Far-right and Stalinists maneuver in Philippine presidential election

John Malvar

Political jostling and maneuvering are at a fever pitch in the Philippines, as the November 15 deadline for withdrawals and substitutions of candidates in the 2022 presidential election approaches. Campaigns are being run by a collection of scoundrels and reactionaries in what is proving to be the most right-wing election in the country’s history. All of the various Stalinist and pseudo-left organizations have thrown themselves into the mix, adapting to the general atmosphere of reaction.

The current front-runner in early polling is Ferdinand Marcos Jr., son of the former dictator who ruled the country in a brutal martial law regime in the 1970s and early 1980s. Marcos represents an explicit continuation and escalation of the repressive policies of the outgoing administration of Rodrigo Duterte.

Former senator Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. speaks to reporters after filing his certificate of candidacy for next year's presidential elections in Manila, Philippines Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2021 [Credit: Rouelle Umali/Pool Photo via AP]

He has launched a well-funded campaign of disinformation in both mainstream and social media aimed at rehabilitating the martial law period of his parents’ rule. Armies of online trolls churn out lies on a daily basis depicting the Marcos regime as a “golden era” in Philippine history. Next year 2022 marks the 50th anniversary of the imposition of martial law. Marcos Jr has declared that he will overhaul the country’s textbooks on the dictatorship if he is elected.

Marcos continues the policies of the current Duterte administration in another respect. Over the course of his presidency, Duterte dramatically reoriented Philippine diplomatic and economic ties away from Washington and toward Beijing. In an interview with ABS-CBN, Marcos declared that he intended to continue Duterte’s China policy.

Over the weekend, Marcos met with possible presidential candidate Sarah Duterte-Carpio, daughter of President Duterte, in Cebu City. They spoke extensively and posed for photographs flashing the V for victory gesture of the Marcos’ campaign and the extended fist salute of Duterte.

Duterte-Carpio told the media that their meeting was held to discuss how Davao, the city where she is mayor, could best support the Marcos campaign. It is widely speculated, however, that the possibility of a tandem campaign—in which one would run for president, the other vice president—was being discussed.

The degree of criminality and murder represented by the social forces around these two campaigns, as they smiled and posed for the press, is perhaps without precedent in this country’s bloody history. A formal alliance between the camps of Duterte and Marcos is highly plausible, but it is also possible that Duterte-Carpio is contemplating a separate bid for president.

Senator Ronald dela Rosa, who is currently the presidential candidate of President Duterte’s PDP-Laban party, is widely speculated to be a placeholder for Duterte-Carpio. Dela Rosa has repeatedly declared that he is ready to drop out and offer her his slot if Duterte-Carpio decided to run for president.

Duterte-Carpio is currently running for re-election in the southern city of Davao, where she succeeded her father as mayor. Dela Rosa met privately with Duterte-Carpio on Monday at Davao City Hall. Asked afterwards about the substance of their meeting, dela Rosa responded, “I just reminded her that November 15 is fast approaching.”

A critical consideration of the dela Rosa campaign is to protect himself and the outgoing administration from charges now being raised in the International Criminal Court (ICC) of crimes against humanity for the brutal conduct of its “war on drugs.”

Dela Rosa, as head of the Philippine National Police (PNP), was the architect and implementer of the Duterte administration’s strategy of state sanctioned mass murder. Official police data report over 6,100 “suspects” were killed by the police in the past five years. If one includes those killed by paramilitary death squads overseen and often paid by the police, the death toll is over 30,000.

President Duterte, speaking to his anti-Communist taskforce, a formal government body, declared that dela Rosa was “getting nervous… I told him not to worry.” Dela Rosa told ABS-CBN news in a recent interview that “he will move to protect President Duterte and himself from the investigation by the ICC if elected president.”

In the three weeks that remain before the November 15 deadline, it is expected that campaigns will merge, candidates drop out and take up new positions. With an eye to not being left out of the spoils, most of the various candidates for the senate are simultaneous running on multiple slates.

The leading candidate of the bourgeois opposition to Duterte is Liberal Party head and current Vice President Leni Robredo. Her senatorial slate reveals the right-wing character of her election campaign. Among her senatorial candidates is Antonio Trillanes of the far-right Magdalo party, who was responsible for multiple military coup attempts in the past two decades.

The names on Robredo’s slate include known scoundrels of long-standing: Richard Gordon, Miguel Zubiri, Francis Escudero, and Joel Villanueva, the corrupt son of a televangelist—members of the landed elite, former Duterte supporters, and proponents of lowering the age of criminality.

Some of the members of Robredo’s slate are also running as candidates on the slate of Panfilo Lacson, a candidate known for being the head of the Marcos dictatorship’s torture apparatus. Two of her candidates, Zubiri and Binay, are running on three slates—Robredo, Lacson and Manny Pacquiao, the boxer and, until recently, key ally of Duterte.

Robredo announced that she was keeping the final, twelfth senatorial slot open to a candidate who “represented the marginalized sector.” All of the various “left” groupings—Makabayan [Nationalist] and Laban ng Masa [Fight of the masses] in particular—publicly stumbled over themselves to secure this slot.

In the end, Robredo selected Sonny Matula, president of the trade union umbrella group, Federation of Free Workers (FFW). The FFW is a right-wing organization, founded on anticommunism. It served as a source of unionized scab labor during major labor conflicts in the 1960s.

In 2016, the FFW staged an event to host Marcos Jr. during his run for vice president, giving him the stage to promote his campaign to the union membership. Matula issued a statement that “First of all, [Marcos] fights for the security of tenure of workers in the Philippines.”

Makabayan and the various other political organizations that share the Stalinist political line of the CPP failed to secure a slot on Robredo’s slate, despite a mass campaign demanding that their front-runner, Neri Colmenares, to be included.

