The Police System That Terrorizes the Poor and Minorities Is Rooted in the Colonial Past

Justin Podur

The Minneapolis City Council’s attempt to defund police may have fizzled out for the moment, but the problem of police violence across the United States is unresolved—and much of it stems from the institution’s colonial, counterinsurgency roots.

Here are seven counterinsurgency features of policing and the inequities in the criminal justice system.

1. Counterinsurgency Tactics Are Everywhere.

In the Canadian province of Ontario, when the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) changed its public transportation fare collection method from tokens to the Presto card, users had a strange experience. Sure, the fare booth was predictably replaced by an inhuman and unforgiving terminal that malfunctions all the time (despite the steep price the province had paid for it). But instead of having less human interaction, TTC passengers found they had more—with fare inspectors who corral passengers into small spaces at stations to test everyone’s cards. In counterinsurgency terms, this is called a cordon-and-search operation.

Another counterinsurgency concept, that of “hearts and minds,” can be seen in a public information campaign to shame fare evasion through posters blanketing subway walls and the sides of buses. Riders were infuriated—not just by the campaign itself but also by abuses and racial discrimination by the fare inspectors. Unsurprisingly, spoofs of the TTC’s messaging followed, as they did in New York City in resistance to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s fare evasion messaging.

There is nothing special about Toronto, New York City, or other transit systems that increasingly use these warlike techniques to police customers; what’s happening with the TTC and MTA is a relatively mild example of what happens when counterinsurgency methods are the first resort for any urban problem that arises.

2. Police Don’t Live in the Communities They Police.

Colonial forces are imposed from outside; this prevents too much natural solidarity between the occupier and the occupied. In the United States, the majority of police don’t live in the communities they serve. One Newark officer from the Fraternal Order of Police put it succinctly: “the community hates the police. And you want to put us right in the middle of that with our families?”

The polling is consistent with the idea that one group of people is policing another. A July 2020 Gallup survey showed that 70 percent of Black Americans support reducing police budgets, while only 41 percent of white Americans do. Out-and-out defunding is more commonly supported by Black Americans (according to FiveThirtyEight’s average of two polls, 45 percent of Black Americans polled support defunding, with 28 percent opposed) and opposed by white Americans (with 61 percent of white Americans opposed to defunding and only 23 percent in support of defunding). The difference in public opinion reflects one group benefiting from police security and another suffering from police violence and surveillance.

As Richard Rothstein showed in his book The Color of Law, the racial segregation of U.S. cities was brought about by methodical legal means, racially explicit zoning, and the destruction of integrated neighborhoods. This segregation, too, has consequences for the police-counterinsurgency alignment.

In author James Ron’s book Frontiers and Ghettos: State Violence in Serbia and Israel, he compared the methods of state violence used in a “ghetto,” where a hostile population is meant to be contained by powerful state control but where law and morality still limit its enforcement due to the nature of oppressor and oppressed living side-by-side; and on a “frontier,” where even more devastating warfare is unleashed since state power is more tenuous on targeted populations who don’t live among their oppressors, but the bounds of law and morality are weaker.

In the United States, this theory also has applied throughout its history: domestic ghettos are policed, and frontiers are the sites of total war both at home and abroad. But the more police think of cities as the “frontier,” the more violence they will commit against the policed.

3. Police Get Specialized Counterinsurgency Training.

Police officers are encouraged to take weekend courses in a field called “killology,” developed by retired Army Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman. There, they learn to see themselves as “front-line troops” in a war, presumably on the civilians they are policing.

A critic of killology courses, Seth Stoughton, says they steep police in the worldview that “the officer is the hero, the warrior, the noble figure who steps into dark situations where others fear to tread and brings order to a chaotic world, and who does so by imposing their will on the civilians they deal with.” Another critic, Craig Atkinson, calls the courses “fear porn.” One such training, “The Bulletproof Warrior,” was taken by Philando Castile’s killer.

4. In a Counterinsurgency, Everyone’s a Criminal.

According to defenders of law enforcement, the thinking is: If you don’t want to be policed, don’t commit crimes, right? But the law creates the criminal.

And the number of laws for police to identify those criminals is growing suspiciously. American University professor Emilio Viano notes, quoting the conservative think tank the American Heritage Foundation, that “the ‘number of criminal offenses in the United States Code increased from 3,000 in the early 1980s to 4,000 by 2000 to over 4,450 by 2008.’ From 2000 to 2007 Congress added 56.5 new crimes every year.” The staggering number of laws is incongruous to American society’s actual concerns, as is evidenced by attorney Harvey Silverglate’s book arguing that the average American commits “three felonies a day.”

In this system, the full weight of the law is available to bring down upon anyone at any time.

And once it is brought down on you, you have no meaningful right to a trial.

5. There’s No Right to a Trial in a Counterinsurgency.

In TV cop shows, the police are constrained by clever lawyers and fair-minded judges in the courtroom—but in reality, cases almost never go to trial. As Professor Viano writes:

“In fiscal year 2010, the prevalent mode of conviction in U.S. District Courts of all crimes was by plea of guilty (96.8% of all cases). The percentage ranges from a relative low of 68.2% for murder to a high of 100% for cases of burglary, breaking and entering. With the exception of sex abuse (87.5%), arson (86.7%), civil rights (83.6%) and murder (68.2%), for all other crimes the rate of convictions by plea of guilty is well over 90%. In the… [2012] U.S. Supreme Court decision, Missouri v. Frye, Justice Kennedy, writing the majority opinion, pointed out the statistics that 97% of federal convictions and 94% of state convictions are the result of guilty pleas.”

The fact that 90 percent of cases don’t go to trial is the outcome of two Supreme Court rulings described by Michelle Alexander in a 2012 op-ed in the New York Times:

“The Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that threatening someone with life imprisonment for a minor crime in an effort to induce him to forfeit a jury trial did not violate his Sixth Amendment right to trial. Thirteen years later, in Harmelin v. Michigan, the court ruled that life imprisonment for a first-time drug offense did not violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.”

Regardless of the innocence of the offender or the senseless overzealousness of law writing and enforcement, it is standard operating procedure that the accused do not get their day in court. Instead, prosecutors threaten the accused with shocking sentences, and have them plead guilty to something less to get them into the life-ruining prison system.

