Workers across Myanmar stage general strike against military dictatorship

Owen Howell

Protests against the military junta have continued in Myanmar following a huge outpouring of opposition on Monday in the form of protests and strikes following the killing of two protesters in Mandalay on Saturday. Yesterday groups of demonstrators gathered outside the Thai and Indonesian embassies while groups from the country’s various ethnic minorities protested on the streets of Yangon.

People flash the three-fingered salute of resistance during the funeral of Tin Htut Hein in Yangon, Myanmar Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2021. Tin Htut Hein, acting as a volunteer guard for a neighborhood watch group established due to fears authorities were using criminals released from prison to spread fear and committing violent acts, was shot killed on Saturday, Feb. 20, 2021, in unclear circumstances. (AP Photo)

The general strike by workers on Monday graphically demonstrated the scope and depth of the political opposition to the military’s seizure of power on February 1. Along with numerous news sources, the protest leadership—a loosely organised group called the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM)—reported on its Twitter account that millions of people nationwide participated in the demonstrations and work stoppages.

Due to stringent media censorship regulated by the military junta, the exact scale and composition of the strikes is unclear. However, it is apparent that the protests, dubbed the “22222 [or Five Twos] Popular Uprising,” referring to the date on which it took place, were the largest since the coup.

It is significant that ever wider sections of the working class are joining the struggle against the junta, from doctors, civil servants, and bank employees to supermarket workers and oil rig operators.

The strike was organised in the wake of a bloody state crackdown on Saturday against striking shipyard workers and demonstrators in Mandalay. Police and military forces fired live rounds on a crowd of protesters, leaving two dead from gunshot wounds, including a 16-year-old boy, and about 30 injured.

In preparation for Monday’s strike, authorities constructed barricades and barbed wire at strategic locations in Myanmar’s cities, such as embassies which have become gathering points for some protesters calling for foreign intervention. Streets were patrolled by armoured vehicles and snipers deployed on downtown rooftops.

Businesses throughout the urban and regional centres announced closures, including markets, restaurants, shops, and roadside vendors. The shutdown was also embraced by international chains such as KFC and delivery service Foodpanda. Southeast Asian ride-hailing company Grab halted its delivery services.

In Yangon, the country’s largest city, where commercial activity has been increasingly paralysed by the CDM movement, huge crowds flooded the streets of the Sule, Hledan, and Myaynigone areas, Frontier Myanmar reported. People chanted slogans such as, “Don’t go to the office, break away!”

The second largest city, Mandalay, was also brought to a standstill by the broad extent of the strikes, as hundreds of thousands were mobilised across work sectors. Similarly large demonstrations were held in the smaller towns of Myitkina, Hpaan, Pyinmana, Dawei and Bhamo.

Health workers have comprised a significant section of the CDM since its origin, with nearly one-third of Myanmar’s public hospitals no longer functioning. As of Tuesday, the Emergency Department of Yangon General Hospital, the city’s best-equipped medical facility, was totally deserted. In place of public hospitals, doctors and nurses aligned with the movement have established free medical clinics across the country.

Although the police response throughout the day was relatively muted in the face of huge crowds, in some cases violence was used to disperse gatherings. Attempts to break up the Yangon protests involved a long line of police in riot gear setting upon a massive procession near the Shwedagon Pagoda. As protesters retreated, nearby commuters came to their aid and formed a blockade with their cars, preventing police from moving forward.

The crackdown on mass rallies at the capital Naypyidaw was especially violent. Videos on social media showed security personnel using water cannons and wrestling protesters to the ground in neighbouring townships of Zabuthiri and Pyinmana, in an effort to block demonstrators from marching into the capital. Major entry points to Naypyidaw were heavily guarded by military personnel, after calls on the weekend for an organised march on central government buildings.

Witnesses spoke to the Irrawaddy about the incident. A reporter who escaped the scene said soldiers and police tried to seize cameras from journalists and targeted them for arrest. An engineering student who joined the protest said: “They fired three times while they were trying to break us up. My two friends were beaten and taken away. I managed to run away… They targeted young people.”

Amid the onslaught, hundreds of protesters were forced to hide in nearby houses and monasteries long after the crackdown. A total of 193 mostly young protesters linked to the Naypyidaw rallies have since been arrested and are detained in a military compound outside the capital.

The protests on Monday went ahead despite ominous threats from the junta of violence. Late Sunday, the government issued a warning on state-run television network MRTV: “It is found that the protesters have raised their incitement towards riot and anarchy mob on the day of 22 February. Protesters are now inciting the people, especially emotional teenagers and youths, to a confrontation path where they will suffer the loss of life.”

The Foreign Ministry claimed in a statement prior to Monday that despite “unlawful demonstrations, incitements of unrest and violence, the authorities concerned are exercising utmost restraint through minimum use of force to address the disturbances.”

As the anti-coup movement has grown over the past three weeks, the military is insisting that the protests are the work of “notorious ex-criminal” agitators and blamed protesters for attack on security forces. Its ministries and official publications have falsely claimed that the majority of Myanmar’s population supported the coup, which ousted the government of Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD) after winning last November’s election in a landslide.

Many protesters on Monday scrawled messages on their arms with their blood type and emergency contact numbers, in anticipation of potential injury or death at the hands of a military crackdown.

In the aftermath of the general strike, the military regime has expanded its repressive measures in a desperate bid to halt the movement. The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners revealed that at least 684 people have been arrested so far, while nearly 600 remain in detention.

Meanwhile, in a move clearly aimed at blocking workers’ ability to organise the strike, the internet suffered widespread service outages and disruption on Sunday night, with NetBlocks reporting a 13 percent drop from usual internet usage levels.

