The UK’s COVID-19 mutation: The deadly result of a “herd immunity” policy

Robert Stevens

The UK recorded nearly 700 more COVID-19 deaths (691) yesterday and a further 36,804 new cases of the disease.

This brings the official death toll, based on measuring the number of deaths of people who perished within 28 days of a positive test, to 68,307—the second highest in Europe after Italy. Taking into account fatalities where COVID-19 is mentioned on the death certificate, UK deaths stand at around 80,000. Yesterday, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) revealed that excess deaths—above expected levels since the start of the pandemic in March—had reached 81,300.

The Times front page headline reading "Mutant Virus is 'everywhere'"

The same day the Times led with the headline “Mutant virus strain is ‘everywhere’”. This was their take-away from comments made by the Conservative government’s Chief Scientific Officer Sir Patrick Vallance at Monday evening’s Downing Street press briefing.

Vallance, speaking alongside Prime Minister Boris Johnson, said, “The new variant is spread around the country… It’s localised in some places but we know there are cases everywhere, so it’s not as though we can stop this getting into other places, there’s some there already.”

Vallance said there was no evidence that the mutation, known as VUI-202012/01, was more dangerous than the original strain, “so if you catch it the disease looks the same as any other form of Covid infection”. But he acknowledged that it was “more transmissible, which is why we see it growing so fast and spreading to so many areas.”

The danger to the individual infected is not the primary issue here. A more transmissible virus will infect more people more quickly, leading to hospitalisations that could easily overwhelm the National Health Service and therefore lead to more deaths. Yet Vallance, Pilate like, simply declared that there would be a further spike in cases very soon after an “inevitable period of mixing” over Christmas.

This is only a certainty because the government has allowed it to happen, in the full knowledge of the deadly implications of such gatherings. Millions were told by the government they could gather in household “bubbles” of three for a five-day period from December 23. It was only after the deadly consequences of the new strain could no longer be concealed that the government was forced last Saturday to introduce more restrictive Tier 4 measures covering London and much of the south east.

In this May 24, 2020 file photo, Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson's senior aid Dominic Cummings leaves 10 Downing Street, in London. (AP Photo/Alberto Pezzali, File)

As at every other stage in this pandemic, the Johnson government had ample time to take the necessary measures required to save lives and avoid a catastrophic situation. Yet they did nothing.

According to available facts, the new strain was first detected on September 20, 2020, in Kent, South East England. It was detected by the Covid-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) consortium, which undertakes random genetic sequencing of positive COVID-19 samples around the UK. Established in April this year, COG-UK is a partnership of the UK’s four public health agencies, the Wellcome Sanger Institute, and 12 academic institutions. It has sequenced 140,000 virus genomes from people infected with COVID-19.

A swab test from a patient with the mutation was sent September 20 from Public Health England’s Lighthouse Lab in Milton Keynes to the Porton Down military laboratory in Wiltshire for analysis.

At that stage there were around 3,700 daily cases of COVID-19, but due to government policy the UK epidemic was already beginning a resurgence, undoing the curtailing of its spread during the national lockdown in place for over 2 months from March 23.

September was the month that all schools were reopened, followed by colleges and universities, after being in lockdown for several months. So determined were the government to have the parents of children back in workplaces and generating profits for their friends in big business that the order for the schools to be reopened was made as early as July 2. Education settings would be a crucial means for the untrammeled spread of the virus.

In early October, the swab tested positive for the new strain and the Department of Health was informed, but apparently not government ministers.

By early November, the virus had spread rapidly, with nearly 30 percent of all infections in London testing positive for the new variant. By mid-December, the mutated virus was responsible for nearly two-thirds of cases in the capital.

According to reports, the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Advisory Group (NERVTAG) committee, which advises England's Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty, was supposedly not given information about the mutation until early December. Channel 4’s factcheck site reported, “Scientific advisers say the alarm was not raised about the potential danger of increased transmissibility from VUI-202012/01 until December 8.”

NERVTAG chair Professor Peter Horby said the first preliminary data about the virus was handed to NERVTAG only on December 11 and it was discussed by them that day.

It wasn’t until December 14, 85 days after the mutation was first detected, that the government was supposedly finally informed and reported the mutation to the World Health Organization.

That day Health Secretary Matt Hancock told parliament that over 1,100 cases of the new strain had been identified in nearly 60 different local authorities. According to a December 16 British Medical Journal article, “the true number will be much higher.”

On December 18, NERVTAG reportedly informed ministers about the “substantial increase in transmissibility” resulting from the new strain.

The following day, December 19, Whitty and Vallance decided it would be a good idea to attend a NERVTAG meeting to discuss its spread.

The same day, Johnson made his public announcement of Tier 4 measures with no household mixing and a limit on Christmas gatherings to December 25 in other tier areas.

The entire episode reveals that the government’s COVID-19 infrastructure is criminally dysfunctional, with the work of scientists carrying out crucial work in identifying new strains, including VUI-202012/01, being ignored for months.

Any system in which public health was the first priority would have seen a body such as NERVTAG—in possession of knowledge regarding the great danger posed by the mutation—insisting on a national lockdown.

Moreover, not only would a government operating on the same basis have instant access to this information of life and death importance. It would have no need to be told to impose one because the first lockdown would still have been in place until the virus had been properly contained.

Ultimately the spread of the new strain “everywhere”, including in a growing number of countries outside Britain, is not down to rank incompetence but due to government policy.

The new strain developed and then spread under conditions where nothing is being allowed to come before the interests of the corporations and their raking in ever greater profits. Even when told on December 14 of how infectious the new strain was, Johnson still told the UK population, two days later, that it would be “frankly inhuman” to scrap existing plans for a three household “bubble”, five-day Christmas, and to have shops open 24 hours a day.

All workplaces of course remained open. Moreover, December 14 was the same day that Education Secretary Gavin Williamson threatened legal action against three London councils, Greenwich, Islington and Waltham Forest, unless they reversed their instructions that schools in their areas close a few days earlier for Christmas—under conditions in which London had become the epicentre for the spread of COVID-19 and schools were among the main vectors.

The government has been guided throughout the pandemic, despite having to put in place highly inadequate restrictions from time to time, by its brutal “herd immunity” agenda. Their declared policy at the outset was that as much of the population as possible should be infected with the virus, no matter the cost to lives.

Last March, the Times reported that Johnson’s then main advisor, Dominic Cummings, explained the government’s coronavirus policy at a closed doors event held in London at the end of February. Those present, reported the newspaper, summarised Cummings’ position as “herd immunity, protect the economy, and if that means some pensioners die, too bad.”

