Drone attacks on Russian airbases: A major escalation in the war authored in Washington

Chris Marsden

Yesterday’s drone attack on an airfield in Kursk marks a major escalation in NATO’s war against Russia. It comes just one day after Russia accused Kiev of launching drone attacks on two military airfields deep inside its territory.

There were no casualties from the attack, 62 miles from the Ukrainian border. But a major fire erupted after oil tankers thought to have been hit burned for 10 hours and covered almost 5,500 square feet.

In this handout photo released by the administration of the Kursk region of Russia on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2022, smoke rises from the area of Kursk airport outside Kursk, Russia. A fire that broke out at an airport in Russia’s southern Kursk region that borders Ukraine was the result of a drone attack, the Kursk regional governor said Tuesday, a day after Moscow blamed Kyiv for drone strikes on two air bases deep inside Russia and launched a new wave of missile strikes on Ukrainian territory. [AP Photo/Administration of the Kursk region of Russia via AP]

The location of the attacks and their implementation points once again to the direct involvement of the United States.

Russian officials had already blamed Kiev for Monday’s attacks on two airbases at Ryazan and Saratov in south-central Russia, believed to have involved modified Soviet-era Russian Strizh drones launched by Ukraine. Three service men were killed and four were wounded, with two aircraft damaged. The bombers hit at the Engels-2 airfield and Dyagilevo airbase were both nuclear-capable. Images from Dyagilevo show a nuclear-capable Tu-22M3 bomber with a damaged tail with a Kh-22 missile suspended under its wing.

Russia’s defence ministry said that Monday’s attacks were acts of terrorism and launched a bombardment of Ukraine’s key infrastructure in response.

Suspected Ukrainian drones also attacked the Belbek military airport in Sevastopol, but were downed by air defences, while drones also unsuccessfully targeted a fuel store in Bryansk region according to Russian sources.

Bryansk, Kursk and Belgorod, which immediately border Ukraine, have all been hit multiple times. But the latest attacks and the targets chosen clearly involved extensive intelligence gathering and high-level collusion.

Ukrainian military analyst Serhiy Zgurets noted on the website of Espreso TV that the air force bases hit were the only facilities in Russia that could fully service bombers used to launch attacks on Ukraine. Ukraine’s government declined to publicly acknowledge the strikes, but a senior Ukrainian official confirmed to the New York Times that at least one of the drones was launched from Ukraine and that one of the strikes was made with the help of special forces close to the Russian base.

These targets are the furthest in Russia ever hit during the entire conflict. One of the airbases, Ryazan, is just 115 miles southwest of Moscow, while Saratov is around 400 miles from the Ukrainian border. Russian military commentators stressed that if Ukraine could strike that far inside Russia, it may also be capable of hitting Moscow. Sky News Moscow correspondent Diana Magnay said there “are a lot of questions now about how exactly Ukraine managed it,” before suggesting a “counter-intelligence failure within Russia that allowed a drone from within Russia, perhaps with the help of Ukrainian collaborators.”

The channel reported off-the-record comments by senior Western officials boasting that such attacks inside Russia will have struck a powerful psychological blow that “does show” Ukrainian forces “can operate in Russia at will.” Britain’s Ministry of Defence said Russia was likely to consider the attacks to be “some of the most strategically significant failures of force protection since its invasion of Ukraine.”

The New York Times gloated that the attacks “add to signs that Kyiv is willing to bring the war closer to Moscow and to President Vladimir V. Putin,” had “altered the geography of the war, shown failures in Moscow’s air defense systems and signaled Kyiv’s determination that Russia pay a heavier price for its unrelenting assault on Ukraine’s infrastructure.”

The ability of Ukraine to carry out such attacks is only a mystery if Kiev were not able to rely on Washington’s spy network and its extensive contact within Russia built up over decades. This would place the latest attacks among a growing number of Ukrainian “successes” and more covert provocations collectively designed to both prolong and escalate the war.

These include:

• The bombing of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, ending the transit of Russian natural gas under the Baltic Sea to Germany.
• The explosions in Sevastopol’s naval harbour on October 29, also apparently involving drones that partially destroyed a strategic bridge.
• The November 15 explosions in a Polish farming village that killed two civilians.

Every one of these actions reeks of covert US and NATO involvement, each more reckless and potentially dangerous than the last.

The Nord Stream bombings denied Russia vital revenues and confirmed its isolation from European markets after months of denunciations of Germany by the White House. The implications of Ukraine’s efforts to blame Russia for its own rocket attack on Poland, involving demands by Kiev to NATO to invoke Article 5 committing member states to mutual defence, were so grave that US President Joe Biden intervened to oppose what would have meant an immediate move to direct war with Russia for which the US was not yet prepared.

The latest attacks deep inside Russian territory could have been orchestrated by sections of the US military, intelligence and political elite pushing for such an outcome—no matter how potentially disastrous the outcome of such brinksmanship might be.

Commenting on the attacks, The New York Times wrote that there is “little room for Russia to escalate” in response. It quoted Mick Ryan, a retired Australian Army officer, who said of Ukraine’s attacks, “It is not, as some are sure to claim, an escalation. But it is a necessary political and military measure for Ukraine to limit the humanitarian harm of Russia’s brutal drone and missile attacks.”

This statement is absurd. Ukraine’s attacks, coordinated with the United States, are a major escalation of the war. The United States, having instigated and provoked a war that has killed tens of thousands of Ukrainians, has crossed not only Russia’s “red lines,” but its own.

Every time the United States has claimed it would not do something in Ukraine, it has then gone ahead and done it. 

In May, Biden published an op-ed in The New York Times entitled “What America Will and Will Not Do in Ukraine,” in which he stated that “We are not encouraging or enabling Ukraine to strike beyond its borders.” But Washington has done precisely that, giving targeting information, weapons, and logistics support that have allowed Ukraine to attack deep inside Russian territory.

