Australian Labor Party leader proposes new union-employer Accord to enforce “gig” economy” restructuring

Mike Head

On the pretext of trying to protect workers from “unpredictable, fluctuating pay and hours,” Australian Labor Party leader Anthony Albanese delivered a speech on Wednesday that outlined a plan to collaborate with the employers and trade unions to suppress working class opposition to the corporate offensive.

Anthony Albanese being interviewed about the budget [Credit: @AlboMP, Twitter]

In the name of securing “rights for gig economy workers through the Fair Work Commission,” Albanese proposed to strengthen the hand of the unions and the Fair Work Commission (FWC) in regimenting the spread of the “gig economy” to entire industries.

Under the banner of “portable entitlements for workers in insecure industries,” the Labor leader promised to “consult” with business and the unions about granting limited rights, such as sick leave, but only where “practical.”

This language typifies the vague, conditional and pro-business character of the speech, which unveiled Labor’s “Secure Australian jobs plan” for the next federal election, which is due by May next year.

In essence, the presentation was a bid for the return of another Labor government to police the intensified corporate refashioning of workplace relations through the COVID-19 pandemic, modelled on the role of the Hawke and Keating Labor governments of 1983 to 1996. Working hand-in-glove with the unions via a series of Accords, these governments sought to satisfy the dictates of finance capital by demolishing permanent jobs, driving down wages and breaking up all rank-and-file workplace organisations.

“The best governments in our history have understood the need for a compact between business and their workers to advance their mutual interests,” Albanese declared. “The Labor governments of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating are a prime example. Collaboration between workers, employers and the government of the day delivered genuine enterprise bargaining and the conditions that created 30 years of continuous economic growth.”

In reality, the past three decades have produced in Australia, as internationally, staggering levels of social inequality, with the wealth of the billionaires soaring to previously unheard-of heights, accompanied by the unprecedented suppression of working-class struggles.

As a result, about one-third of workers in Australia are now in insecure casual or part-time work, or have become turned into “independent contractors,” trying to survive as sub-contractors and other small businesses.

Three related political crises lie behind Albanese’s speech. One aim is to try to differentiate Labor from the widely loathed Liberal-National Coalition government, with which Labor and the unions have cooperated closely, particularly since the 2019–20 bushfire calamity and the eruption of the COVID-19 disaster.

Albanese defended this virtual partnership with Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government. “Under my leadership, Labor has been constructive,” he insisted. “During the pandemic we have not opposed government measures for the sake of it, even when we have had justifiable concerns.”

Then he added: “But let me be very clear, the Labor Party will never support any legislation that undermines the pay, conditions and security of Australian workers.” Labor has falsely postured as an opponent of the government’s current industrial relations bill, despite the Labor-affiliated unions having spent five months behind closed doors last year hammering out the main features of the legislation with government and business groups.

Albanese depicted the bill as the greatest threat to working conditions since the Howard Coalition government’s “Work Choices” legislation, which provoked such working class opposition that it contributed to the landslide defeat of Howard and his government in 2007. But the present Coalition government has deliberately retained the last Labor government’s “Fair Work” laws, which permit companies to lock out workers, while banning all industrial action except during the union-controlled “enterprise bargaining” periods.

Another factor for Albanese is to shore up his own leadership. It is under threat because of his inability to recover any ground for Labor since its debacle at the May 2019 election. Labor’s vote fell to a near-century record low of 33 percent, despite the Coalition’s vote also dropping, because many workers, based on three decades of bitter experiences, did not believe Labor’s claims to be fighting for a “fair go” for workers. For now, Albanese is clinging to the leadership, mainly because his rivals are equally discredited.

Above all, Labor and the unions are seeking to head off an explosion of working class resistance to the corporate assault. What they fear more than anything is a breakout of workers from the grip of the unions. That prospect has been highlighted by last week’s vote by the Coles warehouse workers at Smeaton Grange in southwest Sydney to reject a United Workers Union (UWU) sellout of their struggle against a three-month, and now indefinite, lockout by the supermarket giant, one of the biggest employers in the country.

During his speech, Albanese laid out “eight elements” of Labor’s “Secure Australian jobs plan.” They included amorphous proposals to insert “job security” as an “objective” to be considered by the FWC tribunal and to legislate to create a “fair test” to determine when a worker can be classified as a casual. Not an ounce of detail was provided.

Albanese pledged that Labor would “restore the Fair Work Commission to the centre of our workplace relations system.” He said: “Labor has always stood up for the independent umpire.” There is nothing independent about the FWC. Staffed by judges who are former union bureaucrats and employer representatives, it is the primary arena through which the unions, which have entrenched legal status in this state agency, straitjacket workers within Labor’s anti-strike laws.

All these “elements” of Labor’s platform are based on meeting the requirements of the corporate elite, while shoring up the privileged position of the Labor and union bureaucracy. Before outlining his eight points, Albanese emphasised his commitment to a mutually-beneficial “partnership between government, business and unions.”

This partnership is at the direct expense of the jobs, wages and conditions of the workers that the unions falsely claim to represent.

The Labor leader declared: “A government I lead will always respect the central importance of successful businesses as job creators.” While hailing the employers, he painted a mythical picture of class relations.

“Good employers give their workers security and a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. In return, good workers give their employer loyalty, understanding that their jobs are linked to the viability of their employer’s business.”

Labor and the unions have always sought to subordinate workers to the “viability,” i.e., profitability of their employers. With the globalisation of production, that means pitting workers against each other around the world to provide “their” companies with the cheapest labour.

The suppression of the struggles of the working class by Labor and the unions over the past 30 years in the interests of “viability” have coincided with the stagnation and reversal of workers’ wage rates, the destruction of working conditions and the erosion of democratic rights.

The truth is that the interests of workers and employers are diametrically opposed. Rather than a “fair day’s pay,” companies pay workers as little as possible, precisely in order to extract surplus value, and hence profits, from their labour power.