In March, Chief Scientific Officer Vallance declared alongside Johnson at a Downing Street briefing, “It’s not possible to stop everyone getting it, and it’s also not desirable.”

On March 5, Johnson said on a TV show, “perhaps you could take it on the chin, take it all in one go and allow the disease, as it were, to move through the population, without taking as many draconian measures.”

This, a policy of death, has let the COVID-19 virus in all its variants spread virtually without hindrance, leading to the horrific situation millions face today.

At Daimler, German trade union leader calls for job cuts and increased profits

Ludwig Weller

The head of the Daimler works council and IG Metall union leader Michael Brecht gave a lengthy interview to Germany’s monthly business journal Manager Magazin last week, in which he levelled major criticisms at the company’s management.

Rather than direct his opposition to impending plant closures, job cuts and austerity measures, Brecht insisted that the attacks by the Daimler executive on its 300,000 employees were insufficient to “beat Tesla,” one of its main competitors. At the same time and echoing the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, the top union official called for Daimler to be protected against foreign investors.

In a vein similar to the comments by Volkswagen (VW) works council head Bernd Osterloh, who claimed VW CEO Herbert Diess lacked political foresight, Brecht accused the Daimler executive of failing to “protect” the company against its Chinese competitors.

Daimler headquarters in Stuttgart (Photo credit–Enslin)

IG Metall and its works councils are the driving force for “transformation” in the auto industry—that is, securing company profits at the expense of the workforce. In so doing, they are propagating extreme economic nationalism.

In fact, it is rare for auto industry management to speak out so openly in favour of “Germany First” as Brecht did in his interview. Manager Magazin was so struck by the union leader’s nationalist offensive that it began the interview in the following distinctive manner: “Daimler works council chairman Michael Brecht sees the strengthening of Chinese investors as a threat to Germany as a business location. Key sectors like the auto industry must be ‘politically protected.’”

In their interview with Brecht, the magazine’s journalists point out that Daimler has two major Chinese shareholders—i.e., billionaire Li Shufu, the chairman of Geely, the Chinese car manufacturer, as well as the Beijing Automotive Industry Holding Co. (BAIC)—and that China has for some time been Daimler’s largest single market. “What conclusions do you draw from that?” they ask. Brecht answers: “That we should politically protect key sectors like the auto industry, as China and the US already do. The German economics minister Peter Altmaier sees things the same way as we do.”

At the beginning of 2019, Altmaier (the right-wing Christian Democratic Union, CDU) outlined a plan for a “National Industrial Strategy 2030.” The document asserted that “in many parts of the world...there are very obvious strategies for rapid expansion with the clear aim of conquering new markets for one’s own national economy and—wherever possible—monopolising them.” Defending Germany as a business location is therefore the task of both companies and politicians.

IG Metall sees things in precisely the same way. It criticises German auto management from the nationalist right and demands they step up the fight against their international rivals—above all, the US and China.

In the interview, Brecht summed up the nationalist and pro-capitalist policies with which the works council leaders and unions defend “their” corporations against rival companies. In doing so, they not only accept the destruction of tens of thousands of auto workers’ jobs, they go so far as to present themselves as the better managers, prepared to wipe out the jobs in the face of all resistance.

Brecht’s answers to additional questions posed by Manager Magazin, which involve the employment and livelihoods of thousands of workers and their families, make this abundantly clear.

In order to reassure the workforces at the Daimler factories in Stuttgart-Untertürkheim and Berlin-Marienfelde, IG Metall and the works councils have announced their opposition to company plans to cut thousands of jobs. Manager Magazin asks, “Aren’t you fighting against a development that can no longer be stopped?”

Brecht replies that he is not concerned with defending jobs, but rather with defending competitiveness: “No, we want to introduce the technology of the future into these factories. Just look at Tesla, that should be both an example and a warning to the executive.” Tesla builds and develops much more on its own “than we do,” the union official said. “If we just buy our technology from others, we shouldn’t be surprised if, in the end, Mercedes can’t beat Tesla.”

In other words, productivity at Daimler is to be stepped up and wages reduced to an extent that enables the company to do without external suppliers, especially if they are based in China or the United States. This means in turn the elimination of tens of thousands of jobs and a massive increase of stress on the production lines. It serves to divide workers in different factories and countries, who all confront the same corporations and shareholders and can only defend their interests together. Moreover, economic nationalism and trade war are only the precursor to “shooting war,” as history has proven time and again.

The funding of this economic war is to be squeezed out of the workforce. The works council had long fought for the one-billion-euro (US$1.2 billion) “Transformation Fund” that Daimler CEO Ola Källenius has just approved, Brecht reports.

As early as last June, Brecht and his deputy Ergun Lümali sent a circular to all Daimler employees urging management to act and calling for the elimination of tens of thousands of jobs. “We have to urgently press ahead with the transformation process in which we find ourselves,” they wrote. “To do this, we need billions in investment. This money must be earned—despite the crisis.”

This explicitly applies not only to the Mercedes auto division, but also to its truck sector. The new boss there, John O’Leary, was “specially brought into central management by the US subsidiary Freightliner as a reorganiser,” writes Manager Magazin, and then asks: “What does he have to take on?”

Brecht is blunt: “A lot has to happen in the truck business, especially in Europe. We’ve earned only 6 to 7 percent profits here, even in exceptional years.” That’s not enough to finance the necessary investment for the future, he went on. “We have clearly lost market share in Europe; and costs have also risen massively. We as a works council cannot simply ignore such weaknesses.”

Clearly perplexed, Manager Magazin inquired, “Are you inviting executives to cut jobs?” Brecht answers in the affirmative: “We urgently need a solution to the problems, and we won’t like some parts of it; like the Stream 2 cost-cutting programme.”

When the heads of corporations and the works councils talk about “cost-cutting programmes,” they invariably mean job cuts, despite all the talk about “innovation,” “looking to the future” and “securing the plant.” “Stream 1” had a cost-cutting volume of €400 million and involved the elimination of 2,000 jobs. The new “Stream 2” programme, which the central works council has agreed on with Daimler management, involves savings of another €300 million and will also mean significant job cuts.

Works council leader Brecht describes how he intends to implement this: “If personnel adjustments become necessary, we will ensure that no one has to fear for their job. We can handle everything through fluctuation.”

Alongside VW general works council chairman Osterloh, Daimler works council chairman Brecht is one of the most powerful of Germany’s so-called “employee representatives,” which the media invariably refer to as “workers’ leaders.” The latter designation is sheer nonsense. These men do not represent the interests of workers, they defend the interests of large investors. Under conditions of growing global competition between the biggest industrial and trading nations, the unions have mutated into vehement representatives of “German interests”—i.e., the interests of the German finance and economic elite.

