Fossil discovery in China raises intriguing questions for human evolution

Frank Gaglioti

Analysis of a jawbone in the Hualongdong cave in eastern China dated at 300,000 years old has shown an intriguing array of features both archaic and modern. The nearly complete mandible together with a partial cranium has overall been labelled HLD 6. 

The analysis was presented in an important paper by Professor Xiujie Wu, at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) at the Chinese Academy of Science in Beijing, and her team, published in July in the Journal of Human Evolution: “Morphological and morphometric analyses of a late Pleistocene hominin mandible from Hualongdong, China.”

Professor Xiujie Wu

Wu et al wrote: “Results indicate that the HLD 6 mandible exhibits a mosaic morphological pattern characterized by a robust corpus [body of the mandible] and relatively gracile symphysis [mandible median line marked by a thin ridge] and Ramus [movable hinge on either side of head]. The moderately developed mental trigone [the overall structure of the lower jaw] and a clear anterior mandibular incurvation of the HLD 6 mandible are reminiscent of Late Pleistocene hominin and recent modern human morphology.”

In hominin evolution robust features are considered indicative of more archaic human forms, while gracile (delicate) features indicate modern evolutionary traits.

Analysis of the fossil’s cranium published in 2021 showed a similar combination of archaic and more modern features.

“I’ve came across some materials about this latest finding, and couldn’t agree more on believing this finding can show the tendency, and a time point, that since 300,000 years ago, there was a transition that East Asian man experienced evolving from ancient to modern man,” a paleontologist Wang Xiong told the Global Times. Scientists have speculated on the significance of these fossils for human evolution, they may represent a new lineage entirely. How HLD 6 fits into the evolution of modern man, Homo sapiens, is not clear.

“The Hualongdong people could represent a previously unknown ancestor or close relative of early Homo sapiens,” a palaeoanthropologist who was part of the team led by Xiujie Wu told Nature.

The Hualongdong cave, located in the Dongzhi county of the west China province of Anhui, is an important fossil site. Scientists have been investigating there since 2013. Earlier fossil finds included a Homo erectus skull named Dongzhi man, described in 2015, identified from two skull fragments and two teeth. It is between 150,000 and 412,000 years old. Scientists unearthed human bone fragments belonging to at least 16 individuals, including a child approximately 12 to 16 years old and numerous stone tools. Along with the human artefacts, 6,000 fossils of vertebrate animals, including stegodon (an elephant ancestor), giant tapir and giant pandas were discovered. The animal fossils show signs of cut marks indicating human butchery.

Dali Man

“Together with the animal bone fossils and the stone implements, we assume the site was the home for a relatively mature human community,” the IVPP researcher in charge of the excavation, Liu Wu, told the People’s Daily.

H. erectus is thought to have originally evolved 2 million years ago. The species is one of the most widespread, with fossils found in Africa and across the Eurasian landmass to China and southeast Asia (Java man). The species is thought to have become extinct 117,000 years ago, based on a fossil found in Ngangdong, Java in 2019.

Previously the hominin fossils from this period were considered as intermediate between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens but the plethora of Chinese discoveries is challenging this view.

“The hominin fossil discovery and related studies in the last decade have changed this traditional view on the evolution pattern of the late Middle Pleistocene hominins in China radically,” Wu and her team stated. “The hominin fossils from this time period, such as Dali, Jinniushan, Maba, Tongzi, Xujiayao, Xuchang, and Xiahe, exhibit high morphological variability and are not easily allocated to the existing taxonomic groups.” 

All the fossils mentioned were discovered in China and are intermediate between H. erectus and H. sapiens, but not enough information is available to characterise their species denomination. Clearly the late to middle Pleistocene was a period of great flux in human evolution.

Dali man, comprising of an entire fossilised skull of a young male, a typical representative of this period, was discovered by a geologist from the Shaanxi Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources, Liu Shuntang, in 1978 in Dali County, Shaanxi province, China. It is 209,000 years old. 

A paper published in 1981 in Scientia Sinica by palaeontologist X. Z. Wu describes “a well-preserved cranium of an archaic type of early Homo sapiens from Dali, China.” Wu analysed that “It has many characters identical to those of early Homo sapiens or intermediate between Homo erectus and modern man. It possesses also some features similar to those of modern man, and close to Homo erectus in some respects. So it probably belongs to an archaic type of early Homo sapiens.”

An article published in Nature in September drew parallels with fossil remains discovered at the Jebel Irhoud archaeological site in Morocco, found during the early 2000s, that may provide insights into the significance of HLD 6 and the other undesignated Chinese fossils. 

The Jebel Irhoud human remains are thought to belong to one of the earliest members of the evolutionary lineage that includes Homo sapiens. Jebel Irhoud is a cave located 50 km southeast of the city of Safi. It is an important paleontological site discovered in 1960 where several human fossils have been unearthed, as well as a stone tool industry and the remains of several animal species indicative of a steppe ecosystem.  

The fossils were originally dated as 40,000 years old and were classified as Neanderthals, but more accurate work at the site dated the fossils as 300,000 years old. A skull designated as Jebel Irhoud-1 is considered the most important find.

In a comment by professor of anthropology at the Natural History Museum in London Chris Stringer and anthropologist at New York University Julia Galway-Witham in Nature in June 2017, “On the origin of our species,” stated that the “approximately 350,000–280,000-year-old fossils from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco that could represent an early stage in Homo sapiens evolution. The facial shape of a Jebel Irhoud fossil previously discovered at the site shows similarities to the structure of more modern humans, such as the presence of delicate cheekbones. However, the shape of the braincase (the section of the skull enclosing the brain) is archaic in form, and has an elongated shape that is less globular than the structure of more modern H. sapiens.”