A pattern is emerging—one in which the US and NATO keep pushing against Russia in order to test how far they can go without provoking a response from the Putin regime.

There is clearly a calculation that putting ever greater economic, military and political pressure on Russia will exacerbate divisions among the oligarchs and open up the possibility of internal regime change through some form of palace coup. The assassination of Russian fascist ideologue Daria Dugina was a clear warning to Russia’s oligarchs that the penalty for supporting Putin potentially goes beyond sanctions and seizure of assets. The intelligence used by Ukraine in its latest offensive could ultimately have originated from highly-placed Russian supporters, with already existing connections to Washington, who are pushing for a settlement of the conflict at any price.

At the same time, there are forces within Russia’s oligarchy that are pushing for a far more aggressive response by the Russian military.

The relentless and reckless escalation of the war by the United States carries with it the risk that the Russian government responds with a major escalation of its own, with potentially catastrophic consequences.

“The interaction of NATO’s imperialist militarism, recklessly pursuing its global geopolitical agenda whatever the consequences, and the increasing desperation of Russia’s oligarchic capitalist regime threatens to escalate into a nuclear conflagration.

Many UK schools structurally unsound, posing danger to life

Margot Miller

Schools and other public buildings in the UK could be in danger of collapse because they have not been subject to regular safety inspections or properly maintained.

This “risk to life” emerges in the context of a devastating funding crisis in education, threatening staff redundancies, larger class sizes, restrictions to the curriculum and the elimination of support services.

Governments have ignored warnings about the risks to schools since at least 2018. Neither have the education unions acted to ensure the safety of their members and children in their care.

The Office of Government Property (OGP), responsible for public buildings, issued a “Safety Briefing Notice” in September regarding the potential dangers of Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete (RAAC). It made the stark warning that “RAAC is now life-expired and liable to collapse”.

Aerated autoclaved concrete, close-up view [Photo by Marco Bernardini, own work / CC BY-SA 3.0]

RAAC is a foam concrete material used in internal and external construction. Invented in Sweden in the mid-1920, it has been used globally for 70 years—increasingly so since 1980 due to its many ostensible advantages. These include thermal efficiency, fire resistance, and the fact that it is lightweight making for speedier construction and cost efficiency.

The roof of Singlewell Primary school in Gravesend partially collapsed in 2018—luckily at the weekend with no casualties. Most concerning, the roof only showed signs of stress 24 hours before the incident. The Standing Committee on Structural Safety responded to this potential tragedy with a safety alert on the “failure of RAAC planks,” recommending that those installed before 1980 should be replaced.

This committee, an independent body established in 1976, is supported by the Institution of Civil Engineers, the Institution of Structural Engineers, and the government’s Health and Safety Executive to review building and civil engineering matters regarding the safety of structures.

After the collapse at the Gravesend school, the local Kent Council informed other local authorities, advising them to check for RAAC in their schools. The Local Government Association contacted councils in relation to RAAC in schools—including its use in the structure of flat school roofs—and myriad public buildings including hospitals and high-rise structures.

Four years on, inspections and remedial work to ensure school buildings are safe from collapse have only just begun. This is despite other serious incidents, including:

• In February 2017, when a wall collapsed at Oxgangs Primary School, Edinburgh.
• On May 10, 2018, a teacher and three pupils, aged between six and seven, suffered minor injuries after part of the ceiling fell in a Year 2 classroom at Nechells Primary School, Birmingham.
• In October 2019, part of the roof and brickwork collapsed at St Anne’s Catholic Primary School in Sutton, St Helens.
• Sandhurst secondary school in Berkshire suffered a partial roof collapse over a walkway on November 15, 2020.
• In September 2021, Ford Primary School run by the Horizon Multi Academy Trust in Plymouth suffered a partial collapse of the school hall roof.
• A ceiling collapsed at a second floor Year 3 classroom at Rosemead Preparatory School & Nursery in Dulwich on November 15, 2021. No one sustained serious injury, but one child was detained in hospital under observation.

According to digital newspaper SchoolsWeek, the government pledged to replace RAAC in hospitals, but the Department for Education (DfE) is downplaying the potential dangers informing schools applying for building improvement funding grants next year that “not all RAAC is dangerous.”

Hodge Hill primary school in Birmingham needs part of its roof decking removed, but the government’s surveyor questioned the presence of RAAC.

As there seems to be no official record of the materials used to build schools, the DfE sent out a survey to state-funded schools in March year asking if RAAC exists in their buildings. The survey was recirculated in October with an instruction to respond urgently. Schools may be unaware they have RAAC as it is often concealed from view. The OGP advised: “RAAC planks may look the same as pre-cast concrete and may be hidden above false ceilings.”

President of the British Association of Construction Heads, Graham Hasting-Evans, estimated that up to half of four million non-residential UK buildings could be affected by RAAC.

He concluded that RAAC is being ignored because “nobody wants to face up to” a “ticking time bomb… People are worried about Grenfell—there are companies thinking ‘I’m going to go bust because I’ll get sued’”. He added, “it’s not just about cladding, it’s about the structural integrity of the building itself—if it was built with a reinforced concrete frame and that concrete isn’t strong enough, the building starts to fall apart.”

The use by contractors of Aluminium composite material (ACM) cladding—a known fire hazard—was responsible for the inferno that engulfed Grenfell Tower in London in June 2017 killing 72.

Ian Harrington, partner at Eddisons chartered surveyors, said that for some schools the RAAC problem is “so bad you’d have to remove the whole structure.”

This year the government allocated only £498 million for its condition improvement grant to address safety issues in academies, sixth-form colleges and voluntary aided schools. Urgent work concerning RAAC is outstanding at Royal Grammar School in High Wycombe, The London Oratory School, Sandbach School in Cheshire and Chesterton Primary School in Wandsworth due to RAAC.