The transformation of the unions into the tools of those corporations into which they are deeply integrated is taking place all over the world. It results from their defence of capitalism and is particularly pronounced in Germany.

Works council dignitaries such as Brecht do not derive their power in the factories from the fact that workers regard them as their representatives. Their power is anchored in the corporatist “co-determination” system, which allows unions and local factory officials to jointly determine company policy. Auto companies like Daimler and Volkswagen maintain hundreds of highly paid works councils and IG Metall officials whose salaries, stemming from well-paid posts on supervisory boards and other privileges, exceed an ordinary worker’s wage many times over.

Last year, for example, in addition to his salary, which amounts to at least €200,000 a year, Brecht received half-a-million euros from his posts as deputy chairman of the supervisory board of Daimler AG and Daimler Trucks AG, and as a member of the supervisory board of Mercedes Benz AG.

This integration of the unions into company structures, a development that has taken place over decades, cannot be overcome by merely chasing the corrupt IG Metall works councils out of the factories. Rather, new forms of organisation are needed that defend workers’ jobs and social gains completely independently of the unions and state structures.

This can only be done through a united, independent and international movement of the working class directed against the capitalist system. Daimler is not an isolated case. All the big corporations in the auto, supply, steel, engineering, chemical and other industries are using the coronavirus crisis to shed workers, intensify exploitation and prepare for trade war and all-out war.

Half a million dead in Europe from COVID-19 pandemic

Will Morrow

Today, Europe marks yet another grim milestone in the coronavirus pandemic. Half a million people have officially died of the virus across Europe, according to the figures published by Worldometers, which includes Russia in its European total.

The actual number of COVID-19 deaths is likely far higher. An October 14 study in the scientific journal Nature, examining excess deaths in 21 countries, found that the number of deaths above historical norms for January–June was around 20 percent higher than deaths officially attributed to COVID-19. If this is true for all of Europe, in fact there have been a further 100,000 deaths attributable to the pandemic.

The marker of 300,000 deaths was passed near November 10, the 400,000 marker at the end of November. The next 100,000 deaths came in three weeks. As with the previous milestones, it will be noted briefly, if at all, on television news programs. Above all, no European government is proposing a serious policy to urgently address the growing death toll and advance a scientific response. Any measure restricting production, corporate profits and the wealth of the European financial elite is rejected out of hand.

A paramedic walks out of a tent that was set up in front of the emergency ward of the Cremona hospital, northern Italy [Credit: Claudio Furlan/Lapresse via AP, file]

More than 3,000 people are dying each day. Britain recorded more than 37,000 cases and 691 deaths yesterday. Monday saw over 350 deaths in France and 415 in Italy. Yesterday, German health departments reported 19,528 new cases and 731 deaths to the Robert Koch Institute. This makes last week by far the worst yet in Germany, with 175,314 infections and over 4,300 deaths.

The virus is still spreading rapidly and is in fact accelerating. In December, France and the UK ended partial lockdowns, which had never closed non-essential production or schools, encouraging the population to travel for the holidays. In Britain, the Johnson government announced that shopping centers would be open 24 hours a day, to ensure that retailers’ most profitable period would not be impacted.

In France, the R rate is now above 1, meaning the virus is again growing exponentially. The Macron government ended lockdown measures on December 15 though case numbers never fell below 10,000—twice the threshold it claimed was necessary to allow for loosening restrictions. There are now 15,000 to 20,000 cases per day.

Christian Rabeau, the president of the medical commission at the Nancy Regional Hospital, said he anticipated a third wave beginning on January 4, when schools are due to reopen. “There could be 500 more patients in ICU compared to today,” he told Europe1 yesterday. Many hospitals are already approaching capacity. “This weekend, to be able to take in patients that arrived, we had to rearrange portions of the hospital to treat COVID,” he said.

In Britain, the virus is spiraling out of control, with more than 30,000 cases per day. Its spread is being accelerated by the emergence of a new strain, 70 percent more infectious, that now makes up more than 60 percent of cases in southeastern England. This strain has already been recorded in Italy, Spain and the Netherlands, Denmark, and beyond.

Scientific evaluations of the new strain estimate that it could increase the R rate by anywhere from 0.4 to 0.9. In an area with 10,000 daily cases, this would mean 4,000 to 9,000 new cases each day. It is unknown whether the new strain is more lethal, but a rapid growth in case numbers would more quickly overwhelm hospitals and thereby massively increase fatalities.

Scientists oppose the official policy of permitting tens of thousands of infections per day. On December 18, the Lancet journal published a statement by medical scientists in Europe, entitled, “Calling for a pan-European commitment for rapid and sustained reduction in SARS-CoV-2 infections.”

Effectively indicting the current policy, the scientists declare that “low case numbers save lives,” and that “easing restrictions while accepting high case numbers is a short-sighted strategy that will lead to another wave.” They advise immediate lockdown measures until case numbers have been brought below no more than 10 cases per million people per day—approximately one thirtieth of the current levels in France.

The statement calls for a coordinated, continent-wide response, as “a single country alone cannot keep the number of COVID-19 cases low; joint action and common goals among countries are therefore essential.”

Governments, however, are racing to ensure business resumes as normal after the holidays. The Macron government insists that schools reopen on January 4. School are also being kept open in Britain and Germany. Governments are using schools as a child-minding service so parents can be forced to go to work, and are conscious that this will lead to tens of thousands more deaths.

The model everywhere, effectively, is Sweden, whose government openly pursued a policy of “herd immunity” that led to catastrophe. This was the deadliest November in Sweden since the Spanish flu in 1918. In a country of just 10 million people, it has recorded more than 8,000 deaths.

By contrast, Finland and Norway have seen 511 and 405 deaths, respectively, so that on a per capita basis, Sweden has more than eight times the death rate of its neighbors. Had such a policy been implemented at the level of Europe, the results would have been catastrophic.

Scientists are all warning of a new upsurge in the virus in early 2021. In every country, capitalist governments are deliberately putting profits before lives. After the initial lockdowns in the first half of 2020, they declared that no restrictions on production could be permitted again, regardless of the number of deaths. If the capitalist class is allowed to continue to dictate policy, the result will be a catastrophe that could easily eclipse what has already occurred.

The working class must intervene independently and fight for a scientific response to the pandemic. The Socialist Equality Parties insist calling for the immediate closure of all schools and non-essential workplaces. Workers must be compensated in full for all lost time, with a decent living wage provided to every person throughout the lockdown. Small businesses must be fully compensated, and sufficient resources provided to them to ensure that all staff can be paid wages and that they can resume operations after the pandemic.

