UK government’s “Operation Moonshot”—a trojan horse for herd immunity policy

Thomas Scripps

Boris Johnson’s government has announced plans for weekly COVID-19 tests for everyone in the UK, 10 million tests a day, in a programme branded “Operation Moonshot.”

The prime minister claimed that testing capacity would be increased from 300,000 a day now to 500,000 in October and reach the 10 million figure—with the help of “simple, quick and scalable” tests which provide a result in 20–90 minutes.

The plans were met even by Conservative Party insiders with ridicule, described variously as “not feasible” and “crazy.” A leaked briefing memo sent to the Scottish government, published by the British Medical Journal (BMJ), said the programme, if ever implemented, would cost more than £100 billion. This is around three-quarters of the annual budget for the National Health Service (NHS). But so far only an additional £16 billion has been directed toward the entire NHS and other public services in the six months since the pandemic was declared by the World Health Organisation (WHO). Figures in the hundreds of billions have exclusively been reserved for the financial support of major corporations during the pandemic.

The BMJ article revealing “Operation Moonshot”

The government also admits that the technology required for rapid testing is not currently available. A WHO diagnostics expert told the Independent that the plan was “dependent on different technologies to what are being used now [in the UK]. It’s a massive gamble.” Moreover, the new techniques under consideration were often “untested” or came from companies “without much experience of medical testing at scale.”

Dr David Strain, chairman of the British Medical Association (BMA)’s medical academic staff committee, said the mass-testing strategy is “fundamentally flawed” and “based on technology that does not, as yet, exist.”

However, the announcement of the programme was motivated purely by the most reactionary political considerations, rather than any genuine desire to combat the pandemic. A draft document leaked to the BMJ is titled, “UK mass testing narrative.” Johnson summed up this narrative Wednesday night: “Up to now we have used testing primarily to identify people who are positive—so we can isolate them from the community. But in the near future we want to start using testing to identify people who don’t have coronavirus and are not infectious, so we can allow them to behave in a more normal way…”

The government want to shift from a formal policy of controlling the virus to one of encouraging as much intermingling as possible. Johnson told the press Wednesday, “That level of testing would allow people to lead more normal lives, without the need for social distancing. Theatres and sports venues could test all audience members on the day and let in those with a negative result, all those who are not infectious. Workplaces could be opened up to all those who test negative that morning and allow them to behave in a way that was normal before COVID.”

The overriding objective of the programme, or rather the promise of the programme, is to provide a cover for the reopening of the economy. The leaked documents explain, “This is described by the prime minister as our only hope for avoiding a second national lockdown before a vaccine, something the country cannot afford.”

What this means is the virus will continue to spread unchecked. “Operation Moonshot” is a trojan horse for the policy of herd immunity.

The government’s own Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) published a consensus document on mass testing August 27 warning that “any mass testing programme” would have little impact on the reproduction rate (R value) of the virus without, “superb organisation and logistics with rapid, highly sensitive tests,” and could “only lead to decreased transmission if individuals with a positive test rapidly undertake effective isolation.” Any testing programme authored by Johnson would do none of this.

Dr Chaand Nagpaul, chair of the British Medical Association, warned that “the notion of opening up society based on negative tests of those without symptoms needs to be approached with caution—both because of the high rate of ‘false negatives’ and the potential to miss those who are incubating the virus.”

Andrew Lee, a Reader in Global Public Health at the University of Sheffield, warns that in this case the “affected individuals who may be infectious are falsely reassured. They will continue with their lives, potentially relax their infection control behaviours, and infect others.”

The Royal Statistical Society sent an open letter to the Times this week which noted, “Present tests miss about a fifth of those with the disease.”

A shift to this new system will also derail an already failing contact tracing system. Independent SAGE member Martin McKee wrote in the BMJ that the Moonshot project “will distract from fixing the problems with the existing system, especially as public health staff are struggling with the abolition of Public Health England.” Last week, only 69.2 percent of close contacts of people who tested positive with coronavirus were reached through the government’s Test and Trace system—the lowest percentage since the programme began. There are worries that a significant percentage of people who are asked to isolate do not do so because they simply cannot afford to. Roughly 25 percent of infected people do not or are not able to provide a list of contacts.

The government’s latest update also notes, “since the start of July, the median time taken to receive a test result has seen an overall increase.” In the week August 13 to August 19, “Home testing kits saw the biggest increase in the median time [taken to receive results] during this period from 58 hours to 71 hours… Regional test sites increased from 23 hours to 27 hours and mobile testing units increased from 21 hours to 25 hours.”

The leaked documents indicate that the government’s plans are a massive windfall for the private sector, with “communities, institutions and employers” allowed to carry out tests. “Private sector/ business-led testing,” it adds, “plays a key enabling role.” “Letters of comfort” have already been sent to GSK, AstraZeneca, Serco and G4S. Retailers Boots and Sainsbury’s are also named, and Deloitte is reportedly being given a contract for more than half the work.

This is being rolled out under conditions where the seven-day rolling average of daily infections has already close to trebled in the last month to 2,532 and the R value has officially climbed to between 1 and 1.2 for the UK as a whole. Two weeks after schools officially reopened, over 540 have been affected by infections—50 of them with multiple cases. The government’s own “reasonable worst-case scenario” predicts 85,000 deaths over the winter. Other estimates are far higher.

The Tory party can only preside over such a criminal endeavour thanks to the “constructive opposition,” i.e., collusion, of the Labour Party and the trade unions with Johnson’s “back to work” and “school reopenings” agenda.

As the terrible consequences of this partnership unfold, the working class will come into struggle against both main parties of the capitalist class. That movement will be confronted with the full force of the state, including the police and the armed forces, already being prepared under the auspices of an updated “Operation Yellowhammer.”

For the working class to succeed in this struggle, a socialist leadership must be built in every workplace, school and neighbourhood. We urge workers and youth who agree with this perspective to contact the Socialist Equality Party today.

UK Tories use Extinction Rebellion protests to argue for savage political repression

Richard Tyler

Last Saturday, some 100 Extinction Rebellion (XR) protesters blockaded the presses of several of Britain’s main daily papers.

The bamboo barricades they erected outside printing plants in Broxbourne, Liverpool and Glasgow prevented the delivery of millions of copies of the Sun, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and Times.

The ire of XR was directed at right-wing and pro-government titles, which had “failed to tell the truth about the climate crisis,” the organisation proclaimed on its website. The presses of the supposedly liberal media, such as the Guardian and Independent, were spared interruption.

Climate change protesters extracted and arrested in Trafalgar Square, London, October 10, 2019 [Credit: AP Photo/Alastair Grant]

The press plant blockades are part of XR’s “September Rebellion,” and have so far included demonstrations outside parliament, Buckingham Palace, Tate Britain, the Treasury, and the Home Office.

