Spain’s PSOE-Podemos government raises electricity prices

Santiago Guillén

The Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos government has passed a new measure to increase electricity prices, already among the highest in Europe. It represents a new attack on the conditions of the working class, taking place amid a wave of austerity and anti-working class measures.

The measure was introduced days before European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen travelled to Madrid to meet with Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez to approve Spain’s plan to use nearly €70 billion ($85 billion) in grant money. The electricity hike is just the first of many, including new pension reform to extend the retirement age and a labour reform to cut wages and job security.

New electricity rates approved by the PSOE-Podemos government came into effect in June, which will mean a significant and immediate rise in the price of electricity for 11 million households.

Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez (PSOE), second left, walks next to Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias, second right, and First Deputy Prime Minister Carmen Calvo, left, at the Moncloa Palace in Madrid, Spain, Tuesday, Jan. 14 2020. (Image Credit: AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)

The regulated rate is the normal one among working class families, usually with less than 10 kW of contracted power. An estimated 75 percent of households have this tariff, which is normally cheaper than the free-market price. This rate also allows the poorest sectors of the population to apply for the social bonus, a discount on the bill of 25 to 40 percent for retirees, low-income, laid-off or unemployed workers, or other so-called vulnerable consumers.

The new rates, however, establish three time slots:

• The most expensive at rush hour, from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.
• The cheapest at off-peak hours, from 00:00-08:00 plus weekends and holidays.
• Flat hours, covering the rest.

Thus, low-cost rates are only in the middle of the night, at dawn and on weekends. The government claims absurdly that it is “promoting energy saving” by moving consumption to lower-priced hours.

Podemos’ Consumer Affairs Minister and leader of the Stalinist-led United Left, Alberto Garzón, cynically justified the measure, saying it would make the public realize “that with small actions you can save enough euros per month by taking decisions that you were previously unaware of.”

Garzón’s argument is a patent fraud. Workers cannot cook, use washing machines and dishwashers, watch television and shower only in the middle of the night. Dressed up an empty “ecological” rhetoric, it is a transparent attack on the working class.

In winter, the situation will be even worse, as the new cost structure will pressure workers to heat their houses only at dawn. The consumer association FACUA declared that “asking for electricity consumption to be shifted to dawn is degrading for the most vulnerable consumers.”

The electricity rate hike marks a new milestone in the unbridled rise of electricity prices. In the first five months of 2021, an average consumer’s electricity bills rose 22 percent compared to the same period in 2020. April 2021 saw the highest prices in the last 10 years; between March and May, average receipt increased from 63.59 to 75.92 euros.

These prices are the result of a cartel of electricity companies consisting of Naturgy, Endesa and Iberdrola, controlling up to 90 percent of the electricity market. In setting electricity prices, they benefit from the so-called “marginalist” system that bases the price of electricity on the cost of the most expensive method of producing electricity. Thus, electricity from higher-cost, combined-cycle facilities set market prices for all electricity, though those with cheaper production costs (nuclear, wind, hydroelectric) represent a higher percentage of the total electricity generated.

Electricity prices from combined-cycle power facilities is more expensive because they consume natural gas and must pay “emission rights” for each ton of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere. These emission rights are limited by country but transferable in a market for the purchase and sale of rights that is subject to strong speculative pressures that push up prices. In Spain, in one year, emission rights prices have surged from 27 to 58 euros.

In this way, speculators earn ever more money by trading in emission rights. This first boosts prices for electricity generated by pollution-producing electric plants; this then sets the average price, though it only represents a minority of the electricity generated. Energy companies can then reap vast profits.

Due to both such speculation and the PSOE-Podemos government’s rate hike, the price of the cheapest hours of electricity in June 2021 are higher than the peak-hours price a year ago. Current peak-hours prices are double that of a year ago. June 2021 saw Spain’s highest electricity prices ever.

Moreover, Naturgy, Endesa, Repsol and Iberdrola are expected to profit massively from the €140 billion EU bailout fund adopted during the pandemic. Of this amount, 37 percent will be allocated to the so-called “ecological transition.” The “big four” energy firms have proposed more than 400 projects, valued at €60 billion euros. This is almost half Spain’s part of the EU bailout fund.

The burden of this enrichment of the financial oligarchy falls on hundreds of thousands of working families and, even worse, nearly four million unemployed and more than half a million workers subject to temporary redundancy schemes. According to government statistics, 4.5 million people suffer from energy poverty, i.e., cannot cover the cost of their basic energy needs. This leads to over 7,100 deaths a year, more than deaths from traffic accidents.

With a social crisis looming if electricity prices continue to escalate, the PSOE-Podemos government has temporarily cut the part of VAT paid on the electricity bill from 21 percent to 10 percent, although only temporarily, until December. In other words, the PSOE and Podemos intervened not to rein in the profits of the financial oligarchy, but to cut state revenues.

Even then, the measure is insufficient. It will only mean an average reduction of €7 per bill, when only in June the year-on-year increase was €28, with price increases set to continue.

Generous gifts provided to energy companies at workers’ expense would not have been possible without the collaboration of Podemos and the trade unions. Just before the last general elections of 2019, Podemos Tweeted: “We will lower electricity bills by firming up the big electricity companies.” Minister Garzón said, “Thousands of families will not be able to maintain their homes at adequate temperatures, which will have a serious impact on the health of those who have the least. No decent government should tolerate this.”

In reality, Podemos is now part of an “indecent” government, to use Garzón’s own terms.

The trade unions, Comisiones Obreras (CCOO), the General Union of Labour (UGT) and the General Confederation of Workers (CGT) have not called even token strikes or protests. CCOO and UGT sit in regional and national commissions discussing how to use the EU bailouts set to enrich the energy conglomerates. The unions also work with the PSOE-Podemos government to design pension cuts and labour reforms—austerity policies they have sworn Brussels that they will impose.

Ethiopia wracked by internal war and inter-state conflict as famine rages in Tigray

Jean Shaoul

On June 28, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed announced a unilateral ceasefire in Tigray. This was a stark reversal of his declaration late November that he had defeated the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) in a three week-long military campaign.