Unwilling to even posture as an independent candidate, Colmenares told the press that “he is not ruling out the possibility of working with Vice President Leni Robredo despite his exclusion from her senatorial line-up for the 2022 elections.” Colmenares stressed that they had reached out to Robredo’s team, but “had yet to meet with the vice president in person.”

“It is for this reason,” a Makabayan representative told the Philippine Star, “that they have not yet endorsed Robredo or any other presidential aspirant.” The Star wrote, “It is not clear why Robredo, who has also been advocating for a broad coalition to crush Duterte and Marcos in the polls, did not personally meet Colmenares and members of Makabayan.”

Robredo’s refusal to even meet with Makabayan has several underlying motivations. First, the Liberal Party already has its own pseudo-left wing: Akbayan, an organization formed in the 1990s by social democrat and ex-CPP forces. Akbayan has longstanding bad blood with the so-called “national democratic” organizations that continue to follow the CPP’s political line.

There is a powerful strain of outrage in the popular opposition to Duterte at the support which the national democratic organizations, and the CPP itself, gave to Duterte in 2016.

In 2016, on the southern island of Mindanao, Colmenares campaigned for Duterte’s election. Makabayan, and its sister organizations, celebrated his victory, initially supported his war on drugs as a “boon to the poor,” and entered his cabinet.

Finally, Robredo’s reluctance to engage with Makabayan expresses the right-wing campaign that she is attempting to run. Robredo is attempting to incorporate the backing of Lacson, Pacquiao and former Duterte supporter Isko Moreno. She has held unification meetings with each of these camps. Some of these forces will not come anywhere near Makabayan, and thus Robredo, for the time being, excludes them.

Makabayan is maneuvering, looking to increase their value to Robredo, and have secured slots on Manny Pacquiao’s senatorial slate, where Neri Colmenares is running alongside fascist news personality Raffy Tulfo.

Laban ng Masa, associated with the various organizations founded by Popoy Lagman after he broke with the CPP, is running their own presidential candidate, labor union leader Leody de Guzman. De Guzman’s declaration of candidacy was initially a bid to secure the final senatorial slot on Robredo’s ticket. When de Guzman was passed over, Laban ng Masa issued a statement that “though we do not agree, we nonetheless respect their decision.” They made clear their goal, declaring in the same statement, “our representatives should have a seat in every table.”

As it was now apparent that their bid to secure a senatorial slot had failed, Laban ng Masa found itself trapped in an independent presidential bid. Prominent intellectual Walden Bello, formerly of the CPP and now chair of Laban ng Masa, announced that he was running for vice president.

Laban ng Masa began to promote a platform promising various progressive measures, including disbanding the anti-Communist taskforce, increasing taxes on the wealthiest Filipinos, raising the minimum wage, and ending contractual labor.

There is, however, no genuine political independence to this campaign, which but weeks ago was pleading to be included on the right-wing slate of Leni Robredo.

Laban ng Masa’s continuing attempt to integrate itself into elite politics is highlighted by the inclusion of Makabayan on de Guzman’s slate. The forces of Makabayan and Laban ng Masa represent political tendencies that for decades were murderously opposed to each other. Now they are uniting.

Makabayan keeps one foot in Pacquiao’s camp and one in Laban ng Masa. All have their eyes on Robredo, waiting for the moment when they are called upon to support her.

White House lifts ban on international travel amid rising global COVID-19 cases

Benjamin Mateus

Earlier this month, the White House announced that the COVID-19 restrictions placed into effect in March 2020 that effectively barred international travel to the United States would be lifted on November 8, 2021, to all fully vaccinated foreign visitors.

A student listens to the teacher's instructions at iPrep Academy on the first day of school in Miami [Credit: AP Photo/Lynne Sladky, File]

White House spokesman Kevin Munoz confirmed the lifting of the ban on Twitter after the pronouncement, writing on October 15 that “the US’ new travel policy that requires vaccination for foreign travelers to the United States will begin on November 8. This announcement and date apply to both international air travel and land travel.”

For all practical purposes, the announcement ushers in a complete end to any mitigation attempts to check the spread of the virus and inaugurates the concept of allowing the virus to become endemic like the influenza virus.

The call for the shift in policy was undoubtedly coordinated to coincide with the decline in recent cases and hospitalizations, which garnered national attention. Last month more than 1,700 people were dying each day. The healthcare systems from the South through the mid-West into the mountain regions were inundated with patients. Some states were enacting crisis standards of care that limited emergency healthcare measures to those deemed to have best chance of surviving.

More than 11 million people were infected in the last wave. More than 120,000 died. Still, daily new cases remain above 60,000 per day, and more than 1,200 people are dying each day from COVID. Presently, more than 46 million have reportedly been infected, and more than three-quarter million have perished.

Yet, the lobbying groups representing airlines have been clamoring incessantly for months for lifting these bans.

Not surprisingly, with the declaration to lift the travel restrictions, the stock prices for all the major airlines took off. In an email statement, Jonathan Root, senior vice president at Moody’s Investors Services, wrote, “Leisure bookings for the holidays from inbound tourist visits and non-US citizens visiting friends and relatives will accelerate in upcoming weeks. We also now expect a stronger increase in business travel by the first quarter of 2022 than would have occurred if the borders remained closed.”

Nicholas Calio, president of Airlines for America, the lobbying group for the major US carriers, cheered Biden’s decision, adding “The full reopening of international travel is also critical to reviving economies around the globe,”

In an attempt to cover for the deranged policy that will further the global transmission of the coronavirus, the Biden administration is promising that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will require airlines to collect and pass on information on passengers to aid contact tracing.

White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Jeff Zients said at a press conference, “In the coming weeks, CDC will be issuing a contact tracing order requiring airlines to collect current information for each US-bound traveler, including their phone number and email address.”

Contact tracing infrastructure in the United States is largely non-existent. Rather than bolstering the efforts of public health departments across the country to assist them during the pandemic, the federal and state governments have all been gutted through years of attrition. There have been widespread defections by public health officials due to aggressions and threats made against them by right-wing organizations. Having served years in their capacity, many of these same officials report being entirely spent and severely depressed. Funding has been vastly eroded—their authority to impose health orders removed—these hollow public health institutions stand in name only.