Concluding his presentation, Albanese said he was “impressed by the flexibility and innovation shown by Australian businesses as they have adjusted to technological change.” But only a Labor government could add a “balance of fairness” to those “adjustments” as part of its “compact” with the employers.

That mirrors what the UWU has told the locked-out Coles workers: You cannot oppose the closure of warehouses and the destruction of thousands of jobs to make way for automated facilities; you can only assist Coles to enforce a “just transition” by offering slightly higher redundancy payments.

Who is behind the drive to reopen São Paulo’s schools?

Miguel Andrade

As teachers in São Paulo take a stand against the murderous herd immunity policy of the ruling classes internationally, speaking for millions of workers who refuse to accept the alternative between starvation and exposure to the COVID-19 pandemic, local authorities are organizing a media blitz to slander them as lazy and opposed to science. They are attempting to convince parents that it is safe to send their children back to chronically underfunded and precarious schools.

Teachers striking against pension cuts march in São Paulo last year

Two unions, representing a total of 250,000 teachers in the state of São Paulo (APEOESP) and the capital city of the same name (SINPEEM), were forced by overwhelming membership votes to declare a strike which they are already seeking to sell out through bogus negotiations over “safe” conditions for a return to in-person classes.

The government propaganda blitz for school reopenings is enthusiastically supported by the corporate media, even as the state of São Paulo records a rolling average of 245 COVID-19 deaths a day, the highest since August. Brazil as a whole has so far recorded over 237,000 COVID-19 deaths and 9.7 million cases, the second worst toll internationally after the United States. And despite the horrific scenes emerging daily from the Amazonian capital of Manaus, the state of São Paulo remains the country’s pandemic epicenter, with over 55,000 deaths.

Instrumental in the push to reopen schools is the back-to-back promotion by the government and corporate media of “popular movements” of parents and education think-tanks that have adapted the herd immunity policy promoted by Brazil’s fascistic President Bolsonaro to school reopenings. Echoing the mantra that “the cure cannot be worse than the disease,” they have insisted that school shutdowns are provoking an unprecedented wave of mental health and nutrition problems for the most impoverished students.

These efforts reek of hypocrisy, coming from forces that have no interest in controlling the pandemic, and have previously concentrated their main efforts on promoting the privatization of education and the slashing of teachers’ wages and pensions. They are following a common script which stresses the social burden of isolation for children, while claiming that in-school transmission is low if a number of protocols are in place, and that pupils are not subject to serious repercussions from the disease.

In São Paulo, these efforts have been spearheaded by a handful of lobbies that are old acquaintances of teachers and parents, including the Todos pela Educação (“All for education”) NGO and the Ayrton Senna Institute. In addition there is the newly-formed “Open Schools” movement.

The first two entities have been at the forefront of the promotion of World Bank-backed “reforms” in Brazilian schools. As early as April, these same forces were promoting the permanent adoption of distance learning, with the World Bank area coordinator for Brazil writing that “In educational terms, it’s crucial to evaluate which distance education practices could be maintained after the reopening of schools, benefiting from the structure put in place during the pandemic.”

Priscilla Cruz, the president of Todos pela Educação who today sheds crocodile tears about the impact of the pandemic on children, declared in an April online conference, where she was strongly opposed by teachers, that “People say that ‘distance education can generate inequality.’ It could produce some inequality, but we need to measure what the impacts are.”

Priscila Cruz, head of Todos pela Educação [Twitter]

Now Cruz has ditched her earlier promotion of distance learning in order to back the reopening of schools as the “pillar of support for economic recovery,” i.e., the restoration of capitalist profits through the unrestrained economic activity sought by the ruling class.

The Ayrton Senna Institute had promoted the reopening of schools in September, a prescription that was followed most significantly by Manaus, leading to the uncontrolled resurgence of the pandemic in that city. This resurgence is viewed by experts as the fundamental process behind the emergence of the new Brazilian variant of the virus now spreading throughout the country and internationally, with the deadly potential of overwhelming current vaccines.

For its part, the “Open Schools” movement is the most recent addition to this pack of lobbyists, and purports to represent a majority of parents who want a reopening of schools, but whose demands are supposedly silenced by the corporate media. The movement is petitioning the São Paulo courts for the full reopening of schools in the city. It also promoted a staged demonstration of 50 people in front of the apartment of São Paulo Mayor Bruno Covas on January 13 against what they derided as the slow reopening of schools.

The movement has posted a lavishly produced ad on social media to gather support for its petition. It features less than a handful of workers from the impoverished Água Branca housing project in the western sector of the city declaring that they cannot work because they have to look after the kids. They add that a few weeks into the pandemic they had run out of resources to pay for internet, and so their children were not able to follow classes anymore.

Far outnumbering these workers among the original signatories of the petition featured in the video are wealthy representatives of the capitalist ruling elite. It was first launched in the WhatsApp group for the parents of students at the elite private Saint Paul’s School, which is attended by the children of São Paulo’s multimillionaire governor João Doria. They include Tide Setubal Souza, heir of Brazil’s largest private bank, Itaú—with 90,000 workers and 60 million clients—and Ilona Becskeházy, a Bolsonaro loyalist who worked in the Education Ministry under the fascistic minister Abraham Weintraub, who was fired last year to appease the Chinese embassy after promoting theories that China had deliberately created the new coronavirus and for using anti-Chinese racist slurs.

The concerted media blitz is designed to break the resistance of teachers and workers more broadly to the deadly herd immunity policy, against which scientists have expressly warned.

Reviewing scientific data on the carnage being produced by the ruling class in Manaus, where patients are being given morphine to alleviate the pain of death by suffocation, British health experts Devi Sridhar and Deepti Gurdasani wrote in Science magazine less than a month ago: “Even a mitigation strategy whereby the virus is allowed to spread through the population with the objective of keeping admissions just below health care capacity, as is done for influenza virus, is clearly misguided for SARS-CoV-2.”