The military has also released oppressive new guidelines for media outlets, further restricting press freedom and the release of information on protests. Publications will now lose their publishing licenses for referring to the military “regime” or “junta.”

Coup leader General Min Aung Hlaing said on Monday that measures must be taken to “regulate the press in accordance with press ethics,” while the Ministry of Information sent new directives this week to the Myanmar Press Council, calling for journalists to avoid “instigating public unrest.”

Ecuador prison massacres claim 79 lives amid election tensions

Bill Van Auken

The official death toll in a wave of rioting that swept through four penitentiaries in Ecuador rose to 79 Wednesday as police and troops took control of the prisons. The Ecuadorian daily El Comercio reported that another 1,500 soldiers were deployed on the streets of the capital Quito because of the government’s fear of unrest.

Not a single guard or member of the security forces was killed in the prison violence, which was attributed by government officials and the media to a clash between members of rival gangs. It is not known how many of the prisoners were killed by security forces in retaking the facilities.

Soldiers guarding Machala Prison after the riots (Source: Twitter)

Crowds of relatives, many of them in tears, gathered outside the prisons in the cities of Guayaquil and Cuenca, where most of the deaths took place, clashing with security forces.

Ecuador’s right-wing, US-backed President Lenin Moreno used his regular television program to describe the bloodbath as a “fight between organized mafias,” refusing to take any responsibility for the catastrophic conditions in the country’s overcrowded prison system, which saw similar rioting in May 2019 and August 2020.

Moreno further suggested, without the slightest evidence, that supporters of his predecessor and former political ally, Rafael Correa, were behind the upheavals. Claiming that Correa and his backers had “contracted criminals” to foment violence during the October 2019 mass popular revolt against IMF austerity measures that forced the government to flee the capital, Moreno declared that “it wouldn’t surprise us if their hand were present” in Tuesday’s prison riots.

The provocative comments came in the context of political tensions over Ecuador’s presidential election, which is headed for a second round on April 11.

Andrés Arauz, a former minister and director of the Central Bank in Correa’s government, who ran as the candidate of the Unión por la Esperanza (Union for Hope, UNES), came in first in the first round of voting on February 7 but failed to win an outright majority. The party also won the largest block of seats in the country’s parliament but again failed to achieve a majority.

According to the official results, Arauz won 32.72 percent of the vote, with Guillermo Lasso, a right-wing multimillionaire ex-Coca Cola executive and banker who ran as the candidate of the CREO (Create Opportunity) party, coming in second with 19.74 percent, and Yaku Pérez of the Movimento Pachakutik placing third with 19.38 percent.

Pérez and his indigenous party have cried electoral fraud, demanding a recount of some five million votes. Supporters of the party marched in Quito on Tuesday to press their demand. Over the weekend, Moreno’s attorney general and comptroller general announced that they were seizing “all digital content from the database that administers the electoral system” to investigate alleged irregularities.

This triggered a constitutional crisis, with the president of the National Electoral Council (CNE) insisting that the body has independent control over the vote count and warned against the investigation becoming an instrument of “political forces that want to take over the CNE by assault” in order to “promote their interests in the present electoral process.”

Arauz organized a press conference in which he denounced the “gross interference of other institutions of the state” in the electoral process and insisted that there could be no change in the dates for the election’s second round. He charged Moreno of engaging in “maneuvers, tricks and manipulations” intended to “extend the term in office.” For his part, Correa, speaking from exile in Belgium, warned against the threat of a “coup” aimed at keeping his supporters from winning the presidency.

There is no doubt that Moreno and his patrons in Washington are strongly opposed to the coming to power of UNES, the Correaist party. The government made repeated attempts to keep it off the ballot and has sought to enforce a decree barring the use of Correa’s image or voice in election campaigning. Last year, an Ecuadorian court convicted Correa of corruption charges, sentencing him in absentia to eight years in prison and a 25-year suspension of his political rights.

Correa governed Ecuador for a decade beginning in 2007. Declaring himself a supporter of “21st century socialism,” he was part of the so-called “left turn” or “Pink Tide” in Latin America that saw the coming to power of a number of bourgeois governments that sought to utilize the continent’s “commodities boom” to implement minimal assistance programs for the poor, while reorienting trade and commercial ties toward US rivals, particularly China.

The slowing of the Chinese economy and the resulting fall in commodity prices spelled economic crisis and political instability for all of these regimes. Ecuador, with oil accounting for 40 percent of its export earnings, was among the hardest hit.

Correa, whose politics never infringed upon the essential profit interests of the Ecuadorian bourgeoisie or international capital—he maintained loyal support for the dollarization of the country’s economy—had already begun turning sharply rightward before he left office in 2017, backing his vice president, Lenin Moreno, as his successor.

Under Moreno, this rightward turn accelerated sharply, with the new government subordinating itself unequivocally to the interests of US imperialism, expressed most nakedly in the expulsion of WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London in April 2019. Two months later, as part of his government’s ever closer alignment with Washington, it granted the US rights to a military base in the Galapagos Islands. In a further gesture of fealty to the Trump administration, Moreno cut back ties with China.

Meanwhile it obtained a series of loans from both the International Monetary Fund and the US government, driving the country’s foreign debt up to $52 billion. These loans were conditioned upon drastic austerity measures, the privatization of state enterprises and the slashing of public sector employment. One deal reached with the US International Development Finance Corporation just weeks before Trump left office was conditioned upon the Moreno government excluding Chinese companies from Ecuador’s telecom networks.