Adrian Casalotti, chief of public and government affairs for the National Association of County and City Health Officials, an organization representing the nearly 3,000 local health departments across the nation, told the New York Times, “We have learned all the wrong lessons from the pandemic. We are attacking and removing authority from the people who are trying to protect us.”

By contrast, while the public health infrastructure was caving in, the airline industry was being buoyed by federal aid to the tune of over $74 billion in government relief.

The rule in effect means that on November 8, any adult eligible to receive the vaccine must have been fully inoculated with a vaccine that has received emergency use listing by the World Health Organization and proof of this vaccination before entering the US. Children under 18, however, will be exempt from these requirements, which poses a significant public health risk.

The United States will also be opening air travel to individuals from the so-called Schengen countries, European countries that have officially abolished controls between their mutual borders. These include Germany, Italy, Spain, France, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Poland, etc.

Last week Europe had 1.67 million new cases of COVID-19, a weekly increase of 251,000 or a 17.7 percent increase from the previous week. Cases have been climbing for four straight weeks even though many of these countries have surpassed the US in the number of fully vaccinated individuals. These developments have significant implications for a virus that has kept pace with the rising tides of infection and vaccinations. As it stands, the globe is beginning the sixth wave of the pandemic.

The case of the UK is worth reviewing. With 68 percent of its population fully vaccinated and one-sixth previously infected, the country is reporting more than 46,000 daily cases of COVID-19, highlighting the difficulty of ever achieving herd immunity. They are also facing the rise in a new lineage of the Delta variant called AY.4. It is beginning to displace Delta, accounting for 62.4 percent of sequenced COVID-19 cases in the last 28 days.

At present, there are 75 AY lineages, each with specific mutations that have been identified, and their numbers continue to increase. AY.4.2, a sub-lineage of AY.4, was first discovered in June but came to researchers’ attention in September. In four weeks, it rose to account for ten percent of all UK cases. Two additional mutations involving its spike protein may have made it slightly more transmissible than Delta. Researchers, however, suspect that one of these mutations gives it even more ability to escape immunity by making its spike region less recognizable by antibodies.

They admit it remains too early to say if it will become a dominant strain of the coronavirus. But in the context of a complete resumption of global air travel with a billion or two more people traveling to every region of the globe in 2022, it seems every advantage is being forwarded to the virus.

Sudan’s military oust transitional civilian-military government

Jean Shaoul

General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of the Sovereign Council, the joint civilian-military body that has governed the country since August 2019, ousted Prime Minister Abdulla Hamdok’s government Monday.

Hamdok was running the supposed transition to full civilian rule scheduled for 2023. The move comes just weeks before al-Burhan was due to hand over his position to a civilian.

Al-Burhan ordered the arrest of Hamdok, his wife and several cabinet members who have not been seen since. He went on television to announce the dissolution of Hamdok’s government, declaring a nationwide state of emergency, and shut down the internet. Members of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the militia widely hated for its brutal operations in the Darfur conflict and that is commanded by his rival and deputy, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (also known as Hemedti), took up positions on the bridges over the Nile and other key infrastructure in the Khartoum conurbation.

Demonstration against the coup in Khartoum (Twitter)

Hamdok condemned al-Burhan’s power grab as a “rupture” of the 2019 deal setting up the transitional civilian front for continued military rule and urged Sudanese to “resist” peacefully. The Sudan Professionals' Association and Resistance Committees, part of the Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC) that led the country-wide protests that broke out at the end of 2018, called for mass protests and a general strike, as did the Umma Party and Sudan’s Stalinist Communist Party.

Al-Burhan had sought to dampen down opposition by signaling that the coup was just a temporary measure with the promise of elections in July 2023. But thousands took to the streets of Khartoum, the capital, and other towns and cities chanting, “The people are stronger, stronger” and “Retreat is not an option!” Troops fired tear gas and live bullets at the crowds, killing seven, injuring dozens more and bringing commercial life to a standstill.

Al-Burhan came to power in April 2019, with the support of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia, ousting long-term dictator President Omar al-Bashir. The aim was to prevent the overthrow of the entire state apparatus in the face of months-long protests against al-Bashir’s Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated military regime in which he played a leading role.

A few months later, Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC), an umbrella group of 22 bourgeois and petty bourgeois opposition organisations, signed a wretched deal with the military. The military would be fronted by a transitional “technocratic” government, to be headed by Dr Hamdok, a former economist at the African Development Bank and later the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa.

This betrayal ushered in a government that maintained the power of the tiny venal elite that has controlled the country under the military boot since independence in 1956. In practice, the country has been ruled by Dagalo, al-Burhan’s deputy, whose Rapid Support Force is more powerful than the Sudanese army and controls most of Sudan’s towns and cities.

Monday’s coup follows months of mounting unrest over the government’s failure to bring to justice those responsible for the deaths of 1,800 protesters at the mass sit-in in Khartoum in June 2019, inflation that is running at 400 percent, countrywide shortages of food, fuel, and medicine, mishandling of the pandemic and the recent flash flooding. This is in a country where in 2018 at least 80 percent of the 40 million population were living on less than US$1 per day, with 5.8 million in need of humanitarian assistance, an increase of 700,000 on 2017, and more than 2.7 million children suffering from acute malnutrition.

Hamdok had sought debt relief from the US-dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF), whose political price was an agreement to hand over al-Bashir to the International Criminal Court for war crimes and genocide in Darfur, investigate the role of other senior officials and sign up to the normalisation of relations with Israel, as part of a broader anti-Iran alliance. The IMF’s economic price included the ending of fuel subsidies, doubling prices at the pumps, abandoning Sudan’s fixed exchange rate and moving to a floating currency, stoking inflation now running at more than 400 percent, up from 144 percent a year ago. But the IMF’s demands for the privatisation of 600 state firms, many controlled by the military and intelligence apparatus, strike at the heart of the junta’s financial interests.