Maintained schools, which are local authority run, must apply to cash-strapped councils for such repairs. Schools Week reported, in a piece by investigations and features reporter Jessica Hill, that Norfolk County Council investigated 58 schools built from 1955 to 1980 and did the necessary RAAC remedial work. Sheffield City Council has earmarked £520,000 to make good the roof of an extension at Abbey Lane Primary School because of the “risk of collapse”. Sale Grammar School in Greater Manchester had an RAAC roof removed costing £400,000.

This level of dilapidation is only the tip of the iceberg. DfE data indicates a third of schools were built from 1960-1980, when RAAC was universally used. The government’s own figures suggest £11.4 billion is needed to get school buildings to an adequate standard including for safety.

Basic maintenance and repair work not related to RAAC costs councils millions of pounds. Last year Salford City Council was hit with a bill of more than £500,000 for roof repair works at just two schools. The council said that “serious leaks” could have occurred resulting in closure of the schools without the repairs. The Manchester Evening News reported that one of the schools, Hilton Lane Primary School, had timber cladding and windows which had deteriorated, and ground works were also required “to improve drainage which has caused flooding at the site.”

During the summer, emails leaked to the Observer sent by senior officials at the DfE to Downing Street during Boris Johnson’s premiership warned many school buildings posed a “risk to life”. This year, however, less than half of the 1,100 schools which applied for the government’s 10-year rebuilding programme were successful.

Since 2010 in the aftermath of the banking crash and bailout, capital spending on schools declined 25 percent, or 29 percent when adjusted for inflation. In 2019, the Guardian reported one in six schools in England were in urgent need of repairs, to rectify such problems as fire hazards, asbestos, faulty wiring and plumbing and damp.

While endless sums are squandered bolstering company profits during the pandemic and the energy cost crisis, and for the war in the Ukraine, this is being paid for via savage budget cuts. Joint National Education Secretary Mary Bousted said that the latest round of austerity will mean “more children coming to school hungry and cold and unable to learn”, and schools “having less funding than in 2015”.

But from the beginning of the pandemic the education unions lined up with the Conservative government and Labour opposition to put profit before lives, ensuring lockdowns were prematurely lifted and schools reopened. Today, staff and children are herded into unsafe classrooms, many of which are also proven structurally unsound.

Chinese Communist Party moves towards “herd immunity” policy

John Malvar

Under the guise of recalibrating China’s dynamic Zero-COVID policy, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), led by Xi Jinping, is moving rapidly to adopt a policy of “herd immunity,” another term for the mass infection of the population. Confronting economic crisis at home and under the conjoined pressures of international finance capital and the military provocations of US imperialism, the Xi government is scrapping China’s Zero-COVID policy that has saved millions of lives.

The lifting of Zero-COVID measures in China will inflict death on a massive scale upon the country’s population. There is no uncertainty as to the outcome of “living with the virus” in China. The past three years have demonstrated the enormity of suffering and death such a policy inevitably entails: overflowing hospitals, freezers for the storage of corpses, mass burials, and a surviving population wracked by grief and Long COVID. Over 1.1 million dead Americans, over 20 million excess deaths worldwide—these figures reveal what opening a nation of 1.4 billion people to the ravages of the pandemic portends.

A report in Reuters over the weekend, “How many people might die if China loosens COVID restrictions,” offered three scientific estimates in answer to the question posed by its chilling headline. The estimated death toll ranged from somewhere between 1.3 to 2.1 million people.

For over two years, international finance capital has demanded that China lift Zero-COVID, seeking to resume the full-scale exploitation of the Chinese working class and restore access to the vast consumer markets of China. A day after the article warning of a death toll in the millions, Reuters published a financial piece, “Investors bet China’s rally on easing COVID-19 curbs will be furious but fleeting.”

Vast sums of money are flooding into speculative investments in China’s consumer markets, anticipating “furious” growth with the lifting of Zero-COVID. Such growth, however, will not last. The medical chaos and death toll from the mass infection policy will produce a sharp economic contraction. After the initial consumer bonanza, investors would do wisely, the Reuters piece noted, to shift their money to firms producing antigen tests. Capitalism finds nothing quite so lucrative as human misery.

In its justification for lifting Zero-COVID, the CCP follows the playbook of the Western powers and in particular of the United States. The Chinese government repeats the lying claim, trumpeted in the western media, that Omicron is a “mild” variant. It presents pseudoscience as science, promoting traditional Chinese medicine as a cure, in place of Ivermectin and bleach. Driven by economic imperatives, without any regard for public health, they press for a full return to regular work and commerce.

The moves by the CPP bureaucracy toward lifting Zero-COVID predate the recent protests, which have been universally hailed in the Western media. The protests were small, with rallies numbering in the hundreds, drawn almost exclusively from upper middle-class student layers at the country’s elite universities. Their blank-paper signs and slogans—demanding an end to mass testing, presenting public health measures as antithetical to “freedom”—reflect more than mere confusion. They express the interests and frustrations of privileged social layers that find themselves unable to enjoy their affluent lifestyles.

This social stratum is a key constituency of the CCP bureaucracy. Many are members, or aspire to be members, of the party, which is a critical path for their social advancement, but they view Zero-COVID measures as an intolerable infringement.

In their social content and development thus far, the blank-paper protests in China resemble the right-wing anti-mask, anti-vaccine protests staged in the United States, Europe, and Canada in 2020 and 2021. The CCP is responding in a similar fashion, using them as a pretext for further moves toward a policy of mass infection.

Looking to reintegrate China with the world capitalist economy, the Xi government first undermined popular support for Zero-COVID policy and then adopted measures to lift it. In May 2022, the government cut national insurance funding for mass COVID testing, shunting the financial burden, in the billions of dollars, onto heavily impacted municipalities of the country’s border regions. Many of these cities and regions in turn made the expense of testing the responsibility of the individuals tested.