The emergence of modern humans was a very complex and contradictory process. The first fossil considered to represent true humans, Herto Man discovered in 1997 in Ethiopia, is 160,000 years old. Yet genetic evidence suggests that humans may have emerged at least 500,000 years ago.

Stringer and Galway-Witham continued that these findings “suggest that clear-cut boundaries in H. sapiens evolution, such as the descriptions of fossils as ‘archaic’ or ‘anatomically modern’, are likely to fade as the fossil record improves. They are probably right, although their evidence adds to the picture of an extended temporal overlap of archaic and more-modern-looking forms across the continent (Africa)...”

A paleoanthropologist at the National Research Center On Human Evolution in Spain, Maria Martinón-Torres, who was involved in the analysis of HLC-6, told Nature, “More fossils and studies are necessary to understand [the Hualongdong people’s] precise position in the human family tree.” She pointed out that proteins extracted from bones could shed further light on how the Hualongdong people are related to modern humans, as well as to more archaic species. 

The hominin fossils from China will play a critical role in the elaboration of how modern humans evolved.

Israel and the Palestinians: A state founded on dispossession and ethnic cleansing—Part Two

Jean Shaoul

The Greater Israel policy

The 1967 war was a turning point in the development of a Greater Israel policy of permanently annexing the land seized.

Israeli tanks advancing on the Golan Heights during the Six Day War, June 1967 [Photo by Government Press Office (Israel) / CC BY-SA 4.0]

The war extended Israel’s de facto boundaries and created new waves of refugees and internally displaced people. The national unity government, headed by Labour Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, established colonial-style settlements in the newly conquered territories in defiance of international conventions. The settlements in turn created a social layer that had a vested interest in Israel’s expansionary policy, providing a pole of attraction for some of the most reactionary forces, whose fascist heirs are in government today, dictating policy. These forces moved Israeli politics rapidly to the right in the 1970s, increasing social instability and ending Labour’s grip on government.

From left, General Uzi Narkiss, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, and Chief of Staff Lt. General Yitzhak Rabin—later to be an Israeli Labor Party prime minister—in the Old City of Jerusalem after its fall to Israeli forces in the Six Day War. [Photo by National Photo Collection of Israel, Photography dept / CC BY-SA 3.0]

Repression to enforce the occupation of Palestinian land in the West Bank and Gaza was ramped up through the imposition of military rule, collective punishment, house demolitions, forced deportations and detentions without trial, while the Palestinians became a pool of cheap labour to be brutally exploited by Israeli employers. The Palestinian leadership moved first to Jordan, until it was driven out in a savage war by Jordan in 1970, and then to Lebanon.

Following the 1977 election victory of Likud leader Menachem Begin, Israel launched a murderous expansionist policy in Lebanon, with a series of raids, incursions and covert operations in alliance with Lebanese fascist forces against the Palestinians and their allies during the country’s 15-year-long civil war. These wars and covert activities were to continue for 30 years.

Aftermath of massacre of Palestinians directed by Lebanese Forces with the complicity of senior members of the Israeli Cabinet and Defence Forces and conducted by Christian Phalangists and members of the South Lebanon Army in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. [Photo: Robin Moyer, USA, Black Star for Time. Beirut, Lebanon, 18 September 1982. ]

An estimated 32,000 Palestinians and an untold number of Lebanese were killed at a cost of around 1,500 Israeli lives during operations that included the massacre of 3,000 Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila, the Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, by Israel’s Phalangist allies under the protection of the IDF in September 1982.

The Fraud of Oslo

Israel’s attacks on Palestinians in Lebanon and its growing violation of human rights in the Occupied Territories gave rise to the first Intifada, the spontaneous Palestinian uprising of 1987-93 that erupted outside the control of the PLO. It was brutally suppressed by Israel at a cost of more 1,000 Palestinian lives, more than 6 times the number of Jewish Israelis killed.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, US president Bill Clinton, and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, September 13, 1993

This led to the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 by Israel’s Labor Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Arafat on the lawns of the White House, with Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) agreeing to recognise Israel and renounce terrorism.

The Accords were supposed to usher in a Palestinian statelet with its capital in Abu Dis, a suburb in East Jerusalem the so-called two-state solution. Arafat and the Palestinian Authority would take over Israel’s role in controlling the Palestinian masses in a bifurcated state, composed of non-contiguous Bantustans, that would be separate from but contained by Israel. This precluded any possibility of democracy for the Palestinians.

Israel’s ultranationalists and their political representatives in Likud and other far-right and religious parties rejected even this mockery of a Palestinian state on land they coveted. Just two years later, in October 1995, right-wing religious nationalists, egged on by war-mongering opposition leaders Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu, denounced Rabin as a traitor at an angry demonstration in Jerusalem. One month later, a religious zealot assassinated Rabin.

Israel used the Oslo Accords to expand the settlements in the West Bank faster than ever, take control of water and other resources, build roads and install more than 600 checkpoints, disrupting movement throughout the region and wrecking its economy. The settlements, now home to at least 500,000 Israelis, or nearly 20 percent of the population, control a far greater percentage of the land, including the most fertile and productive.

Israel annexed East Jerusalem, part of the West Bank, in breach of international law, with its Palestinian residents now only a bare majority following the building of some 200,000 settler homes. In recent years, there have been repeated clashes between the Palestinians and the police over the threatened eviction of Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan neighbourhoods at the behest of far-right and religious groups led by Ben-Gvir.