The fact that a vaccine is already being distributed and could save an untold number of lives within months makes it all the more imperative to ensure that the pandemic is brought under control immediately.

Claims that there is no money for such measures are patent lies. Trillions of euros have been handed out in bailouts to the major corporations and banks since the beginning of the year. When it is a matter of bailing out the rich, governments declare that no cost is too great. But when it is a matter of saving the lives of workers, there is nothing to be found.

Brazilian Morenoites join Bolsonaro in promoting hydroxychloroquine against COVID-19

Gabriel Lemos

Alongside the increase in the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths around the world, A second wave of the coronavirus pandemic is spreading uncontrollably throughout Brazil. This week, 18 of Brazil’s 26 states and the Federal District reported an increase in the moving average of deaths and in six of them, ICUs are on the brink of collapse.

Brazil has more than 7 million coronavirus cases and some 188,000 deaths, trailing only the US and India in the number of cases, and only the US in deaths.

Bolsonaro with HCQ boxes in one of his live Facebook videos.

If a pandemic like this one was already foreseen and foreseeable, this is even more true for its second wave. However, since July, one-third of the ICUs created exclusively for COVID-19 treatment in Brazil have been deactivated. This further exposes the homicidal herd immunity policy of fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro’s government and of state governors, including those of the Workers Party (PT), the supposed opposition.

Today, Bolsonaro’s herd immunity policy is taking the form of an anti-China and anti-vaccine campaign that threatens to fatally undermine the broad vaccination of the Brazilian population next year. At the same time, Bolsonaro has frenetically promoted medicines that have no scientific evidence of being effective against COVID-19, such as hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and the vermifuge ivermectin, to force the end of the few remaining lockdown measures in Brazil.

In this context, the international and Brazilian pseudo-left has sought to give a left cover to the herd immunity policy of the global ruling elite. In September, Jacobin Magazine promoted one of the academic proponents of this policy, Martin Kulldorff, who would become one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration “of death.” In Brazil, this example is being followed by the Brazilian section of the Morenoite Trotskyist Fraction, the Revolutionary Workers Movement (MRT), on its Esquerda Diário website.

Since the beginning of the pandemic in Brazil, the MRT’s leading member, Gilson Dantas, has written articles defending the use of HCQ, and, more recently, ivermectin against COVID-19. In an April 15 article titled “The medical debate on hydroxychloroquine and the health irresponsibility of Bolsonaro,” he attempts in vain to differentiate his position from that of the fascistic president, saying that although it is “demagogically defended by extreme-right governments,” the left has “challenged or ignored” HCQ “with the allegation that its effectiveness ‘has not been verified’”against COVID-19.

Part of Dantas' "evidence", a recommendation for the use of HCQ.that Portugal would later withdraw.

He mentions observational trials with HCQ in China, where “hydroxychloroquine became official guidance in COVID-19 treatment,” and in France, where Dr. Didier Raoult “managed to knock down the viral load of all patients and zero that of those who associated azithromycin with hydroxychloroquine, in SIX days.”

Without questioning the serious limitations of the Chinese and French trials, he states, “unequivocally, hydroxychloroquine had a positive, concrete clinical effect.” This, however, is far from true. Trials to verify the efficacy of a medicine must be randomized, double blind and conducted with a control group. In none of the studies provided by Dantas did this happen. Dr. Raoult’s study was also retracted by the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents on April 3 for “failing to meet expected [scientific] quality standards.” All this was widely reported before Dantas wrote his article promoting HCQ.

Dantas’ article was published soon after Trump and Bolsonaro started a frenetic campaign in March for the use of HCQ against COVID-19. In Brazil, this campaign was lent a pseudo-scientific cover by right-wing scientists who defended the use of HCQ. The most vocal of these scientists has been Paolo Zanotto, a leading virologist at the University of São Paulo (USP). Dantas also used Zanotto’s “scientific authority” to justify his defense of HCQ.

In an article published in the daily Folha de S. Paulo on April 7, Zanotto wrote that, in a pandemic, “we don’t have time to wait for the results of clinical evaluations,” adding, “the most reasonable thing is early treatment with hydroxichloroquine.” Even with all the long-known HCQ side effects, this same argument would be repeated by a group of scientists called “Teachers for Freedom” in two letters sent to Bolsonaro in April and May in which they defended early COVID-19 treatment with HCQ. Created last year by supporters of the president, the “Teachers for Freedom” say they fight against the “ideological persecution and the hegemony by the left” in universities.

The Quinina website (https://quinina.com.br/) cited by Dantas

The spokesman for the letters was former chemistry professor at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Marcos Eberlim, who today coordinates the Discovery Institute in Brazil and chairs the creationist Brazilian Society of Intelligent Design. They called for a rejection of the “scientific consensus,” i.e., “double-blind multi-centric clinical trials” to allow the use of HCQ. Eberlim also justified this by saying that he works in “an area of science that studies our origins, in which a theory [Darwin’s theory of evolution] is presented as full scientific consensus,” but “there are more doubts than certainties.”

After the April articles, it took Dantas five months to advocate the use of HCQ again. On September 15, Esquerda Diário promoted Dantas’ book, “Coronavirus: the disease and treatment options.” Repeating the early arguments, but without mentioning HCQ, he says that the book presents “data that show the ability of two drugs to zero the viral load in vivo and in humans, through numerous clinical trials of sequence of cases, which point to the unmistakable clinical utility of such drugs to avoid lethal outcomes of the disease.” This statement has no scientific basis.

His latest article on this subject, published on December 2 on Esquerda Diário with the title “Treatment of COVID-19 disease: against Bolsonaro and in favor of science,” makes an open defense of the use of HCQ and also of ivermectin. After months in which countless studies failed to show the effectiveness of HCQ against COVID-19, most notably the British Recovery Trial in June and the World Health Organization’s Solidarity trial in October, Dantas insists that “clinical experiences from countries like France, China and others ... are saving lives.”

Dantas’ article does not quote any recent studies demonstrating the efficacy of HCQ and ivermectin. However, it does contain five photos of reports with studies that show the alleged effectiveness of HCQ and its supposed beneficial use in Indonesia, Portugal and Costa Rica. All reports were published between May 17 and July 2 on the Quinina website, which in its header has a banner of Dr. Didier Raoult’s “Fondation Méditerranée Infection.”