With political power fully consolidated in the hands of Xi Jinping at the 20th Party Congress in October, the CCP set about to implement a set of measures for the removal of Zero-COVID restrictions on the country’s economic life.

On November 11, the party launched its “Twenty Articles,” which eased every component of Zero-COVID and included stockpiling medicines to brace the country for the mass infection that would ensue. These steps were taken immediately before the G20 summit, at which Xi symbolically participated without wearing a mask. The CCP signaled to world capitalism that China was reopening for business.

The CCP is now scrapping Zero-COVID with alarming rapidity. Every few days sees a new announcement—reduced quarantines, an end to mass testing, discouraging people from testing—that signals that even basic mitigation measures are being abandoned.

Regular mass testing is the bedrock of Zero-COVID. Without a scientific assessment of infection rates and community transmission, it is no longer possible to be confident in the numbers coming out of China. Both infections and deaths are now doubtless significantly underreported.

The ongoing policy shift in Beijing was demanded by the imperialist powers and world financial centers for over two years. Using the language of war, they spoke of China’s public health measures as mass atrocities, human rights violations, and totalitarianism. The New York Times ran a piece in January of this year comparing China’s white uniformed health workers to Nazis. In a manner that bears startling resemblance to the Opium Wars of the 19th century, in which the imperialist powers opened China at gunpoint to the sale of drugs, US imperialism insisted China open itself to dollars and disease.

The western media has latched onto the anti-Zero-COVID protests with alacrity, celebrating them as a vindication of “freedom.” The Times published an editorial statement on Sunday speaking of their “moral obligation” to support the protests, but it made no mention of the death toll that will ensue as the protesters’ demands were acted upon. China is teetering on the brink of catastrophe and a festival atmosphere fills the pages of the western media. They are the cheerleaders of apocalypse.

For the forces in the Pentagon and the White House, the lifting of Zero-COVID means more than just a restoration of supply chains and a much needed source of profit. They see in the unrestrained spread of the pandemic in China, and the millions that it will kill, a means of fomenting intense social crisis and destabilizing the CCP regime. Washington’s insistence, dressed in the language of human rights, that COVID cannot—must not—be contained constitutes a form of biological warfare, a preparation for open military conflict that is every bit as important as the new B-21 bomber.

The experience of China’s Zero-COVID policy over the past three years is irrefutable proof of two principles. First, it is possible through coordinated social planning to eliminate the coronavirus and prevent mass death. Second, it is impossible to carry out such a policy on a national basis.

The CCP bureaucracy is, to its core, nationalist. It was the nationalism of Stalinism that drove every one of the CCP’s betrayals of the working class in the 20th century. It is impossible to either build socialism or end a pandemic in the confines of a single country. The CCP apparatus has no way forward and is looking to protect its power and privileges as it capitulates to world capitalism. Just as it opened the country’s economy to global capitalist exploitation in 1980s and 90s, today it is opening China to disease and mass death.

The “herd immunity” policy being adopted by the CCP will result in the deaths of millions. The spread of the virus in China, moreover, will propel the evolution of new variants that will redound on the entire world. This catastrophe, however, is not inevitable.

There are growing protests among the Chinese working class, particularly in the southern manufacturing cities, which are of an entirely different character from the blank-paper protests of the upper middle class. Tens of thousands of workers at the Foxconn iPhone factory and in the garment industry in Guangzhou have come into open conflict with the state. They are fighting against exploitative working conditions, withheld pay, and the fact that they are not adequately protected in the factories from the spread of COVID-19.

German government steps up armaments drive and sends more tanks to Ukraine

Johannes Stern

Following last week’s meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Bucharest, the German government is stepping up its arms deliveries to Kiev. According to media reports, Berlin is sending another seven Gepard anti-aircraft tanks to the Ukrainian army. News magazine Der Spiegel reports that the tanks are “currently being refurbished by the Munich-based armaments company Krauss-Maffei Wegmann (KMW).”

A “Gepard 1A2” anti-aircraft gun tank fires during a combat exercise [AP Photo/Joerg Sarbach]

Germany is playing an increasingly aggressive role in the massive rearmament of the Ukrainian army against Russia. According to the government, the total value of licences issued for arms deliveries until 28 November 2022 now amounts to 1.93 billion euros. The government’s official list of “military support for Ukraine” includes the following deliveries for last week alone:

• 3 BIBER armoured bridge laying vehicles
• 10 surface drones (previously: 2)
• 65 border guard vehicles (previously: 53)
• 14,000 sleeping bags (previously: 10,000)
• Mi-24 spare parts
• 30 ambulances

And according to the same list, the following items, among others, are “in preparation/implementation”:

• 14 remote-controlled tracked vehicles for support tasks
• 42 mine-clearing tanks
• 435 border protection vehicles
• 6,100 rounds of 155mm artillery ammunition
• 186,000 rounds of 40mm grenade launcher ammunition
• 5 Dachs armoured engineer vehicles
• 16 Zuzana 2 self-propelled howitzers (joint project with Denmark and Norway)
• 3 IRIS-T SLM air defence systems
• 20 70mm rocket launchers on pick-up trucks with 2,000 rockets
• 5 armoured recovery vehicles
• 5,032 anti-tank hand-held weapons
• 13 BIBER armoured bridge layers

The deliveries are part of NATO’s escalation of the war against Russia, which is increasingly directly evoking the danger of a third world war. In Bucharest, NATO foreign ministers agreed on the expansion of the war in Ukraine and the stationing of additional troops on the Russian border.

Representatives of the NATO states spoke out in favour of allowing Ukraine to attack targets in Russia itself. “We should allow the Ukrainians to use weapons to attack missile sites or airfields from which these operations are launched,” said Latvian Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkēvičs. Allies should “not fear” an escalation, he added provocatively.