The disruption to traffic in the capital met with much complaint throughout the mainstream media. However, it was the blockading of the printing presses of Rupert Murdoch’s Sun and Times, together with the Tory house organ, the Telegraph, and 4th Viscount Rothermere’s Daily Mail that led to the most ferocious response.

“The Telegraph will not be silenced,” the paper thundered, describing the protest as a “blatant attempt to shut down free speech.”

The protesters were “trying to destroy our greatest democratic principle: freedom of speech,” railed the Sun on Sunday’s editorial.

In its Sunday edition, the Times, voice of the British establishment for over two centuries, reported that those “involved in similar demonstrations in the future will be treated as a ‘saboteur of democracy’, under plans being drawn up the government.” Its leader column looked forward to Home Secretary Priti Patel pushing police forces “to take a more robust line” on the group’s disruptive actions.

These right-wing rags loudly protested at the momentary interruption to their ability to spew out their daily lies and distortions. However, their editorial pages have demonstrably not issued a word in defence of jailed WikiLeaks publisher and journalist Julian Assange, who has actually exposed attacks on democratic and human rights by governments around the world—divulging crimes that have led to the deaths of tens of thousands in wars supported by the very papers now proclaiming their allegiance to democracy.

The Labour Party was swift to join in the chorus of condemnation. Shadow Culture Secretary Jo Stevens said, “A free press is vital for our democracy. People have the right to read the newspapers they want. Stopping them from being distributed and printers from doing their jobs is wrong.”

Former home secretary, now Lord Blunkett, said, “Peaceful protest using distancing is acceptable, anarchy is not.”

After Jeremy Corbyn’s former shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott, had meekly defended the protests as “legal,” in the tradition of the “suffragettes,” Labour leader Sir Kier Starmer came under pressure for his silence. He dutifully called the demonstrations “wrong”: “The free press is the cornerstone of democracy and we must do all we can to protect it.”

Murdoch, Rothermere et al demanded the government implement sweeping measures cracking down on protest and abrogating fundamental democratic rights, such as the right to demonstrate.

Taking to the pages of the Daily Mail, Home Secretary Priti Patel duly obliged. The protesters were “committing criminal acts” and should be in no doubt they would “face the full force of the law. You will be punished for your actions.” The newspaper reported last Saturday, “A Home Office source said: ‘Priti was furious. She told the police to ‘get stuck in’ to stop a second night of disruption.”

Subsequently, 80 protestors were arrested and charged with causing a public nuisance and aggravated trespass for their involvement in the blockades. More than 650 arrests have been made by the Metropolitan Police for breaches to the Public Order Act. Using new powers under the COVID-19 regulations, over £200,000 in fines were issued for exceeding the 30-people limit in a gathering.

In a move underscoring the shift to authoritarian forms of rule, the Metropolitan Police pre-emptively arrested on August 26—ahead of all this month’s protests—XR co-founder Roger Hallam and four other activists who are members of the Beyond Politics group. Hallam founded the group in June after quitting XR. The five were charged with conspiracy to cause criminal damage at planned protests and are being detained in custody for four weeks, until after all planned protests are concluded.

Patel announced further measures to strengthen the repressive state apparatus. “In addition to providing the most generous funding settlement in a decade and recruiting an additional 20,000 officers, I am committed to ensuring that the police have powers required to tackle the disruption caused by groups such as Extinction Rebellion and I will be looking at every opportunity available, including primary legislation, to ensure that there is a full suite of tools available to tackle this behaviour,” she wrote.

“Whitehall sources” soon revealed what this means. According to the Telegraph, Prime Minister Boris Johnson had asked officials to take a “fresh look” at the legal status of Extinction Rebellion, and see how it might be classified as an “organised crime group,” putting it on the same footing as the Mafia. Using the powers of the 2015 Serious Crime Act to apply such a designation could expose XR activists to up to five years in jail.

Ministers were also considering “new powers making it easier for police to stop demonstrators entering particular areas, bolstering protections for parts of the UK’s critical national infrastructure, and explicitly outlawing disruption to ‘tenets of democracy’, such as MPs voting in Parliament, judges attending court and the printing and distribution of the free press,” the Telegraph reported.

Taken alongside plans for a raft of legislation to outlaw “critical workers”—such as those involved in public transport—from taking strike action, the Tory government is preparing to obliterate long-standing democratic rights affecting millions.

Pointing to the broader target of this offensive, every attempt was made to depict the protests as being motivated by left-wing and socialist sentiments. The Telegraph wrote of “fears the group had been infiltrated by far-Left groups that want to pursue a more overtly militant socialist agenda.” The newspaper drew a comparison with protests following the murder of George Floyd in the US, which they claimed without any foundation whatsoever had also been “hijacked by neo-Marxists.” The limited reformist demands of XR, according to the Telegraph, are “window dressing for their true purpose: a revolutionary, extremist movement set on overthrowing our society.”

Extinction Rebellion is a middle class protest group, whose actions are not directed at fundamentally changing the present social order. Indeed, the blockade action was not inspired by any thought of bringing about a societal change that would see the press barons deprived of their possessions. The same purveyors of falsehoods, who are playing a vital role in the government’s homicidal back-to-work drive, hiding the real dangers millions confront from COVID-19, can be won to the cause of environmentalism, according to XR. “The news industry has a key role to play in the transformation we need to face up to the intersecting crises. We desperately need them to stop spreading hatred and lies, and instead take a real lead to help us hold our government to account,” XR wrote on its website.

Extinction Rebellion’s September 1 tweet stating, “Just to be clear we are not a socialist movement”

XR’s “Principles and Values” deliberately make no criticism of capitalism. Faced with the press accusations of being a front for Marxism and revolution, XR issued a tweet refuting any links to socialism. “Just to be clear we are not a socialist movement… A banner saying ‘socialism or extinction’ does not represent us.”

While initially directed against groups such as Extinction Rebellion, the real target of state repression and the move towards authoritarianism is the working class. The sight of tens of thousands engaged in multi-ethnic, multi-racial protests opposing police violence has spooked ruling elites everywhere. Now this is joined by the prospect of strikes and mass protests provoked by the rampaging of the coronavirus pandemic and the destruction of jobs and living standards.

As with all fundamental social and economic problems facing humanity, the terrible consequences of climate change cannot be averted by appeals to the capitalist class and their state apparatus. Capitalism rests on the exploitation of the working class to provide profits for those who own and control the means of production, including the press barons. Only by wresting that control away from the tiny layer of the super-rich and their political representatives and placing it under the democratic control of the majority, can the moves towards authoritarianism, like the destruction of the environment, be prevented.