Among the many publications on the website created to promote HCQ against COVID-19 are several writings and videos by Paolo Zanotto. In one of the videos, Zanotto opposes lockdown measures in the most reactionary terms, saying that they are part of a “cultural” or “values war” to “manipulate reality and impose another one,” that is, “alter daily life in a sudden way, which the Jacobins did, the Bolsheviks did, which the Nazis tried to do in Germany.” Such reactionary views are also shared by Dr. Raoult, who in January downplayed the pandemic, and is also known to deny global warming and Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Esquerda Diário’s response to Dantas’ defense of the use of HCQ against COVID-19 and its alignment with such right-wing elements could not be more cynical and unprincipled. Since September, his articles have been accompanied by a note stating that Dantas’ position “does not represent the opinion of the MRT, which is neither against nor in favor of medicines for COVID-19 disease, nor does it defend the debate on the treatment of COVID-19.”

Nothing could expose more clearly the petty-bourgeois character of this organization, along with its criminal irresponsibility and contempt for the lives of workers that are being lost daily to the deadly pandemic. The MRT is “neither against nor in favor” of the promotion of false information and reactionary theories that can only lead to even more deaths.

This response, on the one hand, is utterly hostile to the efforts of Marxism to carefully address the most advanced scientific fields. With the COVID-19 pandemic, this became even more essential to analyze the new coronavirus, the disease and its intersections with society, and to elaborate a program of action that preserves the health and life of the international working class. On the other hand, it ignores the numerous articles previously published on Esquerda Diário by Dantas and others that openly promoted pseudo-scientific “alternative therapies.”

In 2015 and 2016, Brazil witnessed a broad debate on phosphoethanolamine, a drug that was produced and distributed for 20 years by USP chemistry professor Gilberto Chierice as the “cure for cancer.” In 2015, Brazil’s health agency, Anvisa, ordered the suspension of the production and distribution of phosphoethanolamine, because, until then, no clinical trials had been done to demonstrate its effectiveness. Later clinical trials would show that it has no efficacy.

At the time, Dantas and Esquerda Diário widely denounced the end of phosphoethanolamine distribution to cancer patients. Dantas even claimed that the drug “has therapeutic power [unless we imagine that thousands are lying...],” and that the corporate media, allied to “Big Pharma,” manipulated public opinion to show the opposite. He also tried to base his position in defense of phosphoethanolamine on the “theory about cancer” of the 1931 Medicine Nobel Prize winner Otto Warburg, who, according to him, “was never taken seriously by official oncology.”

In fact, official oncology abandoned Warburg’s thesis after it became clear in the ’70s that cancer is caused by genetic mutations. In addition to its invocation in support of Chierice’s defense of phosphoethanolamine, Warburg’s thesis is also used by quack physician Lair Ribeiro to promote alternative treatments such as coconut oil and a ketogenic diet against cancer. Ribeiro, who had already been mentioned by Dantas as a “scientific authority” in an article that downplayed the effectiveness of chemotherapy against cancer with a study widely criticized by the scientific community, recently also advocated the use of HCQ against COVID-19.

Just as today, the defense of HCQ joins Esquerda Diário with Bolsonaro, the same thing happened around the phosphoethanolamine case. In 2016, Bolsonaro, then a federal deputy, was the author of a bill that allowed the use of the drug even without scientific evidence. The bill had the broad support of PT congressmen, and then-PT president Dilma Rousseff sanctioned it just before she was impeached.

In addition, Dantas and Bolsonaro used the same argument in favor of phosphoethalonamine at the time: for the current president, Anvisa should “ensure that each citizen is free to seek a cure,” while for Dantas the use of the drug was based on the “right to freedom of the patient over his own body.” This is also the same outlook that today underlies the anti-vaccination position of Bolsonaro in favor of the “freedoms of Brazilians” and that of the creationist Eberlim, for whom the “scientific consensus” should be abandoned to promote drugs without scientific evidence and the alleged scientific bases of the creation of the world by God.

The anti-scientific and anti-Marxist character of Dantas’ position can only be explained by his political and social origins. Before joining the MRT, he was a member in the ’70s and ’80s of the ultra-Pabloite Trotskyist Revolutionary Workers Party, the Brazilian section of the International founded by Argentinean Juan Posadas in 1961. The party was one of the many revisionist tendencies that took part in the creation of the PT and liquidated itself into it.

As a physician who specialized in “traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture,” as he stressed in a short autobiography published in a 2017 book on Trotskyism in Brazil, Dantas represents an upper-middle-class section of the population, for whom Esquerda Díario speaks, that for decades has embraced one or another form of postmodern irrationalism and abandoned the objective foundations of modern science itself.

Chilean health unions conclude sellout deal with right-wing government

Mauricio Saavedra

Chilean health care unions have announced to an angry membership that an agreement has been reached with the government over the “COVID bonus” promised to frontline health professionals.

The Facebook page of the Confederation of Health Workers (FENATS Nacional) announced yesterday that the unions had settled the agreement with the Ministry of Finance and that eligible health professionals would receive the payment of 200,000 pesos no later than next January 30.

“Patricia Valderas, president of (FENATS) considered the fact as ‘a well deserved achievement by the workers, who have made an effort during the pandemic and always, to attend the citizens as best as possible, without counting many times with the necessary resources. We will continue to fight for the rest of the demands we have pending,’” reported the site.

Chilean Finance Minister with union bureaucrats holding up sellout deal (Credit: Finance Ministry)

What she did not explain is that the risible 200,000 pesos (approx. US$275), achieved after months of horse-trading, is not even half the measly 500,000 pesos (approx. US$650) originally pledged by the Congress earlier in June. Nor will the tens of thousands of precarious independent contractors, known as honorarios, or replacement workers, receive a cent of the bonus.

This slap in the face orchestrated by the public sector unions has been treated with the contempt it deserves. In the last 15 hours hundreds of angry responses from a cross-section of health care workers denounced the deal as a sellout. Below is a small sample of the comments:

Roxana Andrea: A shame that honorary workers are excluded from any bonus, and even more, from the covid bonus. We’ve been out there since day one of the pandemic and doing the same job as a plant or incumbent employee. A huge injustice!

Gustavo Cruz Ramirez: Truly a shame, this is a humiliation for health workers instead of an achievement.

Ximena Rodriguez: In my opinion there should no longer be FENATS. It has completely lost the credibility of its members and the discontent of all health officials. This completely violates our rights and dignity. How awful is the (FENATS union) president and (Finance Minister) Briones. The frontline is worth 200,000.