According to a report by the Reuters news agency, the US is indeed already considering delivering GLSDB (Ground-Launched Small Diameter Bomb) munitions to Ukraine. The precision-guided surface-to-surface projectiles have a range of about 150 kilometres, which is twice as far as the artillery systems currently available to Kiev. With these projectiles, it would be possible for the Ukrainian army to attack targets in the northern part of Crimea, for example.

The escalation is supported by the German government. At the Berlin Security Conference, which took place immediately after the NATO meeting, Chancellor Olaf Scholz (Social Democratic Party, SPD) reiterated the goal of defeating Russia in Ukraine. “Russia cannot and will no longer win this war on the battlefield,” he declared. We will “continue to support Ukraine for as long as it takes: economically, financially, humanitarianly, through the reconstruction of destroyed energy infrastructure now—and also with weapons.”

In addition, the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) is training thousands of Ukrainian soldiers in Germany and massing its troops in Eastern Europe against Russia.

In order to defend the territory of the Alliance, Germany would “maintain 17,000 soldiers for the NATO Response Force over the next two years,” the Chancellor announced. In 2023, Germany will “once again take over the leadership of NATO’s rapid reaction force” and was already “present in Slovakia with forces of the Army and the Air Force.” The air force was “securing the airspace over Estonia and our navy has increased its presence in the Baltic Sea. And we have permanently strengthened our battle group in Lithuania.”

In his speech, Scholz made clear that Germany’s war aims go far beyond Eastern Europe. He praised the “implementation of the special assets [funding] for the Bundeswehr of 100 billion euros” and boasted: “We are talking here about the largest investment in our armed forces since their existence.” However, the “turn of the times” he had proclaimed was about “much more than just quite a lot of money.” What was needed was “more decisiveness, more willingness to take risks and more efficient structures… from procurement to equipment, from strategy to operations.”

From the beginning, the German ruling class has seen the war in Ukraine provoked by NATO as an opportunity to reassert itself as a leading military power following its historic crimes in two world wars. Now, plans that have long been drawn up to massively rearm and organise Europe militarily under German leadership are being put into practice.

Scholz stressed the need for “a European defence industry that meets the demands of modern armed forces.” In addition, he said, they were working on “improving the military capabilities of the European Union.” This included the “European missile defence shield” he proposed. In the meantime, “14 partners have joined this initiative.”

The German government, a coalition of the SPD, Liberal Democrats (FDP) and Greens, is also pushing ahead with nuclear armament. “As long as states like Russia possess nuclear weapons as part of their threat potential, NATO naturally needs a credible deterrent potential,” Scholz said menacingly. For this reason, the German government “has decided to procure F-35 fighter jets in the coming years and thus continue to make a German contribution to the Alliance’s nuclear sharing in the future.”

Since the historic increase in military spending and the passing of a war budget on 25 November, the tempo has increased. Almost daily, the German government announces new far-reaching armament projects. In addition to the F-35 fighter jets, Scholz announced the retrofitting of the Puma infantry fighting vehicles and the procurement of snow vehicles. On the same day, the budget committee of the Bundestag (federal parliament) initiated the procurement of more than 600,000 rounds of automatic cannon ammunition for the Puma infantry fighting vehicle.

The return of German militarism is being accompanied by a systematic ideological offensive. At the NATO meeting in Bucharest, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (Greens) called Russia’s actions in Ukraine a “breach of civilisation,” a term used in Germany for Hitler’s war of extermination and the Holocaust.

The use of this term for the war in Ukraine is an incredible trivialisation of the historic crimes of German imperialism. Russia’s intervention in Ukraine is reactionary, but it has nowhere near reached the scale of the crimes of the Nazis. If anyone is following in this tradition, it is Baerbock and the German ruling class.

This was also shown by the adoption of the so-called “Holodomor“ resolution last Wednesday. By declaring the famine in Ukraine in the early 1930s to be a “genocide,” the Bundestag (federal parliament) accepted a historical falsification that originated in far-right circles.

Significantly, the Left Party also did not vote against the resolution, thus backing the war propaganda. This does not come as a surprise. Its leading representatives—such as Thuringia state Prime Minister Bodo Ramelow or Berlin mayoral candidate Klaus Lederer—bang the drum for arms deliveries to the Ukrainian army, which is riddled with right-wing extremist forces, and even call for the reintroduction of conscription.

ILO report reveals deepening cuts in real wages

Nick Beams

A report issued by the International Labour Organisation has blown apart the claims by capitalist governments and central bankers around the world that interest rate hikes, now threatening to drive significant areas of the world economy into recession, are necessary to “fight inflation” by suppressing wage demands.

ILO Global Wage Report 2022-23 [Photo: International Labour Organization]

The ILO’s Global Wage Report for 2022-23, issued at the end of last month, revealed that real wages are already being cut by ever-increasing amounts as prices rise at the fastest rate in four decades.

But in the face of all the evidence, the guardians of international capital continue to promote the Big Lie that workers’ demands are responsible for the inflationary spiral and must therefore be suppressed.

The central bankers’ class war is being led by Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell. Last week in a major speech at the Brookings Institution he declared that “wage increases are probably going to be a very important part of the [inflation} story going forward.”

There was an imbalance between supply and demand in the labour market, he insisted, making it clear that even limited rises in nominal wages – well below the inflation rate – were in excess of those deemed by the Fed to be consistent with its supposed target of 2 percent inflation.

The ILO report said available evidence for this year showed that rising inflation “is causing real wage growth to dip into negative figures in many countries, reducing the purchasing power of the middle class and hitting low-income groups particularly hard.”

The cost-of-living crisis came on top of the COVID-19 crisis, which in many countries had its greatest impact on low-income groups, as it pointed to the political dangers for the ruling classes.