Faris Odeh, a 14 year-old boy who was killed in early November 2000—during the Second Intifada—throwing a stone at an Israel Defense Forces tank in the Gaza Strip. This photo was taken on October 29, 2000, and Odeh was shot dead 10 days later on November 8, while again throwing stones at Israeli troops. [Photo: Associated Press/Laurent Rebours)]

These conditions gave rise to the second Intifada in September 2000, after Ariel Sharon’s provocative march through the Al Aqsa mosque compound under military escort to assert Israel’s control over Islam’s third most holy site. The Intifada was as much an uprising against the PLO leadership that had sanctioned the disastrous Oslo Accords. Between 2000 and 2008, Israeli security forces killed nearly 5,000 Palestinians, around five times the number of Israelis killed by the Palestinians.

The Separation Wall and the Gaza blockade

Sharon then ordered the building of the infamous Separation Barrier that stole a further 10 percent of Palestinian land to wall off Israel from the Palestinians and cut off thousands of Palestinians from their families and workplaces. Targeted assassinations of Palestinian leaders became routine, amid far-right demands for “population transfers” and measures aimed at effecting ethnic cleansing to counter the “demographic timebomb.” The number of Palestinians now exceeds the number of Jews within Israel’s internationally recognised borders and the Occupied Territories.

Early Israeli construction of West Bank barrier, 2003 [Photo by joeskillet/Flickr / CC BY 2.0]

In 2005, Sharon closed 14 Israeli settlements and withdrew the army from the Gaza Strip, while maintaining control of entry by land, sea and air. This masked a far more significant land grab in the West Bank that was given the green light by the Bush administration.

Two years later, following Hamas’ defeat of an attempted coup by Fatah forces, Israel imposed a suffocating blockade that has turned Gaza into an impoverished ghetto, devastating the lives of its residents. It denies Gaza any independence, providing only the bare minimum of essential services such as water and electricity—after destroying much of its public infrastructure and residential buildings, hospitals, schools and mosques following murderous assaults on the enclave, which it characterises as “mowing the grass”. These include Operation Cast Lead (2008-09), Operation Pillar of Defence (November 2012) and Operation Protective Edge (2014). The combined toll of Palestinian deaths in more than seven major assaults on Gaza by the mightiest air force in the Middle East was at least 4,164—with a loss of just 102 Israeli lives.

Israeli Air Force, dropping a white phosphorus cluster bomb on a populated area in Gaza during Operation "Cast Lead", December 2008/January 2009 [Photo by Al Jazeera Creative Commons Repository / CC BY 3.0]

Unable to carry out any reconstruction, Gaza’s economic situation was dire well before the present assault. About three quarters of Gazan households are dependent upon some form of aid from the United Nations and other agencies, that the European Union has said is now “under review.” In 2012, the UN predicted that the besieged enclave would be uninhabitable by 2020, only to revise it in 2017 to warn that “de-development” was happening even faster than predicted.

The situation within Israel for Palestinian citizens, who form 20 percent of the population, is precarious. Home to some of the poorest people in the country, their communities face official neglect and budgetary discrimination. Such are the levels of poverty and unemployment that rival criminal gangs have taken control of the Arab towns and villages, leading to more than 180 killings since the start of the year.

In May 2021, Israel’s Palestinian citizens took to the streets in strikes, protests and riots that were triggered by the violent police storming of the Al Aqsa Mosque and brutal acts of ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem. This was the first time they had joined in a general strike with Palestinians in the occupied territories to protest the assault on Gaza and against Israel’s apartheid-style constitution. Netanyahu’s far-right coalition plans to disqualify Palestinian Knesset members from serving in the Israeli parliament and to ban their parties from standing in elections.

A revolt of the oppressed

It is this immense suffering that led to the Palestinians’ action of October 7-9. Tantamount to a mass suicide mission, it was the revolt of an oppressed people determined to escape the concentration camp in which Israel, with the support of all the major powers, has confined them.

Fire and smoke rise from an explosion on a Palestinian apartment tower following an Israeli air strike in Gaza City, Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023. [AP Photo/Adel Hana]

Israel and the Palestinians: A state founded on dispossession and ethnic cleansing—Part One

Jean Shaoul

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government, backed to the hilt by all the imperialist countries and their media echo chamber, portrays the 1,400 casualties resulting from Hamas’s Al Aqsa Flood incursion into Israel as a unique act of terror. According to the torrent of propaganda, this is a “ground zero” event for which there is no justification and which in turn legitimises whatever crimes Israel now commits against Gaza’s two-million-plus population as a supposed act of self-defence.

Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu (left) far-right Israeli lawmaker Bezalel Smotrich (right) and Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid (centre) and leaders of all Israel's political parties pose for a group photo after the swearing-in ceremony for lawmakers at the Knesset, Israel's parliament, in Jerusalem, November 15, 2022. [AP Photo/Tsafrir Abayov]

In reality it is a casus belli to implement a long-planned campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Gaza Strip and possibly even the West Bank and a war on Iran and its allies in Lebanon and Syria. Netanyahu’s allies in the imperialist centres are one hundred percent behind him, demonising any opposition to Israel’s fascist policies as anti-Semitic acts that must be banned.

But can anyone be in any doubt that Israel is planning a second Nakba? Netanyahu has made this absolutely clear. He told the 1.1 million Palestinians in north Gaza to “Leave now,” while the army spokesperson said they would not be allowed to return “until we say so.” Where they were supposed to go, no one said. In any event, this did not stop Israel bombing them where they fled.

Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, launching Israel’s “complete siege on Gaza” blocking all of life’s essentials—electricity, food and even water—from entering the besieged enclave, spewed forth a fascist rant, “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told the military, “Strike Hamas brutally and [do] not take the matter of prisoners as a significant consideration.”

The reality of “striking Hamas” is the mass murder of thousands of civilians, half of them children, in the carpet bombing of Gaza as a ground invasion is prepared. Such is the carnage resulting from air strikes that the United Nations Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) declared, “There are not enough body bags for the dead in Gaza.” Entire neighbourhoods have been reduced to rubble.

