have no ready access to clean water and live in teeming slums where it is impossible to practice social distancing.

Although some states have been forced to re-impose certain limited restrictions due to the upsurge in cases, industrial workplaces and other worksites are being allowed—indeed encouraged—to continue operating; while employers, with government complicity, violate whatever meagre measures workplace safety measures have been officially ordered.

None of the initiatives taken by the Modi government in response to the pandemic have proven “successful.” His ill-prepared lockdown, announced with just a few hours’ notice in late March, was a disaster. Tens of millions of people were plunged overnight into destitution due to the government’s failure to provide financial aid to workers who lost their jobs. The period of the lockdown was not used to strengthen India’s chronically underfunded health care system, or to put in place a system of mass testing and contact tracing to combat the spread of infections. Instead, the lockdown became the mechanism for spreading COVID-19 into remote areas as the Modi government kept tens of millions of migrant workers in packed unhygienic camps for weeks, then sent them back to their native states without testing them for the virus.

As recently as July 9, the government repeated that India has not reached the community transmission stage of COVID-19. Asked if India has entered the community transmission phase, Rajesh Bhushan, Officer on Special Duty in the Union Health Ministry, told a press briefing, “Even today, the health minister clearly said that India has not reached the state of community transmission. In some geographical areas, there have been localized outbreaks.”

Engaging in an unsuccessful attempt to prove his point, Bhushan asserted that just “49 districts (out of 733) alone account for 80 percent of COVID-19 cases.” Therefore, “in such a situation in which you can trace and track close contacts of active cases, talking about community transmission is not justified.” His claim conveniently ignores the fact that many of the 49 districts cover urban areas such as Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Pune, and Bengaluru, where tens of millions of people live. Between them, Delhi and Mumbai alone are home to more than 40 million people.

The stupid and ignorant assertions of government officials are not merely a reflection of personal incompetence. Rather, the Modi government and its state counterparts have contemptuously dismissed any scientific approach to combating the pandemic so they can focus exclusively on defending the profits and wealth of India’s millionaires and billionaires. If reopening the economy for big business requires that they cast aside World Health Organisation advice to carry out mass testing, isolate infected people, and trace contacts, so be it!

The reality is that serious scientists have been warning of the dangerous levels of community transmission in India for well over a month. Dr. Jacob John, a prominent virologist, pointed to widespread community transmission in India in an interview with the BBC in early June. Dr. John highlighted the fact that India, according to government data, has tested only 0.3 percent or 0.4 percent of the population. Referring to Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) data, he said that statistics have “shown less than one percent—0.73—of cases across 83 districts showed evidence of past exposure to confirmed cases, and if that was not community transmission how else were they exposed.”

In an interview with The Wire on June 16, Professor Ramanan Laxminarayan, Director of the Washington-based Center for Disease Dynamics and a Princeton fellow, stated that community transmission was “absolutely” happening in India. Applying mathematical models used in the US or UK to India, Laxminarayan estimated that India already had tens of millions of cases and that the figure could rise to 200 million by September.

While the Modi government bears chief responsibility for the massive humanitarian crisis triggered by COVID-19, the opposition parties who lead various state governments are also culpable. They have presided over miserable social conditions and continue to starve the health care system of desperately-needed funds.

India’s worst impacted state, with 275,649 cases and 10,928 deaths as of Thursday, is Maharashtra, where the far-right Shiv Sena leads a government backed by the nominally secular Congress Party. The southern state of Tamil Nadu, which is the second worst impacted state, with 151,820 cases and a total of 2,167 deaths, is governed by the right-wing All India Anna Dravida Munetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), while Delhi, the National Capital Territory and third worst impacted state (116,993 cases and 3,487 deaths) is governed by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). For decades, India’s political establishment has deliberately run the public health system into the ground—spending 1.5 percent of GDP or less annually on health care—in order to slash corporate taxes and pursue other “pro-investor” policies.

India’s criminal ruling elite has totally failed to deal with the health and social disaster produced by the pandemic. The only way that the relentless spread of the coronavirus can be stopped and working people shielded from the pandemic’s ruinous economic fallout is if the working class develops its own independent response. As the International Committee of the Fourth International explained in its June 23 statement:

Control over the response to the pandemic must be taken out of the hands of the capitalist class. Mass action by the working class, coordinated on an international scale, is necessary to bring the pandemic under control and save millions of lives that are now at risk. The fight against the pandemic is not only, or even primarily, a medical issue. It is, above all, a matter of social and political struggle.

More than two hundred Mexican oil workers at PEMEX have died from COVID-19

Andrea Lobo

The Mexican state-owned oil company PEMEX has reported the highest COVID-19 death toll for any company in the world. According to the latest official count, 202 active workers and 5 contractors have been killed by the virus.

Bloomberg News confirmed that only the Metropolitan Transport Authority in New York comes close with 131 deaths, while the entire US meat and poultry industry, which has four times as many workers as PEMEX, has recorded 132 deaths.

PEMEX administers its own network of hospitals for its 125,745 active employees, their families and retirees, covering a total of 750,000 people. This has led PEMEX to also report that 234 family members and 310 retirees have died from COVID-19.