Those promoting the reopening of schools in São Paulo and seeking to spread such a policy throughout the whole of Brazil, amid an uncontrolled pandemic that is breeding and evolving through new variants, have blood on their hands. The striking São Paulo teachers, for their part, speak for the millions who stand opposed to this policy and have no trust in the government protecting the lives of their children.

In the September interview with the head of the Ayrton Senna Institute first promoting the reopening of schools, Brazil’s largest daily Folha gave a backhanded acknowledgment of popular sentiment, declaring that “among groups of parents, there is little impact of content favorable to the reopening [of schools], while alarming news is highlighted.”

The struggle to place the defense of human life over capitalist profits must be carried out through the formation of rank-and-file committees to organize teachers in conscious opposition to all those seeking to facilitate the herd immunity policy of the ruling class by negotiating a “safe” reopening of schools that the ruling class has absolutely no interest in assuring. Chief among these forces are the APEOESP and SINPEEM unions and their pseudo-left apologists, which are doing everything in their power to sabotage the strike by São Paulo’s teachers.

Germany’s “Network for Academic Freedom”: A network for Hitler’s rehabilitation

Peter Schwarz

Seventy German academics founded the “Network for Academic Freedom” on February 3. Even though the organization consists merely of an empty website, a brief press release and a list of names, the mainstream media has given it widespread publicity. The “Network’s founding received more recognition in the mainstream media than almost any other political event in academia in recent months,” wrote the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung.

If the founders were remotely honest, they would name their organization the “Network for the Rehabilitation of Adolf Hitler.” They seek to conceal their true aims behind a barrage of propaganda. They portray themselves, in a press release, as a persecuted minority whose “positions and opinions” have been “marginalised and morally sanctioned,” and complain about “restrictions on academic freedom,” which “often follow an ideological or political agenda.”

In reality, the founders consist of professors who can express their opinions wherever and whenever they like. They possess access to well-financed university departments, as tenured academics cannot be fired and have unrestricted access to the media. Their network is not aimed at defending academic freedom, but rather at suppressing any criticism of their right-wing agenda.

If they are asked to provide “concrete examples” of people who have been excluded for “outsider positions,” the inevitable response is Jörg Baberowski, who has developed into the leading academic voice of right-wing extremism over recent years and is also a member of the network.

Baberowski cracks down on critics: 2/12/2014 - WSWS Editor-in-Chief David North is barred from attending an event with Robert Service with the help of security | 1/20/2020 - Baberowski tears down IYSSE election posters

It is grotesque to portray the Berlin-based historian as a victim of an attack on academic freedom. He is himself responsible for ruthlessly persecuting his critics. He has banished students from public meetings, dragged them before the courts, insulted them in the most gratuitous manner and threatened them with violence for contradicting his right-wing extremist views. A widely viewed video reveals Baberowski tearing down election flyers for the International Youth and Students for Social Equality and threatening their spokesperson, Sven Wurm, with a raised fist, declaring, “Should I smack you in the face?”

Baberowski also slanders specialists in his field when they dare to criticise him. Not even a week went by after the formation of the network before the first of them spoke out publicly. Jan Plamper, a history professor at London’s Goldsmith’s College, described on the blog of the Merkur newspaper how he was “cancelled” by Baberowski. Baberowski sought to eject Plamper from the editorship of a joint project after he expressed criticisms of Baberowski.

Public radio station Deutschlandfunk Kultur broadcast a segment on February 1 and 2 titled, “Dispute over Berlin-based historian: They are trying to silence Jörg Baberowski.” It amounted to a despicable attack on the IYSSE that employed distortions, falsifications, and flat-out lies, and violated the most elementary standards of journalistic practices. The segment was obviously prepared in coordination with the Network’s founders. There was no other contemporary reason for it—the incidents it dealt with took place in many cases several years ago. The author, Sebastian Engelbrecht, previously distinguished himself as a defender of Baberowski.

Baberowski and his supporters are furious with the IYSSE, because its members were the only ones who sounded the alarm seven years ago when Baberowski claimed in Der Spiegel that Hitler was “not vicious.”

Thanks to an intense struggle to clarify the facts, Baberowski is seen today by the vast majority of students and the public at large for what he is: a right-wing extremist professor who downplays the Wehrmacht’s crimes, defends Hitler, agitates against refugees and receives praise from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), neo-Nazis and Breitbart News. When Baberowski sought to sue the student council in Bremen and the IYSSE, the courts confirmed that he could legitimately be described as a right-wing extremist.

Despite all the efforts by university managements, professors, politicians and the media to defend the right-wing extremist professor, his reputation has largely been ruined. The new Network is therefore less concerned with Baberowski as an individual than it is with the project he has sought to realise for years—Hitler’s rehabilitation. It is necessary to return to the outset of the controversy with Baberowski in 2014 to understand the significance of this issue.

Baberowski defends Hitler

On February 10, 2014, Der Spiegel published “The Transformation of the Past,” by Dirk Kurbjuweit, later translated into English as “Questions of culpability in WWI still divide German historians.” The article pursued the self-proclaimed aim of “reevaluating the question of German guilt”—i.e., reevaluating Germany’s crimes in both world wars—100 years after the outbreak of World War I and 75 years after the eruption of World War II.

The publication coincided with a decisive turning point in German foreign policy. One year earlier, 50 representatives from politics, academia and the media drafted a document, “New power, new responsibilities,” under the aegis of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), which called for the revival of an imperialist and militarist German foreign policy. At the Munich Security Conference, held simultaneously with the Der Spiegel article’s publication, Defence Minister Ursula Von der Leyen, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and President Joachim Gauck each energetically argued for this course.

As the IYSSE commented at the time, in an open letter to the university administration at Humboldt University, “the revival of German militarism requires a new interpretation of history that downplays the crimes of the Nazi era.” This was the task of the Der Spiegel piece.

