Scottish National Party government to pardon arrested miners after 36 years

Barry Mason

On October 28, Scottish National Party (SNP) government Justice Secretary, Humza Yousaf, announced a pardon for Scottish miners convicted of certain offences during the 1984-85 nationwide strike. A total of 1,424 miners and others were arrested in Scotland during the 1984-85 strike, with 13,000 arrested UK wide.

To enact a pardon, the SNP will introduce legislation into the Scottish parliament, and it will come into effect on passage of the bill.

Miners behind barricades at Allerton Bywater, North Yorkshire

In announcing the pardon fully 36 years after the events, Yousaf said, “This collective pardon… applies posthumously and symbolises our desire for truth and reconciliation, following the decades of hurt, anger and misconceptions which were generated by one of the most bitter and divisive industrial disputes in living memory.

“The pardon is intended to acknowledge the disproportionate impacts arising from miners being prosecuted and convicted during the strike—such as the loss of their job… it will also recognise the exceptional circumstances that resulted in former miners suffering hardship and the loss of their good name through their participation in the strike.”

Yousaf’s announcement made sure not to say that any financial redress would be made available to those miners dismissed from their jobs as a result of convictions arising from the strike.

The miners’ strike was deliberately provoked by the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher. Her election in 1979, along with Reagan in the US, represented a political shift away from the policies of class compromise of previous decades towards direct class confrontation.

From the mid-1970s, the major corporations had sought to counteract falling rates of profit through an aggressive turn towards global investment and internationalised production. As part of this strategy, they demanded the deregulation of the economies of the advanced industrial countries, the slashing of tax rates and the destruction of welfare provision. Thatcher put forward a programme for the economic and social reorganisation of Britain in order to make it globally competitive. This was centred on the privatisation of profitable nationalised industries to open key areas of the economy to corporate investors and the dismantling and closure of any that required subsidies—epitomised in Thatcher’s commitment to “rolling back the frontiers of the state” and letting the “lame ducks” go to the wall.

When the strike began there were 174 pits in the UK, employing over 181,000 men and producing 90 million tonnes of coal. At the beginning of March 1984, the Tories called for the closure of 20 uneconomic coal pits, with the immediate spark for the strike the announced closure of Cortonwood Colliery, in South Yorkshire.

The action began on March 5, 1984 and was to end on that same day a year later. It saw 26 million days lost, the most since the 1926 British general strike.

Police confront a mass picket in Cortonwood, January 1985

The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) under the leadership of the Stalinist, Arthur Scargill, insisted that mines only close on grounds of exhaustion and called for the preservation of a nationalised and subsidised industry. But the Scargill leadership refused to challenge the isolation of the strike by the Trades Union Congress and Labour Party. They ensured that the substantial support that existed within the working class was not mobilised against the hated Thatcher government.

The Tories responded to their defeat of the miners by closing the majority of remaining coal mines within a decade. In 1985, the government closed 23 mines and in 1986 another 17.

In 1994, Thatcher’s successor John Major announced the closure of 55 more pits and the privatisation of British Coal. By the time the Tories left in office in 1997, 125 mines had been closed since the strike. In 2012, only three privately run deep coal mines remained in Britain and the last deep mine, Kellingley colliery, closed in December 2015.

A two-part assessment of the miners’ strike, first published in March 2004 to mark the 20th anniversary of the events, can be read here.

Scottish miners arrested during the strike disproportionately lost their jobs after the event. Some 14,000 miners went on strike in Scotland. Although only representing seven percent of the UK mining workforce, they represented 30 percent of all miners who lost their jobs following convictions. In Scotland, around 500 were convicted of offences during the strike, of which 206 were dismissed from their jobs. Major confrontations between police and striking Scottish miners took place at the former steel production plant, Ravenscraig, in Lanarkshire, where pickets tried to stop scab lorries delivering coal to the plant. Nearly 300 people who were protesting at the entrance to Ravenscraig were arrested in just one day on May 3, 1984.

Lawyers representing the National Union of Miners (NUM) welcomed the pardon but said it was only a first step. The organisation calls for those sacked following convictions to be awarded financial compensation to make up for lost wages and pensions.

Quoted in the Times October 29, Alex Bennett, now 73, who at the time of the strike was chairman of the NUM at the Monktonhall pit near Musselburgh, spoke of his experiences. “At the start of the strike there was no trouble on the picket line. It was the local police from the mining communities who were involved. We knew them, they drank in the Miners’ Welfare. That changed in June 1984, when they took away all the local police and brought in strangers and snatch squads and started making arrests.

“I was arrested on June 24 outside Bilston Glen [pit] by a snatch squad, with a colleague who was also an official with the NUM. They tried to charge us with mobbing and rioting but they couldn’t make it stick, so we were charged with breach of the peace.”

Bennett’s case was heard at a court in Edinburgh in December 1984. “We were found guilty, and in January I got my P45 [job termination notice]. The strike ended, the men went back to work, but I didn’t.”