Pemex workers at the area of a oil pipeline explosion in Tlahuelilpan, Hidalgo state, Mexico, Saturday, last year. (AP Photo/Claudio Cruz)

As governments all over the world impose reckless “return to work” orders amid the worsening pandemic, the data from PEMEX provides damning evidence of the magnified toll that unsafe conditions at workplaces have among working-class families.

However, these numbers are still a vast undercount. The company has only tested 7,192 people, or less than 1 percent of its employees, retirees and their families. Nearly 60 percent of the tests, or 4,204, have come out positive, while more than 7,000 people diagnosed by PEMEX with respiratory symptoms were never tested.

Moreover, PEMEX medical workers are excluded from the COVID-19 data, while data nationally suggests that medical staff compose over one-fifth of all infections and deaths. PEMEX nurses were among the thousands of medical staff across Mexico and internationally who have struck to protest the lack of personal protective equipment.

At the same time, from a medical standpoint, the data provided by PEMEX is virtually useless since it does not include the workplaces, hospitals and medical details of the COVID-19 patients.

In response to the growing outrage, the corporation claimed in its latest press release that its “integral prevention strategy against COVID-19 has successfully contained the spread of infections among workers.”

A veteran PEMEX engineer spoke to the World Socialist Web Site from the southeastern Ciudad del Carmen, Campeche, where an outbreak among 84 workers at offshore oil rigs, including 7 deaths, was first reported on April 13 and compelled the company to begin providing daily COVID-19 reports. Far from “containing” the virus, he argued that no effective measures have been taken.

He explained: “Each shift goes up there [to the rigs] every 14 days, with hundreds of workers from across different states of the Mexican Republic. There are no health controls, and they are practically forced to go there to work even if they vulnerable.

“They lack adequate protective equipment and four workers sleep share each bunk bed. Sometimes they do ‘hot beds,’ where one worker rests while the other one works. Most infections occur through the bunk beds. When the workers end their shift, they then return to their hometowns spreading the virus.”

Workers with chronic medical conditions have taken to social media to denounce PEMEX and the trade union, STPRM, for forcing them to work during the pandemic. “Well, if they threaten to take away your wage, how could you refuse,” one wrote.

Others on social media have protested that conditions at oil rigs, ships and storage facilities are too overcrowded. A PEMEX worker told Índigo recently that many truck drivers have contracted coronavirus from interacting with clients at oil stations. Another declared, “They had never placed us under so much danger as now, and since these gentlemen arrived with their austerity, they don’t care about our befallen comrades. That is what makes me angry.”

The worker at Campeche confirmed to the WSWS that he knew some of the deceased workers and explained, “The widows and/or families are not getting their compensation. The union has not wanted to pay their postmortem [insurance]. They usually delay it by months, years and sometimes never pay.”

Regarding the high death toll among retirees, he added, “They are vulnerable, suffer high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity. They have not received proper preventive care. Some active and retired co-workers have gotten sick and are not given care, so they seek care at their own expense in other hospitals and have died. The hospitals are saturated and have lacked medicines and medical specialists for many years.”

He concluded: “The trade union leaders shine from their absence. They are locked up in their farmhouses or beach houses. They don’t show their face or support their members. Meanwhile, the government is not paying any special attention to the case of PEMEX workers.”

The government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO) also sought to diffuse criticisms by holding a press conference on Wednesday with PEMEX director Octavio Romero Oropeza. He congratulated Romero for combating guachicoleros—groups that steal oil—and ramping up production at refineries, but entirely ignored the reports of massive casualties from COVID-19.

Despite the drop in oil consumption and prices due to the pandemic crisis, he argued that production at PEMEX and particularly its refining capacity must be increased to have “national development” and “self-sufficiency” by depending less on foreign capital and imports.

The fact is that, “given its extremely high private debts,” as explained by El País recently, “the Mexican oil corporation is practically operated through the permission of international credit agencies… [which allows] investors to maximize their profits.”

The Mexican ruling class, moreover, only seeks to exploit the pandemic to further privatize the oil sector and funnel the proceeds from PEMEX to private investors. For this purpose, the AMLO administration and Morena party have already doubled down on austerity measures, which leave no room for providing safe conditions for workers.

During a conference in mid-April, José Friedrich, Sub-Secretary of Development under the Morena government in the leading oil-producing state of Tabasco, told American investors, “In order to come out of the economic debacle that Mexico will certainly suffer… if we need to make agreements, alliances, contracts, partnerships with private firms to foment these investments, we must have those ready at the right time. I think it will be a very strategic issue.”

AMLO’s ostensible defense of Mexico’s state-owned oil production has been a core item in AMLO’s “left” credentials in the last decade. He claims to have left the Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD), which he led, because it was planning to support the 2012 Pact for Mexico, a set of regressive policies centered around the effective privatization of the oil industry. A surge in gasoline prices resulting from this privatization led to mass demonstrations in 2017 across Mexico, which the trade unions and AMLO’s Morena party channeled behind AMLO’s 2018 election.

