The FIFA World Cup in Qatar: geopolitics, money and double standards

Peter Schwarz

The fact that top-class sport including world football is dominated by big money and power interests is no surprise to anyone. But with the World Cup in Qatar, this has reached a new stage.

The awarding of the World Cup to the Gulf state by FIFA in 2010 was a scandal at the time. Qatar is a country which has no football tradition. It has 3 million residents, but only one in ten of these is a Qatari citizen. The country’s unbearable heat made the usual summer schedule for the tournament impossible. Moreover, it is ruled by a despot who does not even allow rudimentary forms of democracy.

A fireworks display is seen outside Al Bayt Stadium in Al Khor, Qatar, during a ceremony prior to a World Cup, group A soccer match between Qatar and Ecuador, Sunday, Nov. 20, 2022. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)

It was clear that huge sums of money changed hands and massive political pressure was exerted behind the scenes to bring about the decision. But Qatar was not exceptional in this regard. The awarding of the World Cup to Germany (2006), South Africa (2010) and Russia (2018) were also overshadowed by bribery and corruption.

Since the World Cup was awarded to Qatar, huge commercial deals have been concluded. FIFA alone expects revenues of $7.5 billion, $1 billion more than at the last World Cup in Russia. Qatar has invested over 200 billion dollars in the World Cup and infrastructure: $8 billion in eight modern, air conditioned stadiums, $16.5 billion in 140 hotels with 155,000 beds, $36 billion in a new metro and $20 billion in airports, ports and motorways.

These projects were built by a huge army of workers from Asia under slave-like conditions of exploitation. Twelve-hour shifts and a seven-day work week in sweltering heat, indescribable accommodations, starvation wages, often withheld for months, confiscated passports and a ban on changing jobs were common. According to a report by the British Guardian, 6,750 workers from India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Pakistan have died in Qatar in the ten years since the World Cup was awarded. Amnesty International calculated that more than 15,000 foreign citizens of all ages died between 2010 and 2019. In 70 percent of these cases, the cause of death was unknown.

Meanwhile, according to a local representative of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), whose salary is paid by the Qatari government, conditions have improved somewhat. A statutory minimum wage of 1,000 Riyal (€230) per month is now in force—in one of the richest and most expensive countries in the world!

Western companies have benefited greatly from the construction boom. The German planning office Albert Speer und Partner drew up the masterplan for the World Cup and the drafts for the eight football stadiums. Albert Speer, who died in 2017, is the son of Hitler's architect and arms minister.

Qatar is also a sought-after investor. The sheikdom owns numerous real estate and luxury hotels in Britain, France and Germany and is a major shareholder in Volkswagen, RWE, Deutsche Bank, Lagardère, Vivendi, Veolia, TotalEnergies and other leading companies. The sheikdom has also purchased the Paris Saint-German football club and has made it the strongest team in France by acquiring expensive world-class players such as Messi, Neymar and Mbappé. Bayern Munich, the current champion of the German Bundesliga, is sponsored by Qatar.

Since the imposition of sanctions against Russian gas and oil, Qatar has also become a leading liquefied gas exporter. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Minister for Economic Affairs Robert Habeck and other international politicians made a pilgrimage to Doha this year to secure LNG deals.

Geopolitical objectives

Even more important than commercial interests for the imperialist powers are the geopolitical goals they are pursuing in Qatar. The small state in the middle of the disputed, energy-rich Gulf region is an important political and military base for them.

The US maintains its largest Middle East airbase in Al Udeid, which played a vital role in the war in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria and is located in the immediate vicinity of Iran. Qatar participated in the Libyan war against Muammar al-Qaddafi with its own fighter and transport aircraft. It supported Islamist terrorist groups that fueled the civil war in Libya and were later used in Syria against the Assad regime.

If Western politicians, media and football officials now deplore the human rights situation in Qatar and call for equal rights for women and gay people, this is pure hypocrisy. The US and its European allies have killed one million people in the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria and have forced millions more to flee. In comparison, the authoritarian rulers of the Gulf monarchies are petty criminals.

As far as the imperialist powers are concerned, the tournament in Qatar was never in question. FIFA boss Gianni Infantino, who moved to Doha a year ago and declared at the beginning of the World Cup in a bizarre press conference that he now feels himself to be a Qatari, an Arab, an African, a homosexual, a disabled person and a migrant worker, only expresses this cynical attitude most bluntly.

The situation is different with the abhorrence of many football fans, who are honestly outraged that the World Cup is being played on the bones of their fellow workers from poorer countries. The brutal exploitation of the construction workers has also hit a nerve with them because they too are confronted with rising workloads and falling wages. In Germany, a representative survey in May 2021 found that 65 percent of respondents reject the participation of the German national team in the World Cup.

How FIFA auctioned the World Cup to Qatar

Many details are now known about how FIFA sold the World Cup to Qatar in 2010. Twenty-two of the twenty-four officials who voted at the time in favour of the decision have since been forced to leave due to corruption, with some ending up in prison. Politicians and prosecutors were ousted, and even Sepp Blatter, who dominated FIFA like a mafia don from 1998 to 2016, had to vacate his chair—only to make way for another schemer, Infantino.