He told the paper that though he won an employment tribunal he was blacklisted by the National Coal Board and was unable to find work for three years.

Yousaf’s announcement followed the final report by the John Scott review which recommended a pardon for convicted miners. The review, under the leadership of John Scott QC, was announced in June 2018 by Michael Matheson, who was then the SNP’s Cabinet Secretary for Justice. It called for miners and other interested parties to submit evidence to the review by November of that year. The review was due to report by 2019 but was later granted an extension.

Thousands of miners march in Mansfield, May 1984

The SNP had previously blocked attempts to examine the injustices done to Scottish miners when Labour Member of the Scottish Parliament, Neil Findlay, attempted to raise the issue. A Guardian opinion piece by journalist Kevin McKenna in March 2015 noted, “Scotland… has a chance to mark the [30th] anniversary [of the miners’ strike] by giving belated justice to the hundreds of Scottish miners wrongly fitted up by our own police force during the dispute. The Scottish Labour MSP Neil Findlay has researched the cases of many of these men, whose lives have been ruined by the lies of the Scottish police. His pleas to the SNP government have been constantly ignored, though… Findlay’s case for a review of the conviction of 500 Scottish miners who were wrongfully criminalised by the police and judiciary was published in a report at the end of last year. It contains clear and corroborated evidence of police wrongdoing, upheld by the judiciary but ignored by the SNP.”

The blanket refusal of the SNP to consider an investigation of police conduct in the miners’ strike in Scotland began to soften in 2015. Chris Stephens, who was elected SNP MP for Glasgow south west to sit in Westminster in May that year, called for a shift in the SNP policy. The newly elected Stephens was secretary of the SNP trade union group with around 15,000 members.

In a Scotsman article on October 12, 2015, Stephens reported he had written to and would ask Matheson “to consider holding an inquiry into policing miners, arrests, dismissals and miners who lost out on redundancy pay, during the miners’ strike in Scotland.”

Mass arrests were made during the brutal police attack on miners at the June 1984 Battle of Orgreave in South Yorkshire—one of the main centres of the mining industry. Police arrested 93 miners at Orgreave and 95 pickets were charged with riot, unlawful assembly and other offences. In June 1991, the South Yorkshire Police paid, in an out-of-court settlement, £425,000 in compensation to 39 miners for assault, wrongful arrest, unlawful detention and malicious prosecution. No police officer has ever been disciplined in relation to the events.

In 2016, then Tory Home Secretary Amber Rudd ruled out an inquiry into the role of the police at Orgreave. Following Rudd’s decision, the SNP administration came under increasing pressure within its ranks to demonstrate its independence from Westminster and call for an inquiry into the policing of the miners’ strike in Scotland.

From the start, the strike was politicised, with the Thatcher government, describing the miners as the “enemy within” and recognising the NUM as its most militant representative. Writing on the 20th anniversary of the strike the World Socialist Web Site commented, “The year-long miners’ strike of 1984-85 was a watershed in political life in Britain. The worst single defeat suffered by the working class in the post-war period, its results continue to resonate to this day.”

We continued, “The miners faced brutal attacks by the police, who utilised techniques of suppression never seen before in mainland Britain. Mounted officers charged at pickets and through the streets of mining communities. A national task force was created of heavily armoured riot police, which was used to mount military style attacks. Miners were prevented from freely moving around the country, and special courts were created to deal with the large numbers of arrests made.”

Ravenscraig Steel Works shortly before its closure in the mid-1990s (credit: Elliott Simpson, Creative Commons)

The article explained that “The suffering of the miners during the strike was on a scale almost without precedent. Some 20,000 miners were injured or hospitalised, 13,000 arrested, 200 imprisoned, two were killed on picket lines, three died digging for coal during the winter, and 966 were sacked.

Central to the SNP’s pardon of the miners is an effort consign the strike and its lessons to the past forever, in favour of a “reconciliation” on all sides. Its official announcement included the comments from Justice Secretary Yousaf, backed up by Nicky Wilson, President of the National Union of Mineworkers (Scotland) and Iain Livingstone, Chief Constable of Police Scotland. SNP First Minister Nicola Sturgeon commented, "We have an opportunity now to bring reconciliation to miners and to police officers and to try to heal the wounds of the past. We will call upon the UK Government to adopt the same reconciliation approach in taking forward a UK-wide inquiry.”

The decision of the SNP, regardless of their political calculations, has major implications. It is further damning evidence that the state committed crimes on a mass scale against miners and their families in order to defeat them at all costs.

Overstretched Russian hospitals turn away COVID cases

Andrea Peters

In scenes similar to those happening around the globe, hospitals in Russia are collapsing under the weight of a surge in seriously ill COVID-19 patients. The situation is particularly severe in the country’s provinces, which have been hard hit in recent years by health care “optimization” measures that shuttered facilities to cut costs. Those that remained are now turning away the sick.