Brexit crisis intensifies after Johnson government tears up agreement with Brussels

Robert Stevens

Britain and the European Union (EU) failed to reach any agreement in emergency talks Thursday, as Boris Johnson’s Conservative government pressed ahead with plans to rewrite and effectively nullify the Brexit treaty reached with Brussels less than a year ago.

On Wednesday, the Tories published their “Internal Market Bill,” which the government states will “protect jobs and trade” in the UK at the conclusion of this year’s transition towards leaving the EU. The legislation, to be put before parliament next week, will “enable the UK government to provide financial assistance to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland with new powers to spend taxpayers’ money previously administered by the EU.”

Deliberately ramping up divisions with the EU, it negates clauses in the “Northern Ireland protocol” enshrined in the Withdrawal Agreement Bill parliament passed last December following Johnson’s victory in the General Election. This was only agreed after three years of tortured negotiations that resulted in the fall of Johnson’s predecessor, Theresa May, seeking to prevent hard trade border on the island of Ireland. A compromise was reached by keeping Northern Ireland close to the EU customs union at the same time as being in the UK’s customs territory.

Johnson’s new bill would grant government ministers powers to intervene on matters relating to export declarations on goods shipped from Northern Ireland to Great Britain and to negate the application of EU state-aid rules in Northern Ireland.

Johnson’s actions are in breach of international law and this is explicitly recognised in the text of the legislation. It boasts that the powers in the bill “have effect notwithstanding any relevant international or domestic law with which they may be incompatible or inconsistent.” Therefore “Regulations … [of the bill] are not to be regarded as unlawful on the grounds of any incompatibility or inconsistency with relevant international or domestic law.”

The flagrant breach of the treaty led to the resignation of Jonathan Jones, the head of the government’s legal department, Tuesday. On Wednesday, ahead of the talks with the EU, Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis, when asked in Parliament about the legality of changing a binding international treaty, replied “Yes, this does break international law in a specific and limited way.”

Tensions escalated further as the talks began, after the EU warned that if Johnson persisted with the legislation it might take the UK to court.

Two sets of talks Thursday failed to reach a consensus. Cabinet Office Minister and arch Brexiteer Michael Gove held emergency talks with European Commission’s Maroš Šefčovič, while David Frost, the UK’s chief negotiator, met his EU counterpart Michel Barnier.

Gove stated that Sefcovic “requested that the UK withdraw its Internal Market legislation. I explained… that we could not and would not do that and instead I stressed the vital importance of reaching agreement through the joint committee on these important questions.”

The EU has given the UK three weeks to withdraw the legislation. The European Commission responded in its statement, “Violating the terms of the Withdrawal Agreement would break international law, undermine trust and put at risk the ongoing future relationship negotiations.”

The Tory government claims the measures are required to protect the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, which ended three decades of civil conflict in Northern Ireland. The EU did not “accept the argument” that the UK Internal Market Bill was needed to protect the Good Friday Agreement. “In fact, it is of the view that it does the opposite,” the EC statement stressed.

Sefcovic, said the EC “reminded the UK government that the withdrawal agreement contains a number of mechanisms and legal remedies to address violations of the legal obligations contained in the text—which the European Union will not be shy in using.”

The talks between Frost and Barnier on trade—after seven previous rounds that have gone nowhere—ended with officials on both sides saying that next to no progress had been made.

Pressure is mounting to secure an agreement, with pro-Remain forces within Britain’s political establishment and even some Tories who support Brexit warning of the danger of Johnson’s “brinksmanship.”

Three former prime ministers, Tories Sir John Major and Theresa May and Labour’s Gordon Brown, issued warnings on the danger of the UK being unable to strike future deals and being ostracised as a nation that refuses to abide by international treaties. Brown declared Friday that to break the treaty would be a “a huge act of self-harm” and would see Britain plunged into “battle with Europe for years ahead.”

The Financial Times editorialised Wednesday in a piece headlined, “The UK’s reputation for rule of law is in jeopardy,” that “Tories who have voiced private concern may have to side with the opposition [in Parliament] to strike out the key passage in the legislation.”

Such statements hailing the UK’s supposed adherence to the rule of international law excise from history the filthy record of British imperialism, including the illegal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. But they attest to the enormous concerns in ruling circles over the mounting tensions being exacerbated by Brexit that threaten Britain’s global position.

Johnson has a majority of 80 and a staunchly pro-Brexit base of MPs, and his position is not imperiled by a threatened rebellion over the legislation among his backbenchers next week. It is understood that only up to 30 backbench Tories may be ready to vote against the government. An amendment to the Bill has been tabled by Tory former minister Sir Bob Neill, backed by May’s former deputy prime minister Damian Green. It aims to put a brake on provisions overriding the withdrawal agreement by requiring a separate Commons vote to approve the date on which they would take effect.

However, given the mounting crisis developing over Brexit under conditions where his government is widely despised due to its overseeing the preventable deaths of tens of thousands during the COVID-19 pandemic, Johnson made a plea Friday evening for Tory MPs to back him.

If a no-deal Brexit is the outcome, this will inflame social and political tensions within Britain, as food and medicine shortages would follow as well as manufacturing production being hit.

But were the Johnson government to cobble together a compromise deal with the EU, this would not bring an end to the crisis wracking the British and European bourgeoise.

The central issue for the working class is that Brexit epitomises the malignant growth of inter-imperialist antagonisms that are plunging the world into a brutal trade war and exacerbating the threat of military conflict.

The different factions of the ruling elite disagree violently over whether Britain is best placed within this global conflict outside the EU trade bloc and acting as a centre for global speculation and a deregulated cheap labour platform, in a diplomatic and military alliance with the US, or to maintain an alliance that accounts for over 40 percent of UK trade.

These divisions will persist. But in or out of the EU, and with or without a trade deal between the UK and EU, the working class faces a ferocious attack on its jobs, wages and living standards. As the Socialist Equality Party has explained, the Brexit and pro-EU wings of the Tory party are insistent that whatever their disagreements, nothing can stand in the way of completing the “Thatcher Revolution” through an intensified onslaught against the working class: one that will be waged based on the dire social and economic conditions already created by the pandemic.

Workers have no dog in the fight among the warring factions of the British ruling elite or with the capitalist politicians of the EU. What is posed is the necessity for the working class to intervene on its own independent programme, based on the perspective of the United Socialist States of Europe.

State University of New York scapegoats students for COVID outbreaks, prepares repressive measures

Alex Findijs

As COVID-19 cases continue to multiply across the State University of New York (SUNY) system, the state government is blaming students for the outbreaks. Just three weeks into the semester over 1,100 students have tested positive. Nearly 700 of these come from SUNY Oneonta alone, highlighting how quickly the virus can spread in school environments.