It is the fear of these measures that would strip the generals of their access to state funding and practical immunity from prosecution for war crimes that led them to oppose the Hamdok government.

The Transitional Military Council (TMC), made up of a disparate alliance of warlords, military commanders, militia leaders and al-Bashir loyalists who have repeatedly switched sides, is riven with dissent. The two men at the top, al-Burhan and Dagalo are rivals, with the former close to Cairo and the latter to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi.

While the TMC had signed the Juba Peace Agreement, bringing five of the seven armed rebel groups on board in October 2020, the two largest groups based in Darfur in the west and South Kordofan and West Nile in the south, refused to sign. The deal angered the tribal leaders and impoverished ethnic groups based in East Sudan, allied with former leader al-Bashir, who feared their position would be further diluted by the greater representation given to the rebel groups and their regions.

They mounted a blockade in Port Sudan, Sudan’s main port on the Red Sea, and the roads leading to Khartoum, leading to drastic shortages of basic commodities, including oil, in the capital. Leaders from the Forces of Freedom and Change accused the military of encouraging the blockade to sow ethnic divisions. Last month, the military mounted an attempted putsch, seen as a dress rehearsal for Monday’s coup. It incited pro-military demonstrations in the capital calling for the overthrow of the civilian government, with many people bussed in from outside Khartoum and security forces protecting government buildings and staff withdrawn.

Al-Burhan’s coup comes the day after the visit to Khartoum of Jeffrey Feltman, US envoy to the Horn of Africa, to demand Sudan continue to adhere to the IMF’s political and economic demands. Washington’s primary concern is to ensure that rising social tensions, replicated across the region, do not spread to its allies, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, which fear their own working class and poor peasants. The last thing the US and Europe want is instability in Sudan, strategically located in the Horn of Africa, alongside the Red Sea and the entrance to the Suez Canal through which much of the region’s oil passes, and a new wave of refugees heading for Europe.

The United Nations and the Arab League say they are “deeply concerned” about the coup, calling on “all sides” to respect the 2019 accord. The Inter-Governmental Association on Development (IGAD), the main regional organisation, currently chaired by Sudan, condemned the coup. Their statements follow US and European Union condemnation, with Washington demanding that the Sudanese military immediately release civilian leaders and restore the transitional government and announcing it would suspend its $700 million aid programme to the country.

The generals believe they have the support of Egypt’s President Abdel Fatteh el-Sisi. Cairo wants a government in Khartoum that will oppose the Ethiopian government’s plans to fill the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Nile and start electricity production, potentially restricting flows into Sudan and Egypt in the event of a drought. But el-Sisi has refrained from openly backing Burhan's putsch. Tensions have risen as talks to resolve the crisis, which Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry has described as an “existential threat” to his country, have stalled.

Workers’ opposition to al-Burhan’s power grab takes place amid growing militancy throughout the Middle East and North Africa, including protests and strikes in Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon and Iran against corruption, poverty and social inequality.

Strike vote begins at UK universities in disputes over pay, conditions and pensions

Ioan Petrescu

Balloting is underway at over 150 higher education institutions in the UK as lecturers prepare to strike over cuts to pensions, declining pay, the use of insecure contracts in the sector, and unmanageable workloads.

Their fight is part of a worldwide upsurge in the class struggle, which has seen autoworkers in the US, educators in Sri Lanka, metalworkers in South Africa, and many other sections of workers involved in disputes for better pay and working conditions.

The University and College Union (UCU) is organizing the ballots and has been threatening strike action for the past year. But its rhetoric is belied by its reluctance to mobilise its membership of over 100,000 in a genuine struggle. Even as it finally sanctioned ballots, the UCU sought to bring university management back to the table and head off industrial action, declaring that employers have “three weeks to save term.”

Strikers and students on the picket line at UCL in London during the national strike in February 2020 (WSWS Media)

The UCU only gave the go-ahead for strike ballots due to mounting anger from university staff, who are seeing their conditions worsen without respite and are itching for a fight against their employers. The union bureaucracy’s main calculation is that a strike ballot now is the best way for its members to let off steam while it negotiates a backroom deal with employers.

As in previous disputes, the union is seeking to sabotage unified action by splitting workers across two disputes (over pay and pensions) and calling on staff at most universities to strike for just one of them. Of the 152 institutions balloted in total, six will be balloted purely on the University Superannuation Scheme (USS) pensions dispute. Another 78 are to be balloted solely over pay and working conditions. A further 68 institutions will vote in two ballots over both USS and pay and working conditions.

The USS fund is facing a huge deficit, and the body has called on both the employer group Universities UK (UUK) and the UCU to provide proposals for “reform” to its Joint Negotiating Committee (JNC). In a meeting at the end of August, the JNC accepted UUK’s proposal, due in no small part to the unwillingness of the universities to underwrite UCU’s proposals to the same level as their own.

The UUK proposals involve cuts to the more generous Defined Benefit pensions scheme and shunting lower earners to an inferior Defined Contributions pensions scheme. The cuts to the Defined Benefit plan will mean a USS member aged 37 earning £41,526 (the current starting salary for a lecturer in many institutions) can be expected to build up an annual guaranteed pension of £12,170—if they continue to work full-time in the sector until age 66. This compares with £18,857 under the current arrangement. The same 35 percent cut would also apply to the guaranteed cash lump sum which the member would receive when they retire.

The UCU’s proposal, however, is not a significant departure from the status quo. It essentially gives its blessing to the all the cuts that have taken place. According to the UCU itself, a typical member’s pension has already been slashed by £240,000 through changes introduced since 2011.