He has pulled his federal forces out of Mekelle, the capital of Tigray province, one of Ethiopia’s semi-autonomous, ethnically defined provinces in the north of the country, as well as other towns in the region, ahead of advancing Tigrayan fighters. It follows the ousting of his forces from Mekelle by TPLF fighters.

In this Wednesday, May 5, 2021 file photo, Tigrayan women Tarik, 60, center, and Meresaeta, left, who fled from the town of Samre, roast coffee beans over a wood stove in a classroom where they now live at the Hadnet General Secondary School which has become a makeshift home to thousands displaced by the conflict, in Mekele, in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis, File)

Abiy said his army units were ambushed and “massacred” while passing through villages, but he denied claims that his military had been defeated as “a lie.” Nevertheless, he added, conditions had become unbearable for his troops. He claimed that his government had voluntarily withdrawn its forces in a unilateral cease-fire for humanitarian reasons, to allow crops to be planted.

Getachew Reda, a TPLF executive member, contradicted him saying that Ethiopian forces had capitulated as Tigrayan forces captured military assets, killed several hundred men and took thousands of prisoners of war. On Friday, to reinforce his point and humiliate Abiy, thousands of Ethiopian prisoners of war were paraded through Mekelle amid cheering crowds as they were taken to a nearby prison.

Reda accused the Ethiopian troops of robbing banks, looting food aid and cutting off electricity and telecommunications as they retreated.

Abiy’s loss of Mekelle marks a turning point in a war that has plunged Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous country of 112 million people, into chaos, amid escalating ethnic conflicts around the country. It threatens to destabilize the wider Horn of Africa region, in which Ethiopia has long acted as the anchor state on behalf of US imperialism.

Such a defeat for one of Africa’s most powerful armies is a major blow to Abiy’s authority. Washington’s man staked everything on what he declared would be a brief, decisive campaign to bring the restive Tigray region under control. His eight-month long military campaign has been a catastrophe as the conflict became increasingly bitter and fierce, widening to encompass drone support from the United Arab Emirates from its base in Djibouti, neighbouring Eritrean forces in the east and Amhara provincial forces in the west fighting alongside Ethiopian federal troops.

With more than half of Ethiopia’s army based in Tigray, a legacy of the 20-year-long war with Eritrea, Abiy could not rely on the military’s support and sacked his army chief, head of intelligence and foreign minister days after the fighting began and drew down Ethiopia’s peacekeeping forces in Somalia.

There have been numerous reports of wanton damage to buildings, property, and farms, with Tigrayans subject to massacres and sexual violence at the hands of the Eritrean and Amhara militias and left to starve. This served to bolster support for the TPLF, intensify secessionist demands in Tigray and drive thousands of young Tigrayans to take up arms. The majority of Tigrayans have been without electricity, communications and other essential services for the last week and are in desperate need of emergency food supplies.

While Abiy had for months denied that Eritrea had sent its soldiers to support his army in Tigray, he finally admitted this in March when he sought to place responsibility for atrocities on Eritrean forces. Eritrean troops have remained in Tigray, despite Abiy’s claim that Eritrea had agreed to withdraw them.

On Friday, Ramesh Rajasingham, the UN's acting humanitarian aid chief, told a Security Council meeting that the situation in Tigray had deteriorated dramatically and the region was experiencing “the worst famine situation we have seen in decades.” More than 90 percent of Tigray’s last crop harvest and 80 percent of its livestock have been looted or destroyed and planting for the next harvest has been seriously reduced by the fighting.

More than 400,000 face famine, although the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) says the number facing starvation is closer to 900,000. Another 5.2 million are at “emergency” or “crisis” levels.

The UN says that nearly two million of Tigray’s six million people have been displaced, with 70,000 fleeing to neighbouring Sudan. International aid agencies say their work in Tigray has been impeded because the Ethiopian federal government had cut electricity, internet and phone lines to the region, and have warned of a pending humanitarian catastrophe.

With several key bridges destroyed, little aid is entering the region, while troops along Tigray’s western border with the Amhara region had prevented food trucks from entering the province. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the UN, said that according to reports she had heard, getting aid into Tigray is now “more difficult” than it was a week ago, which is “not an indication of a humanitarian cease-fire, but of a siege.”

Fighting has continued between Tigrayan and Eritrean forces in north-western Tigray, close to the towns of Badme and Shiraro, which both Tigray and Eritrea claim as their own, with Tigrayan leaders threatening to invade the Amhara region of Ethiopia.

Abiy, a former military intelligence officer and an Oromo, took office in February 2018 as ethnic tensions mounted across the country, incited by the elites in a bid to prevent a unified opposition to their economic programme that had benefited the wealthy at the expense of the great mass of the population.

Touted as a “reformer” and given the Nobel Peace Prize for ending the 20-year-long war with Eritrea one year later, Abiy disbanded the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), a coalition of several militia groups and parties dominated by the TPLF. He replaced the EPRDF with his Prosperity Party (PP) which TPLF refused to join. Abiy retired Tigrayan military and government officials, launched corruption charges against some of their members and announced plans for the wholesale privatisation of the state-owned economy and liberalisation of the banks.

Abiy launched his murderous “law-and-order” operation against the TPLF-run regional government of Tigray last November in response to what he claimed was an attack on an army compound. That move followed the federal government’s efforts to bypass the TPLF after it rejected Abiy’s decision to postpone the 2020 elections due to the pandemic and went ahead with its own elections in September.

The military conflict in Tigray takes place amid ethnic strife and inter-communal violence across many parts of the country, with large swathes of Benishangul-Gumuz, Afar, Somali, Oromia, Amhara and the Southern Region under “Command Posts,” —in effect military rule. This meant that around 18 percent of the country, 102 out of the 547 parliamentary seats, were unable to vote in last month’s twice-postponed parliamentary elections. In two regions, Somali and Harar, polling had to be postponed until September.