The fact that these intrigues came to light at all was the result of imperialist power struggles and intrigues.

On the eve of the 2015 FIFA Congress in Zurich, the Swiss authorities arrested seven officials of the Football Association in a spectacular action at the luxury hotel Baur au Lac in Zurich on charges of corruption. They acted on behalf of the US judiciary, which had opened an investigation into FIFA for the 2010 World Cup award.

The focus was not so much on the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, but on the 2018 World Cup in Russia, which was decided on at the same 2010 meeting. After the US brought an anti-Russian regime to power in Ukraine in 2014 and Russia annexed Crimea, the US was determined to prevent the tournament from taking place in Russia. They failed, but the investigations set in motion an avalanche that was difficult to bring under control.

The US still had scores to settle in the case of Qatar. After all, they had applied for the 2022 World Cup themselves and sent a high-ranking delegation—led by ex-President Bill Clinton and actor Morgan Freeman – to Zurich. According to eyewitnesses, Clinton threw ashtrays around when he heard the result of the vote.

The decisive factor favouring Qatar was—in addition to the purchase of the votes of three South American delegates—the Frenchman Michel Platini and two other delegates, whom Platini influenced. The former football star was, at that time, president of the European football association UEFA and viewed as a possible successor to Blatter at FIFA. A few days before the FIFA vote, Platini met with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and the Emir of Qatar, Tamim Al Thani, who apparently 'convinced' him to vote for Qatar.

Blatter allegedly represented the interests of the US at the time. But that didn't save him, because he continued to support staging the 2018 World Cup in Russia. Infantino is said to have maintained close contacts with the US justice system and to have testified five months after the raid in Zurich as a witness before a grand jury in New York that investigated FIFA. He also had personal contacts with Federal prosecutor Michael Lauber, Switzerland’s top prosecutor.

Two days after the raid in Zurich, Blatter was elected head of FIFA for another term, but had to resign three days later due to pressure from the US. In the eight months leading up to the election of his successor, the Swiss judiciary also removed his most promising successor, Platini.

While it dropped most of the 25 criminal investigations, the federal prosecutor's office charged Blatter with paying $2 million in “consultant fees” to Platini. Although later acquitted by a court, the FIFA ethics committee subsequently imposed a perennial ban on Blatter and Platini, paving the way for Infantino, who was elected with the support of the US Association. Swiss Prosecutor Lauber later also lost his job because he met Infantino secretly several times after his election while still investigating him.

Once in office, Infantino blocked the investigation within FIFA and shut down its ethics committee. He took things even further than his predecessor Blatter, including an attempt to outsource all FIFA rights to a consortium led by Saudi Arabia.

The investigative zeal of the US judiciary also weakened after the World Cup in Russia could no longer be prevented and FIFA awarded the 2026 World Cup to North America.

Loretta Lynch, the Attorney General in the Obama administration, who in 2015 initiated the investigation against FIFA , is now in the pay of FIFA and sings hymns of praise to Infantino. In 2019, she joined the law firm Paul Weiss, which took over the representation of the football association in the FIFA Gate scandal from the law firm Quinn Emanuel.

Imperialist Alliances

Nothing now stood in the way of the World Cup taking place in Qatar. Not only does it promise fantastic business, but it also serves as a platform for the US and the European powers to forge new alliances against Russia and China. In doing so, they are courting not only Qatar, but all the Gulf monarchies and in particular Saudi Arabia, which have so far been reluctant to compensate for the failure of Russian gas and oil through higher production volumes and to embrace a course of confrontation with China.

In July, President Joe Biden was the first Western head of state to visit Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman since the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. At the opening game of the World Cup, Salman sat next to Infantino and the Emir of Qatar as a guest of honor. Between 2017 and 2021, Saudi Arabia and Qatar were on the verge of war.

The outrage over the murderous exploitation of Asian workers is now being deliberately downplayed. The media has instead turned its attention almost exclusively to the rights of women and gay people. “Critical” reporting is limited to the question of whether the team captains will be allowed to wear a “One Love” armband or various rainbow insignia to express opposition to homophobia. Even this purely symbolic gesture has proven too much, with the national football associations bowing to the ban imposed by FIFA, which does not want to allow its lucrative commercial and political relations with the despots of the Gulf region to be hampered.

The double standard is unmistakable. “Human rights” are invoked whenever it comes to justifying brutal imperialist wars—against Iraq, Libya, Iran, Russia, China, etc. They are ignored when it comes to their own human rights violations or those of allied dictators.

Renewable Energy isn’t Replacing Fossil Fuel Energy—It’s Adding to It

Richard Heinberg

Wind turbine, Columbia Gorge. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Despite all the renewable energy investments and installations, actual global greenhouse gas emissions keep increasing. That’s largely due to economic growth: While renewable energy supplies have expanded in recent years, world energy usage has ballooned even more—with the difference being supplied by fossil fuels. The more the world economy grows, the harder it is for additions of renewable energy to turn the tide by actually replacing energy from fossil fuels, rather than just adding to it.