Joshe Manuel: SORRY, BUT AN ACHIEVEMENT FOR THOSE OF US WHO HAVE FOUGHT IN THIS PANDEMIC? Please! The only ones who have been fighting this Pandemic and I could say 90% of us are replacement and honorario personnel. They should give that bonus only to those staff members who have been on duty working in the field, in each hospital on a face-to-face basis. As always, honorarios and replacements are left aside though we are the ones who are fighting this bug 24/7.

Natalia Espinoza Nuñez: Joshe Manuel: Think, that those of us who are on leave, away from our work, by preventive distancing, it is not for vacation, it is for being sick, and where most of us get sick is at work, and others for years of service…

Marlys Quintallana: And to the leaders, how much did the bonus increase, it’s a real shitty thing that their “achievement” is not for their workers.

Paz Carrillo: Marlys Quintallana: You know, colleague, what seems most unusual to me is that the officials of the armed forces were given triple and more bonuses, and those who are and have been in constant danger are the health workers, not them. But this country is like that, they give more privileges and recognition to those who torture, harm and not to those who help, what a pity and outrage ... Let’s hope that the other bonuses won years ago are given and that they don’t just settle for this famous bonus!

Silvia Chza: Marlys Quintallana: It’s very true, they are all sellouts.

Oriel Gomez: Super that the (Carabineros) get something like close to a million (approx. US$1,380) bonus. And those of us who were (on the frontline) until we were quarantined and then continued to work, they gave us crumbs.

These statements are testament to a hostility and growing opposition in the working class toward the corporatist unions and the political parties that have dominated them for almost half a century.

The unions were transformed during the military dictatorship into corporatized instruments of the employers and the government, and used to drive productivity increases, wage cuts and job destruction, thereby allowing Chile to become the most socially unequal country in the OECD. Especially under the center-left coalition governments that have ruled during 20 of the last 30 years of civilian rule, they have done everything in their power to suffocate any independent struggles, leading the workers into stunts and promoting empty and demoralizing parliamentary appeals.

As the conditions of the working class deteriorated over the second decade of this century, the political fortunes of this sizeable middle class bureaucracy have improved markedly, deriving their privileged existence from positions in the executive apparatus or the legislature, the civil service, the unions and other social organizations, or by directly integrating themselves into the corporate world. Not a few “Socialists” and “lefts” sit on the boards of lucrative superannuation funds, the AFPs.

The corporatist agenda has only accelerated during the pandemic: the Communist Party (PCCh)-dominated CUT and the other trade union federations agreed to a return to work in mining and other sectors of the economy. They accepted a freeze on collective bargaining, along with wage cuts, supported the furloughing of hundreds of thousands of workers in private industry for the benefit of employers, and refused to call any industrial action against poverty, hunger, insecurity and evictions impacting the working class.

Their grip is increasingly tenuous and they know this. The long list of betrayals has had an impact on mass consciousness. Amid the dangerous surge in the coronavirus pandemic across the country, workers and working class communes have come out in spontaneous protests and demonstrations in direct opposition to the “left” political caste.

But opposition to the unions is not enough. The working class urgently requires a clearly worked out program to take forward its independent political interests. It must break with bourgeois politics, especially the Stalinist PCCh, the pseudo-left Frente Amplio and the establishment left, who accept the confines of parliamentary legality, capitalist private property and production for profit.

The Johns Hopkins slavery “scandal”

Dominic Gustavo

Historical census records show that Johns Hopkins—founder of his namesake university in Baltimore, Maryland—was a slave-owner, university officials announced on December 9, in an open letter. The revelation has been seized on to generate a racialist campaign at Johns Hopkins University, site of the nation’s leading medical college.

The open letter, entitled “Reexamining the history of our founder,” states that university officials received a tip from a Maryland state archivist about the existence of the census records in the spring. A team of university historians followed up on the tip and found “government census records that state Mr. Hopkins was the owner of one enslaved person listed in his household in 1840 and four enslaved people listed in 1850. By the 1860 census, there are no enslaved persons listed in the household.” Additional documents from the 1830s showed that Hopkins sometimes purchased slaves to settle debts.

Martha S. Jones, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins who led the investigation, followed up with an opinion piece published in the Washington Post entitled: “The founder of Johns Hopkins owned enslaved people. Our university must face a reckoning.” Jones claims that the revelation has “shattered” the myths surrounding Hopkins as a Quaker entrepreneur and an abolitionist.

Johns Hopkins, 1795-1873 (Wikimedia Commons)

Hopkins, she said, “largely derived his wealth from real estate, railroads, banking—and by being party to slavery’s crime against humanity… Centuries ago, wealthy men such as Hopkins amassed their fortunes through endeavors only two or three degrees removed from the exploitation of people treated as property. Before the Civil War, Americans held more wealth in enslaved people than they did in railroads, banks and factories combined.” She added that it was “all too callous for a man whose vast riches financed the university for which I work today.”

Dismissing the fact that Hopkins was ever “subscribing to abolitionist views,” Jones went on to write : “This is the beginning of a long and probing inquiry on our part into the consequences of slavery, yes, but racism, in particular, and how that has shaped our institution across time… Among the first obligations is to finish the research that we have begun.”

A chorus of voices from the press repeated Jones’ narrative. The New York Times joined the Washington Post in dismissing Hopkins’ abolitionist past—of which, they claimed, there was not “any evidence of at all”—and quoted a statement by the Johns Hopkins University leadership: “The revelation about Johns Hopkins calls to mind not only the darkest chapters in the history of our country and our city but also the complex history of our institutions since then, and the legacies of racism and inequity we are working together to confront.”

An op-ed by Johns Hopkins Professor of English and History Lawrence Jackson published in the Baltimore Sun carried the same message, declaring that the announcement showed that Hopkins “wasn’t an abolitionist, as history has held, but instead a slaveholder… making him exactly like the others of his class and race in Baltimore.”

The spectacle reached its height in a virtual town hall meeting organized by the university leadership on December 11. In her opening remarks, Katrina Caldwell, Chief Diversity Officer at Johns Hopkins, said that the findings about Hopkins, “reinforces the need to pursue, with intention and speed, our ongoing commitments to our strategic diversity, equity and inclusion work. And the commitments that we have already made to address the legacy of racism that plagues our institution.”

This was followed by Johns Hopkins President Ronald Daniels, who histrionically referred to the revelations about Hopkins as “painful and distressing” and “devastating.” He promised “a new set of goals around diversity, equity and inclusion,” before repeating himself about feeling “waves of distress, despondency, pain.”