Now, hundreds of workers and their loved ones are being sacrificed at PEMEX at the behest of the financial speculators profiting from Mexico’s oil sector, as AMLO continues the cost-cutting and privatization policies of his predecessors.

Workers at PEMEX and all across Mexico can only confront the subordination of their safety and lives to the interests of Wall Street and its Mexican partners by taking the response to the pandemic in their own hands and in opposition to all the pro-capitalist and nationalist trade unions and parties, including Morena.

This means forming rank-and-file safety committees at every workplace and neighborhood to organize the necessary steps to protect their lives and those of their families.

Facing mounting crisis, US lashes out against China

Peter Symonds

This week marked a major escalation in the US war drive against China. Confronted with deep economic and social crisis at home and his own worsening election prospects, President Trump is aggressively confronting China across the whole range of potentially explosive issues.

In an ominous sign, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, for the first time, formally branded this week virtually all of China’s claims in the South China Sea as “illegal,” denouncing its alleged “bullying” of smaller powers and flouting of “the international rules-based system.”

The hypocrisy involved is staggering. The US has refused to ratify the very law—the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea—that Pompeo has seized upon to condemn China. The so-called rules-based system is one in which Washington sets the rules—for others—while flouting international law at will. The record of US imperialist thuggery, including of illegal invasions, military interventions and coups, stretches back for more than a century.

Pompeo’s statement sets the stage for a dramatic escalation of US military might in the South China Sea which Beijing has declared is a “core interest”—that is, one in which there is no room for compromise. Earlier this month, the US Navy staged “high end” war games involving two aircraft carrier strike groups in these strategic waters provocatively near key Chinese military bases in southern China. This week, to underline Pompeo’s statement, a US destroyer conducted another so-called “freedom of navigation” operation close to Chinese-controlled islets in the South China Sea.

In a press conference Tuesday, Trump reinforced his administration’s bellicose stance towards China by announcing a series of punitive measures towards Hong Kong, including ending preferential trade treatment for the Chinese territory and a ban on the export of sensitive technologies. He has also signed off on the Hong Kong Autonomy Act which paves the way for sanctions on Chinese officials involved in imposing a new national security law on Hong Kong.

The Trump administration has also recently imposed sanctions on Chinese officials involved in alleged human rights abuses of Muslim Uyghurs in the western province of Xinjiang and inside Tibet. While the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) uses police state measures widely, including particularly against the working class, the US has not the slightest concern for the democratic rights of people in Hong Kong, Xinjiang or Tibet. Rather, in what is a well-established modus operandi, Washington is exploiting the issue of “human rights” to further its own predatory interests—in this case the undermining and fragmentation of the rival that it regards as the chief threat to its global hegemony.

At the press conference, Trump launched into a savage attack on China reiterating the litany of unsubstantiated allegations and outright lies that are now his stock in trade. He accused China of “stealing” American technologies, “pillaging our factories” and “ripping off” the American economy. To deflect from his own criminal negligence in handling the COVID-19 pandemic that has cost the lives of nearly 140,000 Americans, Trump once again accused China of “concealing the virus and unleashing it upon the world”—without providing a shred of evidence.

Trump’s rambling, and at times incoherent, comments were nominally directed against his presumptive Democrat rival for the presidency, Joe Biden. However, the fact that Trump and Biden are both accusing each other of being “weak” on China only underscores the bipartisan character of the aggressive US targeting of Beijing. Trump continued and accelerated the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia” that was aimed at subordinating China to American interests. A Financial Times commentator noted this week: “To be in Washington is to sense a nation sliding into open-ended conflict against China with eerily little debate.”

Trump is upping the ante against China virtually on a daily basis. The New York Times reported this week that the White House is considering an unprecedented travel ban against all 90 million members of the Chinese Communist Party, as well as their families. This extraordinary measure would in effect sanction the entire administrative and political apparatus of the world’s second largest economy. Legislation previously used on a racialist basis to ban travel to the US from Muslim countries would be exploited to impose a blatantly political move against China.

The resort to such extreme measures calculated to provoke retaliation by China is a measure of the depth of the crisis in Washington and the desperation not only of the Trump administration but the whole political establishment. Having failed to reassert its domination through a quarter century of brutal military occupations in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, US imperialism is careering blindly towards a war with a nuclear-armed power that would engulf the world.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and exacerbated all of the underlying contradictions of capitalism. Amid a resurgence of the class struggle globally, the Trump administration is not the only government being driven to recklessly project mounting social tensions at home outwards against an external enemy.

While worried commentators are warning of a new Cold War, the confrontation between the Washington and Beijing will not be a re-run of the rivalry between the US and the former Soviet Union. Confronted with its historic decline, American imperialism cannot tolerate a “peaceful co-existence” with a rising economic power that, by its very existence, threatens its global dominance.

For its part, Beijing has no progressive answer as the US aggressively seeks to undermine, challenge and confront it on every front—diplomatically, economically and militarily. The fragile CCP regime represents the country’s ultra-wealthy capitalist elite and sits on top of its own social time bomb, making futile attempts to appease Washington, while engaging in a dangerous arms race that can only end in disaster for humanity. It is utterly incapable of making any appeal to the one social force capable of halting the drive to war—the international working class.