The notion of voluntarily reining in economic growth in order to minimize climate change and make it easier to replace fossil fuels is political anathema not just in the rich countries, whose people have gotten used to consuming at extraordinarily high rates, but even more so in poorer countries, which have been promised the opportunity to “develop.”

After all, it is the rich countries that have been responsible for the great majority of past emissions (which are driving climate change presently); indeed, these countries got rich largely by the industrial activity of which carbon emissions were a byproduct. Now it is the world’s poorest nations that are experiencing the brunt of the impacts of climate change caused by the world’s richest. It’s neither sustainable nor just to perpetuate the exploitation of land, resources, and labor in the less industrialized countries, as well as historically exploited communities in the rich countries, to maintain both the lifestyles and expectations of further growth of the wealthy minority.

From the perspective of people in less-industrialized nations, it’s natural to want to consume more, which only seems fair. But that translates to more global economic growth, and a harder time replacing fossil fuels with renewables globally. China is the exemplar of this conundrum: Over the past three decades, the world’s most populous nation lifted hundreds of millions of its people out of poverty, but in the process became the world’s biggest producer and consumer of coal.

The Materials Dilemma

Also posing an enormous difficulty for a societal switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources is our increasing need for minerals and metals. The World Bank, the IEA, the IMF, and McKinsey and Company have all issued reports in the last couple of years warning of this growing problem. Vast quantities of minerals and metals will be required not just for making solar panels and wind turbines, but also for batteries, electric vehicles, and new industrial equipment that runs on electricity rather than carbon-based fuels.

Some of these materials are already showing signs of increasing scarcity: According to the World Economic Forum, the average cost of producing copper has risen by over 300 percent in recent years, while copper ore grade has dropped by 30 percent.

Optimistic assessments of the materials challenge suggest there are enough global reserves for a one-time build-out of all the new devices and infrastructure needed (assuming some substitutions, with, for example, lithium for batteries eventually being replaced by more abundant elements like iron). But what is society to do as that first generation of devices and infrastructure ages and requires replacement?

Circular Economy: A Mirage?

Hence the rather sudden and widespread interest in the creation of a circular economyin which everything is recycled endlessly. Unfortunately, as economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen discovered in his pioneering work on entropy, recycling is always incomplete and always costs energy. Materials typically degrade during each cycle of use, and some material is wasted in the recycling process.

A French preliminary analysis of the energy transition that assumed maximum possible recycling found that a materials supply crisis could be delayed by up to three centuries. But will the circular economy (itself an enormous undertaking and a distant goal) arrive in time to buy industrial civilization those extra 300 years? Or will we run out of critical materials in just the next few decades in our frantic effort to build as many renewable energy devices as we can in as short a time as possible?

The latter outcome seems more likely if pessimistic resource estimates turn out to be accurate. Simon Michaux of the Finnish Geological Survey finds that “[g]lobal reserves are not large enough to supply enough metals to build the renewable non-fossil fuels industrial system … Mineral deposit discovery has been declining for many metals. The grade of processed ore for many of the industrial metals has been decreasing over time, resulting in declining mineral processing yield. This has the implication of the increase in mining energy consumption per unit of metal.”

Steel prices are already trending higher, and lithium supplies may prove to be a bottleneck to rapidly increasing battery production. Even sand is getting scarce: Only certain grades of the stuff are useful in making concrete (which anchors wind turbines) or silicon (which is essential for solar panels). More sand is consumed yearly than any other material besides water, and some climate scientists have identified it as a key sustainability challenge this century. Predictably, as deposits are depleted, sand is becoming more of a geopolitical flashpoint, with China recently embargoing sand shipments to Taiwan with the intention of crippling Taiwan’s ability to manufacture semiconductor devices such as cell phones.

To Reduce Risk, Reduce Scale

During the fossil fuel era, the global economy depended on ever-increasing rates of extracting and burning coal, oil, and natural gas. The renewables era (if it indeed comes into being) will be founded upon the large-scale extraction of minerals and metals for panels, turbines, batteries, and other infrastructure, which will require periodic replacement.

These two economic eras imply different risks: The fossil fuel regime risked depletion and pollution (notably atmospheric carbon pollution leading to climate change); the renewables regime will likewise risk depletion (from mining minerals and metals) and pollution (from dumping old panels, turbines, and batteries, and from various manufacturing processes), but with diminished vulnerability to climate change. The only way to lessen risk altogether would be to reduce substantially society’s scale of energy and materials usage—but very few policymakers or climate advocacy organizations are exploring that possibility.

Climate Change Hobbles Efforts to Combat Climate Change

As daunting as they are, the financial, political, and material challenges to the energy transition don’t exhaust the list of potential barriers. Climate change itself is also hampering the energy transition—which, of course, is being undertaken to avert climate change.