“In the absence of adequate policy responses,” it said, “the near future could see a sharp erosion of the real income of workers and their families and an increase in inequality, threatening the economic recovery and possibly fuelling further social unrest.”

According to the report, global data for the first half of this year revealed “a striking fall in real monthly wages” which fell by 0.9 percent, the first negative figures since the first edition of the wages report in 2008.

The decline was much larger in the economies of the G20, comprising 60 percent of the world’s wage workers, where the fall is estimated to be 2.2 percent for the first six months of this year.

The biggest fall was in North America, the US and Canada. Real wage growth was zero in 2021 and then dropped to minus 3.2 percent in the first six months of this year. In the European Union, where wage subsides were in operation in 2020 and 2021 because of the pandemic, real wages rose slightly, but were minus 2.4 percent in the first half of this year, wiping out all the previous limited gains.

The report also pointed to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic which are not captured in the data on average wages.

Analysis revealed how “the combination of job losses, shorter hours worked and adjustments in hourly wages during the crisis resulted in an accumulation of lost earnings for wage employees and their families in many countries.”

Compiling data from 28 countries, representing different regions and incomes groups, it found that the total wage bill decreased by between 1 and 26 percent in 2020 with an average decline of 6.2 percent, equivalent to the loss of three weeks’ wages for each average employee.

In 21 of those countries for which data was available for 2020 and 2021, the decrease in total wages was equivalent to the loss of four weeks of wages per employee in 2020 and two weeks in 2021, a cumulative loss of six weeks’ wages over two years.

The standard doctrine of capitalist economics is that real wages can only increase when there is an increase in productivity. That is, the working class and capital can “share” the increase in economic output.

This fiction is exposed in the ILO data. They make clear that the economic and financial system is an institutionalised mechanism for siphoning all additional wealth into the coffers of the corporations and the financial oligarchy.

According to the report, in 52 high-income countries real wage growth has been lower than productivity growth since 2000 and the erosion of real wages in the first half of this year combined with positive productivity growth has widened the gap.

“In fact, in 2022 the gap between productivity growth and wage growth reached its widest point since the start of the twenty-first century with productivity growth 12.6 percent above wage growth,” it said.

As Financial Times columnist Rana Foroohar noted in a comment on the report: “People are working harder and better. But they simply aren’t seeing as much monetary benefit from their efforts as they would have in the past.”

The supposed “justification” advanced by Powell and other central bankers for the interest rate hikes, even at the risk of recession, is that these measures are necessary to prevent a wage-price spiral from setting in which would be an even worse outcome.

But according to the ILO report, “empirical evidence” shows that nominal wages are not catching up with inflation and “the gap between wage growth and productivity growth is continuing to widen, with labour productivity increasing .... and wages falling in real terms.”

“Hence,” it continued, “there would appear to be scope in many countries for increasing wages without generating a wage-price spiral.”

In other words, the data suggest “sweet reason” should prevail, and the capitalist economy should be somehow made to function to at least meet some of the needs of the producers of all wealth, the working class.

This is akin to the claims that nuclear war – an ever-present danger arising from the US-NATO war against Russia in the Ukraine – will not take place because the consequences would be too horrific, and the ruling classes would therefore pull back.

Such arguments ignore the fact that geopolitics is not driven by rationality but the strivings of the imperialist powers for global domination.

Likewise, in the sphere of the economy, the appeal to reason ignores the fact that the capitalist economy does not function in the interests of the population but by the never-ending drive for profit.

Over the past three decades, and the past 15 years in particular, the central banks have pumped trillions of dollars into the financial system to try to prevent its collapse beginning in the global financial crisis of 2008 and the accelerated after the crisis at start of 2020 as the pandemic struck.

This has created a mountain of fictitious capital comprising debt and vastly inflated stock and asset values. This fictitious capital does not embody real wealth as such but is a claim on the wealth extracted from the working class in the process of production.

Now the chickens have come to roost in the form of spiraling inflation – the result of the refusal to eliminate COVID, the endless supply of cheap money and the war against Russia in Ukraine – and the ruling classes are seeking to resolve the crisis they have created by making the working class pay for it.

Britain uses “aid” to Afghanistan as a cover for imperialist domination

Jean Shaoul

According to the government’s own watchdog, much of the UK’s £3.5 billion aid to Afghanistan between 2000 and 2020 was spent not on “humanitarian aid” but on the police and other security agencies’ paramilitary operations. It served to entrench corruption and injustice.

The Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI)’s report, published last month, is a devastating indictment of the government’s aid and state reconstruction policy.

An internally displaced Afghan child looks for plastic and other items which can be used as a replacement for firewood, at a garbage dump in Kabul, Afghanistan, December 15, 2019. [AP Photo/Altaf Qadri]

Far from providing humanitarian aid and relief in the aftermath of the NATO-led war and occupation, as publicly portrayed, these financial flows served first and foremost the imperialist powers’ broader geostrategic and military agenda. Moreover, all the international institutions such as the World Bank and United Nations and various NGOs were mobilized in this endeavour.

The ICAI’s report, scrutinizing the UK foreign aid budget, previously distributed by the Department for International Development and now subsumed under the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), criticized the use of the aid budget to fund the Afghan national police’s salaries as a “questionable use of UK aid.” This was because the police’s primary task was not civilian policing, but counterinsurgency operations.

Overall, the UK spent £252 million funding the salaries of the Afghan national police (ANP) and £400 million on the Afghan security services over the last six years of Britain’s operations in the country, the period of the ICAI’s review. The government overruled the efforts of UK aid officials to stop the funding. This was because London, despite misgivings on the ground, “chose to prioritise the transatlantic alliance,” meaning that it fell in line with US requirements, largely drawn up by the military, to crush the Taliban’s long running and intensifying insurgency against Washington’s deeply unpopular puppet government in Kabul.

