China’s Path to Socialist Modernization

Vijay Prashad & Tings Chak

Photograph Source: Hou Bo – Public Domain

The Communist Party of China (CPC) held its 20th National Congress from October 16 to October 22, 2022. Every five years, the delegates of the CPC’s 96 million members meet to elect its top leaders and to set the future direction for the party. One of the main themes of the congress this year was “rejuvenation” of the country through “a Chinese path to modernization.” In his report to the congress, Xi Jinping, the CPC’s general secretary, sketched out the way forward to build China “into a modern socialist country.”

Most of the Western media commentary about the congress ignored the actual words that were said in Beijing, opting instead to make wild speculations about the deliberations in the party (including about the sudden departure of former Chinese President Hu Jintao from the Great Hall of the People during the closing session of the congress, who left because he was feeling ill). Much could have been gained from listening to what people said during the National Congress instead of putting words in their mouths.

Socialist Modernization

When the Communist Party took power in China in 1949, the country was the 11th poorest country in the world. For the first time since the “century of humiliation” that began with the British wars on China from 1839 onward, China has developed into a major power with the social situation of the Chinese people having greatly improved from their condition in 1949. A short walk away from the Great Hall of the People, where the congress was held, is the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall, which reminds people of the immense achievement of the Chinese Revolution of 1949 and its impact on Chinese society.

Xi Jinping became the general secretary of the CPC at the 18th National Congress in 2012 and was elected president of the People’s Republic of China in March 2013. Since then, the country has gone through significant changes. Economically, China’s GDP has almost doubled to become the world’s second-largest economy, growing from 58.8 trillion yuan in 2013 to 114.37 trillion yuan in 2021, and its GDP expanded at a rate of 6.6 percent per year during the same period. Meanwhile, the country’s per capita GDP almost doubled between 2013 and 2021, with China approaching the high-income country bracket. In terms of the world economy, China’s GDP was 18.5 percent of the global total in 2021, and the country was responsible for 30 percent of world economic growth from 2013 to 2021. China also manufactured 30 percent of the world’s goods in 2021, up from more than 20 percent in 2012. This adds to the decades of historically unprecedented growth rate of 9.8 percent per year from 1978 to 2014 since the launching of economic reform in China in 1978. These economic achievements are historic and did not come without their set of challenges and consequences.

While delivering the report at the opening of this congress, Xi spoke about the situation that the Chinese people faced a decade ago: “Great achievements had been secured in reform, opening up, and socialist modernization… At the same time, however, a number of prominent issues and problems—some of which had been building for years and others which were just emerging—demanded urgent action.” He went on to talk about the “slide toward weak, hollow, and watered-down party leadership,” pointing out that “money worship, hedonism, egocentricity, and historical nihilism” were the deep-seated problems in a development process that was “imbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable.” These are significant self-criticisms made by the man who has led the country for the past decade.

Corruption

A decade ago, in his speech at the 18th CPC National Congress, outgoing Secretary General Hu Jintao mentioned the word “corruption” several times. “If we fail to handle this issue well,” he warned, “it could prove fatal to the party, and even cause the collapse of the party and the fall of the state.” Xi Jinping’s first task after taking over as general secretary of the CPC was to tackle this issue. In his inaugural speech as the party head in 2013, Xi said he was committed to “the fighting of tigers and flies at the same time,” referring to the corruption that had spread from the high echelons down to the grassroots level within the party and the government. The party launched “eight-point” rules for its members in December 2012, to limit practices such as inconsequential meetings and extravagant receptions for official visits, and advocated “diligence and thrift.”

Meanwhile, a year after the launch of the “mass line campaign” by Xi’s administration in June 2013, official meetings were reduced by 25 percent in comparison to the period before the campaign, 160,000 “phantom staff” were removed from the government payroll, and 2,580 “unnecessary” official building projects were stopped. Over the past decade, from November 2012 to April 2022, nearly 4.4 million cases involving 4.7 million officials were investigated in the fight against corruption. Party members have been investigated. In the first half of this year alone, 24 senior officials were investigated for corruption, and former ministers, provincial governors, and presidents of the biggest state-owned banks have been expelled from the party and given harsh sentences, including life imprisonment.