A video of a medical worker in Khakassia, a region in southern Siberia not far from the border with Mongolia, surfaced on the internet and quickly went viral.

The paramedic in a hospital in Khakassia with the elderly woman

“I will not bring her home to die—a 90 year old. This person survived the war, what are you saying! Why do I, an EMT, have to sob, plead with you to take a patient?” cries the distressed paramedic as she tries to convince hospital personnel to accept the ill woman.

After word of the emergency call became known, the hospital claimed it would find a place for the patient if she tested positive for COVID-19. She was turned away and sent home. The medical worker heard on the recording subsequently suffered a nervous breakdown.

A video appeal sent to President Vladimir Putin and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu by another Khakassia paramedic describes the overstrained hospital system in the region.

“There aren’t enough beds. We take patients to hospitals as a formality such that the medics are relieved of their responsibility, and then they send them home. In the pharmacies there are no medicines or antibiotics. What there is (available) is at a price five to six times high. It’s simply unreal.”

He explains that ambulances wait at the doors of the ER for six to 10 hours with patients hooked up to the vehicle’s mobile oxygen supply. When it runs out, they hope they can be connected to the hospital’s source. “I simply have no words,” he says.

Popular anger over the situation in Khakassia has been exacerbated by the fact that signs posted on the door at a local hospital inform patients that if they have lost their sense of taste and smell—symptoms of COVID—they will not receive a COVID test, there is nothing that can be done for them, and they just have to wait a few weeks for the symptoms to pass. A second note tells people that if they want, they can pay for a COVID test at the building next door.

In response to the situation, the federal health ministry announced it was sending a team to investigate the situation and provide “practical” support.

Khakassia is one of four regions in Russia identified by Kremlin deputy prime minister Tatyana Golikova as among the hardest hit by the pandemic. The others include Chuvash, Ivanovo, and the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, although COVID rates are rising in all but two of the country’s 85 regions.

In Volgograd a woman told the press outlet Gazeta.ru that she spent eight hours traversing the region in an ambulance with her father, whose oxygen saturation levels had fallen to 83 percent, looking for a hospital that would take him. No beds were available. He died and six family members contracted the virus as the result of exposure when trying to care for him.

In Yuzhnouralsk, a Siberian city in Chelyabinsk Oblast, a hospital turned away a young mother with oxygen saturation levels of 90 percent and bilateral lung damage of 35 percent. According to the woman’s relative, by the time some patients are finally given a hospital bed, they have already lost half of their lung functioning.

The Russian government recently issued new directives regarding the treatment of COVID patients at home. People are to isolate the sick person in a completely separate room and keep the elderly and those with chronic illnesses away. For millions of ordinary Russians who live in small apartments with multiple generations, these are absurd and impossible requirements.

The lack of hospital beds and proper facilities to isolate the ill from the healthy are fueling the spread of the pandemic. In St. Petersburg, a city of 5 million, 91 percent of hospital beds are occupied. The situation in the country is being made all the worse by the high rate of false negatives on COVID-19 tests, which officials estimate to be as much as 40 percent.

Over the last week, infections in Russia have hovered between 20,000 and 22,000 per day. On Thursday, daily deaths rose to 439, a new record. While Russia claims that so far only slightly more than 32,000 people out of the over 1.8 million infected have died from coronavirus, since the start of the pandemic there have been an excess 120,000 deaths in the country.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov described the coronavirus situation in Russia this week as “alarming.” Nonetheless, President Putin stated that the government understands and is in command of the situation. He insisted there will not be a new lockdown of the economy. He made these remarks even as government officials identified the use of mass transit as one of the primary sources of the spreading infection.

The Russian government will also disburse an additional 29.7 billion rubles ($385 million) to the regions to cover the cost of medicines and compensate health care workers. Thousands of medical personnel across the country have been reporting for months that they have never received promised bonuses from earlier this year.

Switzerland in the coronavirus pandemic: “We are on the verge of a medical catastrophe”

Marianne Arens

The worst coronavirus outbreaks have occurred in capitalist countries that ought to have the best means to combat the virus. This is something the World Socialist Web Site has repeatedly pointed out. It is an unanswerable indictment of capitalism—an indictment that also applies to relatively wealthy Switzerland.

The second wave of the pandemic has been accompanied by a deep crisis in that country’s health care system. Particularly in southern and western Switzerland, in the cantons of Geneva, Vaud, Valais, and neighbouring cantons, infections have skyrocketed over recent days. Intensive care units in the hospitals are full, and doctors and nurses on the verge of collapse.

On November 2, a chief doctor from Fribourg issued an urgent appeal via Twitter for the population to wear masks and follow contact restrictions. “This is the last chance to act,” stated Dr. Nicolas Blondel, in his calm but emphatic message. “COVID-19 is not the flu, and we are on the verge of a medical catastrophe. Switzerland has currently violated its duty of care.” Half of all coronavirus tests in Fribourg are coming back positive, an unprecedented positivity rate in Western Europe.