He was joined by Kevin Sowers, president of the Johns Hopkins Health System, who stated: “It is clear that the anti-racism, equity seeking and inclusion views we espouse must guide our continued examination into our history and really inform our future.” He added, “We also have to commit to diversify our leadership team.” Another colleague stressed that it was important to “acknowledge the pain that many members of our community must be feeling.”

Johns Hopkins, born in 1795, grew up on his family’s tobacco plantation in Anne Arundel County, Maryland south of Baltimore. In 1807, the Hopkins family freed their slaves, abiding by a decree issued by the local Quaker group, of which they were a part. Thereafter Hopkins, then 12, left school to help his parents work the fields. At 17, Hopkins went to work for his uncle in Baltimore, where he learned how to run a wholesale grocery shop.

In 1819, Hopkins established his own wholesaler business with his three brothers as partners. The business prospered, shipping goods throughout Maryland, Virginia, Ohio and North Carolina. Hopkins, by all accounts true to his Quaker roots, lived a life of asceticism. He never married, and rarely spent money on personal indulgences, devoting himself almost exclusively to his business. However, most of his wealth came from his investments in assorted enterprises, including railroads, real estate, insurance companies, steamship lines, and warehouses. He retired in 1847, a very wealthy man at age 52.

For a wealthy man in pre-Civil War Maryland to own slaves was not out of the ordinary, and it is certainly not a shocking revelation, as the petty-bourgeois racialists have characterized it. Slavery was the dominant form of labor exploitation in the Southern states of that era. Objectively, the fact that Hopkins owned slaves does not preclude him from having been an abolitionist, just as Thomas Jefferson being a slave-owner does not invalidate the progressive character of the principles espoused in the Declaration of Independence.

It should be noted that Hopkins was a strong supporter of Lincoln and the Union during the Civil War, earning him the ire of many of the rich and powerful in Baltimore. In the years before the war, he worked with a number of abolitionists, including Myrtilla Miner, whom he supported in her efforts to establish a school for African American girls, which would become the University of the District of Columbia.

Before his death in 1873 at age 78, Hopkins donated $7 million—about $150 million today—for the establishment of a free hospital, medical training colleges, a university, and an orphanage for black children. It was, at the time, the largest act of philanthropy in US history.

In his conception of historical materialism, Friedrich Engels rejected interpretations of history that placed the subjective motives of individuals as the primary driving force, describing them as: “essentially pragmatic; it judges everything according to the motives of the action; it divides men who act in history into noble and ignoble and then finds that as a rule the noble are defrauded and the ignoble are victorious.”

“Pragmatic” fittingly describes the attitude of the race-obsessed middle classes towards history. For them, the material basis of ideas and events are to be glossed over, because there is no objective truth. Rather, “narratives” are to be constructed to serve present political aims. This irrational, unscientific approach to history has nothing in common with Marxism and, it must be stated, is inevitably used to serve the most reactionary ends.

While these right-wing racialists denounce the exploitation of chattel slavery, they reserve no such condemnation for the dominant form of labor exploitation today: wage labor under capitalism. In an era in which social inequality—the irreconcilable chasm between the needs of society and the interests of the possessing capitalist class—represents the inescapable “irrepressible conflict” in American society, the abject silence of this petty-bourgeois milieu speaks volumes. The very real human suffering of those who were enslaved is being cynically utilized by this privileged layer to gain access to wealth and influence.

Predictably, the supposedly stunning discovery about Johns Hopkins owning a few slaves is being used to demand new programming on race at JHU. This, amidst a global pandemic that has killed 1.7 million people, which scientists at JHU are playing a leading role combatting; in Baltimore, among the poorest big cities in America; in the greatest social catastrophe since the Great Depression, with millions unemployed and struggling to pay rent; in the sharpest political crisis since the Civil War, with the outgoing president openly cultivating a fascistic movement.

In the Johns Hopkins slavery “scandal,” the class character of racial politics is on full, grotesque display.

Bogus debate on “decline of French” in Montreal fuels Quebec chauvinism

Hugo Maltais

In the midst of Canada’s raging COVID-19 pandemic and as Quebec, Ontario, and other provinces have registered record numbers of infections, provincial and federal politicians in Quebec have been absorbed in a manufactured controversy over the decline of French in Montreal.

On November 13, the Journal de Montréal published a report sensationally titled, “Incapable of being served in French.” It reported that during a visit to 31 stores and restaurants in downtown Montreal, 16 had greeted customers/journalists in English.

The Journal de Montréal is a daily tabloid published by Quebecor, a media and telecommunications empire that owns newspapers and television and radio stations. It is owned by Pierre-Karl Péladeau, a billionaire whose fortune is estimated at US$1.8 billion and who briefly served as leader of the pro-independence Parti Québécois (PQ) in 2015-16.

The Fleurdelisé flying at Place d'Armes in Montreal. (Image credit: Makaristos/Wikipedia [Public Domain])

The November 13 “exposé” was quickly followed by a chorus of op-eds from leading Journal de Montréal columnists, including Mathieu Bock-Côté, Richard Martineau, Mario Dumont, Josée Legault and Denise Bombardier. A fabricated controversy, this furor was aimed at promoting Quebec nationalism and pushing the right-wing populist Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ, Coalition for the Future of Quebec) provincial government even further to the right.

Quebecor’s media outlets have long played a major role in stoking Quebec chauvinism. After supporting the CAQ and its right-wing nationalist platform in the 2018 elections, Quebecor applauded and encouraged it as it passed two chauvinist laws during its first year in office.

The first, Bill 9, slashed the number of immigrants admitted to Quebec annually and introduced knowledge of “Quebec values” into the selection criteria. The second, Bill 21, prohibits the wearing of religious symbols by state employees, including public school teachers, deemed in “positions of authority,” while reaffirming Quebec’s Catholic “heritage.” It also bans Muslim women who wear a face-covering veil from receiving vital public services, including health care and education.

Virtually the entire Quebec establishment welcomed Bill 21’s attack on the basic democratic rights of religious and cultural minorities. It was hailed by Le Devoir, a daily newspaper close to Quebec’s indépendantiste circles, as well as by La Presse, which speaks for the federalist sections of big business. In other words, the Journal de Montréal ’s anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim agitation is only the most vulgar expression of a policy that is being supported and pursued by the ruling elite as a whole.

However, the Journal de Montréal and other hardline Quebec nationalists remain dissatisfied. In recent months, Quebecor’s flagship tabloid has published several editorials criticizing the CAQ, with headlines such as “Should the nationalism of the CAQ be taken seriously,” “The nationalist veneer of the CAQ is cracking” and “Is the nationalist credibility of the CAQ starting to wane?”