The accelerating slide towards world war will undoubtedly provoke opposition from workers and young people around the world. That opposition, however, has to be welded into a unified international anti-war movement of the working class based on a socialist program and directed at overturning the capitalist system and abolishing its outmoded division of the world into rival nation states. That is the perspective for which the International Committee of the Fourth International fights.

WiSER Postdoctoral Scholarships 2020

Application Deadline: 31st August 2020

About the Award: Coordinated by Professor Achille Mbembe, the Program includes 40 researchers and straddles the traditional divide between Francophone, Anglophone, Arabophone and Lusophone scholarly
communities. It also transcends the divide between Sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa while reconnecting the African continent to the Southern Atlantic and Indian Oceanic worlds. This multi-regional research program’s goal is to unlock the paradoxes of regionalization in a setting, the African continent, shaped by multiple porous borders and mobile spaces. Instead of
assuming that regionalization is tied to state territoriality, it examines the ways in which frontiers and horizons – spatial, material, cultural and imaginary – are increasingly produced by the intersection of cross border flows, networks and informal institutions that are not delineated by states
only, but also by technological devices of all kinds and by movement as such.
The Program’s aim is to foster a new understanding of the ongoing geographies of regionalization that arise from: (1) the intensification of mobility, flows and circulation in a context of porous borders, mobile spaces and technological transformations; (2) the accelerated extraction and use of natural resources that has been taking place in Africa over the last century and a half, its historical pathways and the socio-ecological transformations it has unleashed; (3) the mutations in causes of illness (epidemics and the increase of non-communicable diseases) and the way the crisis of climate is reshaping the human/ecological/environment relationships.
In this Program, the two concepts of the mobile space and porous borders serve as broad conceptual indexes that will be used to distinguish between (1) different types of mobilities/circulation/speed and different types of borders; (2) the cultural and institutional forms generated by such movements; and (3) the technological, ecological and spatial reconfigurations that arise in the context of increasing informalization and transnationalization of life forms and processes.

Eligible Field(s):

• The research program includes 4 Clusters: (1) Sahel/Sahara/Mediterranean; (2) Congo Basin; (3) Southern Atlantic/Indian Oceanic Africa; (4) African Technoscapes.
• A candidate is only allowed to apply in one Cluster.

Type: PostDoctorate

Eligibility: We seek candidates with different skills and training backgrounds (including in health, natural and environmental science and in technology studies) who are willing to work on highly innovative research projects (borders, mobility, speed, circulation of people, objects, ideas and technological devices, ecological transformations, regional transport systems, markets and small towns, cross-border practices, media and digital corridors; cultural and literary scapes; logistics, multispecies interactions; health ecologies and pandemics; trans-regional extraction, enclaves and offshoring etc.).

Eligible Countries: Fellowships are opened to international candidates. African and diasporic candidates are strongly encouraged to apply.

To be Taken at (Country): South Africa

Number of Awards: 8

Value of Award: We invite applications for 8 (eight) two-year postdoctoral positions. Each fellowship will be funded up to R250,000 per year (medical insurance included), to which will be added R10,000 for research. The successful candidates are expected to join the Institute in Johannesburg remotely in October 2020 and in person, subject to the pandemic crisis, from February 2021.
They will be expected to:

• (1) fully participate in the research program and in its publications;
• (2) take part in the scientific events and other activities relevant to their research (advanced seminars, workshops, round tables, experimental syllabus);
• (3) produce 3 podcasts or op-eds per year;
• (4) publish 1 peer-reviewed article and per year and
• (4) one final chapter to be included in an edited
  volume.

Duration of Award: 2 years (The program runs from October 30, 2020 to October 30, 2022)

How to Apply: Applications should be sent electronically to: Najibha Deshmukh, Senior Administrator, Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (najibha.Deshmukh@wits.ac.za)

Visit Award Webpage for Details

Rothamsted International Fellowship 2020 for Developing Countries – UK

Application Deadline: 28th September 2020

Eligible Countries: Developing countries

To be taken at (country): UK

Eligible Field of Study: Fellowship proposals must be in agricultural, biological, environmental, mathematical or computational sciences, and must be aligned with Rothamsted’s Research Strategy.

About the Award: Rothamsted is the longest running agricultural research station in the world, providing cutting-edge science and innovation for nearly 170 years.
It’s mission is to deliver the knowledge and new practices to increase crop productivity and quality and to develop environmentally sustainable solutions for food and energy production.
No single approach can deliver sustainable agriculture with high productivity and value. A broad perspective that encompasses the whole plant system is needed and a careful balance of approaches is required. Rothamsted integrates biotechnology with other areas of science such as agronomy and agro-ecology so both existing and new knowledge can be implemented through agricultural practice.