Hu Jintao’s comments and Xi Jinping’s actions reflected concerns that during the period of high growth after 1978, CPC members grew increasingly detached from the people. During the first months of his presidency, Xi launched the “mass line campaign” to bring the party closer to the grassroots. As part of the “targeted poverty alleviation” campaign launched in 2014, 800,000 party cadres were sent to survey and visit 128,000 villages as part of this project. In 2020, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, China successfully eradicated extreme poverty, contributing to 76 percent of the global reduction in poverty till October 2015.

Beyond the party’s self-correction, Xi’s strong words and actions against the corrupt “flies and tigers” contributed to the Chinese people’s confidence in the government. According to a 2020 research paper by Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, the overall satisfaction with the government’s performance was 93.1 percent in 2016, seeing the most significant growth in the more underdeveloped regions in the countryside. This rise of confidence in rural areas resulted from increased social services, trust in local officials, and the campaign against poverty.

Right Side of History

At the 20th Congress, Xi Jinping reflected on the history of colonialism—including China’s “century of humiliation”—and the implications this would have for China going forward. “In pursuing modernization,” Xi said, “China will not tread the old path of war, colonization, and plunder taken by some countries. That brutal and blood-stained path of enrichment at the expense of others caused great suffering for the people of developing countries. We will stand firmly on the right side of history and on the side of human progress.”

Chinese officials routinely tell us that their country is not interested in seeking dominance in the world. What China would like to do is to collaborate with other countries to try and solve humanity’s dilemmas. The Belt and Road Initiative, for instance, was launched in 2013 with the purpose of “win-win” cooperation and development and has thus far built much-needed infrastructure with investment and construction contracts totaling $1 trillion in almost 150 countries. China’s interest in tackling the climate catastrophe is evidenced by its planting of a quarter of the world’s new forests over the past decade and in becoming a world leader in renewable energy investment and electric vehicle production. On the public health side, China adopted a COVID-19 policy that prioritizes lives over profit, donated 325 million doses of vaccines, and saved millions of lives as a result of this. As a result of its initiatives in the public health sector, the average life expectancy of Chinese people was 77.93 years in 2020 and reached 78.2 years in 2021, and for the first time, surpassed life expectancy in the United States—77 years in 2020 and 76.1 in 2021—making this drop “the biggest two-year decline in life expectancy since 1921-1923.”

China’s communists do not see these events without putting them in the context of the long process undertaken by the government toward achieving and ensuring their social development. In 27 years, China will celebrate the centenary of its revolution. In 1997, then-President of China Jiang Zemin spoke about the two centenary goals—the 100-year markers following the founding of the Communist Party (1921) and the Chinese Revolution (1949)—that “underwrite all China’s long-term economic planning programs and contemporary macroeconomic policy agendas.” At that time, the focus was on growth rates. In 2017, Xi Jinping shifted the emphasis of these goals to the “three tough battles”: to defuse major financial risks, to eradicate poverty, and to control pollution. This new congress has gone beyond those “tough battles” to protect Chinese sovereignty and to expand the dignity of the Chinese people.

Rishi Sunak and Britain’s Post-Brexit Fairy Tales

Patrick Cockburn

Photograph Source: Rory Arnold / No10 Downing Street – OGL 3

Much mirth is expressed over President Joe Biden mispronouncing the new Prime Minister’s name as “Rashee Sanook”. Many see this as showing how the merry-go-round of British leaders has confused the rest of the world. Some take up the opportunity to sideswipe Biden, saying that he was pretty confused to begin with.

I doubt if it matters that much: world leaders tend to know surprisingly little about allied and hostile states because they single-mindedly focus on their own domestic politics. Biden’s attention will be fixed these days on the midterm congressional elections and his own prospects in the presidential election of 2024. More important for Rishi Sunak will be the real standing of Britain, regardless of name recognition or lack of it.

A telling but negative omen about his abilities is perhaps not receiving enough attention because of the wave of relief that Liz Truss has gone from Downing Street and Boris Johnson is not going to re-enter it. There is upbeat talk of “grown-ups” taking charge at last and encouraging recollections of Sunak’s success in mitigating the economic impact of the pandemic. He is presenting himself as the cool-headed financial expert thankfully at the helm with the skill and experience to avoid the approaching rocks.

But keep in mind that Sunak backed Brexit. He voted to leave the EU, even without a withdrawal agreement. That is one reason why Steve Baker and many Brexit leaders gave him decisive backing last weekend. On the most critical economic decision facing Britain since 1945, the new Prime Minister was decisively on the side of those who claimed that the country would have a better future outside the EU.