Alexander noted that the criminal justice system is unequipped for any other way: “If everyone charged with crimes suddenly exercised his constitutional rights, there would not be enough judges, lawyers or prison cells to deal with the ensuing tsunami of litigation.” The author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness also argued in the New York Times op-ed that “crash[ing] the system just by exercising our rights” could comprise a strategy to combatting the inequities and flaws in the criminal justice system. Blogger Arthur Silber agreed that this strategy could work if done en masse, noting, “[n]othing short of mass non-cooperation has a chance in hell.”

But the price of seeking one’s right to trial is prohibitive. Julian Assange is being publicly tortured right now mainly for doing journalism, but partly also for insisting on his rights to a trial. And Aaron Swartz was hounded to death, driven to suicide by a prosecutor applying the standard operating procedure by threatening Swartz with a 35-year sentence for trying to make scientific publications available to those outside of university paywalls.

In cases relating to the drug war, the goal of police and prosecutors is also to get the accused to turn on one another: in exchange for more lenient punishments, suspects are made to become informants against others—another key element of counterinsurgency and its slow destruction of solidarity in the criminalized, targeted society.

6. U.S. Policing Was Developed in Concert With the U.S. Empire.

Consider one of the founding fathers of American policing, August Vollmer. A U.S. Marine who invaded the Philippines in the Spanish-American War in 1898, he set out to “reform” Berkeley’s police when he became its first chief in 1909. He used the scientific techniques of counterinsurgency developed by the U.S. empire in the Philippines (a system described in Alfred McCoy’s book Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State). Vollmer brought in centralized police records, patrol cars, and lie detectors. Vollmer established a criminal justice program at the University of California, Berkeley in 1916 and wrote books including scientific racist theories of “racial degeneration” and crime. He joined the American Eugenics Society and wondered how to prevent “defectives from producing their kind.”

Smedley Butler provides another example. The military man famously wrote that he had been “a gangster for capitalism,” including that he “helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.” He had done so by, among other things, establishing Haiti’s first police force when the Marines occupied that country in 1915, as Jeremy Kuzmarov describes in his book Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation-Building in the American Century. When Butler became police chief in Philadelphia in 1924, he too upgraded police technology and militarized its tactics, including military checkpoints and Marine-style uniforms. The mayor fired him after two years, sending him back to the Marines.

7. Counterinsurgencies Use Auxiliaries.

In counterinsurgency campaigns, state armies and police work with paramilitaries, who do dirty work with plausible deniability.

As Alan MacLeod reported on September 28, there were more than 100 vehicle ramming attacks against protesters since the George Floyd protests started in May, many of which “seem to have the tacit approval of local law enforcement,” given the lack of consequences.

Portland activist Mac Smiff told the Brief Podcast, “We call it a shift change. They’re all the same people… there’s the cops, there’s the sheriffs, there’s the marshals, there’s the DHS [Department of Homeland Security], there’s the Proud Boys, there’s the Patriot Prayer, it just goes on and on. They just take turns.”

It is called impunity: the criminal activities of paramilitaries or proxy forces go unpunished, while the full power of the state is brought down upon the intended victims of counterinsurgency.

The default counterinsurgency mode is a consequence of being ruled by an elite that sees the whole population as the enemy. The model for policing isn’t going to be changed even if Trump is replaced by “shoot them in the leg” Biden. The occupied always challenge the legitimacy of their occupiers: the debate about abolition is not going anywhere.

The Science of Race and the Racism of Science

Thomas Klikauer & Norman Simms

The familiar paradigm of five human races was born in the year 1795—at the transitional moment between the rationality of the Enlightenment and the emotional fervour of Romanticism—when a German doctor, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, set out the distinct characteristics of those groups he called Caucasians Mongolians, Ethiopians, Americans, and Malays.

Though he saw these races as all part of one human species and believed they could develop separately and eventually die out, this easy-to-memorize listing has had lasting afterlife with unfortunate consequences. Mostly ignoring modern discoveries and changes in methodologies, the same paradigm became the common go-to justification for legal, social and political racism. Roughly two-hundred years later, in 1997, the US government classified people originating from Europe, the Middle East, and Northern Africa as white and had them sitting at the top of an assumed hierarchy of ethnic intelligence.

These arbitrary “populations” were framed as the “natural winners”, writes Angela Saini in her book Superior: The Return of Race Science that gives the myth of racial science and racisms a serious dressing down. Race science and racism are never far apart. In 2007, French president Sarkozy infamously said, “Africa has not fully entered into history” – well, apart from the fact the history of modern anatomical humanity probably started in Africa. Sarkozy’s present-day American counterpart talked of “shithole countries”.

These two world leaders are not alone in painting their – largely invented – enemies as ugly foreigners, while seeing subordinate as inferior. The trick is done through ideologically invented “natural hierarchies” that seek to give meaning to arbitrary racial types. Unfortunately for the racists, almost all scientists agree that we all started off as non-white human beings about 100,000 years go when the first anatomically modern human beings developed the ability to make complex art. Recent evidence even goes back at least twice as far and assigns the earliest manifestation of symbolic thought to the Neanderthals (and some add, the Denisovians).

Whoever these original symbol-making people were, one thing they were definitely not is white in the sense of Caucasian or Aryan. If things don’t look that way superficially, we have to learn to see beyond illusions and delusions. In Africa and elsewhere after the arrival of European colonists during the 15^th century, the creation of indigenous art sharply declined and so did the indigenous populations through warfare, torture, massacres and disease carried to distant places, mostly by the much acclaimed “superior” white people.

Not long after Blumenbach’s categories were taken as unquestioned evidence of racial differences, whiteness had become a visible measure of modernity. It was used during the Slavers/Abolitionist debates in ante-bellum America and lingered into the framing of Jim Crow laws after the South was forced to free its slaves and a raft of progressive Reconstructionist tried to correct old faults in the system (see the 13^th, 14^th and 15^th Amendments to the US Constitution).

The notion of Caucasian superiority became an official policy found in the “White Australia Policy” (1901) that restricted non-European migration to Australia even though Australia’s beloved white settlers always carried round 4% Neanderthal DNA gained most likely through sex-acts thousands of years ago. The myth also justified the hunting down of Native Americans in California in the nineteenth century and Aborigines in Australia well into the twentieth century.