Kurbjuweit interviewed political scientist Herfried Münkler in order to downplay Germany’s responsibility for the First World War. This task was much harder to accomplish for the Second World War, because it is virtually impossible to deny that the initiative for the war came from Germany. Kurbjuweit based himself on Ernst Nolte and Baberowski on this issue.

Nolte, who has since died, triggered the so-called Historians’ Dispute (Historikerstreit) in 1986 with the claim that Nazism was an unfortunate but understandable reaction to Bolshevism, a claim subsequently associated with the far right. In a Der Spiegel interview, Nolte accused Britain and Poland of bearing joint responsibility for Hitler’s 1939 onslaught on Poland that triggered the outbreak of the Second World War. He also assigned the Jews “a share of the blame for the Gulag,” because various Bolsheviks were Jews.

Baberowski defended Nolte in 2014. “Nolte was done an injustice. Historically speaking, he was right,” he commented in Der Spiegel. But he went well beyond anything Nolte stated when he said about Hitler, “Hitler was no psychopath, and he wasn’t vicious. He didn’t want people to talk about the extermination of the Jews at his table. Stalin, on the other hand, delighted in adding to and signing off on the death lists. He was vicious. He was a psychopath.”

The Trotskyist movement already understood that Stalin was a vicious murderer when Baberowski, then a Maoist, was still defending Stalin and raising funds for the mass murderer Pol Pot, since Left Oppositionists and other socialists were Stalin’s primary victims. But to portray Hitler in a “relatively” positive light is a form of the most obscene historical falsification, comparable to Holocaust denial.

It was significant that in 2014, no one, apart from the IYSSE and Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP), responded to Baberowski’s statement. In 1986, Nolte’s much vaguer formulations triggered a storm of protest, which led to his discrediting as a scholar. Today, the “Network for Academic Freedom” would welcome Nolte as an honorary member and describe him as an alleged victim of “cancel culture.”

Baberowski’s statement was not only an outright falsification of history, but also trivialised the Nazi dictatorship, since an important role in its crimes was played by Hitler’s personal cruelty.

Peter Longerich wrote in his 2015 biography of Hitler that the latter’s personality “not only (played) a role that should not be underestimated in important political decisions, but also (co-determined) the essence of his politics.” At one point, Longerich graphically describes how Hitler personally travelled to Munich during the “Röhm putsch” to issue arbitrary death sentences against former comrades-in-arms.

In his biography of Hitler, Ian Kershaw describes the savagery with which Hitler executed the leaders of the July 20, 1944, assassination attempt after they had been tortured in prison and humiliated in front of the People’s Court: “The normal mode of execution for civilian capital offences in the Third Reich was beheading. But Hitler had reportedly ordered that he wanted those behind the conspiracy of July 20, 1944, ‘hanged, hung up like meat carcasses.’”

On the orders of Hitler and Goebbels, the executions were filmed and photographed. Kershaw writes, “The condemned men were led in, wearing handcuffs and prison trousers… The hanging was carried out within 20 seconds of the prisoner entering the room. Death was not, however, immediate. Sometimes it came quickly, in other cases, the agony was slow, lasting more than 20 minutes. In an added gratuitous obscenity, some of the condemned men had their trousers pulled down by their executioners before they died. And all the time the camera whirred. The photographs and grisly film were taken to Führer Headquarters. Speer later reported seeing a pile of such photographs lying on Hitler’s map table when he visited the Wolf’s Lair on August 18.”

Baberowski, who specialises in research into violence, is well-versed in these questions. When he asserts, in spite of knowing better, “Hitler was not vicious,” it amounts to a deliberate trivialisation of Hitler and the Nazi dictatorship.

His claim that the extermination of the Jews was not discussed at Hitler’s table is also an outright falsification. There are countless extracts from the “Table discussions” recorded by Hitler in the Führer Headquarters between the summer of 1941 and early 1942 in which he angrily rails against Jews and claims that Europe will be “Jew-free” by the end of the war.

The Nazis’ greatest crime, the murder of six million Jews, was directly initiated and ordered by Hitler, as Longerich proves. He writes in the summation of his biography, “It was Hitler who took the fundamental decisions about the colonisation of the conquered areas by German and ‘Germanic’ settlers, and the persecution of the native inhabitants, and it was he who in the spring and early summer of 1942 resolved to take measures that would lead to the extermination of the European Jews during the war.”

The return of fascism

The new Network has been established to justify these unprecedented historical crimes under the fraudulent banner of “academic freedom.” The fact that 70 professors have joined shows that right-wing and fascist ideas are gaining ground among academics.

The membership list overlaps to a considerable degree with the signatories of the “Appeal for Free Spaces for Debate” last December, which was signed by right-wing extremists like Monika Maron, Vera Lengsfeld and Matthias Matussek. Alongside well known right-wingers, like Peter Hoeres, Egon Flaig and Andreas Rödder, the founders of the Network include academics who are moving rapidly to the right under the pressure of the social crisis.

Anyone who believes the return of fascism in Germany is impossible is blind. In the AfD, a right-wing extremist party is playing a major role in German politics for the first time since the Nazis. Hitler has many admirers in the ruling elite, which is now preparing his gradual rehabilitation.

Around the world, the bourgeoisie is turning ever more openly to authoritarian and fascistic forms of rule. In the United States, the oldest Western democracy, a sitting president for the first time organised an attempted coup from the White House to prevent the coming to power of his democratically elected successor. The fascist conspiracy, which extends deep into the Republican Party and the state apparatus, is continuing following Trump’s departure.

The bourgeoisie is responding to the sharp social tensions that are being further intensified by the coronavirus pandemic and the criminal policy of placing profits ahead of human lives. They fear a social rebellion and are turning, as in the 1930s, to fascist forces to suppress it.