Nicolas Blondel, Senior Physician General Internal Medicine, Cantonal Hospital Fribourg (Youtube-Video)

“Here in the hospital, the situation is extremely serious,” reported the doctor. “We currently have over 185 patients with COVID-19 in the hospital. Earlier the ambulances were arriving every 15 minutes. If it continues like this, we’ll run out of space.” The patients are not just elderly, over the age of 70, but “we also have many younger patients, including even some under 40. These patients are not doing well, and even now we can’t treat some of them the way we would like to.”

Blondel issued a warning against the coronavirus deniers, of which there are many in Switzerland in and around the right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP), and also issued a mild rebuke to the authorities and the media. He said, “We don’t know what to expect in the coming days. If the entire population changes its behaviour, perhaps there is still a chance, a last chance, for this to end differently than it did in Lombardy … so now, stop, stop believing those who say that everything is OK. To be honest, I think the media is falling behind a bit, just like the authorities. This is the last moment to adopt measures.”

It is, in fact, high time for the working class to intervene into political affairs to stop the virus. Nothing can be expected from the politicians and the media because they are firmly under the thumb of the banks and business lobby organisations like Economiesuisse, which oppose lockdowns due to their impact on profits.

The World Socialist Web Site calls for the formation of rank-and-file safety committees in schools, workplaces, and on public transport in order to impose all necessary measures to contain the virus, including the shutdown of all non-essential production. “For a general strike! stop the second coronavirus wave in Europe!” was one of the slogans in a statement issued in late September by the European sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International.

The statement declared, “It is urgent to mobilize the working class in Europe and internationally in a general strike to halt the ongoing resurgence of COVID-19. After the premature lifting of lockdowns imposed this spring, the drive by European governments to fully reopen schools, workplaces and public gathering places has paved the way for a devastating resurgence of the virus.”

The predicted catastrophe has now arrived. Globally, over 50 million cases and more than 1.25 million deaths have occurred, which means that 2.5 percent of those infected have died. Moreover, it is becoming ever clearer that the pandemic is not merely posing medical questions and challenges, but above all political ones. The bourgeois governments, including their “left” wing, have consciously and criminally neglected any effort to combat the pandemic.

Arch-capitalist Switzerland, which not only contains an unparalleled density of banks and billionaires, but also world-leading pharmaceutical firms and a well-developed health care system, has totally failed to combat the pandemic. During the first wave, Switzerland had the second fastest-growing increase in coronavirus cases in Europe at the end of March. The breathing space provided by the summer was allowed to pass without any action being taken. Now, there is not even a strict requirement to wear masks. “In terms of a lockdown, Switzerland is the second Sweden,” the German daily Die Welt laconically remarked.

As a result, incidence rates have risen dramatically. The Federal Health Agency (BAG), which registers all cases in Switzerland and Liechtenstein, reported on Tuesday morning close to 6,000 cases (5,980) over the preceding 24 hours. A further 107 patients lost their lives to COVID-19, while an additional 243 were taken to hospital. The 14-day incidence rate per 100,000 inhabitants is a staggering 4,771 infections, and 26.7 percent of all tests carried out during the same period came back positive.

Southern and western Switzerland, as noted, have been hardest hit. In Canton Valais, hospitals have had no free capacity for two weeks. In Geneva and Vaud, the Swiss army was brought in to help, as it was earlier this year. Over recent days, hospitals have flown patients able to travel by helicopter to hospitals in the German-speaking cantons, which still have capacity.

“We have no reserves,” complained Herve Zender, head doctor in the intensive care unit in a Neuchâtel hospital, according to Euronews. Providing an example, the doctor said, “This morning, I was asked to accept another patient, but I had no space for him. Therefore, I had to transfer the most stable patient in the unit to another hospital. That has become standard procedure for us now, we have no reserves.”

But what will happen when no other hospital has capacity? Infection numbers are also rising considerably in the German-speaking cantons.

According to the Canton Bern website, 16 people died in the canton on Monday alone, more than 8 percent of the 193 deaths recorded since March 2020. An additional 29 patients were taken to hospital, where 427 patients are currently being treated, including 62 in intensive care, 42 of whom have been intubated.

Reports from Argau are also alarming: the lack of medical personnel is so extreme that COVID-19-positive nurses who are symptom-free are being told to continue working.

As was the case over a century ago when the Spanish flu pandemic raged, the concept of “triage” is being publicly discussed once again. This refers to the decision when hospital beds run out as to who will receive medical treatment and who will be left to die. The “Guidelines for triage with a lack of resources in intensive care units” were updated and expanded to include a national coordinating office in Switzerland on November 4.