Still, the illusion was an unquestioned truism: that race is a fixed feature that people inherited in their blood. Think of the Apartheid regime in South Africa and the treatment of Koreans in Japan. Race and racism categorize and stigmatize clusters of people in easy-to-spot colours: red, white, yellow, and black: a simple prism for the simple minded!

It is by no means a historical surprise that race and race science were invented in the context of colonial ideologies supporting oppression and exploitation. Racism was used to justify slavery until – at least in the UK – it was “officially” (!) ended with the 1823 Parliamentary prohibition of the trade in slaves. Slave Trade Act of 1807. Undeterred, the peculiar system of slavery and its ideology of racism carried on in many parts of the world. At an 1841 meeting, for example, Charles Caldwell “claimed that your African bore more of a resemblance to apes than humans”. Unfortunately for Caldwell, underneath their brown fur, chimpanzees look very much like him when he takes his clothes off; in other words, they are white.

Out of post-Revolutionary France came a new milestone in the history of race science in the form of Joseph-Arthur, Count de Gobineau’s influential The Inequality of the Human Race (1853). Gobineau argued that there were three races: yellow, white and the “negroid variety as the lowest”. Naturally, there was and still is no hard scientific evidence for any of this nonsense. Interestingly, the French aristocrat also believed that the “glorious Aryans…had existed in India many centuries ago”. Very regrettably for him, six years later, Charles Darwin “demonstrated that we could only have evolved from shared origins”. Despite the ensuing Monkey Debate, “Darwinism did nothing to slow racism”, and a German zoologist linked black Africans to primates in 1862.

Not long after, the pseudo-science of racialism really took off in Germany when the predecessor of today’s Max Planck Society, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science was established in 1911. Decades before the rise of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialists or the publication of Mein Kampf, Nazis the learned society promoted the teaching of racial theory and racial hygiene at German universities. This included the subject of eugenics, that is, the purifying of the Master Race through the breeding of pure Aryans – racial hygiene – while other inferior dark-skinned races were to be “gradually eliminated”.

The Society’s members willingly cooperated with the so-called Spartacus Educational programme spelled out in 1939 by Herman Rauschning, rationalizing with pseudo-science the Nazis Racial Laws. Under the direction of German race science’s leading proponent, Professor Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer was a willing executor. To kick start this attempt of making Germany great again, Jewish scientists were expelled from the Institute.

Otmar von Verschuler’s protégé, Dr. Josef Mengele, proved one of the most evil characters of Nazism infamous for making selections at arrival of cattle-cars full of doomed Jews, torturing twins in the name of racial purity, and pursuing other sadistic experiments. Much of this was done in accordance with a mockery of Blumenbach’s outdated paradigm.

Despite the illusion of neutrality and objectivity, ever since Plato’s put-down of the Sophists, Galileo Galilei we know that “science is always shaped by the time and the place it is carried out in”. If racists wanted race science, the experts found it. Worse, if Nazism’s hygienic science needed to rationalize the steps to genocide, Verscheuer and Mengele provided the excuse. And it all “didn’t originate in Germany alone”.

The University College London’s own Sir William Matthews Flinders Petrie, “generally regarded as the father of modern Near Eastern archaeology” also wrote about racial superiority. Before him, Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton (1822-1911) – known affectionately as the godfather of eugenics – advocated the use of social controls (such as, selective breeding and mandatory sterilization) to improve the health and intelligence of future generations, dreaming of a utopia of highly bred super-people [Übermenchen], a true dystopia.

Even the establishment philosopher Bertrand Russell suggested imposing heavy fines on the wrong type of people for giving birth to degenerate infants. The world’s first voluntary sterilisation law, however, was passed in the American state of Indiana in 1907. By 1914, the word eugenics was used frequently, often as a synonym for being healthy. These racial ideas supported what was the first racially-motivated mass killing in modern history, the 1908 murder by colonial troops of tens of thousands of Nema and Horero people in German Southwest Africa – now Namibia.

A few years later, an American lawyer, Madison Grant, published The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History (1916) which Adolf Hitler called “my bible”. After the defeat of the Third Reich, the former top Nazi scientist von Verschuer became a professor of human genetics at the University of Münster (Germany) in 1951. Like many other party leaders and race scientists, his earlier support for Hitler was airbrushed away in the decades after the war.

The academic and social system of the Federal Republic simply ignored the racist past of its intellectuals. The fact that the term race in itself is racist never entered their thinking. Today, most western scientists agree that mankind is one species and argue that even ethnic subgroups defy fixed categorizations. Homo sapiens cannot not be divided into illogical racial hierarchies. Scientists agree, too, that all people belong to the same species – anatomically modern human beings. After all, there are “far more variations within people of the same race than between supposedly separated races.”

Key to this evidential consensus among scientists and statesmen is the 1951 United Nations’ UNESCO declaration on The Nature of Race and Race Differences. With that it became crystal clear that the study of race no longer had a place within the realms of biology. Race (in the sense of the human family) should not be confused with differences in culture, nationality or language. So-called racial categories are ideological constructs and the terms should be eschewed in political and legal discourses.

Yet white supremacists are undeterred by such legal niceties and historical facts. German biochemist Gerhard Meisenberg founding editor of one of the more racist crypto-academic and rather obscure journals, Mankind Quarterly tries to tell the world that human races exist. Even in 2020, Meisenberg’s co-editor, Richard Lynn, continues to publish this pseudo-scientific magazine white supremacist journal on Racial and Ethnic Differences.

In its attempt to sound politically correct, Mankind Quarterly uses the term ethnicity to smokescreen the underlying ugliness of old-fashioned racism. A quarter of a century ago, the editors’ attempts got a strong boost when a book was published with the innocuous-looking title The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life 1994). Penned by psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray proclaimed that black Americans are less intelligent than whites and Asians, pointing to evidence of IQ tests. In a vicious circle, the authors cited five articles from Mankind Quarterly. In a stinging review, the official journal of the profession, the American Behavioral Scientist, branded the Bell Curve a “fascist ideology”.

In short, for those interested in peddling their racist ideology, science (as though there were one “science”) like the Scholastic professors in a medieval university could point to such an “authority” as proof. Whenever someone tells you, “I am objective” or “I am apolitical”, it is time to for the bells to ring and the lights to flash: become very watchful. Perhaps even more so when race science is framed as “identity” and “human variations”.