During the summer of 2022, China experienced its most intense heat wave in six decades. It impacted a wide region, from central Sichuan Province to coastal Jiangsu, with temperatures often topping 40 degrees Celsius, or 104 degrees Fahrenheit, and reaching a record 113 degrees in Chongqing on August 18. At the same time, a drought-induced power crisis forced Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., the world’s top battery maker, to close manufacturing plants in China’s Sichuan province. Supplies of crucial parts to Tesla and Toyota were temporarily cut off.

Meanwhile, a similarly grim story unfolded in Germany, as a record drought reduced the water flow in the Rhine River to levels that crippled European trade, halting shipments of diesel and coal, and threatening the operations of both hydroelectric and nuclear power plants.

A study published in February 2022 in the journal Water found that droughts (which are becoming more frequent and severe with climate change) could create challenges for U.S. hydropower in Montana, Nevada, Texas, Arizona, California, Arkansas, and Oklahoma.

Meanwhile, French nuclear plants that rely on the Rhône River for cooling water have had to shut down repeatedly. If reactors expel water downstream that’s too hot, aquatic life is wiped out as a result. So, during the sweltering 2022 summer, Électricité de France (EDF) powered down reactors not only along the Rhône but also on a second major river in the south, the Garonne. Altogether, France’s nuclear power output has been cut by nearly 50 percent during the summer of 2022. Similar drought- and heat-related shutdowns happened in 2018 and 2019.

Heavy rain and flooding can also pose risks for both hydro and nuclear power—which together currently provide roughly four times as much low-carbon electricity globally as wind and solar combined. In March 2019, severe flooding in southern and western Africa, following Cyclone Idai, damaged two major hydro plants in Malawi, cutting off power to parts of the country for several days.

Wind turbines and solar panels also rely on the weather and are therefore also vulnerable to extremes. Cold, cloudy days with virtually no wind spell trouble for regions heavily reliant on renewable energy. Freak storms can damage solar panels, and high temperatures reduce panels’ efficiency. Hurricanes and storm surges can cripple offshore wind farms.

The transition from fossil fuel to renewables faces an uphill battle. Still, this switch is an essential stopgap strategy to keep electricity grids up and running, at least on a minimal scale, as civilization inevitably turns away from a depleting store of oil and gas. The world has become so dependent on grid power for communications, finance, and the preservation of technical, scientific, and cultural knowledge that, if the grids were to go down permanently and soon, it is likely that billions of people would die, and the survivors would be culturally destitute. In essence, we need renewables for a controlled soft landing. But the harsh reality is that, for now, and in the foreseeable future, the energy transition is not going well and has poor overall prospects.

We need a realistic plan for energy descent, instead of foolish dreams of eternal consumer abundance by means other than fossil fuels. Currently, politically rooted insistence on continued economic growth is discouraging truth-telling and serious planning for how to live well with less.

Scottish teachers to strike over derisory pay offer

Tom Pearce

Teachers in Scotland are to stage a 24-hour walkout on November 24. The initial strike day will be taken by Scotland’s largest teaching union, the Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS).

Tens of thousands of teachers are striking after rejecting a 5 percent pay increase, calling for 10 percent. There was overwhelming support for action in the ballot, with 96 percent saying yes to a strike, on an overall turnout of 71 percent of the membership.

This is the first day of national strike action by the EIS over pay for almost 40 years. The last action on teacher pay was part of a long-running programme of industrial action in the 1980s.

The EIS and the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association (SSTA) were involved in a pay dispute which lasted for two years against the Conservative government of the time. National strikes took place alongside a rolling programme of action targeted at secondary schools in the constituencies of government ministers.

EIS members at some schools went on strike regularly on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays which ended in 1987 with a Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Act. No action on this scale would be considered today by the union bureaucracy.

The EIS represents eight out of 10 Scottish teachers and is the first of the teacher unions to take industrial action. The dispute emerged after a number of paltry pay offers from the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA) and the Scottish National Party (SNP) government.

The union rejected a 2.2 percent pay offer in June, with the Scottish Negotiating Committee for Teachers submitting a 10 percent pay claim on behalf of the profession. A revised 3.5 percent pay offer was seen as an insult by teachers. The government then offered a 5 percent pay rise, which was overwhelmingly rejected by union members, with 94 percent opting to refuse the deal.

On November 22, COSLA made a fresh proposal for rises of up to 6.85 percent, but only for teachers new to the profession, on a sliding scale, with experienced teachers still receiving just 5 percent. All these offers represent a substantial real-terms pay cut, well below inflation now at 14.2 percent RPI.

The EIS said that members “have had enough of waiting” for an acceptable offer, with General Secretary Andrea Bradley complaining of “months of unjustifiable dither and delay” from the two bodies, leading teachers to become “increasingly angry over their treatment by their employers”.

In truth the “dither and delay” has come from the EIS and other unions stringing along their own members with negotiations when no serious offer was being made.

Bradley stated that teachers “are again being offered a deep real-terms pay cut by their employers,” and “as essential public sector workers” are expected “to bear the brunt” of austerity.