“The struggle for a free hospital bed has begun,” asserted a contribution by the national television and radio broadcaster SRF. While the Health Minister, Federal Councillor Alain Berset (Social Democrats, SP), insisted that non-essential operations in Zürich should be delayed, Zürich Canton government member and health director Natalie Rickli (SVP) responded that hospitals should not have to suffer financial losses as they did during the spring. Federal Councillor Berset had “lost sight of the financial aspect.” Delaying planned knee, hip, and cosmetic operations would be “disproportionate,” she added.

ECB to step up intervention as European banks face rise in non-performing loans

Nick Beams

The president of the European Central Bank (ECB) Christine Lagarde has again indicated that its provision of ultra-cheap money is likely to be stepped up and will extend long into the future as the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic spreads across Europe and banks face a significant rise in non-performing loans.

Delivering the keynote address to the ECB’s annual central bank forum, held online this year, Lagarde said all sectors of the economy “need to have confidence that financing conditions will remain exceptionally favourable for as long as needed—especially as the economic impact of the pandemic will now extend well into next year.”

Christine Lagarde, president of the ECB, speaking at the European Parliament earlier this year (Credit: AP Photo/Jean-François Badias)

The ECB has already purchased more than €640 billion of bonds under its €1.35 trillion pandemic emergency purchase program (PEPP). It has also lent almost €1.5 trillion to banks through its targeted longer-term refinancing operations (TLTRO) at interest rates as low as minus 1 percent.

Both programs are expected to be extended at least until the end of next year with a further €500 billion to be added to the PEPP.

In her address, Lagarde took a swipe at critics of the program from within sections of the financial establishment, particularly in Germany, who have complained that the ECB program is keeping companies alive that should be allowed to go under.

Concerns about “zombification” or “impeding creative destruction” were misplaced and policies that protected viable businesses until activity could return to normal would assist productive capacity, not harm it, she said.

Lagarde warned that even if the second wave of the pandemic proved to be less intense than the first, it posed no less a danger to the economy and its effects could even be worse. If the pandemic was regarded not just as a one-off event then “we could see more lasting changes in behaviour than during the first wave.”

“Demand weakness and economic slack are weighing on inflation, which is expected to remain in negative territory for longer than previously thought,” she said.

The language of ECB pronouncements is always somewhat convoluted because while its real concern is the stability of the banking and financial system, under the terms of its mandate it has to present its actions as being necessary to return inflation to a target of near to 2 percent.

And concerns over financial stability remain ever-present under conditions where the pandemic continues to spread.

They were voiced in a comment published in the Financial Times at the end of last month by Andrea Enria of the supervisory board at the ECB.

He noted that while anecdotally, only a small fraction of loan repayments had shown signs of distress with expiration of moratoria on bank loans in some EU countries, the economic outlook was uncertain. Enria warned, “We cannot rule out a weak recovery with a significant build-up of bad loans.

“The European Central Bank estimates that in a severe but plausible scenario non-performing loans at euro area banks could reach €1.4 trillion, well above the levels of the 2008 financial and the 2011 EU sovereign debt crises.”

Enria called for the establishment of asset management companies, known as “bad banks,” which takeover non-performing loans (NPLs), saying that when they were used after crises bank balance sheets were cleared up more quickly.

He commented that vast amounts of taxpayer money were used in the aftermath of the financial and sovereign debt crises, “but Europe was ineffective is using consolidation to remove excess capacity and foster a radical refocusing of business models. The result today is a fragile banking system, with rock bottom equity market valuations.”

Enria did not elaborate on the reasons for this, but they lie in the competitive conflict between European and US banks. European banks, having plunged into the orgy of speculation in American financial markets leading to the crisis of 2008, sought to cover up the extent of the hit they had taken lest it weaken their position vis à vis their rivals which had been bailed out by the US government. Consequently, they were in a weakened position when the pandemic struck.

Enria called for an integrated European response rather that a “plethora of uncoordinated national initiatives” under conditions where “EU banks are segmented along national lines, making them less efficient and more fragile.”

Indicating the conflicts within the administration of the European financial system, the call from the ECB for a system of “bad banks” was rejected by Elke König, the chair of the Single Resolution Board (SRB), the EU agency charged with winding down failing lenders, in an interview with the Financial Times earlier this month.

However, she warned that banks had to do “intensive work” to sort out viable from unviable entities and that there was “misalignment” within the present system.

The SRB was set up following the sovereign debt crisis of 2011–2012 but, as the Financial Times noted, with the risk of a surge in non-performing loans it was “still working with an incomplete system of EU bank-crisis rules which must operate over a patchwork of different national arrangements.”

König warned that non-performing loans would start to show up in the first and second quarters of next year and said her message to the banks was “be aware NPLs are coming and the best thing to do is address them early… That is the best thing we can do for the time being, and then it is steering through the fog.”

In other words, the key regulators have no clear plan to deal with a crisis, the conditions for which are building up.

And, if the actions of Deutsche Bank are anything to go by, the major banks are determined that nothing should stand in the way of their pursuit of profit, no matter what the risks.