This campaign culminated in a series of articles published to mark 25 years since the October 1995 referendum on Quebec independence. The articles combined calls for the Quebec “people” to “awaken their souls” and “fight for their survival,” with hysterical attacks from Mario Dumont, who as leader of Action démocratique du Québec (ADQ) co-led the campaign in 1995 in favour of a “Yes” to independence, on the ostensible “left wing” of the contemporary independence movement. One after another, the Journal de Montreal’s columnists urged Quebec Premier François Legault and his CAQ government to adopt further ultranationalist measures attacking minority rights. Summing up their arguments, the right-wing ideologue Bock-Côté declared, “It is through the question of identity that we will achieve our independence.”

The CAQ government’s response was given by Simon Jolin-Barrette, who currently doubles as Minister of Justice and Minister for the French Language, and who was the minister principally responsible for drafting and winning parliamentary assent for Bills 9 and 21. In an interview with a television channel owned by Quebecor, Jolin-Barrette said he was “shocked” by the Journal de Montréal’s revelations about the “decline” of the French language. In Quebec, he thundered, “It has to happen in French,” adding that the CAQ government will do more to ensure the “francization” of immigrants.

A few weeks later, Jolin-Barrette announced that the government will introduce amendments to strengthen Bill 101 this spring. He was referring to a law passed by the Parti Québécois (PQ) in 1977 to curtail the rights of Quebec’s linguistic minorities in the name of defending the French language and making French the “public language” of Quebec. Its aim was to secure a larger share of executive and management positions for the francophone petty bourgeoisie.

Premier Legault, for his part, called the linguistic situation in Montreal “unacceptable.” A former CEO and multimillionaire, Legault began his political career in 1998 as a minister in the PQ government of Lucien Bouchard, at a time when it was making savage cuts in health, education and culture in the name of “balancing the budget.”

After leaving the PQ, Legault founded the CAQ in 2011, with the help of the billionaire Charles Sirois, to promote austerity, privatization and corporate tax cuts. At its founding, the CAQ absorbed what was left of Dumont’s ADQ, which had fueled Quebec chauvinism with its campaign against the supposed “excessive” accommodations granted to minorities. Legault led the CAQ to power in 2018 after an election campaign which included virulent attacks on immigrants and religious minorities.

When multimillionaire Legault and billionaire Péladeau talk about “defending the French language,” they are not talking about investing billions to rebuild dilapidated schools in working-class neighbourhoods, ensure free and quality education for all at all levels, or fund the arts so as to make culture accessible to working people.

For Quebec’s ruling class, this demand serves rather to promote the fraudulent nationalist notion that the primary divide in Quebec and Canadian society is between the French and the English, not that between the working class and the capitalist elite, as if a French-speaking worker in Quebec has more in common with a francophone billionaire like Péladeau than with an English-speaking worker in Ontario or Alberta.

In Canada, the ruling class uses language differences to undermine class consciousness and divide the working class, just as the bourgeoisie elsewhere manipulates racial, ethnic, cultural or gender differences.

In this, a pernicious role is played by the supposedly “left-wing” Quebec Solidaire (QS), which has criticized the CAQ on this issue from the right. After Jolin-Barrette announced that the government was preparing a plan to “protect French,” Québec Solidaire Member of the National Assembly Sol Zanetti condemned the CAQ’s “soft” nationalism and rejected its plan as inadequate.

On November 24, Québec Solidaire voted in favour of a motion passed unanimously by Quebec’s National Assembly that called on the federal government to work with the province to bring federally regulated companies under the antidemocratic Bill 101.

QS thus found itself in the company of the six living former Quebec premiers, all of whom publicly supported the motion: Philippe Couillard, Pauline Marois, Jean Charest, Lucien Bouchard, Daniel Johnson and Pierre-Marc Johnson. Whether leading PQ or Liberal governments, every one of them pursued austerity policies and came into bitter conflict with the working class.

QS’s endorsement of a plan to restrict minority language rights is just the latest example of its long-standing efforts to integrate itself into the ruling establishment by supporting its turn to ever more strident forms of Quebec chauvinism.

QS called the ADQ-spearheaded, anti-immigrant “reasonable accommodation” debate “necessary”; welcomed the PQ’s chauvinistic campaign for a “Quebec Charter of Values” as “legitimate”; and has endorsed Quebec attacking the democratic rights of religious minorities under the guise of “state secularism.”

The latest bogus controversy over the French language also found an echo in the federal parliament. On November 14, Emmanuella Lambropoulos, a Liberal Party MP for the Montreal riding of St-Laurent, was forced to apologize for “questioning” the claim that French is in decline in Quebec.

The leader of the Bloc Québécois, Yves-François Blanchet, used this incident to attack federal Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the House. A sister party to the PQ dedicated to the promotion of Quebec nationalism, the Bloc adopted a particularly chauvinistic, even racist tone in the last federal election. Since then, it has worked with the Conservative Party to attack the Liberals from a right-wing perspective, notably over Trudeau’s allegedly weak response to the murder of a French teacher by a Muslim terrorist and the Liberals’ allegedly insufficiently aggressive policies towards China.

Adapting to the rise of the chauvinistic right, Trudeau and his Liberals have encouraged Quebec nationalists at every turn in this fabricated scandal. The federal Minister of Official Languages rebuffed Lambropoulos and announced that the Official Languages Act would be modernized. Trudeau responded to opposition attacks by supporting Bill 101. “Quebec must be first and foremost francophone,” he said, “and that’s why we support Bill 101 in what it does for Quebec.”

A proponent of Canada’s official multiculturalism policy, supposedly “progressive” and open to diversity, Trudeau speaks for those sections of the Canadian ruling class that promote identity politics and the division of the population into distinct ethnic and religious groups. Their ultimate goal is to strengthen Canadian nationalism, camouflage Canadian imperialist violence and divide the working class.

Workers and youth in Quebec and elsewhere in Canada must reject Quebec nationalism (as well as western Canadian regionalism, which foments anti-Quebec sentiment by claiming that Quebec is out to kill Alberta’s oil industry). They must also reject Canadian nationalism, which includes Trudeau-style multiculturalism as one of its essential ideological components.

Quebec nationalism and Canadian nationalism are two sides of the same chauvinist coin. Although they are promoted by different sections of the ruling class, they share the same objective: to pit workers against each other along linguistic, racial, ethnic or cultural lines; divide workers in Canada from their international class brothers and sisters; and prevent a unified struggle of the working class across Canada—French- and English-speaking, immigrant, and First Nations—against capitalist austerity and militarism.

What is required is an independent political struggle by the working class for a workers’ government to secure democratic rights, reject imperialist war and establish social equality.