The union bureaucracy has overseen this situation over many years. Teachers having not received any pay increase has led to educators struggling to meet the cost of food, fuel, energy and housing. Some are now using food banks.

John Swinney, finance secretary in the Scottish National Party devolved government, announced £615 million of spending cuts in his emergency budget review earlier this month. It followed £560 million cuts to public services in September. SNP education secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville told the Scottish parliament the 10 percent pay demand was “unaffordable” in this context, adding cynically that the cost-of-living crisis is “the priority”.

EIS members could be joined later by members of the Association of Headteachers and Deputies in Scotland (AHDS) and the SSTA in taking strike action. AHDS members voted by 92 percent to reject the current 5 percent pay offer and 80 percent are willing to take strike action. SSTA members have voted by 90 percent to strike with a ballot turnout of 62 percent with the union leadership considering action in the week beginning December 5. The NASUWT teaching union is also balloting its members, closing on November 21.

Educators are clear they want to fight, but even with this significant mandate the unions are trying to reduce the impact by not taking coordinated strike action. This also plays workers off against each other, as one union going out puts pressure on other educators.

The EIS did everything in its power to avert Thursday’s strike. Bradley said the union was “hopeful” of a new offer and was prepared to bury the action in talks. “We are ready to consider a new offer as soon as it comes to us,” she said.

With the government refusing any concessions, Bradley said on Wednesday, 'The EIS has announced two days of strike action in January and it is now inevitable that further days will be announced tomorrow [Thursday], so we will looking at strikes throughout the months of January and February...” If the government intervened with an offer the EIS could sell to their membership all action could be prevented, so “it really depends what happens at the negotiating table as to whether they can be averted,” she pleaded.

Educators should draw the lessons of the unions’ role in allowing teachers’ pay to stagnate over decades. There is no basis for confidence in their ability to achieve what workers are fighting for and every reason to expect as sellout.

Imperialist powers ratchet up pressure on Tehran as Iranian protests continue

Jean Shaoul

Protests across Iran following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini on September 16—after her arrest in Tehran for “improperly” wearing a hijab by the country’s morality police—have been continuing under the slogan “Women, life, freedom!”.

Protests are particularly broad in the northwestern Kurdistan province, from which Amini hailed.

They have been fueled by popular anger over the country’s terrible social and economic conditions created in large part by the brutal sanctions regime imposed by the imperialist powers. Last week, the Iranian rial fell to its lowest-ever level against the dollar, with inflation running at 42 percent.

Iranians protest 22-year-old woman Mahsa Amini's death after she was detained by the morality police, in Tehran, Sept. 20, 2022. [AP Photo/Middle East Images, File]

Iran’s oil exports have plummeted, slashing the country’s most important source of income. The Ministry of Labour has reported that 30 million of Iran’s 84 million population live in “absolute poverty,” while a report by the Iranian Labour News Agency maintains that 70 percent (59 million) live below the poverty line.

The anti-government demonstrations and rallies have continued in the face of intimidation, mass arrests, and lethal force. However, having made no appeal to the working class in Iran’s oil, petrochemical and manufacturing sectors, the largely leaderless movement made up of students from the universities and high schools has attracted little active support from workers or the bazaar merchants and traders.

As the Financial Times noted on Monday, in comparison to the mass protests that brought down the Shah in 1979, “This time around protesters have urged all groups — including merchants in the bazaars, teachers and workers in the oil sector — to stage strikes in the hope that this would turn the latest unrest into a revolution and lead to the replacement of the theocracy with a modern, secular government. But workers have responded cautiously.” A Guardian editorial also noted, “Nor are there any signs of splits at the top, which might respond to growing pressure from the grassroots.”

In its March budget, President Ebrahim Raisi’s government, responding to demonstrations by education and health workers and pensioners, raised public sector wages, including for civil servants and soldiers, by 20 percent. The minimum wage was increased by 60 percent, the allowances given to disabled veterans of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war by 25 percent and pensions by 20 percent, while state-affiliated charity organisations upped the monthly stipends to poor families by 30 percent.

Facts about the protests are hard to come by and what information exists is highly politicised. More than 400 protesters have been killed, including 47 children, since September. This is according to HRA, an Iranian human rights group that has received funding from the US National Endowment for Democracy that is directly funded by the US government, and Hengaw, a Kurdish Iranian human rights group based in Norway. But none of these figures can be independently verified.

The Iranian authorities, while acknowledging dozens of deaths, have disputed these figures and say that “approximately 60” members of its security forces have been killed in the protests.

Around 15,000 people have reportedly been detained, with more than 1,000 indictments issued just in the Tehran province, according to the United Nations.  Although 277 of Iran’s law makers were reported as having urged the judiciary to “show no leniency” to protesters, some have since claimed that they did not support the statement and that the letter was a “fake”.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau leapt on this, rushing to express his solidarity in a tweet, later deleted, with the protests and to condemn what he falsely asserted was the regime’s supposed sentencing of almost 15,000 people to death.