The increasingly draconian austerity measures imposed under the IMF agreement sparked a mass uprising in October 2019, whose ferocity literally forced Moreno to flee the capital for the coastal city of Guayaquil. While the government was forced to beat a tactical retreat on the most deeply unpopular measure, the ending of fuel subsidies, the mass movement was contained only with the assistance of the trade union bureaucracy and the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), in which Yaku Pérez, the indigenous candidate in the current election, played a major role.

The mass movement of Ecuadorian workers and oppressed has also suffered the impact of the coronavirus, which has had a particularly devastating effect in Ecuador. In April of last year, the city of Guayaquil literally saw bodies piling up in the streets. The catastrophic handling of the pandemic has only deepened popular hatred of the government.

The front running UNES candidate, Arauz, has campaigned on slogans asking voters whether they were better off before or after Moreno took office. A return to the period of surplus revenues for oil exports, however, is not an offer. Ecuador saw its GDP cut by 10 percent in 2020, while more than 600,000 workers joined the unemployment lines.

The bitter lesson of the Correa-Moreno presidencies is that the fight against social inequality, imperialist domination and the threat of dictatorship in Ecuador and throughout Latin America cannot be waged under the leadership of any faction of the national bourgeoisie, no matter what its “left” pretensions. All of them are subordinated to the profit interests of international capital.

The most urgent task is the forging of a new revolutionary leadership to mobilize the working class in opposition to the unions and political organizations that seek to subordinate workers to the bourgeoisie and fighting to unite their struggles with those of workers across the Americas and internationally to put an end to capitalism.

Stellantis cuts jobs at Illinois auto plant one month after merger

Marcus Day

Global automaker Stellantis—formed from the merger of Fiat Chrysler and France’s PSA Group last month—announced Tuesday that it had indefinitely laid off 150 workers at its Belvidere Assembly Plant in northern Illinois. The plant, roughly 70 miles northwest of Chicago, employs 3,374 hourly and 206 salaried workers across two shifts, according to the latest company data.

The layoffs were carried out last Friday, February 20, said Jodi Tinson, a spokesperson for Stellantis, in a statement cited by the Detroit News. In justifying the cuts, the company said in a statement, “The Stellantis plant in Belvidere, Ill., is rebalancing its staffing levels as it realigns production to meet global demand for the Jeep Cherokee.”

Fiat Chrysler's Belvidere Assembly Plant in Illinois

Neither the United Auto Workers union national office nor UAW Local 1268 in Belvidere have commented publicly on the sackings.

The layoffs at Belvidere are a swift exposure of the hollowness of claims by Stellantis’ executives that the €43 billion ($53 billion) merger of its predecessor companies, FCA and PSA, would not entail any job cuts. The company has said it is expecting €5 billion (roughly $6.1 billion) in cost savings annually from the consolidation.

As the WSWS warned in an article last month, promises by corporate executives to spare jobs and factories following such a significant tie-up are worthless, “as decades of shuttered plants and mass layoffs have shown. Industry analysts are already pointing to Stellantis’ excess production capacity, particularly at its Italian plants, and the large number of brands (14), several of which perform poorly, in the new firm’s portfolio.”

The Belvidere layoffs are an opening shot in what will inevitably be an attempt by the company to increase its profitability through mass job cuts, factory closures and other brutal cost-cutting measures, as the global automakers engage in a fierce struggle to dominate electric vehicles and other new technologies, and with the industry continuing to be roiled by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing semiconductor shortages.

Stellantis is scouring its global workforce and operations—with some 410,000 employed at plants on virtually every continent—for “inefficiencies,” “redundancies” and any areas it views as performing poorly. On the same day the layoffs at Belvidere were announced, CEO Carlos Tavares, who earned a reputation as a relentless cost-cutter and “turnaround” specialist while helming PSA Group, met with union representatives in Italy to discuss why average labor costs at the company’s Italian plants are higher than their European counterparts, according to media reports.

In addition to job cuts, Stellantis is already enacting changes to work rules aimed at ratcheting up the exploitation of workers. The company is moving forward with its implementation of a brutal 12-hour, seven-day schedule for skilled trades at its Sterling Heights Assembly Plant north of Detroit in April, despite provoking an immediate outcry among workers at both SHAP and other plants when the plan was first revealed last October.

For its part, Belvidere Assembly has faced years of job cuts, despite a $350 million retooling of the plant by FCA in 2017. Employment has dropped by nearly 2,000 over the last two years. The factory employed 5,464 hourly and salaried workers as recently as February 2019, compared to 3,580 in the company’s latest figures. An entire shift was cut in 2019, with over 1,400 workers put out of a job or forced to relocate hundreds of miles away to one of the company’s Detroit-area plants.

The plant has also been hit by temporary shutdowns and slowed production in recent weeks due to the semiconductor shortage in the auto industry. Belvidere was idled the week of February 8, putting workers on temporary layoff. Workers have raised questions on Facebook about whether the plant will continue to face rolling shutdowns in the coming weeks due to the lack of parts.

For several years, auto industry analysts have raised questions about the long-term future of Belvidere Assembly and whether it may eventually be targeted for shutdown, given the plant’s distance from Detroit, where FCA/Stellantis has consolidated much of its US production.

Each round of job cuts has had an especially painful impact on the region. Belvidere Assembly is one of the largest and best-paying manufacturing employers in the Rockford metropolitan area, which has been hammered by decades of deindustrialization, with an unemployment rate regularly outpacing the average in Illinois.

A worker at the plant told the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter, “A lot of people are in shock. They’re having a meeting tomorrow about those who will be laid off indefinitely.”

Temporary part-time workers (TPTs) have also recently been let go, according to the worker. “We don’t have part timers either. They told them not to come in until further notice.”