The Financial Times carried a report on Monday that the major German bank had rejected a request from the ECB, made in the summer, that it suspend part of its leveraged finance operations because it was not properly monitoring risks in that area.

The ECB defines high levels of leverage as where the total debt, including unwithdrawn credit lines, exceeds six times earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization.

Leveraged finance is a major part of Deutsche Bank’s business generating €1.2 billion in revenues in the year to September, a rise of 43 percent year on year.

Thumbing its nose at the ECB, Deutsche Bank declared that it was “impractical” to carry out the request, which was non-binding according to the report.

Another area of concern is the purchases of government bonds by major banks. According to a report by S&P Global Ratings in September, European banks held €1.6 trillion of home-country government bonds at the end of June, an increase of 15 percent from the end of February. Purchases have been taking place at a rate seven times faster than over the same period in 2019.

The concern here is that the large holdings of government debt can set off a so-called “doom loop” if there is a sell off of bonds, due to worsening conditions in the economy of the country that has issued them, resulting in a hit to banks’ balance sheets and a further worsening of the economic downturn.

This was the situation that developed in the European sovereign debt crisis of 2011–2012, which was only brought under control when ECB president Mario Draghi committed the central bank to do “whatever it takes.”

At present, the general view is that “this time it’s different” because the increase in bond-buying by the banks is the result of the extraordinary situation created by the pandemic.

But such views ignore one of the central features of the pandemic experience—that this apparent accident was a trigger event, which has intensified contradictions building up within the capitalist financial system over the antecedent period.

Australian Royal Commission covers up causes of aged care crisis

Clare Bruderlin

The Australian Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety recently held its final hearing, at which 124 recommendations were submitted by the counsel assisting the commission. A final report is due by 26 February 2021.

The royal commission was announced in September 2018 by Prime Minister Scott Morrison, in an attempt to defuse public anger over ongoing reports of the abuse, neglect and malnourishment of elderly residents at aged care facilities. It follows 18 previous inquiries into aged care held since 1997, many of whose recommendations have still not been implemented.

A number of the Royal Commission’s hearings were held in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic which swept through aged care facilities, particularly in the most populous states of New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria.

The recommendations, none of which are enforceable or mandatory, are predominately administrative measures for the creation of new committees and commissions which do not directly deal with improving the quality of aged care services. They include a new aged care act, a minimum staff time quality and safety standard, compulsory registration of personal care workers, the establishment of an independent pricing authority to determine aged care costs and an independent Australian Aged Care Commission.

The commission proposed that the government report to Parliament by no later than 1 December 2020 on the implementation of the recommendations. This is also not enforceable.

The commission heard over 10,000 submissions from aged care residents and their families, staff, aged care providers and government agencies over two years. They detail the catastrophic conditions in aged care including widespread malnutrition, dehydration, untreated sores and infections and social isolation. Submissions also highlighted the increasing rate of young people in aged care and growing wait times for home care packages.

Counsel assisting admitted: “[N]one of these many problems is revealed for the first time by this Royal Commission. In the last 20 years, there have been repeated reviews of aspects of the aged care system, many of which addressed recurring problems. While we acknowledge that governments are not obliged to adopt all recommendations of a review, they have tended to respond with piecemeal reforms to aspects of the aged care system, which have not resolved the underlying problems. There have also been instances of significant delay in addressing or implementing important and urgent recommendations arising from reviews.”

These “piecemeal reforms” have, in fact, meant governments relinquishing responsibility in aged care by handing over the wellbeing and lives of hundreds of thousands of the elderly to private corporations.

Reports, studies and surveys initiated by the Royal Commission found that government-run residential aged care services out perform those operated by both private for-profit and not-for-profit approved providers on many quality measures. Despite this, the privatisation of aged care has been accelerated over decades by successive Labor and Liberal-National governments.

Ninety one percent of aged care facilities are privately owned, either by corporations (41 percent) or so-called “not-for-profits,” principally charities and churches (50 percent) making this a multibillion-dollar industry. Just nine percent are government owned.

A report presented to the Royal Commission found that in a survey of 391 residents, the biggest concern raised was understaffing (46.7 percent), including unanswered call bells, high rates of staff turnover and agency staff not knowing the residents and their needs.

Despite the proposal for a meagre increase in the minimum staff time allocated to care for each patient and the establishment of staff-patient ratios, the only staffing figure recommended was one registered nurse per facility for morning and afternoon shifts. Depending on the size of the facility that could translate to one nurse to care for hundreds of aged residents.

The counsel assisting the commission recommends that “From 1 July 2022, the minimum staff time standard should require approved providers to engage registered nurses, enrolled nurses, and personal care workers for at least 215 minutes per resident per day for the average resident, with at least 36 minutes of that staff time provided by a registered nurse.”

This is little change from the average amount of care that residents currently receive, no change to the amount of care received from a registered nurse and no recommendation for time with allied health professionals.