Type: Fellowship

Eligibility: The Candidate must meet the following criteria:

• The Candidate must be of doctoral status, with at least two years’ post-doctoral experience. Candidates without Higher Degrees must have equivalent research experience to be considered eligible for the scheme
• Applications will not be considered where the main objective of the visit is research leading to a higher degree for the Candidate
• The Candidate must be a citizen, or be based exclusively in a low- to middle- income country. Please note that this will be defined as the countries listed on the DAC list of ODA recipients
• Candidates who have extensive and/or continuous employment in a high-income country are not eligible for RI Fellowships
• It is essential that the Candidate returns to employment in their home country where the experience gained through the RI Fellowship can be applied
• Applications are submitted by the UK supervisor, but must be of relevance to research in the candidate’s home country. It is therefore essential that the candidate makes contact with the UK supervisor and helps to co-develop the research proposal. Proposals with minimal contributions from the candidate, or supervisor, are unlikely to succeed
• In addition to the support of the UK supervisor, applications must also have the approval from the Head of Department where the fellowship will be hosted

Selection Criteria: 

• Eligibility and quality of the Candidate.
• Scientific merit of the proposal.
• Clarity of aims and feasibility experimental design.
• Relevance to Rothamsted’s Research Strategy.
• Scope for future collaborations between the Candidate and the Rothamsted Project Leader.
• Social and economic impacts on the Candidate’s home country.

Number of Awardees: Not stated

Value of Fellowship: The Fellowship will provide the successful candidate with:

• Supervision and training at Rothamsted Research
• Funds for Research costs related to their project
• Access to world-class research facilities and scientific support
• Funds for accommodation and subsistence
• Funds for travel between the home country and the UK

Duration of Fellowship: Fellowships must be between six to twelve months in duration.

How to Apply:

STEP 1:

i. Candidate has a research idea in mind with direct relevance to development issues in the Fellow’s home country.
ii. Candidate checks to see that their proposal falls within the agricultural, biological, environmental, mathematical or computational sciences, and is aligned to the Rothamsted Science Strategy.
iii. Candidates must then identify a potential Supervisor at Rothamsted Research and seek their agreement and input to co-develop a fellowship proposal. Note: Candidates may find the Supervisor, either through prior contact with that person, recommendations via colleagues, scientific literature searches or by selecting the relevant researcher from our departmental pages

STEP 2:

iv. Once a Supervisor at Rothamsted has been identified and they are in agreement to co-develop a research projects with the candidate the Supervisor requests an application form and further guidance from Rothamsted International. Note: application forms cannot be downloaded from this website and must be submitted by the Supervisor.
v. Supervisor and Candidate co-develop the fellowship proposal.
vi. Supervisor submits the Fellowship application in advance of the stated deadline.

STEP 3:

vii. Applications are reviewed by a panel of experts.
viii. This is a competitive scheme and the Panel’s decision will be communicated to the candidate and Supervisor – typically within two months of the application deadline.
ix. Successful candidate and their Supervisors agree a start date for the project.

Visit Fellowship Webpage for details

Laos Has Tackled COVID-19, But It Is Drowning in Debt to International Finance

Vijay Prashad

On June 11, Laos (Lao People’s Democratic Republic)—a country of 7 million in Southeast Asia—said it had temporarily prevailed over COVID-19. Prime Minister Thongloun Sisoulith said that his country had “gained an important victory in the first campaign against this vicious enemy.” The first cases of COVID-19 detected in Laos were registered on March 24; a total of 19 people had been infected with the virus by April 12, and—after 58 days of no new cases—the last patient was discharged on June 9. There were no new cases of COVID-19 in Laos since April 12 (93 days of no new cases as of July 14). There have been no deaths from COVID-19 in Laos.

Laos is a landlocked country, surrounded by the People’s Republic of China, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, Myanmar, Thailand, and Cambodia. It shares a 423-kilometer border with China, across which traders and tourists routinely travel. Nonetheless, Laos—like its neighbor Vietnam—has had no deaths from COVID-19. Laos has been particular about the possibility of transmission through travelers who have crossed from neighboring countries (which is why they are being held in quarantine centers for two weeks).

How Did Laos Do It?

News came from Wuhan, China, in the first week of January of the spread of a new coronavirus. On January 6, Laos’ Prime Minister Thongloun was in Beijing for talks with China’s President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang, where their conversations were mainly about economic development. In particular, the leaders of the two countries discussed the China-Laos railway, which has been in the works since 2016 and will run for 414-kilometers from Vientiane (Laos’ capital) to Boten (on the China-Laos border). At the time, too little was known about the coronavirus for it to have been a likely focus of the meeting. Until January 20, there was no clarity that this virus could be transmitted from human to human. As soon as the World Health Organization declared a public health emergency of international concern on January 30, the government of Laos set up a Taskforce Committee for COVID-19 Prevention and Control to monitor the virus and prevent its spread in Laos.