The US auto companies have brought on large numbers of TPTs and other temporary workers throughout the coronavirus pandemic, as full time workers have either been infected or taken leaves of absence to protect themselves or their families from it. The ability of Ford, General Motors, and FCA to vastly expand their temporary workforces was one of the key concessions included in the 2019 sellout contracts negotiated by the UAW, and over the last year the union has given its full backing to the widespread utilization of temps, who pay union dues but are paid less and have fewer benefits.

The UAW has been instrumental in facilitating the decades-long corporate assault on autoworkers’ wages, benefits and working conditions, with the union working to suppress opposition and sow divisions among workers. In return, the union received millions of dollars in bribes from then-Fiat Chrysler, as revealed in the multi-year federal corruption investigation, for which Stellantis pled guilty just last month.

More recently, the UAW worked with the auto companies to engineer the premature reopening of the auto industry in May 2020, in what proved to be the early stages of the deadly pandemic, after plants were forced to be shut down by a wave of wildcat strikes by autoworkers in March. The union served as PR reps for the corporations’ bogus claims of enacting adequate safety measures, while covering up the spread of COVID-19 throughout the plants over the past year and victimizing workers who spoke out on unsafe conditions.

In response, autoworkers have increasingly sought to take matters into their own hands, initiating rank-and-file safety committees, independent of the UAW, at a number of factories in 2020. The committees have asserted that workers’ health and jobs are non-negotiable rights, demanding the shutdown of non-essential factories during the pandemic and full income protection for workers.

The $15 minimum wage scam

Genevieve Leigh

The COVID-19 relief bill currently being debated in Congress includes a proposal for gradually raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour over the course of the next four years.

While some states and cities have recently raised their own minimum wages, it has been more than a decade since the federal minimum wage was last raised, in 2009, to its current extreme poverty level of $7.25 an hour. The 12-year gap between 2009 and now is the longest American workers have ever gone without a minimum wage increase.

In this Jan. 28, 2021 file photo, President Joe Biden signs a series of executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

The proposal for the wage increase comes amid the greatest social and economic crisis for workers in the US since the Great Depression. In the past year, tens of millions of people have lost their jobs. Many of these jobs will never return. Workers have been forced to take on enormous levels of debt just to make ends meet, while being provided a pittance of aid from the US government. Thousands of families have been evicted from their homes and are struggling every day to put food on the table for their families.

Despite these dire conditions, President Joe Biden has already given numerous indications that the proposed minimum wage increase will likely be stripped from the bill. In a meeting last week with mayors and governors, he made it clear that the provision was “unlikely to happen.”

The very fact that an increase in the minimum wage from the current extreme poverty-level wage is seen as out of the question within the political establishment, under such extraordinarily dire conditions, only underscores the bankruptcy of the entire political system and its contempt for the great majority of the population.

What is $15 an hour to a worker in the US?

A $15 hourly pay scale would more than double the current $7.25 federal minimum wage. For a family with two working adults and two children, the current $7.25 hourly minimum wage falls far short of a living wage in every state. For a full-time worker, the current wage amounts to about $15,000 a year before taxes.

A new report published by CNBC and assembled by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology analyzes cost-of-living data and compares the data to the current minimum wage and the new $15-an-hour proposal. The data includes costs such as food, child care, health care, housing, transportation and other necessities.

Remarkably, the report finds that a minimum wage increase to $15 would bring many states close to what is considered a living wage, but not a single state would meet or exceed it. The report notes that the greatest shortfalls would occur in the West and Northeast—in states like California, Hawaii, Massachusetts and New York—where the cost of living and taxes tend to be higher.

According to projections based on the Economic Policy Institute’s (EPI) “Family Budget Calculator,” in larger metro areas of the South and Southwest a single adult without children will require more than $15 an hour by 2025. The EPI calculator projects that, in order to get by, a single adult without children would need an hourly wage of $20.03 in Fort Worth, Texas, $21.12 in Phoenix, Arizona, and $20.95 in Miami, Florida.

In more expensive regions of the country, a single adult without children needs far more than $15 an hour just to cover basic necessities: $28.70 in New York City, $24.06 in Los Angeles and $23.94 in Washington D.C.

Furthermore, to put these figures in perspective, one should consider that if the minimum wage had risen in step with productivity growth since 1968, it would be over $24 an hour today. A minimum wage of $24 would mean that a full-time, minimum-wage worker would be earning $48,000 a year.

The 1968 minimum wage rate, $1.60 per hour, was actually worth slightly more than the equivalent of $10 today, taking inflation into account.

The $15-an-hour minimum wage was first proposed by the organizations around the Democratic Party in 2012. Due to inflation, even if it were actually enacted by 2025, it will have already lost 22 percent of its value compared to when it was first proposed.

The fraud of the “Fight for 15”

The nearly decades-long campaign for a $15 minimum wage, widely known as the “Fight for 15,” has been conducted within the framework of the Democratic Party and its political operatives in the trade unions and pseudo-left organizations.

The campaign was originally spearheaded in 2012 by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and has been the programmatic centerpiece of groups like Socialist Alternative and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), both of which are oriented to the Democratic Party. The demand was also picked up by Democratic presidential nominee Bernie Sanders, who made it part of his platform in his campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination in both 2016 and 2020. It was officially added to the Democratic Party's platform, a largely meaningless document, in 2016.

While workers’ demands for a living wage are entirely legitimate, the organizations claiming to fight for them are, in fact, not on their side. The trade unions are at the forefront of the fight to contain workers struggles and force through the dictates of the political establishment. For its part, the SEIU used the campaign largely to unionize low-wage workers so it could collect dues from these highly exploited layers. The campaign’s original name, which the SEIU still uses today, is “The Fight for 15 and a Union.”