The elections met few of the most basic standards for a credible vote and the results have yet to be announced. It was expected that Abiy and his Prosperity Party would win at the federal level and in most regions, enabling him to claim a popular mandate for his policies, including greater centralisation of authority in Addis Ababa, the capital.

The violent ethnic conflicts have prompted fears that Ethiopia will withdraw its more than 5,000 troops from the United Nation’s peacekeeping mission in Abyei—the highly contested region along the Sudan-South Sudan border at the heart of the tensions between the two countries—creating a security vacuum that could spark renewed fighting.

Abiy, who has lost his shine in Washington, is coming under increasing pressure over Ethiopia’s filling of its massive hydropower dam on the Nile, known as the Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), which both Egypt and Sudan oppose, without a binding agreement on how the water can be shared. The two downstream countries that rely on the Nile for much of their fresh water oppose any unilateral damming that may affect the river’s flow. The UN’s Security Council is set to discuss the issue this week.

Anti-Bolsonaro protests sweep Brazil as opposition draws up 23 charges of impeachment

Miguel Andrade

An estimated 800,000 Brazilians were back in the streets this Saturday. For the third time in five weeks there were demonstrations in over 300 cities across the country to oppose the herd immunity policy of Brazil’s fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro and the growth of poverty, unemployment and social inequality resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic policies of the country’s ruling class.

The country has so far seen the second worst death toll in the world—trailing only the United States—with 525,000 COVID-19 fatalities. Daily deaths remain at 2,000. A slow vaccination rollout, with only 14 percent of the population fully immunized, the reopening of schools and the circulation of the Delta variant mean the country is now facing a third surge of the virus. Experts predict that the death toll may yet double before immunization reaches the bulk of the population.

The wide participation in the demonstrations has thrown the Brazilian ruling class into a deep crisis. This Saturday’s marches had been moved up from their original planned date of July 24 as their organizers, led by the Workers Party (PT), scramble to avoid the recent outpouring of opposition provoking an upsurge in the class struggle.

People march in a protest against the government's response in combating COVID-19, demanding the impeachment of President Jair Bolsonaro, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Saturday, May 29, 2021. (AP Photo/Bruna Prado)

The PT, its affiliated unions and allies in the pseudo-left tried to turn the demonstrations into a means of pressuring House Speaker Arthur Lira, a close ally of Bolsonaro elected with support of PT deputies, into accepting a new “super” impeachment petition presented on Wednesday with the support of extreme right-wing former Bolsonaro supporters.

It lists 23 impeachable offenses committed by Bolsonaro previously included separately in another 120 former petitions thus far ignored by the speaker. Organizers themselves admit that there is nothing new listed in the new petition, and that the most significant new development is the cobbling together of an alliance between the PT, the unions, the pseudo-left and the far-right.

Among the reactionary forces the PT and its allies are attempting to rehabilitate with its impeachment petition against Bolsonaro are dissident wings of the party that elected him, the Social Liberal Party (PSL) represented by the government’s former House leader Joice Hasselmann and the Koch brother stooges of the Free Brazil Movement (MBL), which spearheaded the ultra-right demonstrations of 2015 and 2016 against the PT’s former president Dilma Rousseff.

The right-wing, pro-capitalist character of the petition is made clear from the outset. The list of 23 crimes starts with “putting at risk the country’s neutrality,” a message for giant foreign trade lobbies worried about Bolsonaro’s offensive against China, which included attempts to ban Huawei from the country’s multibillion-dollar 5G market and his enthusiastic promotion of the “Wuhan lab leak” lie.

When the COVID-19 pandemic is referred to, it is mentioned under “crimes against the internal security” of Brazil, an essentially right-wing framework that sees mass death and sickness above all as a threat to the stability of Brazilian capitalism.

Accordingly, the new demonstrations saw banners of the PSL and the PSDB, the traditional party of the Brazilian right, as well as MBL leaders encouraging their supporters to attend. In Rio de Janeiro, state Congress minority leader Marcelo Freixo wore a green-and-yellow t-shirt, proclaiming that demonstrators had to “reclaim the national colors” from the fascists. This was also the motto of the speech given by Guilherme Boulos of the pseudo-left Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL) in São Paulo, where almost one kilometer of the iconic Paulista Avenue was filled with demonstrators.

Organizers of the “super” impeachment petition admit that its political impulse is drawn from recent revelations of corruption in the negotiations for COVID-19 vaccines, which have left former Bolsonaro loyalists in Congress in disarray.

The charlatan Guilherme Boulos, who is always among the first to articulate a convenient pretext for an alliance with the ultra-right, claimed on the day of the protests that the “corruption cases bring a real possibility of impeachment because they create a crisis in Bolsonaro’s own political base.” In the same fashion, Workers Party president Gleisi Hoffmann claimed the presence of the PSDB in the demonstrations “meant the movement for the impeachment is growing.”

The multimillion-dollar corruption scandal surfaced in late June, when the bulk of the petition had already been written and was being prepared for a ceremonial delivery to the House on July 24.

It was exposed when Deputy Luis Miranda of the ultra-right Democrats (DEM) party told the press on June 23 that he had personally warned the president about pressures being made on his brother, a civil servant who headed the Health Ministry’s Imports Department, to ignore a number of irregularities in a deal with the makers of the Indian Covaxin vaccine.

Miranda declared that facts he knew would “bring down the Republic.” He and his brother were immediately summoned to testify before the Senate’s Commission of Inquiry (CPI) into the pandemic, installed at the behest of the opposition. On the day of his testimony, Miranda staged a stunt, wearing a bulletproof vest over his jacket. He accused the government leader in the House, Ricardo Barros, of leading a corruption scheme, and a lobbyist connected to him of offering him six cents on every dollar of the US$320 million deal to stay quiet. He claimed to have warned Bolsonaro about the corruption, and that Bolsonaro told him he knew the schemes were sponsored by Barros. Further charges would be made that other men connected to Barros within the ministry had demanded one dollar in kickbacks for every AstraZeneca dose in another deal.