The ICAI said that its discussions with senior officials revealed that while London disagreed with Washington over its refusal to include the Taliban in any political settlement, it was “unwilling to challenge the US approach.” It “became publicly committed into a narrative of imminent success” even though officials knew this had little chance of success.

The Afghan national police operated armed checkpoints across the country as it sought to suppress the Taliban. Its recruits, who had little training, suffered heavy casualties, leading to desertion and attrition rates of 25 percent a year. Theft of arms and equipment was widespread while the ANP’s payroll was inflated with “ghost officers,” amid “numerous reports from human rights organisations of police corruption and brutality, including extortion, arbitrary detention, torture and extra-judicial killings.”

The huge scale of the US, UK and international support both aid and military—for Afghanistan meant that this was the second largest American “aid” project after Iraq. In 2020, it accounted for most of Kabul’s national budget, under conditions where the government lacked the professional capacity to manage it. Instead, the aid was managed by a veritable army of well-paid management consultants. The report stated that in 2020, there were 585 consultants in the ministry of finance, down from 780 in 2017.

These consultants awarded contracts to the business elites close to the government that syphoned off most of the aid as they fought for contracts and sub-contracts to manage the vast flows of international cash. The report cited a survey by the Asia Foundation in 2021 that 98.7 percent of Afghans described corruption as a major problem, up from 76 percent in 2014.

The ICAI drew upon UK government documents, including some written as late as 2019, that “describe the situation as an extreme form of state capture, which benefited a narrow group of Afghan political elites at the expense of the population at large”. It added, “In these circumstances, there was little prospect of meaningful institutional development. One year on, in 2020, the Department for International Development assessed that central government institutions were largely unable to deliver on their mandates, despite years of financial and technical assistance. Afghan leaders saw them as fiefdoms for patronage, rather than mechanisms for promoting the public interest.”

Britain’s largest contribution of £668 million was to the US-dominated World Bank’s Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF). This was supposed to fund basic services such as health and education, provide infrastructure investment, support for agriculture and jobs and finance the government’s fiscal deficit. It was often administered by “multilateral delivery partners” including the international NGOs that constituted a parasitic industry in the impoverished country.

None of this made any material difference to the lives of the Afghan people. While the ICAI tried to make out that this “was likely to have made a significant difference,” it could not but note that “The ARTF struggled to measure the development outcomes attributable to its interventions” and “overall poverty rates increased over the review period.” The much-vaunted emphasis on developing girls’ access to education and job opportunities for women “was limited by the [Afghan] government’s lack of ownership and implementation capacity” and its practical impact “was still at an early stage.”

The ignominious withdrawal of US and UK troops after two decades of proxy wars and occupation left the country brutalized and pauperised and facing a humanitarian catastrophe. Throughout the 20 years of occupation, the imperialist powers did nothing to develop Afghanistan. Its economy was shattered, with agriculture undermined by so-called aid. This, along with the insecurity, the most severe drought in 40 years, earthquakes and natural disasters, played into the hands of Afghanistan’s warlords and drug dealers, as impoverished farmers turned to poppy cultivation and the opium trade.

According to the World Bank, Afghanistan is the sixth poorest country in the world, with a gross national income per capita of only $500. The United Nations estimates that 24 million Afghans, or more than half of the population, suffer from acute hunger. An estimated 8.7 million are at risk of famine, while 5 million children are on the brink of starvation. This is before the surge in the prices of basic commodities over the past months that sent wheat prices in September 37 percent higher than their levels a year ago.

This has been compounded by Washington’s freezing of Afghanistan’s financial assets, suspension of foreign aid and imposition of an economic blockade—tantamount to starving the country to death—after the Taliban took control in August 2021 amid the US military’s humiliating withdrawal from its longest-ever war. According to the World Bank, this has led to a 30 percent contraction in the economy.

Afghanistan’s decades-long US-orchestrated wars have produced one of the largest refugee populations in the world. At the beginning of 2022, before the war in Ukraine, about one in 10 Afghans—3 million people—were refugees, mostly living in neighbouring Pakistan and Iran. Three in four Afghans have suffered internal or external displacement in their lifetime.

While the UK government pledged to bring out tens of thousands of Afghans who had worked with British forces and officials, along with their families, more than one year after NATO’s withdrawal from the country, many thousands of vulnerable Afghans remain trapped in Afghanistan or neighbouring Pakistan, forcing them to turn to dangerous and unofficial routes to reach Britain. Thousands are stranded in hotels in Britain as their applications for resettlement are processed.

These disastrous conditions underscore the devastating impact of US imperialism’s four decades of covert operations, war, and occupation—all justified with cynical rhetoric of humanitarianism and “building democracy”—on what was already one of the poorest countries on the planet. It must serve as a warning to workers throughout the world about what the US and NATO have in store for both their “allies” and their enemies, as they intensify their operations in Ukraine against Russia and prepare for war with China.

UK government prepares “emergency powers” to smash strikes

Robert Stevens

The Conservative government is preparing to deploy the armed forces to smash upcoming strikes this month by hundreds of thousands of workers, including a 48-hour nurses walkout. Plans are also being forwarded to impose new anti-strike legislation aimed at making industrial action largely ineffective.

Up to 100,000 members of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) are to strike in England, Wales and Northern Ireland on December 15 and 20. The nurses are fighting years long-government pay restraint and support a pay rise of 5 percent above RPI inflation—around 20 precent.

Postal workers on strike at the Bradford North depot October 1, 2022 [Photo: WSWS]

Postal workers in the Communication Workers Union (CWU) are continuing a series of national strikes, with last week’s walkout of 115,000 workers to be followed by stoppages on December 9, 11, 14, 15, 23 and 24.