Sunak’s jibe at Truss during the summer Tory leadership campaign that she was indulging in “fairy-tale economics” has been ceaselessly replayed on television in the past few days. But no channel I have seen is showing Sunak telling even more disastrous “fairy tales” about the advantages to Britain of putting up trade barriers with its largest market.

The devastating impact of Brexit was highlighted this month by Mark Carney, who was for seven years head of the Bank of England. He cited a couple of damning statistics. Asked in an interview about the economic consequences of Brexit, he said: “Put it this way, in 2016 the British economy was 90 per cent the size of Germany’s. Now it is less than 70 per cent. And that calculation was made before today.”

The Brexit referendum vote and the turmoil that followed accelerated the British decline caused by a decade of austerity. The country became less and less capable of sustaining external shocks like the Covid-19 pandemic, the Ukraine war – and its own government’s divisions and contortions.

Sunak presents himself as a safe pair of hands after the Truss and Johnson comic opera, but he is complicit as a true believer in a decision that almost all economic experts agree has done nothing but self-harm to Britain. He may get a sympathy vote as he inherits deep problems, but he shares in responsibility for creating them in the first place.

Brexit revived the Irish question, which bedeviled British politics for centuries and now threatens the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement of 1998. The dispute about the Northern Ireland Protocol is in reality about Irish partition, which has turned into an international issue with which Sunak has no good options.

Go too far in meeting the anti-Protocol demands of the Tory right and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and he alienates the Irish Republic, EU and – most significantly for the UK – the US. He will presumably try to fudge and delay negotiations to avoid a trade war with the EU. But any dispute involving Northern Ireland has so many moving parts that it is largely insoluble and has its own momentum outside the control of Westminster governments – as many British prime ministers have learned to their cost.

Immigration is another dangerous issue which is not quite what it appears. Many supported Brexit and the Tories because they wanted immigration to go down, but instead it has risen spectacularly, doubling to 1.1 million to June this year compared with 2018-19.

The Government has yet to be hit by a bigger dispute over this because public attention is focused on the 38,000 people illegally crossing the channel in small boats and not on the far larger figure for legal immigrants.

Sunak may increase legal immigration to encourage growth but continue to publicise deportation to Rwanda as a gimmick to pretend that the Government is trying to limit immigration. This policy was beginning to shake apart in the last days of Truss, as shown by her last-minute sacking of the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman. Her reappointment by Sunak suggests it may be resurrected.

Standing tall on Ukraine will be one of Sunak’s easier tasks, but an endless war in Ukraine, with every sign of the conflict escalating, means continued high oil and gas prices. Neither Britain nor the EU has much idea of how to break the deadlock in Ukraine, except to hope for a comprehensive Russian defeat or the overthrow of President Vladimir Putin.

As in Afghanistan and Iraq, British policy will remain in lockstep with the White House, regardless of Biden’s inability to remember the British Prime Minister’s correct name.

German parliament agrees to drastically restrict freedom of speech and assembly

Justus Leicht

The amendment to paragraph 130 of the penal code (incitement of the people), decided in a cloak-and-dagger action, is an unprecedented attack on the fundamental rights of freedom of expression and assembly. In view of the rapid return of German militarism, any expression of doubts about the deafening war propaganda and any opposition to the war policy are to be made punishable offences.

Specifically, the legislation will be amended to include a paragraph stating that it is punishable by up to three years in prison to “publicly or in an assembly” condone, deny, or grossly trivialize “genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes.” Officially, this will implement a 2008 EU decision to combat racism, so the alleged statement must be “likely” to “incite hatred or violence” against a national, racial, religious or ethnic group, against parts of the population or against an individual because of his or her affiliation with it, and “disturb the public peace.”

The amendment to the law, which was passed with the votes of the Social Democrats (SPD), Liberal Democrats (FDP), Greens and Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU), was deliberately worded in such a way that no limit is placed on the time and place of the aforementioned crimes, nor did they have to be “finally established by a court.” Such a limitation had been made possible by the EU Framework Decision, but the “traffic light” coalition of the SPD, FDP and Greens, together with the CDU/CSU, deliberately did not use it, as the parliamentary Legal Affairs Committee’s recommended resolution on the law explicitly states. Even if such a statement is made in a non-public meeting, it can still be prosecuted.