Many unions have sought to implement so-called “escape clauses” or waivers in order to avoid minimum wage requirements. These clauses allow employers who agree to accept the union to pay less than minimum wage. A clause of this kind was written into the famous Proposition 1 that covered SeaTac (Seattle-Tacoma airport) in Washington state, which was backed not only by the SEIU, but also by Socialist Alternative and its spokeswoman Kshama Sawant, a member of the Seattle City Council.

In every instance, the trade union bureaucracies are revealed to be nothing more than tools of the corporations, bargaining on behalf of the companies, not the workers. Just this past December SEIU Local 121RN shut down a strike by Southern California nurses, who were demanding safe staffing levels and protections in the COVID-19 pandemic. Earlier in the year, SEIU blocked a strike of 10,000 nursing home workers across the state of Illinois.

In reality, the efforts to pass a meager minimum wage increase are part of an effort by the ruling class and its functionaries in the Democratic Party and the trade unions to contain the growth of working class struggles and anti-capitalist sentiment, while standardizing the lowering of wages overall.

The poverty level of $15 an hour will become, if and when it is every actually implemented, not just a minimum but a maximum. With the collaboration of the unions, corporations have engaged in a decades-long assault on the wages and benefits of workers who previously earned significantly more than the minimum wage—the byproduct of the massive social struggles of an earlier period.

The fight for a good job, health care, a secure retirement, a living wage and more cannot be achieved by appealing to the very same forces that are responsible for the horrific conditions under which workers now exist.

What has been revealed so decisively throughout the past year of the COVID-19 pandemic is the staggering level of indifference and contempt the ruling class and both of its parties have for the lives of workers. Next to nothing has been done to provide even the most basic necessities for workers whose jobs have been destroyed. Faced with the prospect of destitution and homelessness, workers are being forced back into the factories and workplaces by means of economic blackmail to risk their lives to make a living.

Meanwhile, the ruling class has utilized the crisis to carry out a massive transfer of wealth to the rich, leaving US billionaires with $1.1 trillion in additional wealth since March 2020.

None of the basic necessities of life can be maintained outside of a political struggle against the capitalist profit system, a struggle that can be successfully waged only on the basis of a complete break with the Democratic and Republican parties and all the organizations that operate in their orbit.

The perspective driving the struggle must not be for mild reforms, which the ruling class will in any case not grant, but for revolution—the expropriation of the corporate oligarchs and the overthrow of capitalist property relations through the establishment of democratic control over the giant banks and corporations.

Facebook reaches deal with Australian government

Nick Beams

The standoff between the Australian government and the social media giant Facebook came to an end on Tuesday when a deal was reached, revealing that the conflict was not about protecting “quality journalism,” the “defence of democracy” or any of the other issues raised in the battle, but centred on money.

The agreement ended a five-day shutdown by Facebook to news services covering the main media outlets, other news sites, including the World Socialist Web Site, and community and other outlets. It sparked widespread outrage as millions of Facebook users discovered last Thursday that their activities on the social media platform had been suddenly cut off.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg says Facebook intends to sign commercial deal with news publishers (Source: ABC News Australia)

The deal involved an amendment to government legislation, backed by the opposition Labor party, that would have required Facebook to pay news outlets, principally the Murdoch-owned News Corp and Nine Entertainment, now the owner of the former Fairfax chain of newspapers, for content under a bargaining code.

Under the amended legislation, an additional round of negotiations with media companies would be required before binding arbitration begins. There would also need to be acknowledgement of any agreements reached by Facebook with publishers. Arbitration would be a “last resort” following a period of negotiation lasting no longer than two months.

Facebook has said it intends to strike deals with Australian media organisations to pay for content.

In the aftermath of the agreement, both sides attempted to cover their position with statements that they were upholding high principles.

Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said there had been “constructive” discussions and it had been a difficult process “but these are really important issues.”

Referring to the international implications of the dispute, Frydenberg said there was “no doubt Australia has been a proxy battle for the world” and Facebook and Google knew that the eyes of the world were on Australia.

Media coverage of the dispute in Australia and internationally has presented it as a conflict between democracy and globally dominant high-tech giants.

An article published in the Financial Times, authored by Marietje Schaake, international policy director at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center, was typical.

She described the “fierce battle” over the Australian media laws as “the latest test of the relationship among democratically elected legislators, media companies and Big Tech,” previewing fights when other countries seek to curb the powers of huge technology platforms.

“It is worth being clear about these battles at the outset, that only one party has a democratic mandate, the other two do not,” she wrote.

Another comment in the same newspaper said the aim of the Australian government legislation was to ensure that Google and Facebook “pay more cash to support local journalism.”

The notion that the Australian government stepped forward as a champion of democracy or a defender of quality journalism is a total fiction.

What actually happened was that the government acted on behalf of the Australian media giants to support them in their efforts to claw back some of the millions of dollars in advertising revenue they have lost to Google and Facebook.

The statements issued by Facebook were no less hypocritical as they attempted to invoke high principle.

Campbell Brown, the vice-president of global news partnerships at Facebook, said: “It’s always been our intention to support journalism in Australia and around the world.” The company would continue to invest in news globally and “resist efforts by media conglomerates to advance regulatory frameworks that do not take into account the true value exchange between publishers and platforms like Facebook.”

She also indicated that Facebook would be prepared to re-impose the news shutdown but hoped “there will be no need for that step.”