The story gets even more sticky for the white supremacists when a respected Cambridge/Stanford geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza states categorically, “There are simply no races in humankind.” He made it even clearer when pronouncing “the sheer unscientific absurdity of racism”. Today, we know that racism is socially, politically and ideologially has no basis in real science.

With DNA and genetic-testing to prove the basic facts of human lineage, there is no excuse to listen to or act on the absurdities of race science. Moreover “genetic testing is only an educated guess about where your relatives may have lived”. Britain’s so-called Cheddar Man, held up as the ancestor of all ancestors in the UK. It turns out that the 10,000 year old Cheddar Man had dark skin. By today’s standards “he would be considered black”.

But knowing the colour of his skin, or cranial size, or shape of the jaw, or any other supposed anatomic feature, proves nothing about intelligence, cultural achievements or social disposition. All it does is show how stupid racists really are. Just as on the continents of Europe, America or Asia, the African continent is incredible diverse genentically. There is no original or single racial standard. Our primeval ancestors moved about, following changing climates, retreating from adverse conditions, interbreeding when convenient, and sharing tool-making techniques and symbolic ideas. Sometimes these near cousins disappeared into the mists of history – or persist as particles of DNA information in our genome

Even more dreadful for race science, ignorant racists, nincompoop white nationalists or supremacists, and those who want to build walls against the tide of history, the fact is that “almost everyone on the planet is the decendant of a migrant from somewhere”. As science moves forward, it gets even more gloomy for the well-being of bigots.

Mathematics also works against them. Just five generations ago, each of us had as many as 32 possible ancestors contributing to our genetic makeup. Nine generations ago, the number rises to 512 and 15 generations ago, it is 32,768. Go back further and the number reaches millions. This, of course, is impossible. We are not stacks of wheat multiplying exponmentially. The only explanation is that we are all at least a little bit inbred.

The hallucination of race science is still around, just as stupid people want to wrap themselves in colourful flags and pretend to be immune from reality. The situation is actually so bad that the prestgious science journal Nature carried an editorial in 2018 which said that extremists misuse scientific results for misleading ends and that “people out there are activley abusing science for rascist purposes”.

The very same applies to the myth of “intelligent genes” and the fable of a racial gap of around 15 IQ points. Not only have scientists been unable definitively to isolate intelligence in human DNA, but the very idea of an IQ [Intelligence Quotient] is another delusion. Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man (1981) burst that bubble convincingly—to all but the recalcitrant and the pig-headed, such as college admissions heads.

In other words, there is no IQ gene. Instead of a DNA-IQ link, we know that the “environment matters in IQ test results,” in fact to such a degree that such tests are worse than useless; they serve only to exclude the non-middle classes, the non-western immigrants and the young men and women who grew up in poor, disadvantaged households. In addition, there is no average intelligence gap between the sexes or other culturally-constructed groups of people.

Finally, to cap this list of inanities, there is the case of “the world’s first black pill…marketed solely to African Americans”. It was a drug called BiDil and touted itself as a specific treatment for high blood pressure, a disease Afro-Americans were uniquely prone to suffer from. The Lancet, the acclaimed British journal of the medical profession, concluded: “Race became relevant in the creation of this drug not for medical reasons, but for legal and commercial reasons”. A short anecdote can conclude our overview of the situation.

An American pediatrician, Richard Garcia, once described the case of a friend who repeatedly failed to receive a correct diagnosis for cystic fibrosis because it was thought to be a white disease, and she was black. Only when a passing radiologist happened to spot her chest x-ray, without knowing to whom it belonged, was her condition instantly spotted. She had to wait until she was eight years old, and her skin color had to be invisible, before she could be diagnosed.

In the end, then, Angela Saini’s Superior proves one thing: race science remains utter nonsense. It is an ideology, not sciences. Despite overwhelming scientific evidence against the concept of race, race science, racism and even intellectual racism inside the annals of scientific discourse is still with us. In some corners of the medical and related professions, there still lurks “a toxic seed of racism”, says Saini.

As for the proponents of the superior white race, the lack of scientific evidence might not deter the hard-core believers, just as it did not deter Adolf Hitler in his nefarious search for a Final Solution to the Jewish Question. Then, as today, race science remains dangerous. Yet, to the question – will history repeat itself? – we already know the answer. History never repeats itself exactly. Today we know what happened when blood-based ethnicity became a state-sanctioned ideology. We know that race hygiene can end at a train station. And at that train station, there is still a sign that reads “Arbeit Macht Frei” – Auschwitz.

A Plastic-Coated World

Kenn Orphan

Years ago, I had an opportunity to watch the dissection of a seabird. It was not an academic venture, but one of bearing witness to the devastation that industrial society has brought to countless species on our planet. The bird’s stomach contents revealed human detritus of all manner, plastic lighters, bottle caps, pens, even a spoon.
This one creature represented hundreds of millions or more, and species of all kinds. All impacted by the byproducts of our modern consumer capitalist world. It was a surreal sight only later matched in intensity and horror when watching a video of the dissection of a deceased whale whose belly was bursting with tons of plastic bags and other hard synthetic polymers, or the sight of a deformed tortoise whose shell was strangulated throughout its life by a plastic beverage holder.

This month another set of photographs highlighted the global crime and catastophe of ecocide. It was by Sri Lankan photographer Tilaxan Tharmapalan, and it won the UK’s Royal Society of Biology photography competition. Tharmapalan captured images of a wild herd of elephants scavenging for food in a rancid landfill near a wildlife sanctuary. Many of the elephants have become ill or died as a result of feeding on plastic and other toxic waste. But it is the ubiquitous nature of plastic, the myth of recycling, and the normalization of its presence in our lives that I wanted to discuss in this essay.

Images like this make the greenwashing efforts by the plastic industry and Big Oil fall flat. In fact, they have been a lie from the start. It was the plastic industry that started the idea of “recycling.” But this was not intended to reduce the production of plastic. On the contrary, it was intended to give a veneer of “corporate responsibility,” while they ramped up plastic manufacturing. Over the decades recycling became the mantra of many “environmental” organizations. But the myth of recycling remains largely obscured. In every recycled plastic product there is an equal measure of new plastic, so there is no real reduction. It is the exact opposite.