SGP placards against war and the return of fascism [WSWS Media] [Photo: WSWS]

This means that it does not matter when or where war crimes or genocide took place, or whether they have a connection to Germany or not. Since they also do not have to be established judicially, suspicion about a propaganda claim can also suffice. It suffices if police officers, prosecutors or judges declare them to be true.

At the same time, the law provides the German judiciary practically unlimited leeway, through undefined legal terms, as to when it will prosecute supposedly illegal statements and when it will not, when “trivialization” is present, when this is “gross,” and when a statement is “suitable” to “disturb the public peace” (an actual disturbance is not required).

Despite all the denials from the Ministry of Justice, which point to EU infringement proceedings against Germany from last year for failing to implement the 2008 EU decision, the reason for the tightening of the law is obviously the Ukraine war. It was literally decided in a cloak-and-dagger action, public discussion was apparently to be avoided, as the Süddeutsche Zeitung vividly described:

There had been no major announcement; instead, Marco Buschmann’s (FDP) Ministry of Justice had given an initially non-public “formulation aid” to the Legal Affairs Committee. The committee had then attached the text to an inconspicuous reform bill on the Federal Central Register on Wednesday. So it was able to move quickly: On Thursday evening shortly before 11 p.m., the traffic light factions in the Bundestag, together with the Christian Democrats, had already given their final approval.

Now, only the Bundesrat, the second chamber, must agree on November 25; after ratification by the Federal President and publication in the Federal Law Gazette it then comes into force.

The reason for the haste and stealth with which this law is being rushed through is the fear and anger of the ruling class that NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine against Russia, despite incessant propaganda, is rejected by broad sections of the population. Many working people are not driven by the desire for victory over Russia, but by concerns about rising living costs and fear of war. The answer of the ruling class is to criminalize the rejection of atrocity propaganda against Russia.

The significance of the law, however, goes far beyond the Ukraine war. In most wars and civil wars around the world, allegations of war crimes and genocide play a central political role. Sometimes they are true, but only a pretext; often they turn out to be lies.

Thus, in order to justify the war against Iraq, real past crimes of the Hussein regime, such as poison gas attacks against Kurds during the war against Iran, were brought up, but tales of atrocities were also invented, such as that Iraqi soldiers tore Kuwaiti babies out of incubators. NATO’s war of aggression against Yugoslavia, which violated international law, was preceded by propaganda about an alleged “horseshoe plan” by Yugoslav President Milosevic, who was allegedly planning genocide against the Kosovo Albanians. Similar propaganda was used to justify the war against Libya to overthrow and assassinate Libyan leader Gaddafi. The examples could be continued.

In future, using the new law, anyone who questions the war propaganda of the ruling class can be prosecuted. Hatred and the denial of war crimes against Germany’s enemies, on the other hand, will continue to go unprosecuted. No state attorney will prosecute Ukrainian nationalists for glorifying Nazis like the Azov regiment or the fascist Stepan Bandera and incitement against “Russian orcs.”

The prosecution of opponents of war has a long tradition in Germany. Socialist leaders August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht were sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for their criticism of the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were locked up in a penitentiary for their opposition to the First World War. The Nazis eventually imprisoned hundreds of thousands of Communists and Social Democrats in concentration camps in order to conduct World War II.

In the name of the fight against “incitement of the people,” of all things, the ruling class is reanimating this tradition. The new law is part of comprehensive attacks on basic democratic rights aimed at suppressing widespread opposition to war and social devastation.

For example, in the capital Berlin authorities banned all “Nakba Day” demonstrations marking the destruction of Palestinian society and homeland in 1948. In many parts of Berlin this year, it was forbidden to commemorate the liberation from fascism in World War II by the Soviet Union with Soviet flags at Soviet memorials and monuments on Liberation Day, May 9. In a ruling against the left-wing daily Junge Welt in March, the Berlin Administrative Court justified allowing publications to be spied on, harassed and discriminated against by the secret service if they advocated against capitalism and for a socialist society.

Australia: Report reveals soaring levels of hunger, the result of rising living costs

Max Boddy

Last week the charity organisation Foodbank released their annual “Hunger Report,” which gives a snapshot of the level of food insecurity in Australia. It revealed that 33 percent of households, or an estimated 8.6 million people, ran out of money to pay for food or, in some cases, skipped meals for days. This is up from 28 percent the previous year—an increase of around 1.3 million people.