Refusing to take any responsibility for this catastrophe, the SUNY system is on a crusade to punish groups of students for gathering and lay the ground for further police repression on campuses.

SUNY campus

The most severe example of this comes from SUNY Oswego in upstate New York. During move-in, Mayor Billy Barrow deployed city police officers to monitor students as they arrived at their off-campus housing. Since then, Barrow has ordered a surge in police officers during the weekends to patrol neighborhoods with college students and break up any suspected gatherings. He stated that the police have already intervened to break up parties off campus and have been going door to door in college rental neighborhoods.

These measures are being used to impose strict punishments on students, often without any judicial review. In SUNY: five students and one organization were suspended at SUNY Oneonta, 13 students were suspended at SUNY Fredonia, nine students and three organizations were suspended at SUNY Geneseo and 43 students were suspended at SUNY Plattsburgh, just to name a few. This is a common story across the country, with students facing suspension or expulsion, resulting in the loss of a semester of learning and a full semester’s cost.

Thirty-six students have been “summarily suspended” at Purdue University in Indiana. West Virginia University suspended 29 fraternity students after they met for a party while in isolation. Decisions to suspend the students were made with disregard for proper judicial review and rights to due process.

Despite the irresponsibility of some youth and the role that misguided celebrations and parties may have played in spreading the virus, such criticisms and attacks on students are founded on a lie. The unbridled spread of COVID-19 is not the fault of a relatively small number of students but is a direct consequence of the criminal response of the American ruling class.

These crackdowns signal a turn toward coordinated police-state action directed against students as they arrive on campuses amid the socially and politically criminal drive to reopen schools and workplaces amid the pandemic. SUNY Chancellor James Malatras praised the “relationship between the city police department and the university police department,” which he expected would “pay dividends in keeping down the amount of large gatherings and unofficial events that shouldn’t be happening.”

Malatras, a former top adviser to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, has lauded Oswego’s COVID policies as an example of a “good plan well executed.” The possibility is very real that local police will be deployed in other towns and cities to monitor students living off campus.

The utilization of the police force dovetails with the implementation of greater on-campus monitoring and surveillance. According to the Chicago Tribune, several schools across the country have stated they will monitor social media and security camera footage to identify students violating school regulations. Such violations of student privacy serve only the purpose to bolster the repressive tools available to campus authorities and to direct all blame onto students.

SUNY Oneonta President Barbara Jean Morris stated that the school would be “working to identify the students [photographed gathering] and will quickly issue disciplinary actions and possible suspensions. We will also step up our monitoring of these residence halls to prevent this behavior from happening again.”

Efforts to monitor student interactions through the use of facial recognition software are not out of the question. Lock Port City School District in Western New York stoked controversy when it announced plans to implement a facial recognition system in its schools earlier this year. While such methods are nominally being used to break up unsafe gatherings, they inevitably will be used against students seeking to fight back against unsafe school reopenings, police brutality and other conditions being created by the authorities themselves.

This march toward authoritarian police-state measures arises in New York state, a core bastion of the Democratic Party. Democratic Governor Cuomo was hailed by the media during the early days of the pandemic as a messiah who would lead the country out of the crisis. He was even encouraged to enter the race for the Democratic presidential nomination as a last-minute substitution for the flailing Joe Biden.

In reality, Cuomo’s response to the pandemic was lethargic and inadequate, overseeing the deaths of 30,000 New Yorkers as the state became the global epicenter for several months. His policies only appeared superior because of the abysmally pathetic responses from the federal and other state governments. Now that the crisis has slowed in New York, he is free to embark on the path the Democratic Party has been taking in other states; pursuing the same deadly policies as the Trump administration.

As recently as August 28 Cuomo tweeted out the battle cry “Test Test Test.” But where is all the testing on college campuses? Of the 64 schools in the SUNY system, only three required testing prior to or during arrival. So far, fewer than 38,000 tests have been administered on campuses. This is one test for every 37 SUNY students, who number 1.4 million across all schools.

The abysmal state of testing on campuses is shown in the discrepancy between positive tests administered on campus and those administered at other testing centers. Cuomo has referred to college students as the “canary in the coal mine” and has stated that he expects similar outbreaks to occur in K-12 schools. However, keeping schools and workplaces closed to stop the pandemic would cut into the potential profits of the ruling class, a loss that Cuomo and his ilk are not willing to take.

Of the 1,139 positive cases at SUNY schools only 478 were from campus testing centers. SUNY Buffalo has seen 64 COVID-19 cases since reopening. Only two of these were from campus-administered tests. Similarly, SUNY Fredonia has confirmed 84 positive cases, of which five were tested on campus. Again, 64 students tested positive at SUNY Oswego, where 15 were campus-administered tests.

Students are being set up to fail. There has been no mandatory testing before arrival, limited testing available on campus and a lack of coordination and communication with the student bodies. Then, when an inevitable outbreak occurs, the administration blames the students and rinses itself of all responsibility.

Students must organize on their campuses with faculty and staff to form rank-and-file safety committees that will fight for their health and lives. These committees are being formed by educators in schools all over the country. All students and educators interested in taking up the fight to protect the lives and health of students and workers should join the national Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee and work to build committees on their campuses.

Mauritian cruise ship crews strike to demand repatriation

Tom Casey

Crew members aboard the Mediterranean Shipping Company’s (MSC) Poesia and Musica cruise ships have taken strike action in opposition to the company’s months-long failure to repatriate its employees. The two vessels, along with the MSC Seaview, have been stranded near the port of Santos, Brazil since the height of the coronavirus pandemic and the cruise industry’s shutdown in late March.

On Tuesday, a group of 25 employees on the Musica took to the upper deck of the ship, refusing to return to their cabins until the company guaranteed their travel arrangements. Workers staged similar actions on the Poesia, brandishing signs that contained messages such as “Hostage: MSC stop lying,” “We also have families,” and “Send us back home: our life matters.”

Crew on the MSC Musica stage a sit-in, refusing to return to their cabins until the company guarantees their repatration

Between the three MSC vessels off the Brazilian coast, there are 103 crew members from Mauritius who have been trapped on board for nearly six months. Accounting for the fact that for some crew, contracts of employment began well before the pandemic, it is likely that many of these workers have not seen their families for far longer than that.

A worker on the Seaview who spoke with the WSWS confirmed that the actions of the Musica and the Poesia crew came in the wake of several canceled repatriation dates given by the company, which it blamed on the border policies of the Mauritian government. The employees have had several travel plans issued by MSC fall through since July.

Like many marooned cruise ship workers, the stranded Mauritian MSC crew members have been cut off from the company payroll since March. A video published by TopFM.mu, a Mauritian news source, shows a worker on the Poesia describing her inability to pay for her expenses for her children back home. Similarly harrowing stories have been commonplace among stranded cruise ship workers of all nationalities.