Single use beverage containers have only increased, with only a fraction of the plastic packaging produced ever recycled. Most, over 90% in fact, wind up in landfills like the one in Sri Lanka, or on the side of roads where lazy and self-centered motorists dispatch them in haste from their car windows every single day, or in riverways that run to the ocean and wind up churning into a great toxic gyre in the centre. Today, there are more types of plastic than ever before. Most are unrecyclable, although they will be imprinted with a number on the bottom to add to the illusion of their future incarnation for use.

Plastic has become integrated into every aspect of modern life, from medicine to food to furniture to clothing to machinery. Bathed in it from the delivery room of a hospital till the morgue, there is virtually no place in modern life that it cannot be found. And with it has come in incredible curse. All around the planet plastic waste has become a problem of monumental proportions, and most especially in the global south. But westerners need to halt themselves from distancing or heaping condemnation on the global south for this problem.

Sri Lanka, where the award winning photo was taken, like so many other countries under the heal of the IMF and World Bank, are not the ones profiting from the plastic industry. The profiteers are multibillionaire companies like Dow Chemical, Hanwool Corporation, BASF, Lyondellbasell, Ihne & Tesch GmbH, Exxonmobil, Matsui Technologies, and SABIC. And billionaires like Stewart and Lynda Resnick of The Wonderful Company or William Young of Plastipak or Warren Buffett. And as the demand for plastic continues to surge, their net worth has only grown larger.

In addition to this, it is the west, or global north, that has been shipping the bulk of its unrecyclable or “undesirable” plastic refuse to the global south. So the trash in these landfills that are fouling estuaries, deltas and wildlife sanctuaries around the world are from those of us in so-called “developed countries.” Some of these nations have pushed back against these acts of environmental colonialism, but they are in an uphill battle with some of the most powerful and wealthy corporations ever known.

The elephants in that landfill in Sri Lanka are no different than the seabirds, or the whales, or the sea turtles we have watched succumb to humanity’s insoluble and indigestible jetsam and refuse. In fact, they are all harbingers. Portents of what lies ahead for all of us. Whether we like it or not, we are all denizens of a plastic coated world. One that has made enormous profit from the overproduction of plastic for a few and incurred incalculable expense for us all. Plastic can now be found in virtually every corner of the planet, from the Arctic to the Pyrenees to the Marianas Trench. It has even been found in the cells of organisms and in every human tissue. And all of this has come about thanks to the political and economic arrangement of late capitalism, an arrangement that does not possess the capacity for ethical and moral direction in regard to a living planet.

The thin and fragile ribbon we call the biosphere is the only place that we know life exists for sure, and in its great abundance. And it has been relentlessly assaulted through rapacious mining, deforestation and the extraction of fossil fuels by a ruling and wealthy global elite. The byproducts of the latter being climate change fueling CO2, oil spills that ravage coral reefs, and plastic pollution. As for the latter, we will never fully grasp the carnage wrought upon countless species by plastic refuse, on the lands and in the seas we deceptively call the “wild.” We can only fight to protect what remains, even if it has all been tainted by the mad dissemination of synthetic polymers.

The Scourge of Herd Immunity

Eve Ottenberg

Covid-19 kills, and its kill rate is significantly higher than the flu. Some who recover develop insufficient immunity to prevent getting infected again. Some don’t appear to recover. They are stuck with debilities that last months, maybe longer. And it’s possible that this disease is chronic and lingers in some people, like herpes, a virus that can reactivate – that possibility is unknown. All of these aspects of covid bode poorly for a vaccine. But they are utterly fatal to the notion of herd immunity achieved not through vaccination, as responsible doctors would do, but through letting a population contract the disease.

This novel approach to herd immunity is a pipe dream currently entertained by fanatics in the white house – regarding which, William Haseltine of ACCESS Health International recently said, “herd immunity is another word for mass murder.” If covid spreads widely, which this type of herd immunity advocates, “we’re looking at two to six million American dead not just this year, but every year,” Haseltine added. This is the policy of the Trump regime: millions of dead Americans.

Dr. Scott Atlas is Trump’s herd immunity guy. He’s not an epidemiologist, he’s a neuroradiologist and so knows little about infectious disease. He’s also an ideologue from the radical right-wing Hoover Institution. Apparently, he has had a most malign effect on Trump’s thinking. Trump may have decided not to protect himself from covid because he agrees with Atlas that everyone will get covid, so why fight it? Trump calls exposing himself to the plague leadership, but other forms of leadership are on display in places like China, Vietnam, New Zealand, South Korea and Taiwan. There the leaders focused on one thing: killing the virus. And they have, by and large, succeeded, saving hundreds of thousands of their citizens’ lives. Meanwhile Americans die from covid by the thousands, over 221,000 so far.

Sweden famously opted for herd immunity. Death statistics for Scandinavian countries are instructive here. As of October 6, Denmark had 663 covid deaths, Finland 346, Norway 275 and Sweden 5892, according to Statista. Sweden also had by far the most covid cases, 96,677. Sweden didn’t lock down as other Scandinavian countries did, nor did it impose a mask mandate. It relied on people to use their judgment. While this succeeded in crashing the economy, as cautious citizens stayed home, it still resulted in many more dead than neighboring countries, which systematically locked down and mandated masks.

In early June, Turkey chose herd immunity. According to the World Socialist Website, cases and deaths are on the rise. The government, however, has continued promoting keeping people at work and in school. According to one medical association official, “as of last month, a total of 900 health care workers had resigned from their jobs during the pandemic.” President Recep Erdogan’s determination to avoid lockdowns is not popular, but he is a strongman, reportedly admired by Trump, and he has decided to let the virus tear through the Turkish population.

Another place where covid rages out of control is Moscow. Restaurants and bars have been open and there’s been little social distancing. One could say Russia has experimented with de facto herd immunity. However, conservative President Vladimir Putin has never advocated it. On the contrary, according to Tass, Russia will try to use vaccination to achieve herd immunity this autumn, not through letting the disease run rampant. Meanwhile the mayor of Moscow clamps down with measures to promote contact tracing and to limit hours for restaurants and bars.