UCU suggest a negligible increase to employers’ contributions (from 21.1 percent to 24.9 percent) together with an even smaller reduction in members contributions (to 8.1 percent from 9.6 percent). Moreover, the proposal depends on USS changing its March 2020 valuation, which identified the current deficit. The union claims the pensions fund can lower its deficit by investing in riskier, higher return assets—thus gambling even further with its members’ accumulated pension contributions.

The pensions dispute has been ongoing for years, erupting in two massive strikes in 2018 and 2020. In 2018, the UCU—as it tried to enforce a rotten deal—faced a rebellion from its members, who accused it of being “objectively on the side of the employers.” The general secretary at the time, Sally Hunt, was forced to resign, but not before being given a £400,000 golden goodbye by the UCU. Her replacement, Jo Grady, demobilised mass resistance on the part of workers and students to establish a corporatist Joint Expert Panel (JEP) on pensions with the employers. UUK’s current proposal is partly based on suggestions from the JEP. In early 2020, the UCU utilized the COVID pandemic to end another national strike over pensions.

The second issue at stake—the so-called “Four Fights” dispute over pay and working conditions—has also been ongoing for years. Since 2009, the wages of higher education staff have increased by 13 percent, while inflation has increased by 37.3 percent—meaning a 24.3 percent real-terms wage cut. Employers have continually insisted on further below-inflation offers, despite university income from tuition fees growing by a third in the last five years. The latest pay offer from University and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA) was just 1.5 percent. At the same time, the last 10 years have seen a massive increase of zero-hours, precarious contracts.

In response, the UCU is calling for a measly £2,500 increase in wages, an amount that is not even close to making up for the income lost by staff since 2009. If wages had kept up with inflation, a lecturer who earned £42,790 in 2009 (the average salary in the field) would be making £58,352 now. However, the average salary now ranges between £48,000 and £50,000—almost £10,000 less.

The union pairs this with demands that employers offer vague promises to “address” excessive workloads and unpaid work and a “framework” to eliminate precarious employment practices and casualised contracts, including zero-hours contracts, from higher education. These ambiguous appeals are designed to allow the union to present even the most token “commitment” by UUK towards addressing workers’ grievances as a “victory.”

The UCU will do everything it can to ensure the fight by academic workers is maneuvered into a dead-end, as it has numerous times in the past. The issue is not just with this or that corrupt or incompetent union bureaucrat, but with the corporatist perspective of the trade unions, which defend the capitalist system by suppressing the class struggle. Contrary to claims by the UCU Left faction and its pseudo-left supporters, including the Socialist Workers Party, it is impossible to transform the UCU into an accountable defender of workers’ rights.

The pandemic has gone unmentioned by the UCU in any discussion of national strike action. Despite numerous reports that the reopening of campuses has led to outbreaks in many universities, there is no unified tracking mechanism that shows case numbers for all higher education institutions. Each university is being allowed decide on their own whether and how to track CIVID infections on their campuses. The UCU has backed the government in insisting that its members are back on campuses despite no sign of the pandemic retreating.

Universities Minister Michelle Donelan told the House of Commons October 12 that cases had been reported on 68 campuses across the country. These institutions, she said, had reported about 9,000 coronavirus cases within the past seven days. Among the worst hit were the University of Nottingham with 1,510 cases among students in the week ending October 9, plus another 20 cases affecting staff, and the University of Bristol with 393 confirmed cases among students, plus three staff cases. The minister rejected calls to halt face-to-face teaching across the country to prevent the spread of COVID warning that this would amount to “punishing young people.”

Higher education workers and students must reject all attempts by the government to divide them with its nauseating and fraudulent statements of concerns for young people and their education.

With COVID resurging everywhere, ahead of the winter, face-to-face learning must be ended and fully funded and resourced remote learning implemented, to be paid for by the super-rich whose fortunes have ballooned during the pandemic.

Austerity policies in England linked to 57,550 extra deaths in five years

Simon Whelan

The BMJ Open journal published by the BMJ (British Medical Journal) has released findings from the largest study yet of its kind into the cost in human lives of the savage austerity spending cuts initiated in the UK from 2008 onwards.

Analysing the combined impact of cuts to healthcare, public health and social care in the four years between 2010 and 2014, researchers from the Centre for Health Economics at the University of York found 57,550 more deaths than would have been expected.

Professor Karl Claxton of York’s Department of Economics and Related Studies told the Guardian: “Restrictions on the growth in health and social care expenditure during ‘austerity’ have been associated with tens of thousands more deaths than would have been observed had pre-austerity expenditure growth been sustained.”

The team of researchers found that social care spending rose by 2.2 percent per capita between 2001-02 and between 2009-10 but fell by 1.57 percent between 2010-11 and again between 2014-15. This loss alone in social care funding caused an astonishing 23,662 additional deaths, according to the research findings.

A homeless person sleeping on Euston Road in London last winter (credit: WSWS Media)

The University of York research found that a slowing in life expectancy improvement coincided with the Cameron government’s severe reductions to health and social care spending. Professor Claxton said, “Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that the slowdown in the rate of improvement in life expectancy in England and Wales since 2010 is attributable to spending constraints in the healthcare and social care sectors.”

Speaking to the Guardian on the University of York’s’ findings, David Finch, assistant director of healthy lives at the Health Foundation think tank, said even before the COVID-19 pandemic there was “an extremely concerning pattern of stalling life expectancy, particularly in the poorest areas of the country” and subsequently the pandemic had “laid bare the tragic consequences of underlying poor health”.

Separate research by Imperial College London (ICL), published in the LancetPublic Health journal just days before the York findings, reached similar conclusions. Analysing all deaths in England between 2002-2019, the ICL researchers found that life expectancy in many working-class communities was declining years prior to the arrival of the pandemic in the UK in early 2020.

The research conducted by the ICL is the first of its kind to analyse longevity trends in microscopic detail capable of identifying where life expectancy declined with greater precision than any previously conducted research.