It is still not clear what motivated Miranda, a former Bolsonaro enthusiast, to expose information he claimed could “bring down the Republic.” However, the case reveals the extent of the crisis engulfing the Brazilian ruling class.

Miranda now joins a host of ultra-right figures opposing Bolsonaro who are being offered “democratic” credentials by the PT and the pseudo-left. Among them, there are a number of dissident generals, the most prominent of which is Bolsonaro’s former government secretary, Carlos Alberto dos Santos Cruz, who has made repeated warnings that Bolsonaro will follow the example of Donald Trump and provoke violence in an attempt to overturn a possible defeat in the 2022 elections.

The aim of this “broad front” against Bolsonaro is to convince Brazilian workers that the rise of Bolsonaro and the reemergence at the center of political life of the Armed Forces, which imposed a two-decade dictatorship ending in 1985, is a historical aberration. Life can return to normal, they claim, if only Bolsonaro is ousted by his former political sponsors, and they ally themselves with the PT.

The corruption charges have served a larger political goal: that of eclipsing Bolsonaro’s “herd immunity” policy, both in the CPI’s probe and in the wider public debate. The demands of the protest organizers, for vaccinations, poverty relief schemes and impeachment, accept the 2,000 daily COVID-19 deaths as inevitable, as vaccines are not available. They also propose no attempt to contain the pandemic. As WHO officials and health experts internationally have warned, and recent experience of countries with much higher vaccinations rates, such as Britain, Israel, Chile and the United States, have demonstrated, vaccinations alone cannot control the spread of the virus.

But a direct indictment of Bolsonaro’s herd immunity policy would expose the demonstrations’ organizers themselves, as all the Socialist, Social-Democratic, Communist and Workers Party governors they support, in collaboration with the unions they control, have pushed teachers, along with healthcare, transport, oil and factory workers, back into unsafe workplaces in state after state, company after company, regardless of infection rates.

The invaluable testimony by a host of leading scientists before the CPI, detailing with a number of complex models how hundreds of thousands of deaths could have been avoided with lockdowns and contact tracing, is discarded by framing the principal charge against Bolsonaro as corruption.

Not only are state governors and mayors let off the hook, but the much more powerful pandemic profiteers who made billions on the stock markets with the “quantitative easing” policies of central banks the world over, and the billionaire stockholders of giant corporations profiting from deadly working conditions are all spared. The corrupt Bolsonaro and his mobster House leader are treated as an “accident of history,” as put by numerous PT allies, from the pseudo-left’s standard-bearer Marcelo Freixo to former right-wing Speaker Rodrigo Maia.

The CPI’s rapporteur, Senator Randolfe Rodrigues, summed up the Covaxin scandal as revealing that Bolsonaro’s handling of the pandemic was, ultimately, “not ideological, but the same old corruption.” In other words, the herd immunity policy was not an expression of the capitalist crisis and warrants nothing more than a call to the police. “It was not denialism, it was corruption” became one of the main slogans on posters distributed to demonstrators on Saturday.

Brazilian workers must firmly reject the attempt to channel their struggles behind dissident factions of the ruling class. Bolsonaro is responding to the growth of social opposition with the preparation of an electoral coup based on false claims that the Brazilian electoral system is fraudulent. On Thursday, after meeting CIA director Willian Burns in the presidential palace, he claimed that unnamed “foreign powers” were behind plans to destabilize Brazil, an echo of the Cold War pretexts for the CIA-backed coup of 1964.

Chinese president’s speech to mark CCP centenary: A litany of lies

Peter Symonds

Last week’s speech by Chinese President Xi Jinping to mark the official centenary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was a self-serving litany of lies and propaganda aimed at shoring up the CCP regime and his position as its “core” in particular.

The central focus of the speech was Xi’s “Dream” of the “rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” and his roadmap to transform China into a major power on the international stage. He declared that his “goal of building a moderately prosperous society” by the CCP’s centenary had been achieved and boasted the regime had eliminated “absolute poverty” in China.

Although China’s economic expansion, boosted by the influx of foreign investment over the past three decades, has lifted living standards, it has also greatly widened the gulf between the super-rich and the majority of working people. The claim that China has abolished “absolute poverty” is based on a very austere poverty line and dubious statistics. Significantly, Premier Li Keqiang stated last year that China still had 600 million people whose monthly income was barely 1,000 yuan ($US54)—not enough to rent a room in a city.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, rear, gestures as he delivers a speech at a ceremony to mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of the ruling Chinese Communist Party at Tiananmen Gate in Beijing Thursday, July 1, 2021. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

Xi’s second centenary goal is to build China into “a great modern socialist country in all respects” by 2049—that is, 100 years since the 1949 revolution put the CCP in power. The claim that China today is socialist in any respect is an absurdity that is belied by the dominance of the capitalist market in every area of the economy and society following the CCP’s turn to capitalist restoration in 1978.

That Xi is compelled to repeat the bald-faced lies that he presides over “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and that the CCP remains a Marxist and socialist party is testimony to the continuing identification of the Chinese masses with the gains of the 1949 revolution. That revolutionary upheaval throughout China overturned the reactionary Kuomintang regime of Chiang Kai-shek, ended the imperialist domination of China, and abolished much that was socially and culturally backward.

However, the 1949 revolution—which was part of the international post-World War II revolutionary upsurge that was betrayed and defeated in country after country by Stalinism—is a highly contradictory phenomenon. The Stalinist CCP under Mao Zedong based itself on peasant armies and deliberately constrained the widespread struggles of the working class. It sought to construct a New China that maintained capitalist property relations but was compelled to go further than it intended—by 1955 nationalising the means of production and implementing bureaucratic state planning. The working class, however, had no political voice.

Significantly, Xi devoted very little time in his speech to the history of the party, presenting it as one glorious, uninterrupted advance for the “Chinese nation.” He made no mention of the devastating defeat of the Second Chinese Revolution (1925–27) at the hands of Stalin, nor the bitter internal struggles in the 1950s and 1960s fuelled by the colossal failure of Mao’s Great Leap Forward and his disastrous Cultural Revolution that brought the country to the brink of collapse.