At the beginning of the outbreak, the UK also briefly opted for herd immunity. But the results were so disastrous that even a radical right-winger like Boris Johnson had to renounce it. Then he contracted the disease and had a horrible time with it, thus doubtless dooming any more talk of herd immunity as a policy in the U.K.

Thanks to a “miracle cure” derived from aborted fetuses, which will, one presumes, be hushed up so as not to offend evangelicals, though remaining available sub rosa to select oligarchs, Trump’s bout with covid was not as ghastly as Boris Johnson’s. And now the Trump regime tilts toward herd immunity. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar denies this, as well he might, given that herd immunity would cause mass death. One expert, Dr. Chris Murray recently confirmed to CNN that yes, that would be the result. And on October 13, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organization, called using herd immunity – when achieved by a policy of deliberate exposure to the disease – “unethical.”

In addition to causing mass death, such herd immunity to covid would leave millions disabled. And again, herd immunity might never be reached with an illness that can reinfect people or which becomes chronic. So herd immunity is a fool’s errand. But don’t tell that to Scott Atlas or others in the Trump regime. Indeed, last month the CDC drafted an order for all public and commercial transportation passengers and employees to wear masks. The white house blocked it.

Then on October 6, Politico reported that Atlas met with three infectious disease doctors: Harvard medical professor Martin Kulldorff, Stanford medical professor Jay Bhattacharya, and Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta. This trio – who give a professional gloss to Atlas’ herd immunity quackery – “favors moving aggressively to reopen the economy while sidelining broad testing and other fundamental public health measures.”

Gupta later told radical right-wing Fox propagandist Laura Ingraham that “three months, maybe six is sufficient time for enough immunity to accumulate…that the vulnerable could resume normal lives.” Politico also reported that fewer than 10 percent of Americans had covid antibodies. Herd immunity requires 60 to 70 percent to stop the disease. With 10 percent we have 221,000 dead and climbing. Some experts say we really have closer to 300,000. Do the math. There aren’t as many corpses as Haseltine predicts, but there are still plenty.

Then on October 13, Ghebreyesus made a video, specifically pointing out that historically herd immunity has always referred to a population’s immunity to a virus achieved THROUGH VACCINATION. This idea of deliberately exposing people to a potentially lethal, chronic and disabling disease is new. It’s also a fringe idea, the QAnon of epidemiology. And as Ghebreyesus said, ethically questionable.

This WHO statement came the same day that the white house endorsed herd immunity. The New York Times reported that the Trump regime embraces “The Great Barrington Declaration,” something signed by Atlas’ three infectious disease experts and also by numerous practical jokers, such as I. P. Freely and other concocted signatures. This declaration calls for letting the pandemic run rampant among millions of Americans.

It should come as no surprise that right-wing, neoliberal leaders who worship at the altar of a ruthless capitalist religion have been unable to cope with covid. Hatred of public health is encoded in their DNA. Indeed, public health in these countries – the U.S., Brazil, India, the U.K., Russia – is stunted or non-existent, because health care is treated as a commodity only available to the affluent. Countries with more mixed economies and more respect for the efficacy of government, like New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan, China, Vietnam, have dealt with this pestilence much better. They have tried to extirpate it. That approach, the opposite of herd immunity, has succeeded. It has saved multitudes of lives.

If the Trump regime continues down the path favored by neoliberalism – rampant exposure to the disease to achieve herd immunity – there will be millions of excess deaths. This is not unexpected for those who regard unfettered capitalism as a death cult and herd immunity in the face of a wildly contagious, lethal disease as its favored response. Right-wing neoliberal governments will not invest in public health. They want economies open regardless of how many people that kills. This is the logical conclusion of their extreme capitalist religion.

It is also the logical conclusion of a political-economic system of organized banditry that has plundered the globe for 500 years, enslaving millions and in the process unleashing a planet-killing climate catastrophe. Its ideologues gravitate to herd immunity like flies to excrement. They will countenance mass death to keep their corporations profitable. Herd immunity fits with lethal capitalism like a hand in a glove. Therefore the Trump regime, openly or covertly, will continue to pursue herd immunity, which will allow aristocrats like Trump and Chris Christie to get top-of-the-line medical care, including the scarce, aforementioned miracle cures, while the average covid-stricken American, gasping for breath, is lucky even to snag a hospital bed.

Nigerian government clamps down on protests

Jean Shaoul

Ten of Nigeria’s 36 states have announced 24-hour curfews, with Lagos State, home to the country’s commercial hub Lagos with a population of 20 million, announcing an indefinite curfew.

It is one of a number of measures employed by the state to try and halt the growing anti-police brutality movement. Protests have raged nationwide against the government of President Muhammadu Buhari for nearly three weeks.

People protest at the Lekki toll gate in Lagos, Nigeria, Wednesday Oct. 21, 2020. Nigerians protesting against police brutality stayed on the streets in Lagos on Wednesday, breaking the government curfew following a night of violence in which demonstrators were fired upon, sparking global outrage. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)

Groups of young men wielding machetes, clubs and weapons, widely believed to have been deployed by the government, have attacked the #EndSARS protesters, including in the capital, Abuja. There are reports that some prisoners were released from jail to attack protesters and property, terrorising people in Lagos. Such forces have traditionally been used as proxies for the police and army, as a means of denying responsibility.

On Wednesday, the government deployed riot police nationwide to put down the unrest, with gunfire widely reported.

These measures follow the government’s deployment of solders to fire on peaceful protesters blocking the tollgate at the Lekki-Ikoye bridge in Lagos on Tuesday. At least 12 people were killed, including two near the statehouse in Alhausa. The BBC reported more than 20 dead and more than 50 wounded. The protesters had been sitting down on the road, waving the Nigerian flag and singing the national anthem.

The deployment of Nigeria’s army, which has been repeatedly accused of human rights abuses, followed its announcement last week that it was ready to maintain law and order and deal decisively with any situation created by “subversive elements and troublemakers.” The authorities initially denied there were any fatalities, while the army denounced reports of soldiers shooting protesters as fake news, further fueling the uproar.