A sample of 8.6 million records were analysed by the ICL research team with each record assigned to the community where the person resided at the time of their death. A total of 6,791 local communities were examined and the researchers assessed life expectancy trends over time for each of these almost 7,000 people. The research tracked life expectancy in communities of around 8,000 people, with other research typically based on much larger areas containing some 140,000 subjects.

The research reveals how class inequality in UK life expectancy is growing. In 2019, men living in some areas of Kensington and Chelsea in London—the wealthiest district in the country—had a life expectancy a staggering 27 years longer than that of males living in parts of Blackpool. In the ailing north-west coastal town life expectancy has now fallen beneath 70 years for men and 75 for women. Some men in parts of Kensington and Chelsea were living on average to 95.3 years and in parts of Blackpool to just 68.3 years.

The ICL’s research found that the communities with the lowest life expectancy, just beneath 70 years for men and 75 years for women, are situated in the north of England’s inner cities and social housing estates.

In the richest districts of the British capital and across the affluent home counties, the trajectory of growing longevity continues. Simultaneously, life expectancy has fallen fastest in working-class districts in northern cities like Leeds, Newcastle, Manchester and Liverpool.

For example, women living in the inner London borough of Camden can expect to live to approximately 95 years of age, almost 21 years longer than women in the working-class communities with the lowest life expectancy in the west Yorkshire city of Leeds.

The ICL research discovered that as life expectancy rose across much of the country during the first decade of the 21st century, then beginning an ongoing steep decline in the poorest working-class districts in 2010. The research findings assert that from 2014 until 2019 life expectancy fell in almost one in five communities for females, and one in nine communities for males.

The ICL research points out that declines in life expectancy were once rare in wealthier countries like the UK. The existence of the post-war welfare state in Britain, now massively eroded, led to sustained increases in life expectancy. Professor Majid Ezzati from ICL’s School of Public Health told the Independent that this period was at an end: “These data show that longevity has been getting worse for years in large parts of England.”

Declines in life expectancy in wealthy countries, explained Ezzati, have previously occurred only during wars and pandemics. “For such declines to be seen in ‘normal times’ before the pandemic is alarming and signals ongoing policy failures to tackle poverty and provide adequate social support and health care.”

Further damning research released earlier this month was based on an analysis of official government data by the King’s Fund think tank. The research suggests that disparities in expected lifespan between some of the wealthiest and poorest districts of the country has at least doubled since the early 2000s.

“There is a growing chasm in health inequalities revealed by the data,” says Veena Raleigh, a fellow at the think tank. Raleigh continued “Our analysis shows that life expectancy has continued to increase in wealthier areas but has virtually stagnated in deprived areas in the north with the result that the gap in life expectancy between the richest and poorest parts of the country has grown by almost two-and-a-half years over the last two decades.” There is a “deprivation divide” in life expectancy between the more affluent areas in the south of England and poorer areas in the north.

As the Kings Fund research findings were released, a report by the Longevity Science Panel (LSP)—a group of doctors, statisticians and NHS leaders—found that male and female life expectancy fell by 1.3 years and 0.9 years respectively in 2020 as a direct result of coronavirus. The LSP warned that possible new variants of COVID, the impact of Long COVID and the delayed diagnosis and treatment caused by an enormous NHS care backlog could still negatively impact the public’s expected lifespans.

Speaking on behalf of the LSP, Professor Debora Price, Professor of Social Gerontology at the University of Manchester, said: “The pandemic has plainly exposed the many structural and systemic inequalities in our societies that people live with from day to day and that have become a matter of life and death. Health inequalities have worsened.”

This plethora of scientific research, synthesizing data from both the natural and the social sciences, reveals that, in the second decade of the 21st century, life expectancy growth has stalled, stagnated and is now falling precipitously among the working class, in the fifth-richest country on the planet.

This health crisis, exacerbated by the pandemic, is first and foremost a class issue. The explosive growth of social inequality over recent decades is the key factor in understanding the disproportionate and devastating impact of reduced life expectancy in working-class communities. The widening of the already huge gap in life expectancy between the classes is one increasingly characterised by stunted lives, early deaths and misery for the working class.

German billionaires’ wealth hits new heights in the pandemic

Elisabeth Zimmermann

Around the world, the richest and wealthiest have benefited enormously from the coronavirus pandemic. In Germany, too, this is taking on very stark forms. The concentration of wealth at the top of society is horrendous. This was most recently confirmed by the latest rich list presented by Manager Magazin at the beginning of October. The annual list of the 500 richest Germans has been published for the 20th year.

The editorial accompanying this year’s list states, “Never before has the average absolute increase in wealth been as high as it is now. Never has Germany had so many billionaires, 213 currently.”

Susanne Klatten at the BMW booth at the IAA 2017 in Frankfurt (Olaf Kosinsky, CC BY-SA 3.0 EN, via Wikimedia Commons)

The magazine explains that its calculations of all wealth figures “are estimates. The basis of the valuations are business evaluations as well as research in publicly accessible archives, trade and real estate registers. In addition, research is conducted with asset managers, lawyers, bankers and representatives of the list itself.”

Thanks to high stock prices and rising real estate values, the wealth of almost all business and industrialist families has increased. The total wealth of the 100 richest Germans included in the list increased from 606 billion euros in 2020 to a projected 722 billion in 2021—a more than 19 percent rise.

This wealth is equivalent to more than one-fifth of Germany’s gross domestic product (GDP) and is higher than at any time since the list first appeared in 2001. Today, the 100 richest Germans are almost three times as wealthy as the top 100 were back then.

This enormous accumulation of wealth is also reflected in the growth in the number of billionaires. While Manager Magazin estimated their number at 69 in 2001, this year it is 213, meaning that almost half of the 500 richest people in the country own more than one billion euros. The assets of the ten richest Germans alone have increased by almost 80 billion euros this year.

This unprecedented enrichment is the product of deliberate policies. The ruling elite has seen the terrible pandemic as an opportunity to redistribute wealth further from the bottom of society upwards and to impose a ruthless class policy.