The regime has blamed “foreign adversaries,” particularly the US and Israel, for instigating the protests, claiming that Washington and its allies are using their regional allies, including Iraqi Kurds, to arm and support demonstrators. Tehran has carried out a series of attacks on anti-regime Kurdish groups inside Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq that it says have been supporting protesters in the Kurdish areas of northwestern Iran that have seen the most extensive protests.

On Tuesday, the government announced that 40 foreign nationals had been arrested for their role in the unrest. It follows an earlier announcement in September that nine Europeans had been arrested for their involvement.

The authorities have also accused foreign-based Farsi broadcasters such as BBC Persian and the London-based and Saudi-funded Iran International of “fomenting unrest” and placed the country’s news outlets and social media under tight government control.

Washington, London, Paris, Ottawa, Berlin and the other major powers have indeed seized on the protests as a stick to beat the Tehran regime with and possibly to orchestrate regime change in pursuit of their geostrategic interests.

They have stressed that the unrest in Iran makes it more difficult if not impossible to reach an agreement on the stalled negotiations in Vienna around the 2015 nuclear accords. At the same time they point to Iran’s announcement that it will enrich uranium to 60 percent, in breach of the agreed level of 3.67 percent, although well below the 90 percent level considered to be needed for military purposes.

US President Joe Biden, in remarks earlier this month at an election campaign rally later walked back by his officials, promised to “free Iran,” adding that the protesters would “free themselves pretty soon.” His remarks follow military threats and actions, including his efforts to establish an anti-Iran alliance of the Gulf states, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan and Israel.

Tel Aviv, Washington’s attack dog, has stepped up its aggressive air strikes against Iranian targets in Syria, the Persian Gulf and the Eastern Mediterranean, while carrying out acts of sabotage within Iran.

Germany and Iceland, with the support of 44 other states, have convened a special session of the UN’s Human Rights Council for Thursday, focusing on “the deteriorating human rights situation” in Iran. The meeting will provide cover for the imperialist powers to impose additional sanctions against Iranian officials and institutions.

Even before the latest round of protests, the Biden administration had imposed several rounds of sanctions against Iran since June, targeting commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran’s morality police, Law Enforcement Forces, prisons, a provincial governor and other Iranian officials involved in Tehran’s crackdown, including asset freezes and travel bans. Canada, the UK and the European Union (EU) have followed suit.

French President Emmanuel Macron has been particularly vocal, meeting with Iranian women activists in France on November 14. He called the protests a “revolution,” the first Western leader to do so, in a reprise of the designations in 2011 that heralded Western militarist interventions in Libya and Syria. Speaking at the G20 summit in Bali, he accused Iran of increased aggression towards France, with its “arbitrary detention” of at least seven French nationals, including intelligence officers, and destabilising the region with its strikes on Iraqi Kurdistan. He indicated he might ask the EU to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) a terrorist organisation.

The UK’s Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, speaking at a security conference in Bahrain, accused Iran of spreading “bloodshed and destruction,” referring to the Iranian drones supplied to Moscow for its war in Ukraine that NATO claims were used to hit key infrastructure sites. Tehran counters that the drones were dispatched before Moscow’s invasion in February. Cleverly also said that the Royal Navy had twice seized missiles being smuggled out of Iran this year.

Last week, Ken McCallum, the head of Britain’s spy agency MI5, claimed Iranian intelligence agents had been targeting people in the UK. He said there had been at least 10 threats since January to kidnap or even kill British or UK-based people perceived as enemies of the regime. On Saturday, the Times reported that London’s Metropolitan Police had stationed Armed Response Vehicles outside Iran International’s headquarters, following threats by Tehran against its journalists.

Eight billion people on the Earth: A milestone for humanity

Benjamin Mateus & Patrick Martin

On November 15, 2022, approximately 367,000 women gave birth around the world. Among these newborns, according to statistical projections by the United Nations, was the eight billionth person alive now on Earth. The UN estimate noted that it had taken 12 years, since the global population passed the seven billion mark, to add another billion human beings.

The rapid growth of the world’s population is one of the central features of modern history.

A world map with each country’s size in proportion to its population. [Photo by Our World in Data / CC BY 4.0]

It took the entirety of human existence until 1804, according to demographic estimates, for the world to reach the one billion milestone. Even at that point, despite some technical development, mainly in Europe, life expectancy remained abysmal in every region of the world. Infant mortality was so high and reaching old age so rare that life expectancy at birth is estimated to have been barely 30 years.

High childhood mortality and death from infectious diseases were major impediments to a longer life and consequently population growth was slow, despite a far higher birth rate than today. It would take another 123 years before two billion people inhabited the planet in 1927. The third billion took only 33 years and the fourth billion 14 years more, circa 1974. The population reached five billion in 1987, six billion in 1999 and seven billion in 2010.

The latest billion suggests, paradoxically, the beginning of a slowdown, as it required 12 years, more than the 11 years to reach seven billion, even though the number of women in their child-bearing years had increased. With the availability of contraception and the assurance that their children will live to maturity, women and their partners can be selective as to when to have children.