Foodbank Hunger Report 2022: The hunger crisis facing Australia [Photo: Foodbank Hunger Report 2022]

The report is based on an online survey of 4,024 people conducted by Foodbank between 11 and 28 July this year. Based on their responses they were categorised as highly food secure, marginally food secure, moderately food insecure or severely food insecure. The distribution of respondents was based on stratified quotas weighted by state, age, sex and location. The results give an indication of the food crisis in Australia.

Significantly the largest increase from the previous year were those categorised as severely insecure, which rose from 17 percent of households in 2021 to 21 percent in 2022. This means 400,000 more households have been thrust into severe food insecurity in a single year, or 1.04 million Australians.

To be classified as severely food insecure, households must have experienced any one of the following due to running out of money or not having access to food—went hungry and did not eat, went an entire day without food or lost weight as a result of not having food, this includes children.

Households with children are 1.5 times more vulnerable to severe food insecurity, with 32 percent, or one third of all households with children experiencing severely compromised levels of food access. According to the data, 52 percent of all Australian households with children under 18 experienced some form of food insecurity in the last 12 months.

These staggering numbers reveal a crisis bubbling under the surface, as families struggle to afford the rapidly rising cost of living. Brianna Casey, the chief executive of Foodbank, told the Guardian, that it was the worst she had seen in six years in the job, “I’ve never seen anything like what we are seeing right now.

“It’s going to come as a surprise to many that we are seeing rates of food insecurity that are worse than at the height of the pandemic… People have come out of the pandemic in many instances in a more vulnerable position than they went in.”

The pandemic, however, is far from over. August was the deadliest month in Australia since the pandemic began, with over 2000 deaths due to the virus. The Albanese Labor government has removed all basic safety measures, deepening the policies of the Liberal party, which has set the stage for a massive surge of infection.

The policy of ‘letting the virus rip,’ coupled with the US-NATO instigated war in the Ukraine and massive profit gouging by major corporations, is fueling an inflationary crisis which is pushing millions into poverty. The official inflation rate is 7.3 percent, the highest in 32 years, however the official figures hide the true extent of the pressure on families.

According to the latest available Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) figures fruit and vegetables had a 16.2 percent annual price increase in 12 months to the September quarter. At the same time, meat and seafood rose 7.3 percent, breads and cereals 10 percent and dairy related products 12.1 percent. Non-durable household products, such as those for home cleaning and healthcare rose by 11.9 percent and housing increased by 10.5 percent.

This is reflected in the report—the primary reason for households’ food crisis is “increased/high living expenses,” cited by 64 percent of respondents. Within that the top three reasons given were “increased food and grocery costs,” “increased energy costs” and “increased housing cost.”

The majority of those surveyed found they were more food insecure this year than last, on average 55 percent. One male respondent aged 55–65 years from regional Queensland said that the last time he couldn’t afford food he went to get cheaper options from a food cooperative, “I had $5 so that was enough to get through until pension day. Things are getting worse, I am scared.”

Pointing to how widespread the food crisis has become, the report notes increasing “diversity” in the households that have experienced food insecurity from those “typically less vulnerable.”

More than half, 54 percent, of households who had someone in paid work reported food insecurity and while 45 percent of households who were renting reported food insecurity, so did nearly a third, 30 percent, of those households with a mortgage.

Low-income families or those on the below-poverty welfare payments still account for the most impacted by the rising cost of living. As one woman over the age of 55 on the aged care pension wrote in the survey, “I only eat once a day because the cost of groceries have increased and the pension doesn’t cover the real cost of living, so I try and cut down on everything, so I can survive on the government pension.”

The report also notes the role of “natural disasters,” such as droughts, bush fires, and flooding, which impacted nearly 20 percent of all households. The severe impact of these disasters is the result of residents being abandoned by the government. In Lismore, in northern New South Wales, thousands of victims of floods in February are still left homeless or forced to live in overcrowded camper vans.

The soaring levels of hunger in Australia are the results of the decades-long assault on the living conditions of workers, overseen by both Labor and Liberal parties alike. This process was only accelerated in the past two years, as the pandemic has been used to funnel billions into the pockets of the wealthy even as real wage levels are declining.