Mauritius is a small island country in the western Indian Ocean, approximately 700 miles from the coast of Madagascar. As national borders around the world closed in the initial stages of the pandemic, the Mauritian administration of Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth collaborated with the country’s largest privately held tourism corporation, Air Mauritius, Ltd, to impose exorbitant fees on the return of its approximately 4,000 citizens requiring repatriation and quarantine.

It has taken almost half a year for the global cruise industry and worldwide governments to send home nearly 200,000 international workers who were stranded in the wake of the pandemic. In mid-August, there were approximately 12,000 workers still trapped in US waters, with likely thousands more abroad.

A Wednesday article in the New York Times, entitled “Trapped by Exhaustion and Despair,” cites the International Transportation Workers’ Federation (ITF), a major seafarers’ trade union, as estimating that on merchant cargo vessels last month, “300,000 of the 1.2 million crew members at sea were essentially stranded on their ships, working past the expiration of their original contracts and fighting isolation, uncertainty and fatigue.” The WSWS has extensively reported on the deadly conditions facing these stranded seafaring workers, among which there have been dozens of deaths due to COVID-19 outbreaks, as well as several other deaths, which are widely suspected to have been suicides or deaths of despair.

MSC is the world’s fourth largest cruise company. It is also the world’s largest cruise enterprise that is entirely privately held, earning €405 million in profits in 2019, up from €348 million in 2018 [1]. Doubtlessly fueling the ire of its stranded employees is the fact that while its workers have been held hostage on its vessels for months, the company has been among the most ruthless ship operators to push for a resumption of sailings. Last month, amidst several failed European cruise industry restart attempts, as well as the extension of the Cruise Line Industry Association’s (CLIA) voluntary suspension of US sailings, the company managed to be among the first to complete a “successful” cruise since the shutdown of its 2,500-passenger voyage on the Grandiosa.

An August 19 article by the industry publication The Maritime Executive declared that “all eyes are now [on] MSC Grandiosa to see if it can successfully navigate these tricky waters and give this ailing industry some hope.” On Thursday, the Giornale di Sicilia (Journal of Sicily) reported that an Israeli employee on the Grandiosa who had tested positive but was asymptomatic for COVID-19 was evacuated Wednesday into a quarantine facility near Messina.

Although the company boasted that the infected employee’s quick diagnosis and subsequent evacuation reflect its preparedness for coronavirus outbreaks, stating that their enhanced protocol “makes our boats places of total safety,” all claims by MSC that the welfare of their crew is paramount are belied by the horrendous treatment of its workers on board the Poesia, Musica and Seaview.

It was only late on Thursday, doubtlessly in response to the courageous action by its crew members, that MSC issued travel confirmation to its employees. According to a report on defimedia.info, crew members are scheduled to travel home on September 16th.

But the struggle facing seafaring workers is far from concluded. If anything, the stand taken by the Mauritian workers on the MSC Poesia and Musica demonstrates that it is only the direct intervention of the workforce that will deter the major corporations in their relentless drive to enrich their top executives at the expense of the health, safety and basic rights of their employees.

It is significant to note that neither the ITF nor its official Cruise Ship Task Force has made any official statement on—let alone an endorsement of—the actions taken by the Musica and Poesia crew. There remains in this thoroughly corporatized organization little connection to the day-to-day struggles facing the global seafaring work force that it claims to represent.

Constitutional amendment aims to provide Sri Lankan president with authoritarian powers

Sanjaya Jayasekera & Deepl Jayasekera

Early this month, the Sri Lankan cabinet approved a draft 20th amendment to the constitution, which would give sweeping dictatorial powers to the executive president if approved by the parliament. President Gotabhaya Rajapakse’s Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) government is planning to ram the bill through parliament in October.

Sri Lanka’s attorney general has given legal approval to the amendment and ruled that it can be imposed without a referendum, as constitutionally required, if enacted by a two-thirds majority of MPs.

The SLPP won about 145 seats in the 225-member parliament at the August 5 election, and is expected to secure, via backroom wheeling and dealing, the support of enough parliamentarians for a two-thirds majority.

Rajapakse and his SLPP campaigned during the presidential and general elections for repealing the 19th amendment of the constitution, which restricted certain presidential powers. This was necessary, they claimed, in order to establish “strong and stable” government to “develop” the country.

This is a lie. President Rajapakse, who came to power by hypocritically exploiting popular opposition to the previous regime of President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, wants dictatorial powers in order to take on the working class. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the country’s economic, social and political crisis. Anger is rising amongst workers and the poor against escalating government and employer attacks on jobs, wages and living conditions.

The 19th amendment, which limited some of the president’s executive powers, was passed by the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe administration in April 2015. These restrictions include: the president can only appoint top state officials and judges on the recommendation of a Constitutional Council; the president has to seek prime ministerial advice in the selection of ministers and the allocation of their functions; the president can only hold two terms and cannot dissolve parliament until it has completed four and half years of its five-year term.

Sirisena won power by promising to abolish the hated executive presidency, which was established in the 1978 constitution. In fact, two presidents before Sirisena—Chandrika Kumaratunga and Mahinda Rajapakse—made the same promise before they came to power, only to abandon it and then use the executive powers to the maximum.

Like his predecessor, Sirisena ditched his pledge and introduced the 19th amendment. The Tamil National Alliance (TNA), Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) and various pseudo-left groups falsely proclaimed Sirisena’s amendment as a “victory for democracy.”

Apart from retaining the president’s two-term limit, the SLPP’s draft 20th amendment plans to remove all current constitutional restrictions and hand to the president the following powers:

• The president can appoint and remove the prime minister and is not required to consult with the prime minister in the appointment of ministers. Currently, Rajapakse unconstitutionally heads the defence ministry and overseers 23 key state institutions.

• The president can sack the parliament after it has completed just one year of its five-year term.

• The president will be immune from any litigation, including criminal prosecution, and no fundamental rights cases can be filed against him.

• The president can also appoint chairmen of commissions on elections, police, public service, human rights, bribery, corruption and finance, as well as top judges, the attorney general and other high officials. These appointments can be discussed with a proposed Parliamentary Council, whose members will include the prime minister, parliamentary speaker and the opposition leader. It will not be mandatory for the president to be involved in the Parliamentary Council.

The government would also be empowered to pass “urgent bills” in the parliament within 24 hours, thus avoiding any legal challenge from the country’s highest court. Modifications to any bill in parliament cannot deviate from its “merits and principles,” meaning parliament cannot make major changes. This clause was not in the 1978 constitution.