A report submitted to the Royal Commission in 2019 found that per day, aged care residents receive just 188 minutes of care with 36 minutes of care by registered nurses, 8 minutes by allied health professionals and 144 minutes by personal care assistants.

Compared to international standards, Australian aged care staffing was substantially below that of other comparable countries. Only 2 percent of Australian aged care residents are in homes that meet the 22 minutes of allied health services per day recommended in the British Columbia system. Just 7 percent of Australian aged care residents receive the 56 minutes of care per day by qualified nursing staff mandated in Germany.

The counsel assisting recommends that the federal government fund an increase to the Basic Daily Fee by $10 per resident per day to pay for living needs “including nutrition.” While this was described as an “urgent need for action,” it is only proposed to be implemented by July 1, 2021.

Submissions from the public showed that despite the extraction of 85 percent of the fortnightly pension from every resident in aged care, the average amount spent on food in these facilities is $6.08 per resident per day. The Australian single aged pension is $944.30 per fortnight, 85 percent of which amounts to $802.66. Of this a total of $85.12 per resident per fortnight is expended on food covering three meals a day and morning and afternoon tea.

The Royal Commission was informed that facilities would opt for finger food platters because they were “low-risk,” cheap and did not require a chef to prepare, and that some meals could be repeated up to three or four times in order to reduce costs. This explains why malnutrition is so prevalent in these facilities.

The outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in March this year, has exacerbated and starkly exposed the decades-long crisis in aged care. There have been 2,049 cases of COVID-19 recorded among aged care residents and at least 685 have died, meaning a 30 percent death rate among those infected. This toll makes up around 75 percent of all fatalities in Australia, one of the highest rates in the world. Over 1,700 staff have also been infected.

Despite this, the Royal Commission stated that it would not be conducting a “full inquiry” into the COVID-19 aged care outbreaks. Instead, a single hearing was dedicated to submissions on the impact of the pandemic on aged care and a special report released.

The fact that the health departments of both NSW and Victoria, acting under the direction of Liberal and Labor state governments, refused to allow COVID-19 infected patients to be transported to hospital for treatment contributed to the high death rate. The commissioners left such callous decision-making intact.

The report declared: “Now is not the time for blame. There is too much at stake. We are left in no doubt that people, governments and government departments have worked tirelessly to avert, contain and respond to this human tragedy.”

In the recent 2020 federal budget, which was passed with the support of the Labor Party, no additional funding was allocated to aged care. By contrast, the budget was a bonanza for the rich, with $50 billion in tax cuts, wage subsidies and incentives for big business and the wealthiest individuals.

This is in line with the approach by state and federal governments since the outbreak of the pandemic. Their priority is profit not the preservation of life. They have funneled more than $400 billion dollars into the coffers of big business, in the form of wage subsidies, “support” packages and cheap loans.

Meanwhile, Australian governments rejected expert medical advice in April, which outlined a policy aimed at eliminating coronavirus transmission, claiming that this would be too costly. It is ordinary people, particularly the elderly and the most vulnerable who have ultimately paid the price with their lives.

Health minister warns: Ukraine on the verge of coronavirus “catastrophe”

Jason Melanovski

Ukraine is on the verge of a coronavirus “catastrophe,” according to its health minister. The country continues to report daily records of new infections with cases reaching over 10,000 for the first time this month since the start of the pandemic.

Speaking to parliament last week, health minister Maksym Stepanov warned that “the situation quickly turns from difficult to catastrophic. We need to prepare for the inevitable—it is impossible to easily pass the second wave.”

As cases have spiked in recent months, the Eastern European country of approximately 40 million has been forced to reintroduce limited lockdown measures that were eased in May after the initial rush of COVID-19 cases ebbed last spring.

Cases throughout the country have been steadily rising since September. In October, Stepanov stated that the government would enforce stricter lockdown measures if new cases rose to 11,000–15,000. According to Stepanov, Ukraine’s medical system would simply be unable to cope with a daily rate of 20,000 new infections, a rate it is quickly approaching as temperatures drop and people are forced to spend more time indoors.

Image shared by a patient in Kharkov with the Kupiansk Novosti, source: Telegram channel of Kupiansk Novosti

Indicative of the country’s worsening state of COVID-19 infections, President Volodomyr Zelensky announced on Monday that he himself had tested positive for the virus and would be entering self-isolation. Zelensky’s wife spent several weeks in the hospital last June after contracting the virus.

Despite the deaths of nearly 9,000 Ukrainian citizens and a country on the verge of a medical “catastrophe,” Zelensky has publicly displayed an unserious attitude towards the pandemic. In June, he told the newspaper Ukrainska Pravda that he had considered purposely contracting the virus just to prove to people “it’s not the plague.”

While the millionaire former television star Zelensky will undoubtedly receive the best medical care available, contracting the virus is deadly serious for the vast majority of working class Ukrainians who are forced to seek treatment from the country’s impoverished medical system.