Gaza is only the beginning. In the occupied West Bank, Israeli soldiers have set up new checkpoints to block all free movement, giving free rein to armed settlers to attack and kill Palestinians and expel them from their villages.

Within Israel, Palestinians fear they will be subject to ethnic cleansing in line with the “population transfers” long demanded by the ultra-nationalist and fascistic parties. Far-right vigilantes have moved into mixed population towns like Lod, which saw forced evictions in 1948, with the declared aim of “judaicising” them. Security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has announced the purchase of 10,000 rifles to arm these fascist squads. Kobi Shabtai, head of the police, declared there would be “zero tolerance” for protests in support of Gaza in Israel and threatened to send anti-war demonstrators to the besieged enclave.

The full implications of Israel’s 2018 Nation-State Law, enshrining Jewish supremacy as the legal foundation of the state, are now clear—not just apartheid rule with Arabs as second-class citizens, but their expulsion from an exclusively Jewish state.

The establishment of the state of Israel

This is the product of the founding of Israel in 1948 through the forcible expulsion of Palestine’s existing Arab population and of the three-quarters of a century of brutality and mass murder that followed.

The non-binding vote at the United Nations General Assembly in November 1947 urging partition, and a Jewish state on Palestinian land alongside a Palestinian state, was the result of the machinations of rival powers determined to maintain control over such an important geostrategic area. It played on and manipulated the enormous public sympathy for the European Jews who had suffered so terribly at the hands of Nazi Germany and now found themselves denied entry to the West.

One of the most cynical elements of Zionist and imperialist propaganda is that Israel is routinely declared to be the “only democracy” in the Middle East. But its founding, in an already existing country, where Jews, even after mass immigration, constituted just one-third of the population in 1947, could never be achieved democratically.

Herut party head Menachem Begin addressing a mass demonstration against negotiations with Germany in Tel Aviv, 1952 [Photo: Hans Pinn, National Photo Collection of Israel]

Israel’s own historians, using the state archives, have documented the crimes carried out by the political antecedents of the gang of far-right nationalists, religious bigots, and former generals running the country today. Netanyahu’s Likud party is the political heir of the Irgun, whose leader Menachem Begin was prime minister from 1977 to 1983, and the Stern Gang, led by Yitzhak Shamir who became prime minister in 1983. These terrorist gangs waged a brutal war on the Palestinians and British officials during the period after World War I, when Britain ruled Palestine under a League of Nations Mandate. They killed several thousand Palestinians in a roughly 30-year period up to 1948, resulting in the retaliatory deaths of 1,300 Jews.

The massacre at Deir Yassin in April 1948, where more than 200 men, women and children were slaughtered, is one of the best-known examples. Historian Benny Morris explains in his ground-breaking book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947-49 that this was one of the most important factors in “precipitating the flight of Arab villagers from Palestine.” Between November 1947 and the end of the British Mandate in May 1948, more than 375,000 Palestinians became refugees, driven out by a combination of force, atrocities and a campaign of terror including killings.

Israeli military forces receiving a briefing at Deir Yassin [Photo: Beit Gidi Exhibits]

The war that broke in May 1948 between Israel and its Arab neighbours after David Ben Gurion, Israel’s premier, declared the establishment of the state of Israel led to the deaths of some 13,000 Palestinians, twice the number of Israelis killed, as well as an estimated 3-7,000 soldiers from Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq. Israel denied uprooted Palestinians the right to return to their homes, forcing most to eke out a wretched existence in refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Largely denied citizenship in the Arab states, except in Jordan, they and their descendants became registered refugees. Many now live elsewhere in the Middle East, while others have moved to the West.

Ben Gurion himself encouraged the Haganah—the forerunner of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and largely under the control of the Histadrut/Mapai Party, later to become the Labour Party—to expel the Palestinians from their homes. There are at least 31 confirmed massacres—including the horrific massacre in October 1948 by a Haganah batallion made up of former Irgun and Lehi forces—of between 100 and 120 Palestinians in the village of al-Dawayima, near the southern city of Hebron. A soldier who witnessed the events, part of the IDF’s Operation Yoav (October 15–22, 1948), explained, “There was no battle and no resistance. The first conquerors killed 80 to 100 Arab men, women and children. The children were killed by smashing their skulls with sticks. There wasn’t a house without people killed in it.”

Members of the Israel Defense Forces 89th Battalion outside Beit Gurvin, during Operation Yoav, October 1948 [Photo: Unknown author - Palmach archive Sadeh 1 Album 4/28]

No one was charged with the massacre. According to the United Nations Refugee Relief Project, the Gaza Strip’s refugee population rose from 100,000 to 230,000, due to the ethnic cleansing of the southern region.

By the end of the war, only about 200,000 out of 1,157,000 Palestinians recorded in a 1947 British census remained in the parts of Palestine that became Israel. The takeover of Palestinian-owned land was even more dramatic. In 1946, Jews had owned less than 12 percent of the land in what became Israel; this rose to 77 percent after the 1948-49 war when the Israeli government enacted the Abandoned Property Ordinance to take control of the property of Palestinians who were expelled or fled.

Founded on terrorism and ethnic cleansing, Israel could only sustain its twin policies of expulsion and dispossession through constant repression and warfare. Ben Gurion’s Labour imposed military rule until 1966 on those Palestinians who remained in Israel and became citizens. This was only months before imposing military rule on the newly occupied West Bank Palestinians that has continued ever since.