Brazilian presidential run-off unfolds under shadow of military’s “parallel vote count”

Miguel Andrade

The Brazilian presidential run-off, due to take place on Sunday, October 30, is unfolding under the shadow of an unprecedented “parallel vote count” and “audit” of the country’s electronic voting machines being conducted by the country’s military. The armed forces command has essentially aligned itself with the false claims of ballot fraud used by fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro to justify his announced refusal to concede a likely defeat.

Military Police chiefs meeting wth Electoral Court on Brazil’s elections [Photo: Alejandro Zambrona/Secom/TSE]

Bolsonaro has for four years claimed that only voting fraud in favor of his 2018 elections adversary, Fernando Haddad of the Workers Party (PT), blocked his victory in the first round. Since then, anticipating the results of the hatred generated by the sweeping attacks on workers’ living standards he implemented on behalf of national and foreign capital, Bolsonaro has relentlessly attacked the Brazilian electoral system and enlisted the military in these attacks.

In the last days before the run-off, after Bolsonaro trailed former PT president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the first round by 6 million votes, the situation is more dangerous than ever. The military has remained silent on their “audit,” while Bolsonaro repeats his claims that he will not accept the results unless the military proclaims its agreement with them, despite having no constitutional role in the matter.

More gravely, when asked last week by both the Supreme Court and the Court of auditors to release its “report,” the Defense Ministry replied it would not make public any “partial” analysis before the full conclusion of its “audit,” and that this would only happen after January 5, that is, after the inauguration of the next president, set for January 1.

The entire course of the closed door negotiations between all those declaring Bolsonaro a “fascist” and an existential threat to Brazilian democracy, first and foremost the Congressional opposition led by Lula and the PT, has so far succeeded only in elevating the military to the role of final arbiter of the elections, whatever the results of Sunday’s run-off.

Now, while Bolsonaro claims the results of the first round are suspect and calls on his fascist supporters to lay siege to voting sites in the second round, the military effectively declares it will not recognize the election results until after the inauguration of the next government, if ever.

Such a declaration represents an ominous threat, given both the Brazilian military’s bloody history and the intractable crisis of world capitalism, which finds a particularly sharp expression in Brazil. Backed by US imperialism, Brazilian generals ousted the bourgeois-nationalist Labor Party government of João Goulart in 1964, promising “clean” elections a year later, before shutting down Congress, abolishing political parties and habeas corpus, purging the Supreme Court and killing, torturing and sending into exile thousands of oppositionists. This reign of terror would last for 21 years and serve as a breeding ground for even bloodier coups across the continent, claiming hundreds of thousands of victims.

The rapid acceptance by the Brazilian ruling class of the fascistic Bolsonaro, a former Army captain and unabashed apologist of the dictatorship’s political executions, as the leading candidate and later president, signaled clearly that this history was not, after all, “past” as claimed by the PT and the corporate media. Now the military announces loud and clear that they are arrogating to themselves the right to rule on the legitimacy of civil authorities, which could rapidly evolve into a renewed dictatorship.

As the recent developments clearly expose, such dangers cannot be fought by a vote for the bourgeois opposition to Bolsonaro, that is, Lula and the PT. The main goal of the opposition, which has sworn their fealty to Brazilian capitalism in countless meetings with big business and foreign emissaries, is to chloroform public opinion in the face of the crisis engulfing Brazilian and international capitalism which drives the growth of fascist forces internationally.

The opposition’s goal is to provide a lifeline to the moribund Brazilian bourgeois-democratic regime, in order to prevent an assault from below, effectively paving the way for a redoubled assault by the right wing.

Under these conditions, the military’s refusal to rule out election fraud, providing Bolsonaro with key support for his fascistic calls to overturn the results, is being completely ignored by the opposition. Hours before a public rally in the historic Catholic University Theater in São Paulo on Monday, gathering dozens of intellectuals and artists, Lula declared that he believes Bolsonaro will call him and concede defeat on Sunday night.

Lula reacted similarly after news on Wednesday night that Bolsonaro had made a hasty return from the campaign trail to the capital, Brasília, to meet with the military chiefs before announcing he would challenge the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) for allowing radio stations to suppress his legal advertisement schedules. Bolsonaro’s announcement was yet another step in his carefully developed coup plans, but Lula dismissed it as a sign that the president is “psychologically broken.”

Such declarations by the foremost leader of the self-proclaimed Brazilian left and “anti-fascist” opposition are politically criminal. In the face of the plans for a coup that are underway, the PT’s only argument is that it should be returned to power as the best means to contain and disrupt the working class opposition to a renewed dictatorship with the use of its allied union apparatus and pseudo-left identity politics.