Recognising the damage that had been done, Facebook vice-president for Global Affairs Nick Clegg, former leader of the Liberal Democratic Party in Britain and one-time deputy prime minister, issued a post defending the company’s actions.

Clegg said the decision to shut off news was not a decision taken lightly but the company had to take action quickly before the new law came in force. He claimed Facebook had “erred on the side over over-enforcement” and some content was blocked inadvertently.

He took issue with the assertion that Facebook steals or takes original journalism for its own benefit saying this was an upside down portrayal of how news and information flows on the internet. He pointed out the publishers themselves have buttons on their articles to share them claiming that in this way Facebook had generated 5.1 billion free referrals to Australian publishers worth an estimated $A407 million to the news industry.

Seeking to restore Facebook’s battered image, he said it was more than willing to partner with news publishers and that “we absolutely recognise quality journalism at the heart of how open societies function—informing and empowering citizens and holding the powerful to account.”

He said the company had spent $600 million to support the news industry since 2018, reaching agreements with a string of news companies internationally and intended to spend $1 billion more over the next few years.

While not directly naming it, Clegg took a shot at one of the main instigators of the Australian government’s legislation—the Murdoch-controlled media giant News Corp.

“It is ironic,” he wrote, “that some of the biggest publishers that have long advocated for free markets and voluntary commercial undertakings now appear to be in favour of state sponsored price settings. The events in Australia show the danger of camouflaging a bid for cash subsides behind distortions about how the internet works.”

There are important political lessons to be gained from this experience by the working class in Australia and internationally. They can begin to be drawn by puncturing the fictional self-promotions advanced by both sides.

Much as Treasurer Frydenberg and the Morrison government would like to drape themselves in the toga of democracy, their actions have revealed their essential function as defenders of powerful monopoly interests in the global battle for money and profit.

As for Facebook and its claims to uphold the free flow of information on the internet, the fact remains that when it suited its commercial and profit interests to do so it cut off that flow at the flick of a switch and has threatened to do so again should that be considered necessary. It is also engaged in censorship particularly of left-wing websites, including the WSWS.

The conflict demonstrates that democracy, based on the free flow of information on a global scale, cannot be sustained while ever the means of disseminating that information and facilitating communication and discussion about it remain under private ownership subject to the demands of profit. The case for public ownership, under democratic control, of all the media giants is becoming overwhelming.

Australian universities rush to enroll students and disregard COVID dangers

Jack Turner

As the teaching year begins, Australian university administrations are competing to secure the largest share of enrolments, while returning to face-to-face teaching and expanding class sizes with little to no regard for the health risks to staff or students posed by the continuing global COVID-19 pandemic.

At present, the coronavirus, if it is currently present in the community, is circulating at extremely low levels. However recent outbreaks, including of highly-contagious overseas variants of the virus that have spread from hotel quarantines, have demonstrated that the situation can change very rapidly.

Part of the University of New South Wales in Sydney (Credit: UNSW promotions)

The return to physical classrooms is part of the rising “economic reopening” and anti-lockdown push of governments and the corporate media.

Universities are also desperately seeking to boost their revenues after decades of government funding cuts and pro-market restructuring of tertiary education, intensified by the loss of international student fees due to the pandemic.

University of New South Wales deputy vice chancellor (academic), Merlin Crossly, told the Guardian last month that “2021 will be a bit of a celebration” because of the roll out of vaccines. In Australia, vaccines only began to be administered to front-line health workers this week. Most university students fall under the fourth category of the government’s five-part rollout plan, so they will receive the vaccine in the second half of the year at the earliest.

Moreover, the vast majority of the country’s population will receive the AstraZeneca vaccine, which may not adequately protect against the more virulent strains, such as that detected in South Africa.

Even if all goes to plan, this still leaves plenty of time and possibility for outbreaks to start on campuses, endangering the lives of students and staff alike. Judging by media reports, university managements plan to have tens of thousands of students back inside classrooms this semester.

According to the Guardian, “more than two-thirds” of classes will be face-to-face at the University of Canberra. All tutorials and laboratories at Murdoch University will be in person. The Australian National University “expects” all students who can study on campus to do so this year. The University of Sydney reported that half its students attended in-person classes in the second half of 2020 and it expects the number to rise this year.

Universities are not required to enforce the official 1.5-metre social distancing rules. University managers are being allowed to work out arrangements with staff. To the extent that social distancing is practiced, and/or mask wearing and hand sanitation required, it is being left up to individual staff and students, sometimes at their own expense.

At Western Sydney University, students and staff have been issued with COVID-19 Protocols that include the following:

· Where 1.5 metres cannot maintained, all impacted students MUST wear a mask.

· Students and Staff must bring their own masks.

· Hand sanitising and wipe dispensers are provided in the corridors… The academic must wipe the lectern or teaching space. The students must wipe the desk space where they are sitting. This cleaning must take place at the START and FINISH of every class. If the hallway supply of wipes and sanitiser run [sic] out, call x5800 for the PPE to be replenished.

· The in-class teacher is responsible for the monitoring and assurance of these Covid-19 protocols.

· A LIMITED supply of hand sanitiser, wipes and masks are [sic] available to support Face to Face teaching… These limited resources can be used ONLY where the central supplies are exhausted or where the academic or student forgets to supply their own. Remember, academics and students are REQUIRED to supply their own masks. These resources are emergency ONLY [emphasis in the original].

Many academics are being instructed to teach in a new “hyflex” model, which means presenting lectures and tutorials to students in classrooms while simultaneously having students participate online. Often this is being presented as a temporary measure, yet it accelerates moves by universities to maximise class sizes.