The IDF repeatedly fought one-sided battles with Palestinians who sought to return to their former homes or visit their families after 1949, with Ariel Sharon’s Qibya massacre in 1956 that killed 69 Palestinians one of the most notorious. Between 1949 and 1967, the Fedayeen war between Israel on the one hand and Egyptian armed forces and Palestinian militants on the other killed between 2,800 and 5,000 Palestinians, around four times the number of Israelis killed.

Inhabitants of Qibya coming back in their village after its attack by israeli forces, October 1953

In June 1967, Israel used President Gamal Abdul Nasser’s expulsion of UN forces from the Gaza Strip, which Egypt controlled, and Sharm el Sheikh, where they were guarding the Straits of Tiran, and the closing of the Straits to Israeli shipping to launch a pre-emptive but long-planned strike against Egypt. An estimated 20,000 Arab soldiers lost their lives, compared to less than 1,000 Israeli deaths.

During the five-day war, Israel seized Syria’s Golan Heights, the Jordanian-controlled West Bank and East Jerusalem, which it annexed, and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, as well as the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip. It forced another 250,000-325,000 of the 900,000 Palestinians in the Jordanian-controlled West Bank to flee to Jordan and 100,000 Syrians to flee to Syria.

The 1967 war was to lead to another war in October 1973, when Egypt and Syria launched a surprise military attack—ultimately unsuccessful—on Israel aimed at securing the return of the Israeli-occupied lands. Their defeat was to result in Egypt’s signing a peace agreement with Israel and the abandonment by all the Arab bourgeois regimes of any support for the Palestinians.

The 1967 defeat of the Arab armies created the conditions for Yasser Arafat and his Fatah organisation, with its commitment to achieving a Palestinian state through armed struggle, to take the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). This began a vastly unequal military struggle between Israel, armed to the teeth and supported politically and diplomatically by US imperialism, and the Palestinians, now isolated and abandoned by the Arab regimes.

Brazilian parliamentary inquiry indicts former president Bolsonaro and generals for attempted coup

Miguel Andrade & Tomas Castanheira

October 18 marked the conclusion of the work of the Brazilian legislature’s Joint Parliamentary Inquiry Commission (CPMI) into the fascist assault on the national capital of Brasília on January 8, barely a week after President Luís Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers Party (PT) had taken office. Its stark conclusion was that former president Jair Bolsonaro had been “intellectually and morally” responsible for the assault, as well as for a “conspiracy to commit a crime, political violence, a violent attempt to abolish the rule of law, and a coup d’état.” 

Bolsonaro supporters face off with troops in Brasilia on January 8, 2023 [Photo: Joedson Alves/Agencia Brasil]

Bolsonaro was indicted along with over 60 others, half of whom belong to the military, including former Army commander Gen. Freire Gomes and Navy commander Adm. Almir Garnier, who according to Bolsonaro’s former aide, Lt. Col. Mauro Cid, had agreed to provide Bolsonaro with troops for a takeover.

The indictments have no immediate practical consequences, being referred by Congress to a number of other state branches, including the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) and the Federal Police. Nonetheless, the report in itself constitutes a crucial element in the deepening of the crisis of bourgeois rule in Brazil. Despite all its efforts, the PT’s ruling coalition in Congress could not hide from millions of Brazilians that a vast conspiracy was put into motion involving dozens of high-ranking officials from the security apparatus. And, despite the party’s lies about a decisive victory on January 1 and in the months after the beginning of government transition, this conspiracy was fully alive and able to take over the capital.

The assault saw thousands of fascistic supporters of Bolsonaro storm the headquarters of the three Constitutional powers—the Congress, Supreme Court (STF) and the presidential offices—after repeated calls by Bolsonaro for his followers to express support for his false allegations that electoral fraud was responsible for his defeat in the October 2022 general elections. The mob was escorted and guided from rallying points in the capital, including the national Army headquarters, to the Three Powers Square where government buildings are concentrated, and where a few dozen police and soldiers either welcomed them or were instantly overrun.

While obviously emulating the putsch attempt led by former United States President Donald Trump a year earlier, with the storming of US Congress, Bolsonaro’s followers were also following clear signals that the military would support an overthrow of the Electoral Court. This was most graphically expressed in a November 9, 2022 military report on the safety of the country’s electronic ballot boxes, which concluded that fraud “could not be ruled out.” Those allegations, made relentlessly by Bolsonaro throughout his term, ran counter to previous reports by the military itself, which in the previous decades of use of the electronic ballot boxes participated in numerous “hackathons” sponsored by the electoral authorities, failing to produce any evidence that the machines were prone to fraud. 

After the vote tally was announced on October 30, and as Bolsonaro refused to concede, supporters immediately started setting up camps in front of barracks all over the country, demanding a military takeover. The camps were defended by the military as an expression of “freedom of speech,” at the same time that official press releases of the high command decried “authoritarian” measures by the STF against those claiming electoral fraud. Shortly before the end of the year, on December 18, a Bolsonaro supporter was caught attempting to blow up a fuel tanker at the capital’s airport, in an attempt to provoke and legitimize the use of emergency powers.

As the high point of such conspiracies, the fascist assault on the capital provoked a political storm in the country. It came barely a week after Lula’s theatrical third inauguration on January 1, in which the PT proclaimed a decisive victory over the far-right and the dawn of a new era for bourgeois democracy in Brazil. Lula, who was visiting a flood-hit region south of the capital in the state of São Paulo on January 8, refused to use executive powers to order the military to take over the security in the capital for fear he would lose control of the situation. The government then decided on a takeover of the capital’s state-level security forces, which lasted for almost two months.