The first sign of trouble came on February 1, when Zhang Biao, who had recently visited Laos, was found to have the virus upon his return home to Chongqing, China. On January 26, Zhang arrived in Vientiane on a China Express Airlines flight as part of a tourist group. He traveled with the group to Vang Vieng, a tourist destination four hours away from Vientiane. He returned to China on January 31, where he was found to be infected. In response, the Laotian authorities retraced his steps, tested people who had come into contact with him, and aggressively moved to prevent any further infections. Laos suspended the issuance of visas to Chinese nationals, and Lao Airlines reduced its flights to China (not only is China the main market for Lao Airlines, but the tourist trade in Laos is also almost entirely reliant upon China). There were no confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Laos until almost two months later, March 24.

On March 5, Laos’ Deputy Minister of Health Dr. Phouthone Muongpak held a press conference where he said that there had been 53 suspected cases of COVID-19 in the country, but each of the patients had tested negative. “We are confident in our surveillance system,” said Dr. Phouthone, the deputy head of Laos’ Taskforce Committee for COVID-19 Prevention and Control. Teams of epidemiologists traveled to places in Laos where there were reports of deaths that appeared to be from COVID-19; samples taken from the bodies were tested at three laboratories: the National Center for Laboratory and Epidemiology (which had WHO experts oversee the test), the Institut Pasteur du Laos and the Microbiology Laboratory at Mahosot Hospital. They all came back negative. Additionally, samples were also sent to the WHO laboratory in Australia and came back negative, said Dr. Rattanaxay Phetsouvanh, the director-general of Laos’ Department of Communicable Diseases Control.

The Vientiane Times credited the lack of cases in Laos to the rigorous scanning and testing done at ports of entry and the quarantines imposed on those who entered the country. Even those who showed no symptoms when they entered Laos were told to go into self-imposed quarantine for two weeks. Showing an abundance of caution, on March 9, the government declared that celebrations of Lao New Year (April 13-15) would be canceled.

In fact, there were no cases in Laos from January 30 until March 24, when the first two confirmed cases were reported: they were a 28-year-old male hotel worker from Vientiane who most likely contracted the virus during a work trip to Bangkok, Thailand, in early March, and a 36-year-old female tour guide from Vientiane who most likely contracted it from a tourist (as reported to me by a government official). Both patients were taken to the Mittaphab “150 Bed” Friendship Hospital in Vientiane, which was soon to be designated as a COVID-19 hospital.

Five days later, on March 29, the Lao government announced a full lockdown of the country. Any necessary activity would have to follow the strict WHO protocols of physical distance, mask wearing, and hand washing. The task force was enjoined to train medical professionals and the security services, develop plans to break the chain of infection (including testing, contact tracing, quarantine, and treatment), and use the public sector to procure necessary medical equipment (including protective gear and ventilators). The government agencies were told to “provide detail[ed] guidance” in an easy-to-understand format through the various government media and through a special website; only science-based information was to be transmitted to the public.

On July 8, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research released a report called “CoronaShock and Socialism.” The text looks closely at the experience of four parts of the world with socialist governments—Cuba, Venezuela, Vietnam, and Kerala, India—and how these parts of the world were able to substantially break the chain of infection. The analysis showed that these countries were better able to deal with the virus because they took a science-based approach, they had a public sector that they could rely upon for the production of the materials they needed to combat the virus, and they cultivated public action. Laos very much followed these principles, as two officials at the Ministry of Health informed me via telephone in early July. In addition, Laos received essential materials (protective suits, masks) from both Vietnam and China (Chinese medical personnel also came to assist the Laotian medical service).

In June, Prime Minister Thongloun said that—for now—Laos appeared to have beaten back the virus. Dr. Howard Sobel, the WHO representative in Laos, concurred. The response of the government of Laos, Dr. Sobel said, “was exemplary. The government anticipated the arrival of this terrible disease and did all the right things to stop it spreading.” Doubts about the low number of cases and the lack of deaths were set aside by Ludovic Arnout of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. “It’s difficult to hide [coronavirus cases],” he said, “so I believe it.”

Impact

Laos has not fully recovered from the impact of the U.S. bombing of the country: 2.5 million tons of U.S. bombs dropped on Laos between 1964 and 1973, with the soil in many parts of the country polluted for generations. When U.S. President Barack Obama visited Laos in 2016, he regretted the “biggest bombing in history,” but he did not apologize for it. He promised $90 million over three years to remove an estimated 75 million unexploded bombs that continue to claim lives and damage agriculture decades after the “secret war” ended.

Nonetheless, the communist government in Laos has—with investment from China—persisted in a development pathway that has brought some gains for its population. Basic human indicators have improved, and for the past two decades unemployment has remained under 1 percent.

But the coronavirus recession will strike Laos very hard. In April, Anousone Khamsingsavath, director-general of the Department of Labor Skill Development at the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare, said, “Poverty in Laos will be exacerbated because large numbers of people have been laid off from their jobs.” Her ministry “reported recently that the unemployment rate had surged from the average of 2 percent to 25 percent at present,” according to the Vientiane Times. The World Bank noted that while Laos has “so far avoided a health crisis,” it has not been “immune from the global economic downturn.” Growth rates, which had been estimated before the pandemic to be secure at 7 percent, will collapse to near zero as a consequence of the global coronavirus recession.