The “hyflex” model creates the possibility of almost limitless student numbers per class, thus further driving up staff workloads and diminishing the quality of university courses.

In an email to department heads this month, the Faculty of Arts general manager at the University of Sydney called for an increase to class limits as “a matter of urgency” to relieve pressure on over-enrolled classes.

This agenda has received no opposition from the trade unions, which have remained silent on the COVID-19 dangers. Instead, they have advised their members that they cannot refuse to work in unsafe conditions unless there is an “aggravating factor,” such as a recent infection case.

The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) website states: “As long as the public health advice allows it and your workplace is practising physical social distancing and hygiene measures, being at work does not itself constitute an immediate or imminent hazard that would allow you to cease work without penalty.

“For example, if students or colleagues are not adhering to the social distancing guidelines or your area has run out of hand sanitiser, it is unlikely to meet the threshold for stopping work unless there is some sort of aggravating factor, such as a confirmed case of COVID-19 recently being in the area.”

The unions are continuing their decades-long collaboration with the managements, which has facilitated the pro-business transformation of universities. At the start of the pandemic, the NTEU offered employers wage cuts of up to 15 percent, supposedly as a “job protection” scheme, but nevertheless said it would accept thousands of redundancies.

This cleared the way for the elimination of what the NTEU itself estimated to be up to 90,000 jobs in the university sector last year, despite widespread opposition among staff members. This offensive is now being accelerated. Macquarie University management, for example, told its staff last week that $50 million had to be saved across the university through a series of “change proposals.” That equates to another 400 to 500 job losses.

With the help of the unions, Liberal-National and Labor governments have implemented decades of market-driven education “reforms.” The last Greens-backed Labor government lifted caps on student enrolments and cut tertiary funding by $2.7 billion in 2013. As a result, universities are constantly fighting each other for enrolments, particularly from full-fee paying international students.

According to news.com.au, the Australian Border Force Commissioner has granted travel ban exemptions to permit 1,050 international students to enter Australia in recent months as part of the scramble to secure a section of the lucrative international student market.

International students pay three to five times the fees of local students. A three-year Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Sydney would cost an international student over $121,500; a health science degree would cost at least $165,000. Education is counted as one of Australian capitalism’s biggest exports, worth $37.6 billion in 2018–19.

Just as the unions have policed management’s demands to eliminate jobs, they are doing nothing to ensure the safety of staff and students, because this would cut across university revenues.

To ensure the necessary precautions are taken to defend their health, university staff, academics and students need to establish rank-and-file committees that are independent of the unions. These committees would ensure that class sizes are strictly limited and only proceed under conditions in which all participants are safe.

Such measures, while basic, mean rejecting the financial and political dictates of the managements, the governments and the corporate elite. To stop the destruction of jobs and conditions, there must be a vast redistribution of resources away from the banks, big business and the military, and into education, and that is possible only as part of a socialist program organised by the working class.

800,000 COVID-19 deaths in Europe: capitalism, social murder and the case for socialism

Alex Lantier

Yesterday, the official death toll from the coronavirus pandemic across Europe surpassed 800,000.

Death on this scale is so massive a blow to society that it is difficult to comprehend. It is as if the cities of Frankfurt (753,056) or Amsterdam (821,752) had been wiped off the map. The loss of life has surpassed the total casualties at the battle of Verdun in World War I, or the number of soldiers killed in the gigantic 1941 battle of Moscow during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.

In this Thursday, Feb. 18, 2021 file photo, a healthcare worker administers the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, during the start of the COVID-19 vaccination campaign for those in higher risk categories, at a vaccine center in Overijse, Belgium. Two months after the first needles went into arms, the European Union is still struggling to get its COVID-19 vaccine drive up to speed. EU leaders are meeting on Thursday, Feb. 25, 2021 to try to kickstart the process as new virus variants raise concerns that they might spread faster than Europe's response. (Eric Lalmand/Pool via AP, File)

One in 529 people has died of COVID-19 in Belgium, one in 545 in the Czech Republic, one in 558 in Britain, one in 625 in Italy, one in 630 in Portugal, and one in 646 in Bosnia. As deaths surge and births collapse, life expectancy has fallen in Western Europe for the first time since World War II: 1.5 years in Italy, one year in Spain and Britain, and half a year in Sweden and France.

Tens of millions in Europe have lost loved ones. By last month, 63 percent of Spaniards, 59 percent of Poles, 58 percent of Italians, 57 percent of Britons and Swedes, 51 percent of Frenchmen and 34 percent of Germans had at least one relative or close friend test positive. Fully 19 percent in Spain and Poland, 21 percent in Italy, 13 percent in Britain, 11 percent in France, 10 percent in Sweden and 8 percent in Germany, saw a relative or close friend die.

Tens of millions of workers lost their jobs as the economy fell by 11 percent in Spain, 10 percent in Britain, 9 percent in Italy, 8 percent in France, 5 percent in Germany, and 3 percent in Poland and Russia. Restaurants, theaters, gyms and other small businesses are unsure when or even if they will ever be able to reopen normally. Students who have lost part-time jobs are lining up to receive food and basic supplies from charities or other associations.

The pandemic is not only a tragedy, however, but a comprehensive failure of the social order. A ruling class utterly indifferent to human life is carrying out policies that amount, as the prestigious BMJ ( British Medical Journal ) recently wrote, to “social murder.”

Today, the total number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 stands at 33.5 million, or about 5 percent of Europe’s population. Every day, 100,000 people or more test positive, and deadlier variants of the virus spread further. The Czech Republic recently appealed for international aid, with its hospitals overwhelmed, and expected to be swamped in two to three weeks. It received only one reply, from Berlin, offering to take just nine patients.