From the start, the summoning of the CPMI, joining both senators and representatives, was forcefully resisted by the PT government. Opposing Bolsonaro since his 2018 election campaign from the standpoint of the defense of the capitalist state—and criticizing Bolsonaro for compromising Brazilian capitalism’s interests abroad—the PT sought to deal with the fascistic faction of the national bourgeoisie by ceding secretive, police-state powers to STF Justice Alexandre de Moraes. From the immediate aftermath of the January 8 attacks, the government resisted calls for a CPMI, insisting that a classified inquiry being led by Moraes was sufficient.

The CPMI was only initiated after the far-right opposition had gathered enough support in Congress to attempt to falsely indict the Executive for staging the attacks. The government then set in motion parliamentary maneuvers to ensure its representatives a majority on the commission. The commission’s hallmark was its exclusive reliance upon information already publicly available through leaked or declassified information obtained by the Federal Police. Hearings were restricted to questioning figures, such as Lieutenant Colonel Cid, kept in pre-trial detention by order of Justice Moraes, and who were already negotiating plea bargains. Information not made publicly available by Moraes was only accessible by CPMI members in a “safe room” monitored under the most stringent conditions, which included a prohibition on members of Congress making any reproduction of the material. 

Throughout the procedures, the government’s overriding concern was to present the suspects as isolated from the security establishment, and, as such, acting as individuals and not an expression of the crisis of the capitalist state. 

The CPMI’s final report, written by the government-allied Senator Eliziane Gama, makes precisely the point that, despite the 60 indictees, including Bolsonaro, “there is nothing to see” in the investigation. It concludes: “Against the coup plotters, the solidity of our institutional arrangement prevailed,” pointing to “the sanitizing action of the sectors of the police security forces that did not allow themselves to be contaminated by the ideological discourse of Bolsonarism” and to “the constitutional stance of the Armed Forces.”

In other words, the Brazilian military, which the CPMI admits was deeply implicated in a conspiracy to overthrow democracy less than four decades after the official dissolution of its 21-year-long bloody CIA-backed dictatorship, is to be commended as the chief defender of democracy. 

Gama leaves no doubt that the government sees the CPMI report as a means to “close the case” on the coup conspiracy and resume business as usual: “This report is a real demonstration of the victory of democracy against fascism, fundamentalism and the attempt to usurp and take away rights that we have kept for years through blood and sweat, which is our democratic rule of law.”

This attempt to ignore reality, contradicted by the fact that key members of the military chain of command were prepared to follow Bolsonaro in establishing a dictatorship, is rooted in the class interests represented by the PT-led coalition. The Bolsonaro government, and his plans to overthrow bourgeois democracy, arose out of the world crisis of capitalism, which is giving rise to wars, austerity to finance them and the growth of the far right and police-state measures to impose them in country after country. The PT, entirely committed to the preservation of capitalist rule, fears a working class reaction against capitalism itself—the source of austerity, war and dictatorship—infinitely more than it fears fascism. 

Those class interests are behind the cowardly, and veering on pathetic, attempt to deny the terminal crisis of bourgeois democracy in Brazil expressed in another section of the report. It states: “It would be a tragedy for democracy if it were confirmed, for example, that at least 6 of the 16 members of the Army High Command, would have been in favor of reading article 142 of the Constitution as a norm authorizing military intervention in the country and/or in favor of decreeing a GLO (Guarantee of Law and Order [operation]), during internal discussions within the high command.”

The fact that the CPMI has been shut down without any attempt to investigate the claims presented in its own report regarding the “tragical” implications of “at least” a third of the military top brass supporting a coup exposes the PT government itself as an accomplice of the far right and the military.

The report also makes abundantly clear that the PT government and the Brazilian ruling class as a whole are aware that the continued revelations stemming from the aftershocks of the January 8 attacks are actually fueling the mass opposition the government is attempting to squelch. While glorifying the military as the backbone of democracy, the report lays the groundwork for a massive expansion of state powers. 

The report opens with a political analysis of the broader framework of the coup plot in Brazil in which it denounces unnamed “coups by the left” and “left-wing extremism”: “Modern coups—on the left and on the right—don’t use tanks, cables and soldiers. They begin with hybrid, psychological warfare, based on lies, smear campaigns, subliminal propaganda, the spread of fear and the fabrication of hatred.” 

The document, written and approved by the PT and its pseudo-left allies, including the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL), proceeds in chauvinistic language that matches that of Bolsonaro and the fascists: “The coup moves forward by appropriating the national symbols. The guerrillas of chaos distort the National Flag ... they make the National Anthem their song, as if ‘Ouviram do Ipiranga’ [the first words of the hymn] wasn't the soundtrack of a country marked by diversity, plurality and freedom.” 

After decrying the “exhaustion of liberal democracy,” the report adds: “However, it should be noted that the crisis of prestige of liberal democracy is not only appropriated by far-right movements. The process of manipulating those affected by the globalization process also has actors on the extreme left, which also shows that material discontent is fertile ground for anti-democratic militants from across the ideological spectrum.”

The report argues that “extremism,” supposedly a product of mass communication made possible by the internet, must be countered through censorship. It claims: “[T]he current state of the Brazilian digital ecosystem is a threat to our Democratic Rule of Law, which is why it violates the deepest constitutional standards.” 

Argentine elections expose political rot and the growing threat of fascism

Andrea Lobo

As Argentina faces mass poverty, its worst economic crisis in two decades and triple-digit inflation, one of the main officials responsible, Economy Minister Sergio Massa, placed first in Sunday’s presidential elections with 36.7 percent of the vote. In a runoff next month, he will face the fascistic libertarian Javier Milei, a foul-mouthed admirer of Trump and Bolsonaro, who won 30 percent of the vote.