Most terrifyingly, this will mean that Laos, which had a relatively stable economy, will slip into debt and chaos. In May, Fitch Ratings downgraded Laos’ Long-Term Foreign-Currency Issuer Default Rating to B- and revised its overall outlook from “Stable” to “Negative.” This change in Laos’ economy is mostly due to the effects of the coronavirus on the global economy. Laos is slated to make a debt servicing payment of about $900 million in 2020, money that it simply cannot afford to pay (its foreign exchange reserves are a mere $1 billion).

“We defeated the virus crisis,” a government official told me. “Now we are going to be defeated by the debt crisis, which we did not create.”

Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously approves anti-encryption EARN IT Act

Kevin Reed

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted on July 2 to send an amended draft of the EARN IT Act—a bill that both attacks free speech and surreptitiously abolishes encrypted electronic communications—to the Senate floor prior to leaving for the two-week Fourth of July recess.

The Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act of 2020 (EARN IT), which falsely claims to protect children from online sexual abuse, was approved unanimously by twelve Republicans and ten Democrats on the committee.

The modified bipartisan legislation was co-sponsored by Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (Republican of South Carolina) and US Senator Richard Blumenthal (Democrat of Connecticut) and approved after two amendments had been introduced to it.

Lindsey Graham and Pres. Donald Trump (Image Credit: Whitehouse Flickr)

The first of these changes removed the Department of Justice as the government body charged with enforcing the “best practices” proposed by a national commission for websites, social media platforms, internet service providers and other online services to avoid liability for content posted by users and other third parties that qualifies as “online child sexual abuse material.”

While the national commission still includes the attorney general, secretary of Homeland Security, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission and 16 others chosen by Congress, compliance with the commission’s “best practices” will be voluntary and the states will be responsible for enforcing them.

The second change concerns the protections granted under what is known as Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which states, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” The original provisions of the EARN IT Act required companies to “earn” their Section 230 protections. The bill approved by the committee removes entirely the “earn it” concept and opens tech companies up to criminal or civil charges against them by state governments.

Numerous tech and free speech experts and organizations immediately attacked the new legislation as a “bait and switch” which, far from improving upon the terms of the original draft presented by Graham and Blumenthal last March, intensifies its assault on free speech and electronic communications free from government surveillance.

Riana Pfefferkorn, associate director of surveillance and cybersecurity at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, wrote that the EARN IT Act uses widespread resentment about Section 230 to stage an attack on encryption. “Encryption, particularly end-to-end encryption, is likely to be targeted as being contrary to ‘best practices’ for preventing [child sexual abuse material], because if a provider cannot ‘see’ the contents of files on its service due to encryption, it is harder to detect [child sexual abuse material] files.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote on July 2, “instead of giving a 19-person federal commission, dominated by law enforcement, the power to regulate the Internet, the bill now effectively gives that power to state legislatures. And instead of requiring that Internet websites and platforms comply with the commission’s ‘best practices’ in order to keep their vital legal protections under Section 230 for hosting user content, it simply blows a hole in those protections.”

In a comment on the passage of the redraft through the Senate committee, Graham said, “To those who shared the horrors of child sexual abuse on the internet with the Committee, you inspired us to act and you made it impossible for us to look away.” The bill is also cosponsored by leading Democratic Senators Dianne Feinstein of California, Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Dick Durbin of Illinois.

A particularly significant role was played by Leahy, who introduced an amendment purportedly to address concerns about how the bill undermines encryption technologies. While Leahy’s amendment prohibits holding companies liable because they use “end-to-end encryption, device encryption, or other encryption services,” the bill encourages state lawmakers to look for ways to undermine end-to-end encryption, such as forcing messages to be scanned for content violations on a local device before they get encrypted and sent along to their recipient.

The unanimous support of leading Democrats and Republicans for the reactionary EARN IT legislation indicates that US political establishment is arriving at a consensus for establishing government control of online content and communications. As powerful contradictions intensify within capitalist society along with the expansion of the internet, mobile wireless devices and social media—utilized by a growing movement of the working class and young people from below—the ruling establishment is moving toward a regime of censorship and unfettered invasion of privacy.

In May, just as mass demonstrations were beginning to unfold across the country after the brutal murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, President Donald Trump issued a threat to “close down” or “strongly regulate” the social media platforms by removing their Section 230 protections after Twitter placed “fact checking” flags on his tweets.

There are also the efforts of the US Justice Department and Attorney General William Barr to pursue a lawsuit against Google for alleged anti-trust violations—including an implicit threat to “break up” the Silicon Valley tech monopoly—as well as congressional legislation that will force consumer mobile device manufacturers such as Apple to build law enforcement back-door access into their data encryption products.

Harley-Davidson slashes 700 jobs worldwide as stock price continues to rise

Jessica Goldstein

Last week Harley-Davidson announced that it will cut 700 positions globally in 2020. Five hundred positions will be eliminated through layoffs and the remaining 200 are vacant positions that will remain unfilled, according to a company press release issued July 9.