President Rajapakse, however, wants to go beyond these anti-democratic measures. He claims, in fact, that the current constitution has been amended 19 times because of its “unsuitability,” and has called for a new constitution based on “one country, one law for all the people.” Such a move would undermine existing laws related to the Tamil and Muslim minorities and further entrench communalist discrimination. Rajapakse’s cabinet has appointed a nine-member “experts committee,” mainly consisting of Rajapakse lackeys, to draft a new constitution.

Sri Lanka’s current constitution was established in 1978 by the then United National Party (UNP) government, which appointed J. R. Jayewardene as the country’s first executive president, transformed the parliament into a rubber stamp and the judiciary into a pliant institution. The 1978 constitution was established to drastically change the Sri Lankan economy and integrate it into globalised production by gutting the social rights of workers and the poor, creating cheap labour conditions and crushing all social opposition.

After systematic anti-Tamil communal provocations—a vicious weapon used by successive regimes to divide the working class and to weaken it in the wake of the 1948 formal independence—the Jayewardene regime began what became a three-decade long civil war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The executive powers were also used to sack around 100,000 public sector employees, who, in July 1980, began a general strike against the government’s attacks on living and social conditions.

The current Rajapakse-led government, however, is not simply returning to the 1978 constitution. The Sri Lankan capitalist class is mired in a deep crisis due to the collapse of exports, tourism and remittances—a result of the growing impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Economic growth is estimated to be negative three percent this year, under conditions where the cash-strapped government has to pay $US4 billion annually, until 2024, on foreign loan repayments.

More than 400,000 jobs have been destroyed in the manufacturing sector, with workers’ wages in the private sector being cut by at least 30 percent, according to a labour ministry survey. Social tensions are rising throughout the country as part of the growing resistance of workers internationally.

Rajapakse’s preparations for autocratic rule are in line with the moves of his international counterparts towards fascistic and dictatorial forms of rule. In the US, President Donald Trump is seeking to mobilise fascist elements, while unleashing repression against workers and those protesting against police violence. In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janatha Party government is intensifying its anti-Muslim attacks and whipping up extreme-right elements to use against workers and the poor.

Rajapakse has already inserted serving and retired military officers into his administration and is creating the framework for a presidential dictatorship, based on the military.

Sri Lanka’s so-called opposition parties have no fundamental differences with the government’s moves towards dictatorship, and are equally fearful of the growing opposition of workers and the poor to capitalism and to Sri Lanka’s ruling elite.

The UNP, Samagi Jana Balavegaya (SJB), TNA, JVP and the Muslim parties have strengthened Rajapakse and his government, attending two all-party meetings on March 24 and April 2, praising the president’s response to COVID-19 and offering their assistance. On August 20, all the opposition parties endorsed the president’s parliamentary policy statement without a vote.

This week the SJB held a protest in the Colombo suburbs and “pledged” to defeat the 20th amendment by “mobilising the people.” This rhetoric is aimed at hoodwinking the population and diverting it into dead-end parliamentary appeals.

Similarly, the JVP is seeking to politically disorient the working class by covering up the real dangers posed by the Rajapakse government’s dictatorial plans. Addressing a September 4 press conference, JVP leader Anura Kumar Dissanayake declared that the new constitutional amendment was “not in the interests of the country” but to “politically benefit one section”—i.e., the Rajapakse family.

Likewise, pseudo-left formations, such as the Frontline Socialist Party (FSP), have lined up with these right-wing parties, and the trade unions, to block any independent mobilisation of the working class.

Addressing a September 4 press conference, FSP educational secretary Pubudu Jayagoda declared that the “autocratic rule of an individual will bring horrific disaster to the country” and issued a pathetic appeal to government MPs to oppose the 20th amendment. Following the August 5 general elections, Jayagoda declared that the FSP was “ready to work with left, petty-bourgeois and progressive sections of the right-wing parties… on common issues.”

The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) is the only organisation that has consistently warned the working class about the growing danger of authoritarian rule in Sri Lanka. No amount of appeals to the government or the opposition parties will change the right-wing anti-democratic agenda being advanced by the Sri Lankan ruling elite.

The working class can only take forward the defence of its democratic and social rights by breaking from every faction of the capitalist class and mobilising around its own independent interests—i.e., on the basis of a revolutionary socialist program. This means fighting for a unified struggle of workers across ethnic lines and to rally the rural poor in the fight for workers’ and peasants’ government based on an international socialist program.

Australian raids on Chinese journalists mark escalation of US-led witch hunt

Mike Head

Reports surfaced this week that further reveal the provocative anti-China agenda driving the secret Australian intelligence raids on four Chinese journalists on June 26. A US-instigated witch hunt against China is being stepped up, fueling a rapidly sharpening conflict between China and Australia.

Operating on a warrant personally issued by Attorney-General Christian Porter, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), the domestic political spy agency, mounted dawn raids on the journalists, as well as a state Labor Party parliamentarian and a part-time member of his staff.

Thanks to ASIO and its media conduits, the 6.30 a.m. raid on New South Wales MP Shaoquett Moselmane, the son of Lebanese immigrants, was splashed all over the media, with headlines falsely accusing him of being a “Chinese agent.”

It was reported to be the first activation of the US-backed “foreign interference” legislation introduced by the Liberal-National government, with Labor’s full support, in 2018.

What was kept secret at the time was that journalists from Chinese publications were also raided. After questioning the journalists for “several hours” and seizing mobile phones, computers and hand-written notebooks, the ASIO officers ordered the journalists not to inform anyone of the raids, the Chinese media reported this week.

These police-state powers were first introduced under the cover of the “war on terror.” They give ASIO the power to secretly conduct interrogations and “special intelligence operations.” Anyone, including the targeted victims, who alerts the public to such operations can be jailed for up to 10 years.

Following the ASIO raids, the journalists left Australia. According to media reports, they included Tao Shelan, the Australia bureau chief of the China News Service, and Li Dayong, China Radio International’s Sydney bureau chief.

Around the same time, the Australian government, citing ASIO advice, revoked the visas of two Chinese academics. One is Professor Chen Hong, who has been director of the Australian studies centre at East China Normal University in Shanghai since 2001 and a frequent visitor to Australia for decades. The other is Beijing Foreign Studies University Professor Li Jianjun, who is currently on a PhD scholarship at Western Sydney University.

ASIO has refused to make any statement about the basis for the raids and visa cancellations. According to media reports, the journalists and academics shared chats with Moselmane on WeChat. Such is the apparently flimsy evidence of “foreign interference.”

Professor Chen told Beijing’s Global Times it was “preposterous” that the chat group, where they shared jokes and photos of personal excursions, was regarded as a covert means of political influence.

Chinese authorities only revealed the ASIO raids on the journalists this week in response to the latest chapter in the escalating anti-China campaign by the Australian media and political establishment—sensational headlines about two Australian journalists being questioned by Chinese police.