Another factor is the massive programme of military rearmament, which is strongly opposed by the population at large. Although military spending has increased dramatically since 2014, the German ruling elite insists that this is nowhere near adequate to transform Europe and Germany into a military world power. Widespread opposition to this is also developing.

The miserable role played during the Third Reich by the university chairs, who interpreted every critical voice among students as an insult to the authority of the state, is well known. Several joined the Nazis prior to 1933, while the rest could no longer restrain themselves when it became clear that Hitler’s victory was beyond doubt. While their Jewish colleagues went into exile, hundreds of learned professors signed a written “Affirmation of Professors at Germany’s Universities to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist State.”

In his essay “The Führer Protects the Law,” the jurist Carl Schmitt justified the murder of 200 people on Hitler’s orders alone during the Röhm putsch. It should be noted in passing that Baberowski dedicated his latest book, The Endangered Leviathan, to Carl Schmitt.

French neo-fascist Le Pen, interior minister debate anti-Muslim policies

Alex Lantier

On Thursday night, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin and neo-fascist Marine Le Pen held an hour-long debate on France2 TV. The result was a sinister, degraded spectacle, focused on fascistic measures against Muslims and immigrants, in which the moderators admitted that it was difficult to distinguish Le Pen from Darmanin.

French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin debates far-right leader Marine Le Pen Thursday night in a televised debate [L’Obs, YouTube]

Before this carefully staged event, the press published a battery of polls on potential candidates in next year’s French presidential elections. An IFOP poll found that 67 percent of the population expects Le Pen and President Emmanuel Macron to make it to the second round, setting up a rematch of the 2017 elections. Moreover, 70 percent would be unhappy about such an election. A Harris Interactive poll found that currently Macron would only very narrowly defeat Le Pen, who would get 48 percent of the vote.

The debate thus had the character of an attempt by the French political establishment and media to frame the 2022 elections, with Darmanin standing in for Macron—presuming that Macron runs again, despite his massive unpopularity. That a debate between France’s best-known neo-fascist and its top cop could be taken as a preview of the next elections points to the increasingly fascistic course of the ruling class.

Though France has seen 3.4 million of Europe’s 32 million cases of COVID-19 and 81,000 of its over three-quarters of a million deaths, not a word was spoken about the pandemic. Le Pen had confirmed shortly before, in an interview with Jean-Jacques Bourdin on BFM-TV, that she opposes lockdowns. Nor was there a word on France’s bloody war in Mali or the grotesque levels of social inequality produced by austerity policies imposed by Macron, the “president of the rich.” On these fascistic policies, there is unanimity in the ruling elite.

Instead, moderators Léa Salamé, Thomas Sotto and Nathalie Saint-Cricq began by pressing Le Pen to say if she supports the ultra-repressive “anti-separatist” law, which would allow the state to impose loyalty oaths and dissolve associations or political parties. Drafted under Darmanin’s authority at the Interior Ministry and presented as a measure targeting Muslims, this bill is now under discussion at the National Assembly.

Le Pen floundered as she tried to criticize this fascistic bill, claiming she was “disappointed” in the law, and complaining that it does not openly declare that it targets Islam. She also obliquely referred to the dangers the law poses not only to Muslim associations, but to the entire public. She said: “We needed a great, fighting law, not an administrative text. You are limiting the liberties of everyone, but you are not struggling against Islamist ideology.”

Darmanin responded by attacking Le Pen from the right, as “soft” on Islam. “You are acting with softness, Mrs. Le Pen, you have gone so far that you say that Islam is not a problem,” he said—an astonishing and sinister statement about a religion practiced by an estimated 3.5 million people in France. He later added: “Mrs. Le Pen, as she attempts to de-demonize her party, has come to act with softness. You should take vitamins, I find that you are not tough enough!”

There ensued a debate on whether the Macron administration has been successful in limiting immigration. The moderators also speculated about whether Le Pen is “mature” or “presidential” enough to serve as president, and Darmanin repeatedly insisted that Le Pen is poorly prepared.

Le Pen also hailed Darmanin’s book, Islamist Separatism: A Manifesto for Secularism, just out in bookstores. “I could have signed this book. You define Islamism very clearly,” she said, adding: “But what of all that remains in the law? Very little.” She called to ban publicly wearing the headscarf, making it virtually illegal to be a practicing Muslim.

Darmanin advanced the fascistic argument that French law can ban burqas or headscarves, but only that its principles prevent it from openly stating it is targeting a religion. “Secularism, that means precisely not recognizing them,” Darmanin claimed. Referring to the 1905 secularism law, he claimed: “Everyone knows it was made against the Catholic Church, but it is not called the Law against the Catholic Church. It is called the law of separation of church and state.”

This is a travesty of French law. The principle of secularism mandates state neutrality on religious issues and prevents the state from instituting or favoring a religion. It does not allow the state to target a religion or its members. Darmanin’s characterization of the 1905 law as an attack on Catholicism, which still exercises vast influence in France over a century after the 1905 law passed, reflects Darmanin’s own far-right views.

It was confirmed last week that Darmanin is a former sympathizer and writer for the Action française , the fascist, monarchist group that opposed the 1905 secularism law and supported the Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime. Re-established in 1955, it took back its original name in 2010. The fact that French law on religious affairs is being rewritten under the authority of an Action française sympathizer is another warning to the far-right turn of official politics.

When Macron and Le Pen emerged as the candidates in the second round of the 2017 elections, the Parti de l’égalité socialiste (PES), the French section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, called for an active boycott. It warned that Macron was no alternative to a neo-fascist. Its warning had nothing in common, however, with an abstentionist position. The only way forward, it stressed, was to build a politically independent movement in the working class against whichever reactionary candidate won.