If one looks at those numbers by a different yardstick, it took 123 years (1804 to 1927) for the world’s population to double from one to two billion. The next doubling, to four billion, took 47 years. The next doubling, to eight billion, took 48 years, a year longer. Demographers agree that the period of rapid doubling is now over since the drop in the birth rate that follows the fall in infant mortality has now reached every corner of the world. Their expectation is that population growth will level off at around 10 billion.

Marxism vs. Malthusianism

Marxists view the increase in the numbers of the human race as a tremendous positive, made possible by advances in scientific knowledge, productive technique and public health, and the extension of these to virtually every country in the world. 

We categorically reject the moaning and handwringing of the neo-Malthusians, who decry population growth as the root of all evil, and particularly blame it for the climate crisis and other environmental catastrophes. In our view, these are caused by unplanned capitalist anarchy, not “overpopulation.” 

One such commentary appeared in the New York Times on November 13, in an op-ed column by Thomas Homer-Dixon and Johan Rockström, academic researchers from Canada and Germany. They identified a confluence of multiple crises—war, pandemic, runaway inflation, environmental collapse—and pessimistically declared that these crises are a result of two factors: “the magnitude of humanity’s resource consumption” and the “vastly greater connectivity” of the modern world, due to the internet and improvements in transportation and telecommunications.

The column is upside-down in its presentation. The two factors it identifies, the growth of the productive forces and globalization, are indeed the driving forces of the deepening social crisis. But they are the harbingers of global decay only within the framework of the profit system and the capitalist nation-state. Freed from that straitjacket by a socialist revolution carried out by the working class, both factors would have an entirely positive significance.

People eat street food as shoppers crowd a market in New Delhi, India, Saturday, Nov. 12, 2022. [AP Photo/Altaf Qadri]

What would the authors propose? A return  to a more constricted scale of production and more isolated and parochial social intercourse would be an enormous and unprecedented historical regression, one that could only take place in the aftermath of world war and societal collapse.

The growth of the working class

There is another positive aspect of the expansion of the world’s population. It is associated, not accidentally, with another demographic shift of enormous importance: the growth of cities, and of the working class. Both are the product of the growth of agricultural productivity, as industrialized, capitalist relations displaced more primitive and backward forms of production, first in the West, then in the East.

Hundreds of millions of peasants and agricultural laborers, displaced from tiny plots of land or large estates, have flooded into the cities searching for work, swelling the ranks of the proletariat, and thereby creating new battalions in the class struggle that will finally put an end to capitalism and establish a world socialist society.

Across the planet, there are now more than 500 cities that are home to more than one million people, accounting for 23 percent of the world’s population. There are at least 31 megacities that have populations of more than 10 million people. Only recently and for the first time in human history has the majority of the world’s population lived in urban environments. By 2030, this number is expected to reach 60 percent. The implication here is that most of the world’s population is now proletarian, with all the class distinctions and antagonisms that define conflict between the working class and the bourgeoisie.

In this regard, it bears listing in brief the immense productive capacity of the laboring class. In the last century workers have paved more than 40 million miles of roads that transport goods and services from any one point to another. They have built a global automotive manufacturing industry whose revenue for 2021 stood at 2.86 trillion in US dollars. Worldwide, there were 26.3 million commercial vehicles sold last year.

Domestic and international flights numbered 22.2 million in 2021. Around 55,000 merchant ships set sail on the oceans to engage in international trade. In five decades, energy supply has risen by 2.6 times to 606 exajoules, or 105 billion barrels of oil equivalent, according to the International Energy Agency. All this is the product of the labor of the working class.

In 2020, the world produced 761 million metric tonnes of wheat. But over the last two decades, the increasing demand for food products has led to a 15 percent rise in world combined harvest area to 1,000 million hectares for feed grains, oilseed and food grains. To compensate for the large land conversion and food price inflation, research into enhancing multiple cropping and yield growth requires the immediate attention of policy makers. Technologies now exist to increase food production even further, including plant breeding and genome editing, as well as systems to monitor crop yields and develop better agricultural machinery.

These figures are but a glimpse into the productive capacity of the working class. They do not even begin to reflect the diversity and industry of people everywhere that give shape and substance to their life and culture. Indeed, the international working class may speak 7,100 different languages, but workers have in common the desires and hopes for their future and those of their families and friends.

They are also connected socially via the internet, with approximately five billion active users who rely on the technology for their news, work and social interactions, which include communication, education and entertainment. Last year, 190 million new users joined social media, equating to an annualized growth rate of 4.2 percent. Typical users visit an average of 7.2 different social platforms and spend on average two to three hours a day (or 15 percent of their waking day) on these media. All told, the world spends 10 billion hours using social platforms each day. In short, the world is highly interconnected in a more dynamic manner than ever before.

What is also clear is that the majority of those living on Earth are quite young. The median age of the world’s population stands at 30. At present, half of the world’s population is between the age of 25 and 65, that is, of working age. A quarter are younger than 14 years.