The job cuts are a part of the motorcycle brand’s “Rewire” restructuring plan, and the corporation plans to permanently eliminate the positions, meaning that they will not be rehired in the future. Chief Executive Officer Jochen Zeitz, who took over in February after orchestrating the restructuring of the Puma clothing brand out of bankruptcy, said that the purpose of the company restructuring is to create a “leaner and more nimble organization.”

The Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based corporation recorded its lowest US sales—the company’s largest market—in 16 years. The brand’s revenue decreased by 8 percent globally last year, the fifth straight year in a row of falling sales, and it reported its motorcycle shipments down by 6.4 percent compared to 2018. In response to financial pressures, the company tightened its supply to avoid lowering prices, in the name of protecting profits.

Entrance at Harley-Davidson Factory, Menomonee Falls Wisconsin (Image Credit Michael Walters)

Company analysts cited an aging consumer base and failure to market to younger customers as a main source of its revenue struggles over the past several years, as well as the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic more recently in curbing demand.

The majority of younger workers worldwide, including in the US, can ill afford the expensive motorcycles, priced at an average of $20,338. They also tend not to own private homes at which to store them safely, nor do they have the leisure time of past generations to take the long trips for which they are built.

In spite of this, as for many other auto manufacturing corporations, the company’s stock price has risen from $17.80 on March 23, when lockdown measures in the US went into effect in many states, to $28.87 at the close of the markets Wednesday. The corporation took in over $1.9 billion in profits in 2019, despite the drop in sales.

Last week’s announcement of job cuts follows on the heels of 140 US manufacturing jobs cut by Harley in the last week of June. The company axed 50 jobs at its Tomahawk, Wisconsin plant and another 90 at its York, Pennsylvania plant.

The restructuring at Harley-Davidson will incur charges of $50 million, including severance and other costs. The company will not reveal details of the cost saving until later in July, when it unveils its 2021-2025 financial plans.

In 2019, workers at Harley Davidson’s plants in Tomahawk and Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin rejected a sellout contract put forward by the United Steelworkers (USW) and the International Association of Machinists (IAM), only to have it forced on them less than two weeks later. In addition to paltry wage increases that did not keep up with inflation, the concessions included maintenance of the “SURGE” model, widely hated by workers, which ramps up production by up to 50 percent in the plants from January to June, through augmentation of the workforce with hundreds of temporary, casual workers. This model often leads to temporary layoffs of regular employees in the latter part of the year.

In 2018, the corporation completed the closure of its New Castalloy plant in Adelaide, Australia, in collaboration with the Australian Workers Union and the Labor government, resulting in the loss of 120 jobs. Workers were not told by union officials and management until the end of their shifts that they had been laid off, a tactic used in order to wring out as much production as possible from each worker. The same year, Harley-Davidson also announced the closure of its plant in Kansas City, Missouri by mid-2019.

Harley-Davidson’s restructuring plan will lead to a further casualization and lowering of wages of workers worldwide, while increasing speedup in its plants across the globe in the name of maintaining its profit growth. Its decisions follow the logic of the corporate ruling class around the world, seeing the economic destruction brought on by the pandemic as an opportunity to carry out the destruction of all the gains that workers have struggled for over the past several decades.

The IAM and USW formally withdrew from joint labor-management agreements with Harley-Davidson in 2017, while continuing to maintain existing collective bargaining agreements in its US plants, citing the corporation’s decision to open a plant in Thailand to produce for the Asian market in 2018, which would assemble bikes from US-imported component parts. IAM President Bob Martinez lamented the potential loss of jobs for US workers, but his real complaint was about the lost opportunity for dues to further pad his annual salary of over $300,000.

Both the IAM and USW trade unions line up behind US President Donald Trump’s reactionary “America First” trade agenda. This has resulted in the lowering of wages and destruction of jobs and living standards for both American workers and their fellow workers around the world, as tariffs on imported goods and metals took effect in 2018. The trade war is mainly aimed at China but is also levied against US rivals in Asia, Europe and the Americas.

In 2018, Trump threatened to tax Harley-Davidson “like never before” if it moved US production overseas in reaction to the EU’s 25 percent retaliatory tariff increase on US-imported motorcycles. In reality, the company had been opening plants in countries outside of the US for decades in order to reduce the cost of import taxes and shipping to new markets. It opened a plant in Manaus, Brazil in 1999, and in 2014 began production of two models, the Street 500 and 750, at its plant in Bawal, India.

Instead of uniting workers against the corporate giants like Harley Davidson, which exploit workers doing the same jobs all over the world, the trade unions in the US, Australia and other countries have long sought to use nationalism and chauvinism as a whipsaw to force workers to accept lower wages and pit workers in different countries against one another. Another aim is to deflect anger at falling living standards away from the transnational corporations.

Now, as the COVID-19 pandemic threatens the lives of workers being forced back to work under unsafe conditions in every country around the world, it is more important than ever that workers internationally reject the nationalism of the trade unions and capitalist governments. The fight against the job cuts demands an international and socialist program, oriented toward uniting the workers of every country against the global capitalist system, and organizing the manufacturing of autos and heavy industry to meet the social needs of the working class, not the private profit interests of the parasitic corporations.