Sergio Massa and Javier Milei [Photo: Marcos Corrêa, Wikimedia Commons/Vox España, Flickr]

Despite some relief in the corporate media that the Peronist vote did not collapse as expected, the result was symptomatic of a political establishment that is rotting on its feet and sets the stage for an overwhelmingly unpopular government. The financial press has stressed concerns about “governability,” as public bonds and the peso continue to spiral downward.

The turnout at 74 percent was the lowest since the end of the military dictatorship in 1983, while the Peronists saw their second worst performance despite winning.

Massa is the face of an austerity program aimed at paying the largest IMF debt in the world, which has spurred a barrage of mass protests and wildcat strikes across the country this year. Meanwhile, the Peronist union bureaucracy has been struggling to contain the class struggle.

In the context of a global wave of strikes in defense of living standards and jobs and an emerging mass movement against war, even the national coalition government now being proposed by Massa is not expected to yield any different results.  

Facing an overall shift to the left and toward revolutionary struggle in the working class, Argentina’s ruling class has increasingly relied on the pseudo-left to carry water for the Peronists. However, these forces are now quickly becoming discredited and revealing their political bankruptcy. 

The so-called Left and Workers Front Unity (FIT-U) received 710,000 votes, or 2.7 percent. This was 570,000 votes less than their maximum in 2021. While Milei’s party grew from three to 39 federal deputies, FIT-U went from four to five.

The failure to capitalize on the social crisis has engulfed the parties that make up the FIT-U in political turmoil and pushed them toward an increasingly open alignment with the Peronists. Before the elections, the FIT-U joined a “united front” with a faction of the ruling Peronists led by Juan Grabois and Emilio Persico, and its leading politicians and media are now maneuvering to channel their voters behind Massa.

On Monday, for instance, the pseudo-left legislator Christian Castillo responded on national television that the FIT-U is still debating a common position, but he left little to the imagination. “We are not voting for Milei but will not give our political support to Massa,” he said, dishonestly claiming that there is a difference between voting and giving political support, while suggesting that voting for Massa should be considered. He later said that voting for Massa would be compatible with maintaining “political independence” and cynically fed illusions by promising that the FIT-U will vote for any “legislation that benefits workers” introduced by the Peronists. 

Significantly, Castillo said that the growth of the far right might be a “shooting star” that will simply vanish, while the pseudo-left media has described Milei as an “aberration,” claiming that his rise was merely accidental.

This is a reflection of the nationalist, near-sighted and ahistorical approach of these opportunists, who do not understand what processes drive their own actions and words, where they are headed or the implications of their decisions. They react impressionistically to each event, according to how it impacts their middle class careers in politics, the trade union bureaucracy, academia or NGOs. 

By hindering the development of a genuinely independent revolutionary and socialist alternative and promoting class collaborationism, the pseudo-left is politically responsible for the rise of Milei.

Millions of small business owners, unemployed and informal workers, and youth voted for Milei because they see him as the only option for “extreme” change. In media interviews, his voters often refer to the fact that the Central Bank has no reserves and has failed in containing inflation, which has cut their take-home incomes in half, “there is no money in the streets,” the healthcare system and schools are collapsing, public transportation is lacking, among other reasons.

The growth of the far right is an international process. Facing the initial stages of a new redivision and recolonization by world imperialism, as evidenced by the US-led escalation of the war in Ukraine and Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians, the ruling classes are moving headlong toward dictatorship. 

As described by Leon Trotsky on the eve of World War II, “the ruling cliques of all countries look upon democracy, military dictatorship, fascism, etc., as so many different instruments for subjecting their own peoples to imperialist aims.”

Both, Massa and Milei speak for broad sections of the ruling class, who currently hold different tactics on how to better serve foreign capital and imperialism in the context of a historic crisis of global and Argentine capitalism. This means facilitating the efforts by foreign capital to loot Argentina’s grains, shale gas and lithium, along with the public treasury and cheap labor. 

As the Financial Times writes: “What Argentina really needs, according to Alberto Ramos, chief Latin America economist at Goldman Sachs, is a rapid and dramatic fiscal adjustment, an independent central bank and wide-ranging structural reforms to make the country more open and flexible.”

While Ramos does not oppose the dollarization proposed by Milei, he stresses the imperative of further cutting labor and other production costs to attract investments.

Massa offers a relatively more gradual approach than Milei to accomplish the same goals, while relying on the trade unions to suppress the class struggle and leveraging commercial and financial ties with China. During one of the debates, he summarized his plans: “Argentina needs to enter a process of development: gas pipelines, selling energy to the world, exporting added value. That is the way forward to accumulating foreign reserves and strengthening our currency.” 

The attempts by Massa to strike a more progressive pose that defends “national sovereignty” are absurd. Far from its national reformist beginnings after World War II, when Argentina had one of the highest incomes per capita, Peronism today has been reduced to a tool to enforce the diktats of Wall Street and its partners in the local financial aristocracy.

Milei, for his part, plans to eliminate the Central Bank and most ministries, and to privatize all healthcare and education, at best giving vouchers to the poorest layers, among other reactionary measures. Teach blind parrots how to say “supply and demand,” and you get Milei’s cabinet. His team is composed of influencer economists whose premises were refuted 150 years ago by Marx.

But describing Milei and the far right as an accidental “aberration” is politically criminal, since it minimizes the real threat his rise represents.

Workers should make no mistake. Milei, who wields a chainsaw during rallies, is proposing to cut down much more than social spending and democratic rights, like abortion. When asked about imminent mass opposition against his policies, Milei unequivocally responds: “They’ll go to jail.” 

Moreover, he plans to leave all defense and security considerations in the hands of his running mate, Victoria Villarruel, a daughter and granddaughter of military officials during the US-backed military dictatorship. She is the president of the Center for Legal Studies on Terrorism and Its Victims (CELTYV), a fascist organization dedicated to minimizing and justifying the crimes of the dictatorship, which led to the killing or disappearance of 30,000 leftists.