Xi declared: “All the struggle, sacrifice, and creation through which the Party has united and led the Chinese people over the past hundred years has been tied together by one ultimate theme—bringing about the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” In reality, the CCP’s abandonment of the perspective of socialist internationalism and its embrace of the reactionary Stalinist conception of “Socialism in One Country” led China into an economic and strategic dead-end by the 1970s and resulted in the CCP’s turn to capitalist restoration.

At the start of the 20th century, the Chinese nationalism that underpinned the struggles against imperialism and to unify the nation had a certain progressive content. The CCP, however, was not founded on nationalism but rather, in response to the October 1917 Russian Revolution, the understanding that national democratic tasks could be realised only as part of the struggle by the international working class for socialism.

Today, the whipping up of Chinese nationalism by Xi and the CCP is utterly reactionary. It is not only devoid of any anti-imperialist content but rather represents the ambitions of the wealthy elites, which have profited from decades of capitalist restoration at the expense of the working class, for a prominent place within the world capitalist order.

Xi’s “Dream” has come into collision with the determination of US imperialism to prevent China from becoming a challenge to the “international rules-based system” that the US dominates. President Biden, following on from Trump and Obama, is accelerating the aggressive US confrontation and military build-up throughout Asia and internationally to block China’s further rise through all means, including war.

The CCP has no progressive answer to these mounting threats. While not referring in his speech to the US, Xi praised the Chinese military and blustered that China was “not intimidated by threats of force… we will never allow any foreign force to bully, oppress, or subjugate us. Anyone who would attempt to do so will find themselves on a collision course with a great wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people.”

At the same time as warning of a catastrophic war between nuclear-armed powers, Xi pleaded for peaceful coexistence, declaring: “On the journey ahead, we will remain committed to promoting peace, development, cooperation, and mutual benefit, to an independent foreign policy of peace, and to the path of peaceful development.” The CCP regime has repeatedly sought to cut a deal with US imperialism, offering a further opening up of the Chinese economy and exploitation of the working class.

Commenting on Xi’s speech, the state-run China Daily noted the positive response of corporate leaders, both in China and internationally. It declared that Xi’s “emphasis on China pursuing peaceful development, as well as its resolve to promote high-quality growth and to further deepen reform and opening-up has further boosted confidence in the world’s second-largest economy.”

The turn to capitalist restoration has only deepened the contradictions confronting the Chinese leadership, externally and internally. Rival sections of the capitalist class find their expression inside the CCP in the jockeying of factions for power, privileges and influence. More fundamentally, the deepening social divide is generating extreme class tensions, for which the CCP has only one answer—police-state measures against any, even limited, form of opposition.

In the midst of this worsening historic crisis, Xi has been pushed to the fore as a Bonapartist figure attempting to mediate and balance between competing interests. He has ended the customary limit of two five-year terms on the position of CCP general secretary, possibly allowing him to remain as president indefinitely. In his speech, he repeated what has become mandatory for all officials that “we must uphold the core position of the General Secretary [namely Xi] on the Party Central Committee and in the Party as a whole.”

Xi threateningly declared: “Any attempt to divide the Party from the Chinese people or to set the people against the Party is bound to fail.” The carefully-cultivated appearance of strength that surrounds Xi and the papering over of inner-party divisions is in reality a reflection of the weakness of the CCP rule. Broad layers of the population regard the CCP’s claims to represent socialism as ridiculous and are disgusted by the rampant corruption of party officials, who cash in on their powerful positions to foster their business interests.

The extraordinary efforts of the CCP to mark the centenary of its founding are an attempt to bury the real history of the party under a deluge of historical falsification and lies. Xi and the CCP leadership recognise that any questioning of the party’s role over the past 100 years will only further fuel political opposition.

Morland African Writing Scholarship 2021

Application Deadline: 18th September, 2021

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: The Scholarships are open to anyone writing in the English language who was born in an African country or both of whose parents were born in Africa.

To be taken at (country): Candidate’s home country

Eligible Works: The Scholarships are meant for full length works of adult fiction or non-fiction. Poetry, plays, film scripts, children’s books, and short story collections do not qualify.

About the Award: It can be difficult for writers, before they become established, to write while simultaneously earning a living. To help meet this need the MMF annually awards a small number of Morland Writing Scholarships, with the aim being to allow each Scholar the time to produce the first draft of a completed book. 

At the end of each month scholars must send the Foundation 10,000 new words that they will have written over the course of the month. Scholars are also asked to donate to the MMF 20% of whatever they subsequently receive from what they write during the period of their Scholarship. This includes revenues as a result of film rights, serialisations or other ancillary revenues arising from the book written during the Scholarship period. These funds will be used to support other promising writers. The 20% return obligation should be considered a debt of honour rather than a legally binding obligation.

The Foundation will not review or comment on the monthly submissions as they come in. However, each Scholar will be offered the opportunity to be mentored by an established author or publisher. In most cases the mentorship will begin after the book has been finished and the Scholarship period has ended. At the discretion of the Foundation, the cost of the mentorship will be borne by the MMF. It is not the intention of the MMF to act as editor or a publisher. Scholars will need to find their own agents and publishers although the MMF is happy to offer advice.

Type: Contest

Eligibility: The only condition imposed on the Scholars during the year of their Scholarship is that they must write. They will be asked to submit by e-mail at least 10,000 new words every month until they have finished their book or their Scholarship term has ended. If the first draft of the book is completed before the year is up, payments will continue while the Scholar edits and refines their work. 

Number of Awardees: Not specified

Value of Scholarship: Scholars writing fiction will receive a grant of £18,000, paid monthly over the course of twelve months. At the discretion of the Foundation, Scholars writing non-fiction may receive a grant of up to £27,000, paid over a period  of up to eighteen months.

Duration of Scholarship: The Scholars may elect to start at any time between January and June in the year following the Scholarship Award. Their payments and the 10,000 word monthly submission requirement will start at the same time. The Foundation may exercise its discretion to offer non-fiction writers a longer Scholarship period of up to 18 months.