The timeline of this affair is significant.

On March 2, as part of a deepening US military, economic and diplomatic offensive against the Chinese regime, the Trump administration cut the number of visas for Chinese citizens working at Chinese media organisations in the US to 100, effectively expelling 60 journalists.

The US government also declared Chinese media outlets, including the official news agency Xinhua, to be “foreign diplomatic missions.” As a result, they were publicly placed under heightened surveillance, with limits on their property and locations. In return, the Chinese government expelled most journalists from the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.

In Australia, the corporate media outlets soon turned their attention to Moselmane, armed with material supplied by the intelligence agencies. On March 31 it was reported that he had posted an article on his website praising Chinese President Xi Jinping’s leadership in alerting the world to COVID-19 and containing the pandemic in China.

Moselmane was immediately publicly reprimanded by his state parliamentary leader, Jodi McKay, for making “inappropriate comments.” That underscored Labor’s bipartisan support for the alignment behind the US confrontation with China.

A few days later, media outlets reported that Moselmane had written a commentary on February 5, saying that government and media efforts to blame China for the spread of the supposed “Wuhan virus” were xenophobic and designed to incite anti-Chinese hatred.

For voicing this political opinion, the Labor Party immediately stripped Moselmane of a parliamentary post. Several weeks later, on June 26, ASIO raided his home and parliamentary office, and those of his part-time electorate officer, John Zhang. Labor then forced Moselmane to take indefinite leave from parliament.

Despite the politically and personally damaging “foreign interference” accusations against them, which they both deny, no charges have been laid against Moselmane and Zhang. Zhang has launched a High Court challenge, exposing the nebulous nature of the accusations hurled against him and charging the government and ASIO with violating the implied freedom of political communication in the Australian constitution.

Next, on August 14, Cheng Lei, a dual Chinese-Australian citizen working as a journalist for a Chinese government television network, was reported to have been arrested in Beijing. She was “suspected of carrying out criminal activities endangering China’s national security,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry said.

Little is known of these allegations, but the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs then ramped up the conflict. It advised the only two journalists employed by Australian outlets in China to leave the country. They were the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s China correspondent Bill Birtles and the Australian Financial Review ’s Shanghai correspondent Michael Smith.

Acting on this official advice, Birtles and Smith booked flights out of China for September 3. The night before, Chinese officials visited both and told them they could not leave until police had interviewed them about a legal case, apparently relating to Cheng Lei.

The Australian embassy then told the two journalists to flee into Australian diplomatic residences. There they remained for five days before agreeing to answer questions from the police if they were granted exit permits. After one-hour police interviews, which Smith described as “unremarkable,” they flew out of China.

One can only imagine the political and media furore if the Chinese embassy in Australia had taken similar action to block or delay the ASIO raids and questioning of the Chinese journalists.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian accused Australia of hypocrisy and double standards. “The Australian side describes its ‘questioning’ of Chinese journalists as normal procedure, but accuses the Chinese side of engaging in ‘hostage diplomacy,’” he said.

These developments are part of an accelerating campaign, designed to poison public opinion against China and create a wartime-like atmosphere.

Last month, Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government announced—also with Labor’s bipartisan support—an unprecedented Foreign Relations Bill, essentially designed to tear up or prohibit all agreements with Chinese entities by universities, as well as state, territory and municipal governments.

A few days later, the government launched McCarthyite-style parliamentary hearings into “foreign interference in the university sector.”

These actions are all part of sharp intensification of the anti-China propaganda drive that has been underway for years, spearheaded by the US-integrated intelligence apparatus and the corporate media.

The Australian ruling elite has placed the population on the frontlines of an aggressive US confrontation with China that could lead to a catastrophic nuclear war as the US seeks to reassert the hegemony it obtained via World War II.

As in the US also, the nationalist agitation against China is an attempt to divert the rising unrest being generated by the disastrous, corporate profit-driven response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the soaring levels of unemployment and social inequality.

The use of the draconian ASIO powers under the “terrorism” and “foreign interference” laws is a warning that the drive to military conflict is being accompanied by attacks on democratic rights that will increasingly target domestic social and political opposition, not just academics and journalists.

India-China border conflict remains on knife’s edge

Jordan Shilton & Keith Jones

The four-month-long standoff between Indian and Chinese troops over disputed areas along their 3,475 kilometre-long border in the Himalayas has escalated dramatically over the past two weeks. The threat that a localized clash could spark a regional war that would drag in the world’s major powers is being increased by US imperialism’s provocative support for India’s right-wing Modi government, and a renewed push by the major European powers to bolster their military-strategic presence in the Indo-Pacific region so as to thwart China’s rise.

Alleging a Chinese plot to seize Indian border territory, the Indian military launched what it termed a “pre-emptive” operation on the night of August 29 and 30. Deploying what it has now emerged were several thousand troops, India captured a series of strategic heights in inhospitable mountainous terrain near Pangong Lake along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), the countries’ contested de facto border. The 134 kilometer-long lake lies at the junction of Indian-held Ladakh and the Chinese-controlled Aksai Chin region.

In reality, the India manoeuvre was a provocative escalation of tensions that has brought heavily-armed Indian troops to within two hundred metres, or “eyeball to eyeball,” with their Chinese counterparts.

Last Monday, live ammunition was fired at the border for the first time in more than forty years, violating a bilateral agreement that prohibits soldiers patrolling near the disputed LAC from discharging their firearms. India has claimed that Chinese forces fired into the air during a confrontation, while Beijing has countered that it was in fact Indian troops that opened fire at a Chinese patrol. Nobody was injured in the incident, but it resulted in an escalation of threats on both sides.

Indian sources claim as many as 50,000 Chinese troops have been deployed to the Aksai Chin border region, along with fighter jets and artillery. India, which has similarly made major “forward” deployments to air bases and army camps, has fortified its newly-conquered heights in eastern Ladakh/Aksai Chin with tanks and additional troops.

Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar and his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi issued a statement pledging their respective militaries would “quickly disengage, maintain proper distance, and ease tensions,” following a two-and-a-half-hour meeting Thursday in Moscow, on the sidelines of a Shanghai Cooperation Organization conclave.

This does not change the fact that the conflict remains on a knife’s edge.

The vaguely-worded statement outlines no concrete proposals on how the border standoff and rival claims over where the LAC lies are to be resolved. It needs recalling that the bloodiest clash to date, which occurred in the Galwan Valley on the night of June 15, erupted during an official period of “de-escalation” following two non-lethal clashes between Indian and Chinese troops in May, at points 1,000 kilometers apart. The June clash, which saw soldiers engage in hand-to-hand combat with rods, blades, and stones, resulted in the deaths of 20 Indian soldiers and an unknown number of Chinese forces.