Milei represents a program of open civil war and fascist reaction against the working class. Massa and the Peronists, however, do not represent a more “democratic” alternative. During the 1970s, the Peronist state and union bureaucracy formed fascist death squads called the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance to kill radicalized workers, students and intellectuals, even before the US-backed military coup in March 1976. The incumbent government of Alberto Fernandez and the local Peronist authorities have consistently deployed security forces to crack down on demonstrators, while Massa has promised a policy of “zero tolerance,” which effectively means a police state.

Study finds potential mechanism for “brain fog” in Long COVID

Bill Shaw

A new study published in the journal Cell has uncovered a potential biological mechanism for so-called “brain fog” in Long COVID. Brain fog emerged as one of the first well-described symptoms of Long COVID in the early phases of the pandemic. Brain fog is not one particular symptom, but rather is an array of one or more symptoms that can include difficulty concentrating, memory loss, confusion, thinking more slowly than usual, “fuzzy thinking,” and feeling dazed.

The researchers found that the levels of a compound called “serotonin” in the blood were lower in Long COVID patients than in patients who had recovered from SARS-CoV-2 infection without long-term effects. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter, which is a molecule released by neurons to communicate with other neurons. Other neurotransmitters include epinephrine, dopamine, and acetylcholine.

The researchers studied mice to determine that a drop in blood serotonin levels reduces the activity of neurons whose function is sensory input. Specifically, sensory neurons in the vagus nerve were significantly impacted by the low levels of serotonin. These neurons primarily exist in core body organs including the heart, lungs, and gastrointestinal tract, providing sensory information from these visceral organs to the brain.

This result is surprising, as the researchers themselves hypothesized that the well-known role of serotonin in the brain would be directly connected to brain fog. The reason is that in the central nervous system, serotonin plays a crucial role in sleep, memory, pain signaling, learning, sexual activity, biological rhythms, and many other functions.

However, the researchers found that brain levels of serotonin were normal in mice infected with SARS-CoV-2. Animal models of disease are frequently used by researchers to study aspects of disease that are difficult or impossible to study in humans. In this case, the researchers infected mice with SARS-CoV-2 and employed well-known tests of memory in mice. They could then sacrifice these mice to obtain tissue samples from their brains, vagus nerves, and other organs to measure levels of serotonin and perform additional relevant tests.

Some of the most prevalent symptoms of Long COVID

Although the peripheral effects of reduced serotonin on brain fog were surprising, there is a known direct connection. Increased stimulation of sensory fibers in the vagus nerve activates a brain region called the hippocampus, which is crucial to memory formation. A study in rats in 2018 found that “chemically cutting” vagus-nerve-mediated input from the gastrointestinal tract impaired the formation of episodic and spatial memories known to require the hippocampus. That study also identified for the first time the neural pathway connections from the vagus nerve all the way to the hippocampus.

The researchers determined the association between low sensory nerve activity and reduced performance on memory-related tasks by administering drugs to mice that directly increased the activity of the sensory nerves. First, the restoration of serotonin levels restored memory. Second, the administration of capsaicin restored memory as well. Capsaicin was previously known to be a direct and strong simulator of sensory neurons. 

The researchers also identified the biological pathway by which serotonin activates sensory neurons. First, they identified high levels of expression of particular serotonin receptors called “5-HT3 receptors” on the cellular membranes of these cells. Second, they administered another compound called “meta-Chlorophenylbiguanide” or m-CPBG to the mice. This compound is known to bind to 5-HT3 receptors with the same effects as serotonin. Administration of m-CPBG also restored memory-based performance in the mice.

The study found three causes of low serotonin levels, all of which are related to ongoing viral replication in body tissues. Specifically, persistent SARS-CoV-2 replication in the body leads to reduced absorption of serotonin precursors from the diet, lowered platelet counts, and increased activity of enzymes that break down serotonin. The significance of the lowered platelet counts is that platelets are the major component of blood that carries serotonin throughout the body.

A key strength of the study is that the researchers extensively ruled out other explanations for reduced serotonin. For example, they found that activity of the enzymes that convert tryptophan to serotonin was not impacted. They also found that the genes involved in tryptophan absorption of the gut were downregulated in the presence of type 1 interferon, which is known to be elevated in the presence of ongoing viral replication. Furthermore, they verified that genetic alterations expected to block interferon-induced downregulation did indeed prevent it.

Another strength of the study is that it examined in an agnostic manner thousands of so-called “metabolites” in acute SARS-CoV-2 and Long COVID patients. The only metabolite consistently reduced in both patient populations, and that was highly correlated with symptoms, was serotonin. The subsequent detailed elucidation of the biological mechanism of reduced serotonin, as well as ruling out of alternative biological mechanisms, provides high confidence in the results.

Another key finding of the study is that the effect is not specific to SARS-CoV-2. The researchers found reduced serotonin levels in both human and mouse subjects with other viral infections.

The limitations of the study are that although mice are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection, there is no mouse model of Long COVID itself. Thus, whether the observed reduction in mouse performance in memory-based tasks correlates with human Long COVID symptoms is unknown. Also, the effects of low serotonin levels were quite variable among Long COVID patients. The study also suffered from relatively small sample size, with 58 patients from one United States hospital.

Nevertheless, the study is a major milestone in understanding the pathology of acute SARS-CoV-2 infection and viral infections generally, identifying reduced serotonin levels as a common factor. The study also provides important future directions for Long COVID research that did not exist previously. Furthermore, it represents an impressive achievement in enhancing our understanding of the interaction among viral infection, the peripheral nervous system, and the central nervous system.