The new threats to life expectancy

Life expectancy improved remarkably throughout the 20th century, despite the world wars of 1914-1918 and 1939-1945 in which more than 100 million died, or such harrowing events as the Great Depression. Scientific development, particularly in medicine and food production, proceeded apace, despite, and even in some cases under the impetus of, the wartime mobilizations.

The list of improvements in medicine is long: anesthetics, antiseptic techniques and surgical innovations, and blood transfusions. Ambulance services and emergency medical systems, developed during World War I, now are integral parts of daily life. Modern emergency medicine departments evolved out of experiences in triaging combat casualties during the Vietnam war. 

The discovery of sulfa drugs and penicillin antibiotics in the 1930s was critical in the rapid decline of infectious disease, which was still the leading cause of death worldwide. Vaccination drastically reduced the impact of previously deadly diseases, and even eliminated smallpox, one of the most feared infections.

Life expectancy for selected countries in 1800, 1950 and 2012. [Photo by Our World in Data / CC BY 4.0]

As the graph from Our World in Data indicates, the rise in life expectancy over the last century-and-a-half has been uneven, first favoring European countries and North America, the initial centers of capitalist development.

The Russian Revolution and the victory of the Bolsheviks had a great impact on the rise of life expectancy across the globe over the intervening decades. Many of the reforms and social programs that were implemented worldwide were largely a response of imperialist powers to the threat posed by the international working class.

Life expectancy continued to rise, to more than 70 years of age by the mid-1970s. By then, even lower-income nations were seeing gains, especially during the second half of the 20th century 

Even at its high point, however, the class divisions in capitalist society were reflected in health outcomes. A report in the British Medical Journal from 2021 bears quoting:

Socioeconomic inequity in mortality has been widely discussed. A large multicohort study with 1.7 million participants from the US, Europe, and Australia found that low socioeconomic status (SES) was associated with a 26 percent higher risk of mortality and 2.1 years of life lost between ages 40 and 85 years, and low SES might respectively contribute to 15.3 and 18.9 percent of deaths among women and men. From 2001 to 2014, longevity increased by 2.34 and 2.91 years, respectively, among the wealthiest five percent of US men and women, whereas only 0.32 and 0.04 years among the poorest five percent of US men and women. Similar trends were also observed in the UK, or when high education levels were compared with low education levels. Our analysis confirmed the socioeconomic disparity in mortality and extended the findings to coronary vascular disease morbidity and mortality.

In the US, the growing gap in life expectancy by income has been documented in multiple studies which have shown that for both men and women the gap between the highest and lowest quintile is upwards of 12 to 14 years, with the wealthiest reaching life expectancies in the high 80s or low 90s.

Graphs show inequality in life expectancy based on income [Photo by Our World in Data / CC BY 4.0]

The coronavirus pandemic hit at a point where these socioeconomic factors had already produced a significant slowdown in gains in life expectancy, which is perhaps the most fundamental measurement of the progress of a society.

The policy of deliberately allowing the pandemic to spread—a form of social murder—prevented a swift end to the COVID pandemic. Global life expectancy has declined by two full years, wiping out more than a decade of improvement. The brunt of this impact was felt by the poorest and those living in low-income countries.

This was a byproduct of the various iterations of the “cure can’t be worse than the disease” policies adopted by almost every country in the world against eliminating the coronavirus. In short, the gains made in the course of 150 years of public health endeavors, which have given the world’s population such a tremendous gain in lifespan, have been subordinated to the accumulation of profits.

Some conclusions

Commenting on the new population estimate, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres remarked that the eight billion figure represented “a testament to scientific breakthroughs and improvements in nutrition, public health and sanitation.”

In the same breath, he warned, “Billions of people are struggling; hundreds of millions are facing hunger and even famine. Record numbers are on the move seeking opportunities and relief from debt and hardships, wars and climate disasters. Unless we bridge the yawning chasm between the global haves and have-nots, we are setting ourselves up for an eight-billion-strong world filled with tensions and mistrust, crisis and conflict.”

He was referring to the immense inequalities that define life under capitalism in its terminal decay, with a handful of billionaires controlling as much wealth as the poorest half on the planet. While the top one percent have stuffed their bank accounts and investment portfolios with one-fifth of the world’s income, those living in high income countries can expect to live upwards of 30 years more than those in the poorest.

There are, of course, immense differences between conditions of life for the masses in the advanced capitalist countries and in the most oppressed countries and regions of the world, particularly sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent. It is precisely those regions in which population growth will be concentrated in the coming decades, according to UN projections.

More than half of the projected 1.7 billion global population increase by 2050 will occur in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and Tanzania. In these countries, urbanization is transforming society rapidly, while intensifying the social crisis of hunger, new (and old) diseases, declining literacy and rising child mortality and poverty, heightening social anger and tensions.

There too, however, the intervention of the working class as an independent political force will be decisive. Only the reorganization of the world economy and the development of these regions as part of an interconnected, globalized world society, in which living standards and public health facilities are raised to an equal level, offer a way forward for the great mass of humanity.