How to Apply: To qualify for the Scholarship a candidate must submit an excerpt from a piece of work of between 2,000 – 5,000 words written in English that has been published and offered for sale,. This will be evaluated by a panel of readers and judges set up by the MMF. The work submitted will be judged purely on literary merit. It is not the purpose of the Scholarships to support academic or scientific research, or works of special interest such as religious or political writings. Submissions or proposals of this nature do not qualify.

They should be sent by e-mail to scholarships@milesmorlandfoundation.com Please do not submit anything in hard copy or by terrestrial post.

Visit Scholarship Webpage for details

TWAS-DBT Postgraduate Research Fellowship 2021/2022

Application Deadline: 20th September 2021

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: Developing Countries

To be taken at (country): Applicants may be registered for a PhD degree in their home country, or may enroll in a PhD course at a host laboratory/institute in India.

Fields of Research: 

01-Agricultural Sciences
02-Structural, Cell and Molecular Biology
03-Biological Systems and Organisms
04-Medical and Health Sciences incl. Neurosciences
05-Chemical Sciences

Eligibility: Applicants for these fellowships must meet the following criteria:

• Be a maximum age of 35 years on 31 December of the application year.
• Be nationals of a developing country (other than India).
• Must not hold any visa for temporary or permanent residency in India or any developed country.
• Hold a Master’s or equivalent degree in science or engineering.
• For SANDWICH Fellowships, be registered PhD students in their home country and provide the “Registration and No Objection Certificate” from the HOME university (sample is included in the application form); OR
• For FULL-TIME Fellowships; be willing to register at a university in India.
• Be accepted at a biotechnology institution in India (see sample Acceptance Letter included in the application form). N.B. Requests for acceptance must be directed to the chosen host institution(s), and NOT to DBT.
• Provide evidence of proficiency in English, if medium of education was not English;
• Provide evidence that s/he will return to her/his home country on completion of the fellowship;
• Not take up other assignments during the period of her/his fellowship;
• Be financially responsible for any accompanying family members.

Number of scholarship: Several

Value of Scholarship: DBT will provide a monthly stipend to cover for living costs, food and health insurance. The monthly stipend will not be convertible into foreign currency. In addition, the fellowship holder will receive a house rent allowance.

Duration of Award: Up to five years.

• SANDWICH Fellowships (for those registered for a PhD in their home country): The Fellowship may be granted for a minimum period of 12 months and a maximum period of 2 years.
• FULL-TIME Fellowships (for those not registered for a PhD): The Fellowship is granted for an initial period of up to 3 years.  Such Fellowships may then be extended for a further 2 years, subject to the student’s performance.  Candidates will register for their PhD at a university in India. DBT will confirm any such extensions to both TWAS and the candidate.

How to Apply:

• Before applying it is recommended that applicants read very carefully the application guidelines for detailed information on eligibility criteria, and other key requirements of the application procedure.
• Applications for the TWAS-DBT Postgraduate Fellowship Programme can ONLY be submitted to TWAS via the online portal and copy of the submitted application must be sent to DBT by email.

Apply Here

Visit Scholarship webpage for Details

Assange turns 50 in Belmarsh prison, his life still under threat

Thomas Scripps

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange turns 50 today. It is an occasion to record the enormous suffering that has been inflicted on the heroic journalist by the imperialist powers, in retaliation for his exposure of their war crimes and human rights abuses.

Julian Assange in Belmarsh Prison in 2019

Assange has now spent more than one fifth of his life facing persecution by the US state and his allies, starting with the freezing of his account by Swiss bank PostFinance and the launching of a bogus sexual assault investigation by Sweden in November-December 2010. He lost seven years from June 2012 trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and has been incarcerated for more than two years in Belmarsh maximum security prison.

During this time, he has missed the birth and early lives of two sons and been kept separate from his partner of six years, and fiancée of four, Stella Moris. Prevented from travelling, and denied the most basic means of communication, Assange has had his globally significant work as a journalist brought to a halt. He has been denied the opportunity to defend himself against a relentless campaign of slander and abuse.

The effects on Assange personally have been devastating, described by UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer and campaign group Doctors for Assange as psychological torture. His UK extradition judge was forced to acknowledge that he had suffered severe depression and is at serious risk of suicide.

Far worse is planned. Assange is fighting extradition to the US where he faces charges under the Espionage Act with a possible life sentence. Assange would then be imprisoned in conditions “not built for humanity”, in the words of two former US prison wardens who testified at his trial, subjected to an effective living death—in close to continuous solitary confinement and denied almost all contact with the outside world.

There is no indication that this vicious persecution will cease. A highly calculated ruling by District Judge Vanessa Baraitser in January that Assange could not be extradited to the US on mental health grounds has not changed his conditions one iota. He remains held on remand in Belmarsh and the US Department of Justice has signaled its determination to pursue the case, even as the pack of lies it has assembled against Assange collapses .

No information has been released about the status of the US government’s appeal of Baraitser’s decision, or the counter appeal by Assange’s defence team. It remains unclear when these appeals would be heard, leaving the WikiLeaks founder in a legal limbo. The deciding High Court goes into recess at the end of July, not returning until October.

What is certain is that the ruling class still intend to make an example of Assange, whose work with WikiLeaks did them immense political damage and contributed to an upsurge of anti-imperialist sentiment across the world. WikiLeaks uncovered tens of thousands of unrecorded civilian casualties and the use of death squads and torture during the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. The organisation exposed US support for military coups and brutally repressive regimes, its rendition of innocents and minors to Guantanamo Bay and published the infamous “Collateral Murder” video.

Former CIA director then secretary for defence under Obama, Leon Panetta, summarised the American government’s response: “All you can do is hope that you can ultimately take action against those that were involved in revealing that information so you can send a message to others not to do the same thing.”

Besides the destruction of Assange’s health and denial of his freedom, his pursuit has set chilling precedents which tear to shreds legal and democratic rights. His extradition case has been characterised by the routine abuse of due process, including denying him proper access to his lawyers and key documents and the 11th hour introduction of a new indictment. He and his legal team have been subjected to surveillance by the American state, while plans have been exposed to kidnap and even assassinate him. The charges against him criminalise basic journalistic practice, placing it under the Espionage and Official Secrets Acts.