With the military placing a sword over the head of the next administration, one can only expect that, if elected, the PT will move further to the right, deepening the turn to religious, militaristic and law-and-order reaction that has been the hallmark of the run-off election.

This turn started with Lula’s pious declaration of ultra-right “pro-life,” anti-abortion convictions, and deepened with his calls for billionaires and businessmen to declare their open support for the PT as the best alternative for improving Brazil’s relations with world imperialism. What followed were promises to evangelical churches supporting Bolsonaro that they will hold sway over social policies in a new PT government, as announced by Lula in a “Letter to the Evangelicals” of October 19.

Now the PT is fully focused on presenting itself as the last line of defense of the police apparatus. It has seized on a standoff last Sunday between Bolsonaro’s fascist supporter Roberto Jefferson and the Federal Police, in which Jefferson fired 50 rounds from an assault rifle and hurled three stun grenades against a squad poised to arrest him outside of his home in the countryside of Rio de Janeiro.

Jefferson was the first of the ultra-right elements—such as Bolsonaro himself—to break from the PT’s ruling coalition after Lula was elected for the first time in 2002. Jefferson then, as now, led the corrupt Brazilian Labor Party (PTB), and denounced the PT government for paying monthly stipends in exchange for votes in the Brazilian House, including for the approval of its hated pensions reform. He was sentenced to seven years in prison in 2012 for taking part in the scheme himself, leaving prison 15 months later. He later steadily steered the PTB towards fascistic forces, becoming a Bolsonaro loyalist and sponsoring, in July 2021, the mass entry into the party of members of the traditional Brazilian fascist movement, the Integralistas.

He was arrested soon after on the orders of Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who now leads the Electoral Court, as a threat to the state, under the sealed so-called fake news inquiry. Placed under house arrest due to poor health, he repeatedly violated the sentence’s terms, including by keeping the arms cache used to repel federal officers.

Jefferson fully embodied Bolsonaro’s coup strategy, going on social media, in violation of judicial orders, to complain about the anti-“fake news” measures of the Electoral Court, which days before had ordered the withdrawal of hundreds of pro-Bolsonaro videos and news pieces from social media, and forbidden the far-right Jovem Pan radio from reproducing them. Knowing his provocation would bring a renewed arrest warrant, Jefferson started broadcasting the arrival of the police and later exposed a pool of blood from one officer hit in the head by fragments of a stun grenade. As a result, by the time police reinforcements arrived and were finally able to seize him, his house was surrounded by Bolsonaro loyalists.

Bolsonaro then dispatched his Justice Minister, Anderson Torres, who negotiated Jefferson’s surrender by phone from the nearby city of Juiz de Fora. While Bolsonaro later condemned Jefferson as an “outlaw” to be punished, the protection offered to him with the use of the Justice Ministry sends a clear message to the president’s fascist supporters who have been summoned to seize voting sites on Sunday.

Predictably, the PT’s reaction was to show solidarity with the police and double down on the lie that Bolsonaro is the sole source of fascist violence in the country, with Lula declaring that “this never happened in Brazilian politics,” as if the dictatorship the PT was born opposing had never existed.

US testing shows decline in math and reading skills among students, aggravated by the ruling class response to the pandemic

Harvey Simpkins

Kindergarten teacher Karen Drolet, left, works with a student at Raices Dual Language Academy, a public school in Central Falls, R.I., Feb. 9, 2022. (AP Photo/David Goldman, File)

On Monday, the National Center for Education Statistics released the results of the 2022 National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), which was given to fourth and eighth grade students last spring. The results show a large decrease in English and math proficiency since the test was last administered in 2019.

Forty-three out of 53 states and other jurisdictions tested by the NAEP saw a decline in fourth-grade math skills. For eighth grade, only two jurisdictions did not see a statistically significant decline. For fourth grade reading, 30 jurisdictions saw a decline, while 33 jurisdictions saw a decline in eight grade reading.

On average, between 2019 and 2022, fourth and eighth grade reading both showed a three-point decline, fourth grade math a five-point decline and eighth grade math an eight-point decline. NAEP is scored on a 0 to 500 scale.