The next day there was a wave of attacks on police stations and public buildings across Lagos, including several banks, government buildings, the Oba palace—home to the city’s traditional, ceremonial ruler—the Lekki Toll Gate and the headquarters of a TV news station. The news station is owned by a company linked to Bola Tinubu, a former governor of Lagos who is widely believed to have presidential ambitions. The Tinubu family is believed to own the Lekki Toll Gate which has reportedly lost hundreds of thousands of dollars since the sit ins began. Some youths surrounded Tinubu’s compound on Bourdillon Road in the wealthy Ikoyi district.

On Thursday, a BBC journalist reported hearing gunshots in the Surulere district of Lagos and saw tyres burning, while another journalist posted a video of a shopping mall on fire in the upscale suburb of Lekki, a few miles from the site of Tuesday’s massacre.

The protests in Africa’s most populous country started in early October after the killing of a young man by the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), an elite police unit notorious for kidnappings, extortion, torture and killings. A recent report by Amnesty International documented 82 alleged human rights violations by SARS across the country in the past three years, including hanging, mock execution, assault and waterboarding, and concluded that the squad operates with complete impunity. Most of the victims were young people between the ages of 18 and 35.

The protesters, largely peaceful, are mainly young. They come from all layers of society, irrespective of ethnicity, tribal group or religion. Demonstrations have also taken place in the northern and predominantly Muslim part of the country. These testify to the class-based nature of the oppression they face at the hands of the police, whose task is to protect the private ownership of the means of production, including the country’s oil resources and the wealth of the ruling elite.

The main political parties have played no role in the protests. Neither have the country’s trade unions, reviled for their close collaboration with the government and their sell out of the 2012 mass movement and national general strike against President Goodluck Jonathan’s slashing of fuel subsidies and increase in electricity tariffs. The National Labour Congress has failed to follow through with a single protest since Buhari came to power in 2015.

As the protests grew, demonstrators were met with increasingly violent crackdowns from security forces which used tear gas, water cannon and live ammunition, killing at least 10 people. Dozens more were arrested and are still in custody.

On October 12, Buhari pledged to disband the hated SARS and implement “police reforms.” His repeat of several previous promises was widely viewed with scepticism. According to International Political Science Association’s World Internal Security and Police Index, Nigeria has the worst police force in the world.

SARS’s replacement with a new unit, the Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) only inflamed the protests. SWAT is the name of the the paramilitary police killing squads in the United States—a country synonymous with police brutality and killings. In the northern, mainly Muslim part of the country, state governors opposed the disbanding of the SARS.

As videos circulated globally on social media, the protests elicited support around the world from sports figures, musicians, writers, celebrities and other prominent figures, while Nigerian diaspora communities have rallied in sympathy in Atlanta, Berlin, London and New York. On Wednesday, hundreds of people marched and protested outside the Nigerian High Commission in London, which is home to around 250,000 people of Nigerian origin. More than 210,000 people have signed a petition calling on the UK to sanction the members of the Nigerian government and police force for human rights abuses over the #EndSARS movement. Petitions must be considered by parliament once they reach 100,000 signatures.

In contrast, the response of Africa’s leaders and the imperialist powers has been to remain silent or issue pro forma statements urging Buhari to respect the right to peaceful protest, condemning the violence and calling for the Nigerian authorities to investigate the killings.

Far from disbanding, protesters have broadened their demands. They have called for an immediate release of all protesters, justice for all deceased victims of police brutality with appropriate compensation for their families, the establishment of an independent body to oversee the investigation and prosecution of all reports of police misconduct, the retraining of all disbanded SARS officers before their redeployment and increased salary for the police under the hashtag #5for5.

The protests are being fueled by widespread anger over poverty, inequality and mass unemployment. Around 102 million people, more than half of the population, are living in poverty—a 10 percent rise following the pandemic and the collapse in the demand and price of oil. The official rate of youth unemployment in a country where half the population is under 19 years of age is now 35 percent and many graduates unable to find work are forced to migrate overseas. The mainly young and working-class Nigerians protesting are demanding an end to decades of corruption and mismanagement, with hashtags #EndBadGovernance, #BetterNigeria and #FixNigeriaNow being widely used.

Some are calling for Buhari, the 77 year old former general and military head of state from 1983 to 1985, to resign. Buhari originally took power in a military coup. Elected in 2015 and re-elected last year, he was backed by Washington as part of US imperialism’s drive to consolidate its military and political domination over Africa. His predecessor, President Goodluck Jonathan, had increasingly come into conflict with the US, in part because of his moves to open Nigeria’s oil and gas industry to Chinese investment.

Buhari moved swiftly to implement measures that signaled his willingness to work closely with the US, militarise Nigeria under the guise of fighting Boko Haram and other Islamist groups operating in north eastern Nigeria and the Lake Chad region, and reassert control over its energy resources. The brutality of the armed forces has only strengthened a growing insurgency against the federal government in Abuja.

Buhari himself has remained almost invisible during the crisis, apparently hoping the protests would die down. He finally appeared briefly on television yesterday evening to appeal to the protesters to stop demonstrating and engage with the government. As a former general who has taken and lost power in military coups, he also has his eye on the military.

Colonel Sagir Musa, spokesman for the army, which has a long history of intervening in Nigeria’s political affairs, said it was prepared to intervene in support of the “democratic government”. This gave rise to suspicions that there was a faction within the military and the Department of State Security with its own agenda. Chief of Army Staff General Tukur Yusuf Buratai has remained silent as the crisis has escalated, even as the army intervened.

The end of police brutality and countering the threat of another military dictatorship requires an international struggle against capitalism. That struggle can only be successfully waged by a working class unified across racial, ethnic and religious lines and across national borders in a struggle for socialism.

Israel’s growing anti-Netanyahu protests face increasing right-wing and police attacks

Jean Shaoul

Protests demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have resumed across Israel.

Ten thousand people took to the streets of Jerusalem last Saturday, along with thousands in Tel Aviv and across other towns and cities. Wearing masks, they held handwritten signs, Israeli flags, black flags, drums and plastic horns, and chanted “Bibi [Netanyahu’s nickname] go home.” Another slogan read, “You are messing with the wrong generation,” indicating the new layers—the millennials—that had joined the protests.

There have even been small protests in settlements in the occupied West Bank.

The renewed rallies follow the lifting of the ban on people demonstrating more than 1km from their homes during Israel’s second phase of lockdown restrictions. This blatantly anti-democratic measure was in marked contrast to the leniency granted to large gatherings of the prime minister’s ultra-Orthodox supporters.