Nearly four years later, this assessment has been fully vindicated. Macron, who in 2018 hailed France’s Nazi-collaborationist dictator and convicted traitor Philippe Pétain as a “great soldier” in the face of mass strikes and “yellow vest” protests, has pursued a fascistic course. Ramming through labor reforms, rail privatizations and pension cuts in the face of mass popular opposition, he came to rely virtually entirely on the police forces as his social base.

The ruling elite’s murderous “herd immunity” policy on the pandemic has vastly accelerated the turn towards fascism internationally. In Washington, on January 6, US President Donald Trump incited a coup attempt on the US Capitol in Washington, in an attempt to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential elections. In France, Macron is trying to pass a “global security law,” authorizing the use of drones against protesters and to ban taking videos of police, in addition to the “anti-separatist” law.

Pseudo-left parties of the affluent middle class that backed Macron, openly or tacitly, in 2017 are complicit in this. All helped implement Macron’s “herd immunity” policy, overseeing the return of workers to work and of children to school, leading to a resurgence of the virus that cost tens of thousands of lives in France alone. The Stalinist French Communist Party (PCF) and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Unsubmissive France underscored their political complicity last week by supporting or abstaining in votes on the “anti-separatist” law’s reactionary provisions.

Former Green Party leader Cécile Duflot was virtually alone in this milieu in warning on Macron’s fascistic policy. “Historically, those in power were the most blind at great tipping points: this was true in World War I, when Nazism took power or in pre-Mussolini Italy,” Duflot wrote in Le Monde.

She added: “Democrats do not seem to realize that France can easily turn into a quasi-dictatorship. … The bill on separatism has very dangerous limitations on civil society. Adding to that measures on the state of emergency and general laws, I let you imagine the disaster that can unfold in a few days if [Le Pen] gets power.”

In reality, France has turned into a quasi-dictatorship under Macron. Even if the now entirely plausible scenario of a neo-fascist victory next year is averted, it could still become a fascist regime under Macron or one of his allies.

The defense of workers’ lives and democratic rights against Macron’s fascistic laws and policies requires the independent political mobilization of the working class. Only the preparation of a European-wide general strike to impose a scientifically-guided confinement policy, independently of unions who support “herd immunity” policies, can halt the pandemic. Such a movement would pose the question of developing a mass socialist political movement to transfer state power to the working class.

CDC pushes US schools to reopen “at any level of community transmission”

Evan Blake

On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released its latest iteration of guidelines on reopening schools in the US during the COVID-19 pandemic. The guidelines are thoroughly unscientific and politically motivated to justify opening schools and keeping them open no matter what.

These are the first such guidelines issued under the Biden administration, which has continuously stated that reopening the majority of K-8 schools across the US is its central domestic policy. Facing widespread opposition from teachers who know schools are not safe, the entire political establishment has united in its demands that schools reopen.

Students enter P.S. 134 Henrietta Szold Elementary School in New York. Photo taken in December 2020 [Credit: AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File]

The guidelines are designed to facilitate this policy regardless of the level of community spread in a given school district, stating, “At any level of community transmission, all schools have options to provide in-person instruction (either full or hybrid), through strict adherence to mitigation strategies” (emphasis added). In other words, even if citywide test positivity rates reached 80, 90 or 100 percent, schools can stay open for in-person learning.

While the present CDC leadership and the Biden administration claim to adhere to scientific principles and appear more polished than Trump and his cronies, their basic framework represents a continuation of the homicidal herd immunity policies pursued by Trump. The guidelines were released days before the nation surpasses the grim milestone of 500,000 deaths, aptly described as a result of policies of “social murder” and a deepening of decades-long trends.

The underlying motives of the Biden administration are the same as those of Trump. They seek to resume fully in-person learning in all school districts that currently provide remote instruction. This is aimed at pressuring the maximum number of parents to return to dangerous workplaces to produce corporate profits.

On Thursday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki declared, “The president will not rest until all schools are open five days a week.” Last month, Biden’s top economic advisor Brian Deese bluntly stated, “We need to get the schools open so that parents, and particularly women … can get back to work.”

Millions of teachers voted for Biden believing that he would represent a more humane alternative to Trump, who would understand their plight, given that his wife is an English professor. The brutal reality that the Democratic Party is equally beholden to Wall Street is becoming clearer each day. The Biden administration is now pushing school reopenings at a time when the number of daily new cases far exceeds that which existed when Trump first pressed to reopen schools last July, and the Democrats hypocritically denounced him.

On Friday, American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten described the CDC’s new guidelines as “informed” and “rigorous.” Seeking to quell teachers’ growing skepticism and hostility towards the CDC and the Biden administration, she added with a straight face, “I can assure you that this is free from political meddling.”

The executive summary begins by stating categorically, “It is critical for schools to open as safely and as soon as possible, and remain open.” They outline “five key mitigation strategies” which they claim provide the “safe delivery of in-person instruction and help to mitigate COVID-19 transmission in schools” These include the following: “Universal and correct use of masks; physical distancing; handwashing and respiratory etiquette; cleaning and maintaining healthy facilities; and contact tracing in combination with isolation and quarantine, in collaboration with the health department.”

None of the above conditions are realistic or have been met by any of the thousands of school districts that have reopened since last July. As a result of school reopenings, there have been over 643,000 COVID-19 infections of students and staff in K-12 schools across the US, according to the COVID Monitor website curated by whistleblower Rebekah Jones.

In an effort to tamp down teachers’ expectations that they might get vaccinated before being sent back to unsafe schools, the guidelines explicitly state, “Access to vaccination should not be considered a condition for reopening schools for in-person instruction.” Alongside COVID-19 testing programs, this is simply an “additional layer” that districts should try to prioritize after meeting the above five “key mitigation strategies.”

The word “ventilation” appears twice in the 33-page document, with the CDC merely suggesting that school districts “Improve ventilation to the extent possible such as by opening windows and doors to increase circulation of outdoor air to increase the delivery of clean air and dilute potential contaminants.”