Every step of this pseudo-legal witch-hunt has been upheld by the British courts. It has proceeded with only the faintest of murmurs in the liberal media and official “left” politics. Any past commitment to democratic rights in these layers has so thoroughly collapsed that they have been able to cough up just a handful of articles and parliamentarians, offering even the most tokenistic support for Assange.

Despite the persistent efforts of the official Don’t Extradite Assange (DEA) campaign to curry favour in these circles, the sum total of their endeavours in the UK is a motley cross-party crew of 24 parliamentarians. The presence of Conservative MP David Davis in this group confirms its utterly toothless character. This right-wing backer of Boris Johnson feels perfectly at ease playing at supporting democratic rights in the company of Labour “lefts” Jeremy Corbyn, Richard Burgon and John McDonnell, who have proven themselves utterly harmless to the British state and its interests.

The 24 do not even feign confidence in their ability to set Assange free, or to build a movement which could. Instead, they have directed their attention to issuing humble appeals to Assange’s chief persecutors. On June 11, they signed an open letter to US President Joe Biden congratulating him on his election and concluding, “We appeal to you to drop this prosecution, an act that would be a clarion call for freedom that would echo around the globe.” The letter reads, “You, like us, must have been disappointed your predecessor launched a prosecution carrying a 175-year sentence against a globally renowned publisher”.

This is said of the man who labelled Assange a “high-tech terrorist” and who has seamlessly continued the Trump administration’s case against the WikiLeaks founder, as part and parcel of America’s intensifying war drive.

As far as the DEA carries out an international campaign, it is to set up similar groups of politically disparate figures in different parliaments around the world making the same lame appeals. On Thursday, an open letter signed by members of the German Bundestag representing the Left Party, the Free Democratic Party, the Greens and the ruling Christian Democratic Union and Social Democratic parties called on Chancellor Angela Merkel “to urgently advocate, during her forthcoming visit to Washington to meet with US President Biden, an end to the persecution of Julian Assange.”

None of this is politically serious or credible. Assange will not be freed by appeals to the conscience of the ruling class. The fight for his freedom depends on the mobilisation of a mass social force in defence of democratic rights and against war, the international working class, who must be alerted to Assange’s plight and organised in his defence.

German militarism and the war in Afghanistan

Peter Schwarz

On Wednesday, the last German soldiers flew out of Afghanistan. This marked the end of the biggest and longest deployment of the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) to date.

Bundeswehr soldiers from Camp Marmal on patrol (Image: ISAF / CC BY-SA 2.0)

At 20 years, it lasted more than three times as long as the Second World War. More than 150,000 German military personnel experienced their first war deployment. Fifty-nine died, thousands more were injured and traumatised. The military costs alone amounted to 12 billion euros.

In its final phase, the withdrawal resembled a desperate scramble. It came after US forces began withdrawing the bulk of their troops well before the 11 September deadline set by President Biden. The last German transport planes left Camp Marmal, their transponders switched off for fear of being shot down by the Taliban.

Observers expect the fundamentalist Islamist movement, which was ousted from power at the beginning of the war, to retake the nearby city of Mazar-e-Sharif and large parts of the country in the coming weeks. This has led to numerous German media outlets writing about a “failed mission” and a “defeat of the West.” But this is only half the truth.

For one thing, the war in Afghanistan is far from over with the official withdrawal of NATO troops. Neither Washington nor Berlin is willing to let Iran, Russia, China or any other rival exert influence over the strategically important country.

Military “advisors” and private mercenaries will stay behind. Regional allies of the “West”—Turkey, but also Pakistan, the Taliban’s protecting power—will be encouraged to keep the conflict simmering. US drones and aircraft will bomb the country, as has long been the case with other countries with which the US is not formally in a state of war (Yemen, Iraq, Syria).

German Defence Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer has announced, “When we leave the country militarily, we must continue to stay by Afghanistan’s side, for example by talking within NATO about how we can continue to support the Afghan army.”

Washington and Berlin did not succeed in installing a stable puppet regime in Kabul, as they had originally intended. But from the German point of view, the war served a far more important purpose: it paved the way for the return of German militarism, hated by broad sections of the population after the crimes of Hitler’s Wehrmacht in the Second World War. For the ruling class, this was more than worth the high human and financial sacrifice.

In 2001, the government of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (Social Democratic Party—SPD) and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer (Green Party) had literally forced German participation in the war on the US government. At a press conference, then-US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld later confirmed that Berlin had never been asked to provide soldiers, as the German government had claimed.

President George W. Bush used the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 to implement war plans against Afghanistan that had long been worked out. As the WSWS warned just a few days after the attacks:

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have been seized on as an opportunity to implement a far-reaching political agenda for which the most right-wing elements in the ruling elite have been clamoring for years…

Can there be any doubt that this crusade for “peace” and “stability” will become the occasion for the US to tighten its grip over the oil and natural gas resources of the Middle East, the Persian Gulf and the Caspian? Behind the pious and patriotic declarations of politicians and media commentators stand the long-cherished designs of American imperialism to dominate new parts of the world and establish global hegemony.

 

German imperialism did not want to be left out of this war for the re-division of the world. On 11 October 2001, four days after the start of American hostilities in Afghanistan, Chancellor Schröder announced a fundamental reorientation of German foreign policy to the Bundestag (federal parliament).

“After the end of the Cold War, the restoration of Germany’s state unity and the regaining of our full sovereignty, we have to face international responsibility in a new way,” he declared. “A responsibility that corresponds to our role as an important European and transatlantic partner, but also as a strong democracy and strong national economy in the heart of Europe.”

The period in which Germany had participated in “international efforts to secure freedom, justice and stability” only through “secondary assistance” was “irretrievably over,” the chancellor stressed. “We Germans in particular… now also have an obligation to do full justice to our new responsibility. That also includes—and I say this quite unequivocally—explicitly participating in military operations.”