Many government officials, news reports and commentators quickly blamed remote learning during the pandemic as the cause of the declines. But in Los Angeles, one of the few school districts to maintain remote learning options throughout the 2020–2021 school year, showed gains between 2019–2022 on NAEP in fourth grade reading (two points) eighth grade reading (nine points) and eight grade math (one point). Florida, fully open for in-person learning since the 2020–2021 school year, saw a four point drop in eighth grade reading, seven point drop in eight grade math, five point drop in fourth grade math and no change in fourth grade reading.

Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, the federal agency that administers NAEP, noted, “There’s nothing in this data that tells us that there is a measurable difference in the performance between states and districts based solely on how long schools were closed.”

Students who took the 2022 assessment were also asked whether they attended remote school during the 2020–21 school year. The NAEP report noted that higher performers on the test (scoring at or above the 75th percentile) who learned remotely during the 2020–21 school year reported having “more frequent access to a desktop computer, laptop, or tablet all the time; a quiet place to work available at least some of the time; and a teacher available to help them with mathematics schoolwork about once or twice a week or more compared to lower performers (those below the 25th percentile).”

In other words, remote learners with adequate resources and support were generally able to perform better on the assessment. If the government had provided laptops, internet access and enough teachers, adequately trained, to provide support, remote learning could have been successfully implemented in the spring of 2020 as a temporary measure, along with all necessary public health measures, to eliminate COVID-19.

Instead, in order to save Wall Street, limited and haphazard public health measures were steadily abandoned in the late spring and summer of 2020, with the result that more than two years later, the pandemic has not only not ended but new vaccine-resistant mutations are emerging.

Austerity in education long predates the pandemic. During the Obama administration, there was a net loss of 300,000 school employees, despite K-12 enrollment increasing during his presidency. But the pandemic has laid bare the real state of education in the United States.

Decades of funding cuts have led to massive increases in class sizes, reductions in school nurses and counselors, woefully inadequate pay for essential school personnel, a curriculum increasingly devoted to rote “teaching to the test,” especially in math and reading, along with the elimination of art, music, theater, field trips and other culturally enriching experiences. The pandemic has only accelerated many of these trends, and tens of thousands of teachers have left the profession.

Just this academic year, school districts across the country have cut hundreds of millions of dollars from their budgets. New York City cut $215 million, Minneapolis, $27 million, various districts across California each faced budget deficits of tens of millions of dollars, and the Kansas City school district had a $28 million deficit.

At the federal level, the fiscal year 2022 budget provided $76.4 billion to the Department of Education, less than 10 percent of the Pentagon budget. In 2022 alone, the United States has provided to Ukraine at least $50 billion in weapons and other financial assistance, two-thirds the total federal spending on education.

Further exacerbating the crisis in education are the health effects of COVID-19 on students and school personnel. A study published in Nature from May showed that 70 percent of US children had been infected, some 51 million children, and the CDC’s inadequate statistics show that 1,506 children have died from the virus. While no state or federal agency tracks the number of school workers who have died, the Twitter account School Personnel Lost to Covid shows that, as of August 1, 2,422 school workers have died.

The health impacts are worsening, and countless children and school workers will suffer from Long COVID, which can cause serious long-term health problems, including brain damage and sudden death from heart attacks and strokes. A study published October 20 in Pediatrics looked at 15,000 children hospitalized with COVID-19 and determined that 7 percent experienced neurological complications, including seizures.

Many of those afflicted with Long COVID complain of “brain fog” and the inability to concentrate for even short periods of time, with obvious negative implications for learning.

Millions of students, repeatedly exposed to COVID-19, will likely suffer health impairments of one degree or another. Students will continuously have their education disrupted by illness. When the Omicron wave hit last winter, schools routinely combined classes to fill in for missing teachers infected with the virus, or even packed students into auditoriums or cafeterias with no instruction taking place.

Now, with all mitigation measures dropped for the 2022–2023 school year and a new wave of COVID-19 variants likely to soon swoop over the country, children and school workers will continue to be exposed to the virus, and the same cycle of education disruption seen with the Omicron wave will repeat itself.

Compounding the long-term health problems from COVID-19, according to the Imperial College of London, an estimated 229,500 US children have lost at least one primary caregiver to COVID-19. A study published in April by JAMA Network compared education outcomes for siblings, where one child experienced a parental death before finishing K-12 education and the other after.

The results showed that experiencing parental death before finishing school was associated with lower school performance and, further, that “losing a parent at a younger age was associated with lower grades within a family.”