While nurses and doctors worked themselves to the bone saving lives in run-down hospitals and schools lacked money for even the simplest air filtration, hundreds of billions were handed to the big banks and corporations. These policies drove up stock markets around the world.

In 2020 alone, with the start of the pandemic, the wealth of all billionaires worldwide increased by two thirds. In the first twelve months of the pandemic, their assets increased from eight trillion dollars to the current 13 trillion dollars, according to the Forbes list. It was the highest increase ever recorded.

The German stock markets also grew in tandem with the death toll from the pandemic, making the wealthy richer and richer. At the same time, the “profits before lives” policy was forced on workers, requiring them to labour in unsafe factories and put their children in unsafe schools so as not to jeopardize the profits of the rich. In Germany alone, at least 94,000 people have fallen victim to this policy.

How closely the wealth of the super-rich is linked to the misery and death of the working class can be seen by looking at the individuals concerned.

Siblings Susanne Klatten and Stefan Quandt stand in first place on the rich list again. The family fortune can be traced back, among other things, to the exploitation of forced labour in Hitler’s Third Reich. They own 47 percent of the shares in BMW and also have stakes in other companies. Their assets rose by 9.2 billion to 34.2 billion euros. The auto industry generated huge profits despite the crisis and short-time working in the factories. BMW, like other corporations, maintained its dividend payments and benefited from government aid, while workers were hit by short-time working and the massive job cuts announced.

Dieter Schwarz sits in second place. The owner of Lidl and Kaufland, his fortune grew by 3.5 billion to 33.5 billion euros. His Lidl/Kaufland discount empire generated 122 billion euros in sales, with healthy profits generated by 500,000 employees worldwide. Sales staff and warehouse and logistics workers are among the core personnel particularly at risk from COVID-19, who worked through the entire pandemic.

In third place comes Klaus-Michael Kühne. His fortune has risen by 19.7 billion to 33 billion euros. Share prices of the logistics company Kühne & Nagel, in which he holds a 53.3 percent stake, and the Hamburg container shipping company Hapag-Lloyd, in which he owns a 30 percent stake, have soared to such an extent that the book value of Kühne’s assets has more than doubled.

In fourth place is the Reimann family, whose businesses include beverages, cosmetics and veterinary clinics. Their assets are the only ones in the top ten to have fallen by 2.5 billion euros to 29.5 billion.

Fifth place goes to the Merck family, active in the pharmaceuticals and chemicals sectors. Its assets increased by 7 billion euros to 28.5 billion euros.

In sixth place—a new entry among the ten richest Germans—are the brothers Thomas and Andreas Sprüngmann. They are the financiers and largest shareholders of the vaccine manufacturer Biontech, as well as having stakes in other companies. Their fortune has exploded, rising by 18.5 billion to 24 billion euros.

Here it becomes particularly clear how the super-rich increase their fortunes out of people’s suffering. In order to generate profits, far too few vaccines are produced and sold at extortionate prices, so that the majority of the world’s population is still unvaccinated.

The above-mentioned people exemplify the staggering wealth at the top of society, whose assets were increased so fabulously through massive exploitation and the billions they were gifted by the European Central Bank and federal government.

In the exploratory talks about forming a new government coalition, one of the issues under discussion is how to squeeze this money out of the working class again by reinstating the debt ceiling and other measures. In addition to already announced mass layoffs and plant closures, other harsh attacks on the social gains of the working class are on the agenda. The widening of social inequality is being pushed further by all the establishment parties.

Modi government seeking to tighten India's repressive film censorship regime

Yuan Darwin

India’s Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government is seeking to tighten the country’s already intrusive and pervasive film censorship regime with its Cinematograph (Amendment) Bill, 2021. The proposed legislation would amend India’s existing film censorship law, the Cinematograph Act, 1952, to give the central government “revisionary powers,” thereby enabling it “to order recertification of an already certified film.” This will add an additional layer of direct government censorship to the existing censorship regime, overseen by the Central Board for Film Certification (CBFC), or Censor Board.

The CBFC is a statutory body under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting tasked with regulating the public exhibition of films. It has the power to compel changes before films can be legally presented to the public or to prohibit their release outright.

Scene from Ashvin Kumar's "No fathers in Kashmir," which was only released in India after the filmmaker appealed to the now abolished Film Certificate Appellate Tribunal.

The board consists of a chairperson and 23 members, all of whom are appointed by the central government, and has its headquarters in Mumbai, the centre of India’s film industry. It has nine regional offices in Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore, Thiruvananthapuram, Hyderabad, New Delhi, Cuttack and Guwahati, which are assisted in their examination of films by Advisory Panels whose members are also appointed by the Union government for a period of two years. The CBFC regularly orders directors to remove anything it deems offensive, including depictions of sex, nudity and violence, or “politically subversive” material. It can and does routinely make certification conditional on the cutting of “objectionable” scenes.

Under the proposed Cinematograph (Amendment) Bill, the Narendra Modi-led BJP government is seeking to nullify an Indian Supreme Court ruling in a case named Union of India vs KM Shankarappa, 2001 that found the Union government cannot interfere with a film’s distribution or demand changes to it once it has been certified by the Censor Board.

The Modi government’s bid to arrogate new censorship powers follows hot on the heels of its abolition of the Film Certificate Appellate Tribunal (FCAT), which was established in 1983 as a forum for filmmakers dissatisfied with CBFC decisions to seek redress. The government arbitrarily abolished the FCAT under an executive order, the Tribunals Reforms (Rationalisation and Conditions of Service) Ordinance 2021, and a subsequent bill, the Tribunal Reforms Bill, it pushed through parliament in August.

The Modi government’s tightening of cinema censorship is part of its broader assault on democratic rights. In February, it enacted the Information Technology (Guidelines for Intermediaries and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 with the aim of controlling and censoring OTT platforms and social media.