Scientists have long understood that SARS-CoV-2 is an airborne virus that readily travels in confined spaces, yet there is no suggestion that funding be provided to improve heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. A US Government Accountability Office report from last June noted that 54 percent of public school districts need to update or replace multiple building systems or features in their schools. Roughly 36,000 schools nationwide need HVAC updates.

The guidelines advocate contact tracing, isolating and quarantining, but fail to note that the resources for these programs are virtually non-existent.

After noting that “multiple SARS-CoV-2 variants are circulating globally” which “seem to spread more easily and quickly than other variants,” the guidelines simply state that “adherence to mitigation strategies is essential to control the spread of variants of SARS-CoV-2.” If things get out of control, “mitigation strategies and school guidance may need to be updated to account for new evidence on risk of transmission and effectiveness of mitigation.”

All key aspects of the CDC guidelines are antithetical to the latest science on SARS-CoV-2 and its variants, which proves unequivocally that closing schools is an essential component of any broader strategy to contain the pandemic.

The timing of the guidelines’ release is highly significant. The CDC waited until the day after Chicago Public Schools (CPS) began reopening, following an intense struggle by rank-and-file educators to oppose this reckless policy.

In their struggle, Chicago educators were vilified by Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the entire corporate media, and behind the scenes the Biden administration and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten were directly involved in the negotiations process. Biden’s new CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky also intervened last week, stating, “Vaccinations of teachers is not a prerequisite for safely reopening schools.”

Given its marching orders, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) rapidly struck a deal with CPS which the union rammed through as quickly as possible. Jesse Sharkey—former leader of the now-defunct International Socialist Organization (ISO) and CTU President since 2014—played the critical role of using the threat of a strike against teachers, saying that this would lead to legal repercussions and teachers should accept school reopenings.

The precedent set in Chicago—the third largest school district in the US—combined with the pseudo-scientific CDC guidelines, will be used as a battering ram to reopen schools across the US and globally. The next major targets for reopening include Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, Nashville and other Democrat-led cities, as well as high school students in New York City, Chicago and any other districts that so far only have plans in place for K-8 students. In each of these cities, the unions have collaborated with local Democrats to reopen schools or will do so in the coming days.

The same policies are being pursued globally. Bourgeois politicians are collaborating with the unions to press for schools to reopen in Brazil, Argentina, Costa Rica, Colombia, Canada, France, Germany, Turkey, South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, India, Myanmar, Cameroon and other countries. In each of these countries and more, educators are entering into struggles to oppose these policies.

Educators in every country must build rank-and-file committees independent of the unions and the bourgeois parties, and fight to link up with their most powerful allies in the working class. There must be an intransigent struggle to close all schools and non-essential workplaces, expropriate the pandemic profiteers, and use their wealth to fully fund remote learning and all other resources workers and students need. Only once the pandemic is contained and the population vaccinated can society begin to reopen schools and nonessential workplaces, which must all be retrofitted with state-of-the-art technology.

10 Key Points on Ending Wars

David Swanson

1. Victories that are only partial are not fictional.

When a ruler, like Biden, finally announces the end of a war, like the war on Yemen, it is as important to recognize what it does mean as what it doesn’t. It doesn’t mean the U.S. military and U.S.-made weapons will vanish from the region or be replaced by actual aid or reparations (as opposed to “lethal aid” — a product that’s usually high on people’s Christmas lists only for other people). It does not mean we’ll see U.S. support for the rule of law and the prosecution of the worst crimes on earth, or encouragement for nonviolent movements for democracy. It apparently does not mean an end to providing information to the Saudi military on whom to kill where. It apparently does not mean the immediate lifting of the blockade on Yemen.

But it does mean that, if we keep up and increase the pressure from the U.S. public, from activists around the globe, from people putting their bodies in front of weapons shipments, from labor unions and governments cutting off weapons shipments, from media outlets compelled to care, from the U.S. Congress forced to follow through, from cities passing resolutions, from cities and institutions divesting from weapons, from institutions shamed into dropping their funding by warmongering dictatorships (did you see Bernie Sanders yesterday denouncing Neera Tanden’s corporate funding, and Republicans defending it? what if he had mentioned UAE funding?) — if we increase that pressure then almost certainly some weapons deals will be delayed if not stopped forever (in fact, they already have been), some types of U.S. military participation in the war will cease, and potentially — by protesting all ongoing militarism as evidence of a broken promise — we’ll get more than Biden, Blinken, and the Blob intend.

On a webinar earlier today, Congressman Ro Khanna said that he believed the announcement of an end to offensive war meant that the U.S. military could not participate in bombing or sending missiles into Yemen at all, but only in protecting civilians within Saudi Arabia.

(Why the United States should get to admit it’s engaged in offensive, aka aggressive wars, as a means of fudging what exactly it means to end them is a question worth taking on.)

Khanna said that he believed certain members of the National Security Council would have to be vigilantly watched to keep them from redefining defensive as offensive. He suggested that the people he was most worried about were not National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan or Secretary of State Antony Blinken. I expect that there will be efforts made to continue blowing people up with missiles and traumatizing people with drones under the guise of “combatting terrorism” as somehow separate from the war. If there is to be any discussion of the role that a “successful drone war” played in creating the current horror, or any apologizing for anything, that will have to be driven forward by us.

But what’s just happened is progress, and it’s a new and different sort of progress, but it’s not the first victory for opponents of war. Each time that activism has helped prevent a war on Iran, the U.S. government has failed to become a force for peace in the world, but lives have been saved. When a major escalation of the war on Syria was prevented seven years ago, the war didn’t end, but lives were saved. When the world prevented the UN from authorizing war on Iraq, the war still happened, but it was illegal and shameful, it was partially restrained, new wars were discouraged, and new nonviolent movements were encouraged. The risk of nuclear apocalypse is now greater than ever, but without activist victories over the decades, there quite likely would be nobody around anymore to lament all of our shortcomings.