40,000 rail workers in the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union will continue their strike against Network Rail and 14 train operating companies in a series of 48-hour stoppages on December 13, 14, 16 and 17 and on January 3, 4, 6 and 7, 2023.

To justify repression against workers fighting low pay, the destruction of their conditions and threat of thousands of job losses, the government once again denounced them as stooges of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Conservative Party Chairman Nadhim Zahawi told Sky News' Sophy Ridge on Sunday, “This is a time to come together and to send a very clear message to Mr Putin that we’re not going to be divided in this way… Our message to the unions is to say ‘this is not a time to strike, this is a time to try and negotiate’.”

Zahawi warned that, “It's the right and responsible thing to do, to have contingency plans in place… We're looking at the military, we're looking at a specialist response force... surge capacity.” Troops could be “driving ambulances” and working on UK borders during strikes.

At the end of November, 80,000 ambulance technicians, paramedics and 999 call handlers in England voted for industrial action to be held in January over pay and staffing. It would be the first by ambulance staff in 30 years. During the 1989-1990 national strike by ambulance workers the Thatcher Tory government mobilised the armed forces in an attempt to break it.

A West Midlands Police motorcyclist escorts a British Army ambulance during the 1989-90 strike. [Photo by West Midlands Police / CC BY-SA 2.0]

Sky News reported, “Cabinet Office said around 2,000 military personnel and civil servants are being trained to support a range of services - including Border Force at airports and ports - in the event of strike action.

“They include up to 600 armed forces personnel and 700 staff from the government's specialist surge and rapid response team, as well as other parts of the civil service.

'Decisions are yet to be taken on deploying troops to these tasks but they are part of the range of options available should strike action in these areas go ahead as planned.”

The Sunday Telegraph reported, “Cabinet ministers in departments most affected by strike threats, including the Home Office, Transport, Health and Education, gathered this week for a series of Cobra meetings to coordinate their response.”

Other plans being considered for use against the nurses strikes are bound with the government’s privatisation agenda in the National Health Service. The Sunday Telegraph reported, “Chemists could be allowed to diagnose patients with minor conditions and prescribe antibiotics for the first time to try to reduce demand for GP appointments and cut record backlogs.” It added, “But the plan is unlikely to be deployed before Christmas because it will take time to train staff and arrange NHS contracts for private pharmacies…”

The government is moving, at the insistence of a rabid right-wing media to legally impose Minimum Service Levels [MSL] during strikes. The Sun and Times, both owned by Rupert Murdoch, demanded the government legislate with no more delay. On Friday, the Sun revealed that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak “is considering new emergency powers to break a winter of strikes”. The government planned to “rush through an anti-strikes Bill,“ that would open a new front in the Government’s war with health, rail and postal unions among others.” The “package may include using agency workers to fill strikers’ crucial roles and making it easier for bosses to replace strikers permanently.” The legislation “would add to legislation currently going through Parliament to ensure a minimum level of service on strike days in key industries, such as rail.”

The Times in a leader comment declared that if Sunak “is to have any chance of reversing the slide in his party’s fortunes, he must find ways to prevent a wave of planned walkouts from paralysing the country.” It said, “Sunak’s decision to press ahead with legislation to require the unions to guarantee minimum service levels during strikes is encouraging.” It would “oblige trade unions and rail operators to ensure that at least 20 percent of trains run during strikes, thereby ensuring sufficient services for people to get to work and school.” Passing the MSL legislation was “a test” that “Sunak, and the Tories, cannot afford to fail.”

The Times stated, “Nor should the government be deflected by apparent public sympathy for some of the strikers. That is bound to shift as the impact of industrial action starts to disrupt people’s lives.”

Opposing this view in its main editorial Sunday, the Telegraph warned, “The obvious strategy is for ministers to wait and hope that the public will turn its ire on strikers, especially given that many of the workers planning industrial action have comparatively generous pay and pension arrangements.

“But that is highly risky. Polls show that voters currently back the strikers. Nurses are hugely popular. Inflation is eroding the real value of wages across the economy. There is every chance that public fury will fall on Rishi Sunak’s administration.”

In seeking to suppress strikes, the government relies politically on the trade union bureaucracy. In an interview with the Telegraph, Communication Workers’ Union General Secretary Dave Ward said of the many groups of workers involved in or being balloted for action, “It's almost like a de facto general strike taking place by the amount of disputes.”

But Ward spoke as someone moving heaven and earth to prevent such a development. This week his union sold-out a month’s long national strike of 40,000 BT workers, resulting in an eruption of anger by CWU members.

Ward told the Telegraph that not only that strikes could be ended by Royal Mail, it could partner with the CWU to establish a competitive edge over its rivals. The Telegraph reported, “Ward rejected claims of inflexibility: ‘We’ve said we will deliver 24/7. We've agreed to that.’”

He added, “What I'm saying to you is, we agreed to explore in a deeper way, how we could develop the infrastructure and Royal Mail and how we develop new products and services.”

Ward stressed, “If Amazon were in control of Royal Mail’s infrastructure, I guarantee you now they would be leveraging that as a competitive advantage.”

The agenda of the public sector union bureaucrats is no different. Royal College of Nursing General Secretary Pat Cullen stated that threatened strikes could be shelved based on a well below inflation pay deal, citing the example of the deal struck in Scotland with the Scottish National Party government. “This must be a lesson to ministers elsewhere that negotiations can avert action, and pay offers are put out to members for a vote.”

The Observer reported, “RCN and Unison suggested to the Observer that if a deal similar to that offered in Scotland – between 5% and 11% depending on staff grades – were put forward, this could be a basis for progress.”

Christina McAnea, general secretary of the largest public sector union Unison told the newspaper, “It’s in the gift of the government to stop strikes across the NHS this winter.” The health secretary “should learn from the way ministers in Holyrood averted strikes with talks and more pay.”