Many film directors, producers, screenwriters and actors, including Anurag Kashyap, Hansal Mehta, Vetri Maaran, Nandita Das, Mira Nair, Shabana Azmi, Farhan Akhtar, Zoya Akhtar and Dibakar Banerjee, have spoken out against the new censorship measures.

More than 3,000 people involved in film production in India have signed a letter of protest to the Information and Broadcasting Ministry. “The government’s proposal to amend the Cinematograph Act is another blow to the film fraternity,” the letter declares, “and will potentially endanger freedom of expression and democratic dissent.” It goes on to warn that the proposed amendments would render filmmakers “powerless at the hands of the state” and “more vulnerable to threats, vandalism, and intimidation of mob censors.” The reference to “mob censors” concerns repeated instances of far-right Hindu supremacist and fundamentalist mobilizations, often directed and encouraged by BJP politicians, aimed at shutting down film productions or screenings.

Summing up the significance of the expanded censorship powers, the letter noted they “will effectively give the Central Government supreme power over cinema exhibition in the country.”

Veteran Indian filmmaker Adoor Gopalkrishnan told the Hindu, “Even at present, the filmmakers have not much say in the certification process, with the censor officers implementing the will of the government. ... We are not an autocracy. Every citizen has a right to criticize the policies of the government in power.” Anand Patwardhan, a prominent left-wing documentary filmmaker, said, “The Centre’s proposed amendment to the Cinematograph Act seeking to recall a film already certified by the Censor Board is dangerous and meaningless.”

In a July 1 Politburo statement, the Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPM, said it “strongly opposes these atrocious amendments designed to throttle cinematic talent and freedom” and urged “the restoration of the Appellate Tribunal as demanded by noted filmmakers.” In other words, the Stalinists, although nominally opposing the new changes by the Modi government, fully support the existing regime of film censorship created by the Indian capitalist state, which was itself born out of the abortion of the anti-imperialist struggle by the national bourgeoisie.

Marxists oppose state censorship of art. It is a tool of the capitalist elite to suppress freedom of expression, thought and criticism and to inculcate conformity, national chauvinism and reaction. Genuine art can only flourish if those engaging in it are given unfettered freedom to explore their ideas, free from all attempts by the bourgeois state and self-appointed moral guardians to police them.

India’s film censorship laws and regime have their roots in the British colonial state, which used them to suppress ideas and artwork that supported the anti-colonial struggle. They were taken over by the Indian bourgeoisie as part of its 1947 independence and partition deal with British imperialism. Under the political leadership of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, the Indian ruling class took control of the entire apparatus of state repression that had been created by South Asia’s departing colonial masters and enforced the subcontinent’s bloody division into a Hindu-dominated India and an explicitly Muslim Pakistan.

The Modi government’s turn to increased censorship and repression takes place under conditions of a massive economic, political and social crisis, which has been intensified by the global COVID-19 pandemic. Officially the pandemic has killed just over 450,000 Indians, but a series of scientific studies has demonstrated that the Modi government’s criminal prioritization of corporate profits over saving lives has resulted in some 5 million deaths.

Fearing mounting opposition, above all, from the working class and rural toilers, the BJP government is seeking to further strengthen the arbitrary powers of the state. Its censorship bill is part of its efforts to suppress dissenting voices and intimidate all those who oppose the government’s neoliberal economic agenda and bellicose Hindu supremacist-laced Indian nationalism. By reinforcing censorship and promoting a reactionary social climate, the Modi regime seeks to make it impossible for artists, filmmakers, writers and other intellectuals to do any serious work that challenges its foul communalist outlook and aggressive big business agenda.

The attack on artistic freedom and fundamental rights by the BJP and its Hindu communalist and fundamentalist allies has a long history. Two decades ago, due to threats and provocations by Hindu fundamentalist organizations associated with the BJP, Indo-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta was forced to abandon shooting her film Water in India. Also in 2000, the BJP-led national government ordered a painting by artist Surendran Nair to be removed from an exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi.

In 2004, the CBFC initially banned Final Solution, a documentary about the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in the western state of Gujarat, which killed close to 2,000 people and left hundreds of thousands homeless. The pogrom was incited by Gujarat’s then chief minister, who was none other than Narendra Modi. The film consists of interviews with both Muslims and Hindus swept up in the violence and shows how Hindu extremists exploited a fire, which broke out in a passenger train at the Godhra railway station, killing dozens of Hindu pilgrims, to unleash horrific mass violence targeting Muslims. As a result of a public campaign against the suppression of Final Solution, the ban on the film was lifted in October 2004.

In 2014, the investigative documentary No Fire Zone: In the Killing Fields of Sri Lanka by Callum Macrae was refused certification by the CBFC on the pretext that it would damage New Delhi’s relations with Colombo. In 2017, the film Lipstick Under My Burkha directed by Alankrita Shrivastava and produced by Prakash Jha, also ran into trouble with the CBFC, which initially refused to certify it on the grounds that it contained “contagious (sic) sexual scenes, abusive words, (and) audio pornography.” The film has been screened in over 35 film festivals around the world and prior to its official release, after substantial cuts, in India had earned 11 international awards.

In 2018, the film drama No Fathers in Kashmir directed by Ashvin Kumar hit a roadblock with the CBFC. It was only released in India the following year, after Kumar had appealed to the now-abolished Film Certificate Appellate Tribunal (FCAT). Kumar’s two previous documentaries, Inshallah, Football and Inshallah, Kashmir, were also initially banned by the Censor Board.

Democracy is incompatible with a political regime which arrogates to itself the right to dictate thought and culture, imposing its beliefs through its control of the public purse and the police powers of the state. The struggle in defence of artistic freedom and against communalism will not be won by appealing to the state institutions and parties of the Indian bourgeoisie—parties and institutions that defend a social order in which the vestiges of feudalism and casteism are overlain by ruthless capitalist oppression.