2. Obsession with the character of individual politicians is of zero value.

Hunting among politicians for model human beings to praise, tell children to emulate, and devote oneself to supporting across the board is like hunting for meaning in a speech by a Trump defense lawyer. Hunting among politicians for evil demons to condemn the very existence of — or declare to be worthless pieces of garbage as Stephen Colbert did yesterday in a critique of fascism that seemed to rather miss the point — is equally hopeless. Elected officials are not your friends and enemies should not exist outside of cartoons.

When I told someone this week that Congressman Raskin made a good speech they replied “No, he didn’t. He made a horrible, dishonest, warmongering Russiagate speech a few years ago.” Now, I know this is highly complicated, but believe it or not, the same guy did indeed do both horrible and commendable things, and every single other elected official ever has done so too.

So, when I say that our progress on ending the war on Yemen is a victory, I’m not swayed by the response “Nuh-uh, Biden doesn’t really care about peace and is moving toward war on Iran (or Russia or fill in the blank).” The fact that Biden is not a peace activist is the point. Getting a peace activist to take steps toward peace is no victory at all. The interest of a peace activist should not be principally in avoiding having standers by call you a sucker. It should be in gaining power to achieve peace.

3. Political parties are not teams but prisons.

Another great source of time and energy, after ceasing the hunt for the Good and Evil politicians is the abandonment of identification with political parties. The two big parties in the United States are very different but both largely bought off, both dedicated to a government that is first and foremost a war machine with the majority of discretionary spending devoted to war every year, with the United States leading the world in weapons dealing and war making, and with virtually no discussion or debate. Election campaigns almost ignore the existence of the main thing elected officials do. When Senator Sanders asked Neera Tanden about her past corporate funding, the remarkable thing wasn’t the failure to mention her funding by a foreign dictatorship, it was asking anything about her past at all — which, of course, did not include her support for making Libya pay for the privilege of being bombed. Nominees for foreign policy positions are asked almost nothing about the past and primarily about their willingness to support hostility toward China. On this there is bipartisan harmony. That officials are organized into parties does not mean that you have to be. You should remain free to demand exactly what you want, praise all steps toward it, and condemn all steps away from it.

4. Occupation does not bring peace.

The U.S. military and its sidekick obedient puppy nations have been bringing peace to Afghanistan for almost 2 decades, not counting all the damage done prior. There have been ups and downs but generally worsening, usually worsening at times of troop increases, usually worsening at times of bombing increases.

Since before some participants in the war on Afghanistan were born, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan has been saying that things would be bad and possibly worse when the U.S. got out, but that the longer it took to get out the worse that hell would be.

A new book by Séverine Autesserre called The Frontlines of Peace makes the case that the most successful peacebuilding usually involves organizing local residents to lead their own efforts to counter recruitment and resolve conflicts. The work of unarmed peacekeepers around the globe shows huge potential. If Afghanistan is ever going to have peace, it’s going to have to start with getting the troops and the weapons out. The top supplier of weapons and even a top supplier of funding to all sides, including the Taliban, has often been the United States. Afghanistan does not manufacture weapons of war.

5. Demilitarization is not abandonment.

There are 32 million people in Afghanistan, most of whom have yet to hear about 9-11, and a significant percentage of whom were not alive in 2001. You could give them each, including children and drug lords, a $2,000 survival check for 6.4% of the trillion dollars dumped annually into the U.S. military, or a tiny fraction of the many trillions squandered and wasted — or the countless trillions in damage done, by this endless war. I’m not saying you should or that anyone will. Just ceasing to do harm is a dream. But if you wanted to not “abandon” Afghanistan, there are ways to engage with a place other than bombing it.

But let’s end the pretense that the U.S. military is after some sort of humanitarian good. Of the 50 most oppressive governments on earth, 96% of them are armed and/or trained and/or funded by the U.S. military. On that list are U.S. partners in the war on Yemen, including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt. On that list is Bahrain, now 10 years out from the crackdown on its uprising — Join a webinar tomorrow!

6. Victories are global and local.

The European Parliament today followed up on the U.S. action by opposing weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and UAE. Germany had done this on Saudi Arabia and proposed it for other countries.

Afghanistan is a war with numerous nations playing at least token roles through NATO that can be pressured to remove their troops. And doing so will impact the United States.

This is a global movement. It is also a local one, with local groups and city councils pressuring national officials.

Passing local resolutions and laws against wars and on related topics like demilitarizing police and divesting from weapons helps in many ways. Join a webinar tomorrow on demilitarizing Portland Oregon.

7. Congress matters.

Biden did what he did on Yemen because if he hadn’t Congress would have. Congress would have because people who compelled Congress to do it two years ago would have compelled Congress again. This matters because it is relatively easier — though still outrageously difficult — to move Congress to answer majority demands.

Now that Congress does not have to end the war on Yemen again, at least not in the way that it did before, it should move onto the next war on the list, which should be Afghanistan. It should also start moving money out of military spending and into addressing actual crises. Ending wars should be yet another reason for reducing military spending.

The caucus being formed on this topic should be used, but joining it should count for little in the absence of a credible commitment to vote against military funding that does not move at least 10% out.

8. War Powers Resolution matters.

It matters that Congress finally, for the first time, used the War Powers Resolution of 1973. Doing so hurts campaigns to further weaken that law. Doing so strengthens campaigns to get it used again, on Afghanistan, on Syria, on Iraq, on Libya, on the dozens of smaller U.S. military operations around the world.

9. Weapons sales matter.

It matters that ending the war on Yemen prominently includes ending weapons sales. This should be expanded and continued, possibly including through Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s bill to Stop Arming Human Rights Abusers.

10. Bases matter.

These wars are also about bases. Closing bases in Afghanistan should be a model for closing bases in dozens of other countries. Closing bases as expensive instigators of wars should be a prominent part of moving funding out of militarism.