Yet amid warnings from scientists that a new upsurge of cases due to the variants is inevitable unless drastic action is taken, capitalist governments across Europe are rejecting shelter-at-home orders and moving to eliminate remaining social distancing measures.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson set the tone on February 21, when he announced a “road map” for an “irreversible” lifting of Britain’s “last lock-down.” In this plan, London will not try to control the exponential growth rate of the virus unless conditions “risk a surge in hospital admissions.” Johnson baldly ordered British workers to “accept that there will be more infections, more hospitalizations and therefore, sadly, more deaths” beyond the 126,000 already recorded.

Berlin began reopening schools across Germany on Monday, and Spanish regional governments are loosening social distancing restrictions. French President Emmanuel Macron shocked the public last month by rejecting a widely expected nationwide lockdown order recommended by scientists. While two-thirds of Frenchmen expected such a lockdown, Macron lectured officials at a National Security Council meeting: “I’ve had enough of scientists who answer my questions about the variants with just one scenario: a new lockdown.”

With vaccine rollouts hopelessly delayed, vaccination will not halt a wave of new deaths in the coming months if such policies are pursued. The percentage of the population that has had just one of the two doses of a vaccine ranges from 24 percent in Britain and 13.5 percent in Serbia to 4 percent in Poland, 3 percent in Germany, France, Spain and Italy, 2.8 percent in the Czech Republic and 1.4 percent in Russia.

Mass spread of the virus is not inevitable. By following medical professionals’ calls for strict contact tracing and shelter-at-home orders, a few countries like China, Taiwan and Vietnam dramatically limited the contagion. In Europe, however, political representatives of the financial aristocracy needlessly condemned hundreds of thousands to death.

The fight against the pandemic requires the political mobilization of the working class against capitalism, which subordinates human life to private profit and to the reactionary national geopolitical interests of the imperialist powers.

Initial lockdowns imposed across much of Europe in the spring of 2020 were adopted due to a wave of wildcat strikes across Italy that spread to countries including Spain, France and Britain. “In every industrial sector … there is an extremely brutal shift in workers’ attitudes,” Patrick Martin, the vice president of France’s main business federation, the Medef, wrote at the time. Blaming workers for an “overreaction” to COVID-19, Martin warned that management “can no longer continue production due to pressure from the workers.”

While the working class mobilized to defend life, European capitalist officials and the media worked to defend profits and death. They called for an end to lockdowns and the continuation of non-essential production, thus keeping profits flowing to the banks. Laying out Europe’s “herd immunity” strategy, UK Chief Scientific Advisor Patrick Vallance said it’s “not desirable” to stop the spread of COVID-19, calling for “some immunity in the population to protect ourselves in the future.”

In Germany, where a classified Interior Ministry memo released last summer estimated that letting COVID-19 spread would lead to over 1 million deaths, President Wolfgang Schäuble denounced the view that “everything must take second place to the protection of life.” Germany’s constitution, he bluntly declared, “does not exclude us from having to die.”

As they ended last year’s initial lockdown, European officials designed multi-trillion-euro bailouts, forking over vast public wealth to the financial aristocracy. Bank bailouts of €1.25 trillion from the European Central Bank and £645 billion from the Bank of England, and corporate bailouts of €750 billion by the EU and £330 billion in Britain, sent stock markets skyrocketing. Europe’s richest individual, French billionaire Bernard Arnault, saw his fortune rise by €30 billion.

The greed of the financial aristocracy was indistinguishable from the imperialist powers’ struggle to dominate world markets. Warning of the risk of “China-centric globalization,” Le Monde endorsed Trump’s “herd immunity” policy as “the ‘business first’ option, sacrificing part of its population to not leave Chinese power with an open field.” The EU thereupon also sacrificed its population.

German and French unions signed the EU bailout, as the affluent middle-class forces in the union bureaucracies and pseudo-left parties saw their stock portfolios surge. The “left populist” Podemos party implemented “herd immunity” policies from within the Spanish government.

All these organizations supported the ruling class’s universal back-to-work and back-to-school policy. Since last summer, they kept workers going to work and most youth going to school, even when governments reintroduced bogus “lockdowns” as COVID-19 cases began to explode in November. They took their watchword from Macron’s statement in September: “We must learn to live with the virus.”

The consequences are now plain to see. European health systems, stripped bare by decades of austerity since the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, proved incapable of tracing, isolating and containing the virus even after last spring’s lockdowns initially brought COVID-19 cases down to only a few thousand per day.

Fixated on defending its wealth and indifferent to mass death, the ruling class of the major European countries have intensified their fascistic policies. Officers in Spain, outraged by strikes in March calling for the closure of non-essential factories, declared their loyalty to fascism and their plans for a coup to shoot “26 million” people. Macron’s Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, a former member of the far-right Action française, introduced laws to ban filming of police and regulate Islam, setting the stage for intensified police repression of protests and appeals to anti-Muslim hatred.

Working class opposition is again rising across Europe. Recent months have seen strikes by Italian public sector workers, wildcat strikes by French teachers against in-person teaching, industrial action at plants in Spain and beyond threatened with closure, and a growing radicalization of youth and students against police-state measures. To wage this fight, however, political conclusions must be drawn.

The pandemic marks a historic turning point. European capitalism is discredited—its ruling elites, its corporatist union bureaucracies that function as tools of the state, and its pseudo-left parties. Fighting the pandemic requires building a socialist movement in the international working class, independent of the unions and established parties. Only this can prepare the transfer of state power to the workers to wage an international, scientifically-based struggle against the global COVID-19 pandemic.