Israeli Police officers drag a protester as they forcibly clear the square outside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s residence in Jerusalem, early Sunday, Oct. 18, 2020. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)

Netanyahu imposed the ban with the support of his so-called “centre left” coalition partner, the Blue and White Party, led by Benny Gantz. After fighting three elections opposing a Netanyahu-led government, Gantz now acts as his political bodyguard.

While the regulations were in effect, more than 100,000 people rallied near their homes at over 1,000 designated points across the country in a run of twice weekly protests. The demonstrators opposed Netanyahu’s continued premiership in light of a series of scandals. He has been indicted on serious charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust in three separate cases over control of the media and is notorious for his lavish lifestyle—courtesy of his stock dealings and expensive presents from businessmen. Now however, opposition is growing to his botched handling of the coronavirus pandemic and the economy. Only 27 percent of the population believe he has managed the health crisis effectively.

Netanyahu’s government lifted an earlier lockdown without adequate safety precautions and in defiance of recommendations from the country’s health experts.

Cases soon began to soar, leading at one point to the highest per capita rate of infections in the world and a doubling of the number of deaths over a four-week period—2,291 people have now died. A second four-week lockdown had to be imposed at the start of the Jewish holy days.

Even before the pandemic, 26 percent of households, including 841,000 children, were living in poverty or near poverty. Unemployment has now risen to 21 percent and the economy is expected to contract by 6 percent in 2020, the first annual contraction in Israel’s history.

Netanyahu has denied all accusations of personal corruption and wrongdoing, calling it a frame-up, accusing the judicial system of mounting a coup against him at the behest of “leftists,” and making several attempts to neuter the judiciary. Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit, a former close aide of Netanyahu, has faced threats if he does not quit or drop charges against the prime minister, which if proven could send him to jail for 10 years.

Just last week, Mandelblit exonerated Netanyahu of exploiting billion-dollar contracts for submarines and warships from German steelmaker Thyssenkrupp for his own or his associates’ benefit. His announcement that Netanyahu was not a suspect, even though police recommended indicting some of his associates and relatives, has led to widespread incredulity. Netanyahu, determined to ensure that there would be no parliamentary commission of inquiry into the submarine affair, halted the coronavirus cabinet meeting on Wednesday morning so Likud ministers could vote against it. Senior military and public officials are also suspected of bribery.

So intent is Netanyahu on remaining in power and thereby avoiding or postponing his trial that he has made numerous concessions to his ultra-Orthodox and nationalist support base, inciting divisions between Israel’s secular and religious communities. Most recently, he approved the construction of around 4,000 new homes in the settlements in the occupied West Bank. In scenes reminiscent of his chief international backer, US President Donald Trump, he has repeatedly incited his supporters to take action against his political opponents, including the judiciary.

Protesters in Haifa, Jerusalem and Ramat Gan reportedly faced pepper spray attacks from Netanyahu supporters. One man, who was carrying a knife in his pocket, threw bottles at demonstrators outside Netanyahu’s official residence on Balfour Street in Jerusalem. In Tel Aviv, a group of about 20 boys on bikes and scooters threw two small explosives at protesters, calling them “traitors” and “leftists.” Other incidents were reported in the Jezreel Valley and the northern town of Kiryat Ata.

La Familia—the Beitar Jerusalem soccer fan club known for its far-right, anti-Arab ideology—has also been involved in the violence. At a protest on Thursday night in Holon, an impoverished suburb in southern Tel Aviv, members of La Familia moved between the two main protest sites attacking protesters.

Orly Lev, a well-known agitator and Netanyahu supporter, had previously addressed a crowd of 100 pro-Netanyahu demonstrators, saying, “The people need to understand that we cannot remain silent, that these folks need to be expelled from the streets and from the country, to be thrown over the border.”

Speaking about the attacks in Holon, Yair Lapid, leader of opposition party Yesh Atid, said, “I warned time and time again that Netanyahu's incitement will turn into violence in the streets. It was clear that it would happen.” Protest movement leaders have accused the police of protecting pro-Netanyahu thugs while using excessive force against peaceful anti-Netanyahu protesters, citing video clips of protesters being shoved or punched.

The increasing violence in confrontations between anti- and pro-Netanyahu demonstrators have caused several commentators to warn of the descent into civil war.

Even before the latest attacks, President Reuven Rivlin, a Likud member once close to Netanyahu, addressed the opening of the Knesset’s winter session to try to calm the political temperature. He warned, “It is unthinkable that every night, demonstrators are beating demonstrators. Police are beating demonstrators. Demonstrators are throwing stones at the police. Israel’s tribalism is breaking out through the cracks, and accusatory fingers are pointed from one part of society to the other, one tribe to the other.”

This was a reference to his well-known speech at the 2015 annual Herzliya Conference—the stage used for setting out national policy by Israel’s most prominent leaders. Rivlin described four separate groups split along “tribal” lines—secular, national/religious, ultra-orthodox and Arab—emerging from the country’s socio-economic shifts and warned of the lack of unity and cohesion among them.

He continued, “Stop! Please stop! This is not the way. Pain must have its place. … It seems to me as if we have lost the moral compass that was with us from the state’s independence until today. The compass of fundamental principles and values that we are committed to uphold.”

This situation has developed due to the so-called “opposition” to Netanyahu, whose policies are barely distinguishable from those of this venal politician. To the extent that opposition to him is growing in the population, it is his right-wing opponents, led by Yamina leader and former aide and minister in Netanyahu’s governments, Naftali Bennett, that are the beneficiaries.

Netanyahu’s Likud-Blue and White coalition barely functions and is set to collapse if an already delayed budget is not agreed by December 23. This would trigger the fourth election since mid-2019 and exacerbate the economic crisis that could affect the country’s credit ratings. Three senior finance ministry officials have already resigned citing their frustration over the political infighting. According to opinion polls, support for Yamina is growing fast, possibly enabling him to form a majority government without Likud, the ultra-Orthodox and Arab parties.

These developments show that there can be no serious fight against the pandemic, destitution levels of unemployment and poverty, and the growth of far right and fascistic forces outside of an independent movement of the unified working class in opposition to the entire political establishment and the capitalist system it defends.