One month later, the Bundestag decided to provide 3,900 Bundeswehr soldiers for the fight “against international terrorism.” Schröder linked the vote to a vote of confidence—a highly unusual procedure,especially since, due to the support of the CDU/CSU and FDP, a majority would have been guaranteed even should there be defections from within his own camp. But Schröder wanted to make sure that the SPD and the Greens would vote unanimously in favour of Germany’s largest military deployment since the Second World War. Foreign Minister Fischer threatened to resign if the Green parliamentary group turned against the Afghanistan mission.

The threats proved to be superfluous. An SPD party conference three days later approved the war policy by a 90 percent vote. At the federal party conference of the Greens, more than two-thirds of the delegates backed the decision to go to war.

Since then, more than 150,000 servicemen and women have received their baptism of fire in Afghanistan. They had to learn to risk their lives and kill in the interests of German imperialism. The statement by Defence Minister Peter Struck (SPD) at the beginning of the war that the “security of the Federal Republic of Germany” was being defended in the Hindu Kush summed this up.

In addition, it was necessary to accustom the public to the fact that German soldiers were killing again. The outcome was the Kunduz massacre.

On the night of 4 September 2009, Bundeswehr Colonel Georg Klein, in consultation with his superiors in Potsdam, gave the order to bomb a hijacked tanker truck filled with petrol. Although the truck was stuck in a riverbed and posed no danger, Klein refused the American pilots’ request that they be allowed to warn the many people around the truck of the attack. As a result, over 130 civilians, including many children and young people, met their deaths in a hail of bombs and the ensuing conflagration.

Neither Klein nor any other officers were prosecuted for the massacre. The Office of the Attorney General closed all investigations in 2010. In 2013, Klein was promoted to brigadier general and head of the department in personnel management, responsible for recruiting and leading soldiers. The relatives of the victims were fobbed off by the federal government with pittances of 5,000 euros. Lawsuits were rejected by the courts.

Militarism at home, which played such a devastating role in the Weimar Republic in the 1920s and 30s, was strengthened by the Afghanistan war. Soldiers became a commonplace sight on the streets. They were allowed to travel by train for free if they wore their uniforms. This was expanded to the development of a cult of sacrifice and the establishment of fascist and terrorist networks within the military.

The conservative press is even trying once again to create a kind of “stab-in-the-back” legend, following the example of the myth promoted by Hitler about the “traitorous” Weimar Republic. The tabloid Bild, for example, was outraged that Federal President Steinmeier, Bundestag President Schäuble, Chancellor Merkel and Defence Minister Kramp-Karrenbauer did not personally stand guard when the last soldiers returned from Afghanistan. This was “disrespectful, undignified, disrespectful.”

While hundreds of Afghan translators and civilian staff of the German troops were left behind, and now fear for their lives, at great expense the Bundeswehr flew out a 27-ton memorial stone for the fallen soldiers, which is now being rebuilt in a “forest of remembrance” at the Henning-von-Tresckow barracks in Schwielowsee. This was “an important step for the culture of remembrance of the armed forces,” commented an officer in charge.

Most significant of all, the extensive right-wing terrorist networks within the military and state apparatus are inextricably linked to the Afghanistan mission. For example, Sergeant Major André S., alias Hannibal, was a member for eight years of the Special Forces Command (KSK), which operated largely covertly in Afghanistan, hunting down and killing political opponents together with American Special Forces troops and itself suffering heavy casualties.

Hannibal, who also worked for the Military Counter-Intelligence Service, built up a nationwide network through several online chat groups and the association he founded, Uniter, which included reservists, officers of the criminal police, members of special operations units (SEKs), judges, secret service employees and members of other German security agencies. It set up weapons caches, organised shooting exercises, and drew up lists of political enemies to be killed on “Day X.” Despite this, Hannibal was neither dismissed from the Bundeswehr nor imprisoned.

Hannibal is only one of several known right-wing extremists within the KSK. The Nazi cult within the special unit took on such serious forms that in 2020 the defence minister felt compelled to dissolve one of four companies and replace the commander twice. Now, the unit is led by General Ansgar Meyer, who was the last German soldier to leave Afghanistan.

All the establishment political parties are determined to build on what has been achieved in Afghanistan. In 2014, the Grand Coalition of the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats made another attempt to strengthen German militarism. Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who, as head of the Chancellery, had presumably written Schröder’s war speech in 2001, announced in almost the same words a greater military role for Germany in world politics. Since then, military spending has risen massively—from 32 to 50 billion euros—and Steinmeier has become federal president.

If the establishment parties have learned a lesson from the Afghanistan deployment, it is that imperialist military missions should no longer be concealed with hypocritical phrases about drilling wells, building democracy and women’s rights.

On Wednesday’s “Tagesthemen” news broadcast, Defence Minister Kramp-Karrenbauer drew the lesson from the Afghanistan mission that in other international missions it was necessary to think very carefully about what were realistic political goals. It had been a mistake to give the impression that Afghanistan could quickly be turned into a state following the European model. “We must not repeat this mistake in other international missions, for example in the Sahel, for example in Mali.”

The federal government that follows this year’s general election—regardless of its composition—will intensify the militarist offensive. All parties—from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) to the Greens—have made this clear in their election programmes. Even the Left Party has repeatedly declared that its occasional critical phrases about the Bundeswehr are no obstacle to forming a joint government with the parties of war—the SPD and the Greens.

Their defence policy spokesman, Tobias Pflüger, commented on the Afghanistan withdrawal by saying, “If you read through the justifications given by Gerhard Schröder and Joschka Fischer in 2001, it is obvious that the Bundeswehr missions have not achieved their alleged goal.”

As if it was not already clear at that time what goal Schröder and Fischer were pursuing with the Afghanistan war.

Ultimately, it is the insoluble global crisis of capitalism that is driving the imperialist powers once again to militarism and war, as in 1914 and 1939. The US is intensively preparing a military confrontation with China, and neither Germany nor the other European powers want to stand aside.