Although some troop withdrawals took place after the June clash, tensions have escalated in recent weeks, with both sides insisting that the onus is on the other to defuse the crisis. Meanwhile, the number of disputed points along the border has increased. Late last month, Jaishankar declared the possibility of a military confrontation between the rival nuclear-armed powers is the highest since India and China fought a month-long border war in 1962.

Any number of localized clashes, intended or otherwise, could easily blow up into an all-out war. In an ominous development, a senior Indian military official told the Times of India earlier this week that local commanders have been granted wide latitude to determine how to respond to Chinese military activities. “Our soldiers on the heights are well-armed and fully-prepared,” the unnamed official added.

India’s provocative actions at its border with China are motivated by two interrelated factors. First, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his crisis-ridden Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government are using the tensions with Beijing to shift official politics sharply to the right and whip up a bellicose Indian nationalism. By so doing, they hope to overcome popular opposition to aligning India ever more closely with Washington, justify a further massive buildup of India’s military might, and divert attention away from the disastrous health and social crisis triggered by the government’s ruinous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Secondly, Modi and the entire Indian ruling elite—including the opposition Congress Party, which during the current crisis has repeatedly taunted the BJP government for not being sufficiently aggressive against Beijing—know that they enjoy the full backing of US imperialism in the conflict with China. Almost immediately after the border dispute erupted in May, Washington demonstratively inserted itself into the conflict, denounced China as the aggressor, and directly tied it to the US-incited South China Sea dispute.

This is part of a bipartisan policy, pursued by Republican and Democratic administrations alike for two decades, to cultivate close military-strategic ties with India so as to transform it into a bulwark against an increasingly economic and geopolitically powerful China.

The irreconcilable conflict between US imperialism and China, now the world’s second largest and by some measures biggest economy, was summed up by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a late July speech in which he repudiated the five-decade-old US policy of “engagement” with China. Pompeo unveiled a comprehensive strategy of diplomatic, economic, and military pressure against China, making clear that the US is now determined to bring about regime change in Beijing.

The India-China border dispute is made all the more explosive because it is becoming ever more enmeshed with Washington’s aggressive diplomatic-military offensive against Beijing. Despite the remote and almost uninhabitable character of the disputed territories, including some peaks that rise to 5,100 meters (17,000 feet) above sea level, they are of growing strategic significance.

The $60 billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor, which is a key plank of Beijing’s broader Belt and Road Initiative to develop economic ties with the Middle East, Africa, and Europe, runs near the disputed border, and through Chinese and Pakistani-held territory claimed by India. Moreover, Aksai Chin provides the only road link between China’s Tibetan and Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Regions, where US imperialism and its allies have sought to exploit ethnic grievances to weaken the Beijing regime.

US imperialism’s incendiary role all but ensures that if a war erupts over the India-China border, it will take on global dimensions. Central to US strategy, beginning with Obama’s “Pivot to Asia” and further underlined by the Pentagon’s 2018 declaration of a new era of great-power “strategic competition,” has been to transform India into a US frontline state against China.

As part of its ever more aggressive stance towards China, leading US officials have begun to publicly call for the creation of a NATO-style alliance in the Indo-Pacific region to challenge China. They are pressing for the Quad—a four-country, US-led strategic dialogue revived in 2017 that includes India, and Washington’s two principal Asia-Pacific allies, Japan and Australia—to serve as the basis for such an alliance. India is set to host a Quad ministerial meeting in October, where the prospects for deepening military-security cooperation among its members and adding additional member states, like South Korea or New Zealand, will reportedly be discussed.

While US imperialism, as always, plays the most provocative and destabilizing role, its European and Japanese competitors are not far behind. Outgoing Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe unveiled more than $2 billion in subsidies earlier this week to encourage Japanese companies to relocate their production facilities from China to India. At a meeting on Thursday, Abe and Modi also announced a bilateral logistics and military base-sharing agreement, patterned after that reached in 2016 between the US and India, which allows US warships and warplanes to make routine use of Indian ports and bases for maintenance and resupply.

Two days earlier, India, France, and Australia held their inaugural trilateral dialogue, an annual meeting that will focus on strategic and economic cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region. India is particularly interested in securing access to French military bases in Reunion and Madagascar, which it hopes will enable it to combat the expansion of China’s naval presence in the Indian Ocean through a recently established base in Djibouti and what the Pentagon claims is an undeclared based in Gwadar, Pakistan. Following the dialogue, French Defence Minister Florence Parly travelled to India for Thursday’s induction of five Rafale fighter jets into the Indian Air Force, which is the first stage of a $7.8 billion agreement between the two countries for 36 fighter jets. Parly also held talks with her Indian counterpart, Rajnath Singh, on expanding industrial and logistical cooperation within the framework of Modi’s “Make in India” campaign.

Not to be left out, Germany’s cabinet adopted late last month a new strategic doctrine for the Indo-Pacific that commits Europe’s largest economy to engage strategically and militarily across the region. In keeping with the German ruling elite’s systematic drive to revive militarism and an imperialist “world-power” foreign policy, the 80-page document declares that Berlin’s role “could comprise participating in security policy forums, participating in military exercises in the region, planning joint evacuations, sending liaison officers, as well as various forms of naval presence.”

In a statement announcing the publication of the document, Foreign Minister Heiko Maas underscored the predatory interests behind the plan, asserting, “The Himalayas and Straits of Malacca may seem far away. But our prosperity and geopolitical influence in the decades to come depend precisely on how we cooperate with the states of the Indo-Pacific.”

The hotly-contested Indian Ocean, which accounts for more than 40 percent of global maritime trade and is relied upon by China for oil imports as well as much of its export trade, is rapidly emerging as one of the world’s most volatile flashpoints.

The great power rivalries, which have been enormously exacerbated by the global economic crisis triggered by the pandemic, pose an immense danger to the working class of the region and the entire world.

Working people in India, China, throughout the region and internationally cannot stop the mounting danger of a war, fought between nuclear powers, in the Indo-Pacific by appealing to any of the powers involved. While it is the target of aggression by the imperialist powers and their Indian bourgeois satraps, the Stalinist regime in Beijing, which is the guardian of the vast wealth of China’s rapidly growing oligarchy of billionaires, has no progressive answer. China has responded to India’s provocations at their shared border with reactionary nationalist appeals of its own, and pledges to obliterate the Indian military with China’s superior armed forces should a military conflict with New Delhi erupt.

What is required is the building of a global, working-class-led, anti-war movement to stop the mad drive of the imperialist and great powers towards a catastrophic military conflagration. This movement must be based on the recognition that war can be fought only by taking up a struggle against its source, the capitalist profit system, on the basis of a socialist programme.