Speaking to Bloomberg News last week, Pavlo Kovtonyuk, the head of the health care economics department at the Kyiv School of Economics, reported that despite being aware that the country may be hit with an influx of new cases come fall, little preparation had been carried out by the Zelensky government. “There was very little preparation to set up hospitals, equipment and to provide training for medical personnel ahead of the autumn wave,” Kovtonyuk noted. He added, “slow test processing makes it difficult to trace contacts and to properly isolate infected people.”

To make matters worse, Bloomberg reported that just 13 percent of the country’s $2.3 billion coronavirus fund went to the Health Ministry for hospital equipment, testing and ventilators, while more than four times that was used for road construction and maintenance.

Image shared by a patient in Kharkov with the Kupiansk Novosti, source: Telegram channel of Kupiansk Novosti

As a result of the influx of newly infected COVID-19 patients into an unprepared medical system, the nation’s hospital capacity has already reached 67.2 percent and there are currently no regions remaining in the country where capacity is below 50 percent.

With infection rates climbing, Ukrainian medical workers are already working under highly stressful conditions with limited resources.

This week, photos taken by a COVID-19 patient being treated for the virus near the eastern city of Kharkiv circulated on social media, highlighting the horrid conditions of Ukrainian hospitals. According to the patient who sent the photos by cell phone to Kupiansk News, “… a nurse asked me for a syringe, because an old lady was in the next room and she injected her with the same syringe for 5 days until the needle bent. All because the old lady didn’t have money for new syringes. The nurses received 6,000 syringes a month and there were not enough of them. We had one nurse for 60 people.”

A large number of Ukrainian hospitals in rural areas have been forced to close in recent years due to the austerity measures introduced since the 2014 US-backed coup. As a result of the pro-market reforms first introduced by the former American-born health minister Ulyana Suprun, the country now finds itself lacking both hospitals and medical workers to deal with the pandemic.

Despite the rapidly worsening situation, the Ukrainian government has hesitated to enforce stricter measures so as not to endanger the country’s worsening economy. On Wednesday, the government approved a nationwide quarantine that would only be effective on the weekend and will last until the end of the year.

In addition to the deteriorating medical situation, the pandemic has further impoverished what is already Europe’s poorest country.

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the pandemic is pushing the country into a deep recession and may force over 9 million Ukrainians into poverty. The report also noted that “more than 80 percent of households have lost income, and over 40 percent have at least one family member who has lost a job since the beginning of the pandemic.”

Workers Party pushes back-to-school campaign amid warnings of second COVID-19 wave in Brazil

Eduardo Parati

Workers Party (PT) and Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB) state governments in Brazil’s Northeast region are showing once again that they have no significant differences with the essential response to the coronavirus pandemic by fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro and the rest of the right-wing parties in Brazil: implementing a de facto herd immunity policy.

In October, Ceará’s deputy state governor, Izolda Cela of the Democratic Labour Party (PDT), pointed to a series of coronavirus-related issues in returning to school (means of transporting students, staffing, school infrastructure). She went on to state that the decision for the gradual reopening of the private schools was correct because the simultaneous reopening of the public school system could have provoked “a rigorous demand for health care,” effectively admitting the surge in cases and deaths that would follow the return.

Students in a socio-educational center in the state of Ceará, Brazil (Credit: George Braga, SEDUC Ceará)

On October 1, the PT state governor, Camilo Santana, announced that the offer of in-person classes would be increased in the metropolitan region of Ceará’s capital, Fortaleza, which is the most populous center of Brazil’s Northeast.

Ceará’s state government had already authorized in-person classes in the 44 municipalities of the metropolitan region starting in September. In the following month, it authorized reopening for all middle school students with reduced capacity (35 to 50 percent), all senior high school classrooms (35 percent) and an increase in capacity of preschool to 75 percent. In-person teaching was also re-started for 739 inmates in socio-educational centers and prisons. Local public schools in the capital of Fortaleza had already been declared closed until 2021, but the city authorized the reopening of private schools for middle school students last week.

As of Tuesday, just in Fortaleza, 27 schools had already reported confirmed or suspected coronavirus cases to the Ceará Health Department (Sesa). Sesa did not disclose the numbers in each school and declared that no school had been closed by the state Health Surveillance after the reports of contagion.

In the state of Piauí, Governor Wellington Dias of the PT announced the return of high school seniors in September, postponing the return of the other students until 2021.

In the state of Bahia, governed by Rui Costa, also of the PT, the state health secretary declared that the return to classes for higher education would take place on Nov. 3, and for high schools two weeks later. Costa said at a press conference: “We are monitoring and evaluating this [return] along with the decision of other states. Today, we are closer ... to the return to schools.” Even as he admitted that the low rate of cases is nothing but “an assumption,” he affirmed that the drop in the number of deaths would allow the reopening “within [safety] protocols.”

Maranhão’s state governor, Flávio Dino of the PCdoB, had declared a return to school for July, at the height of the wave of cases and deaths in Brazil, following the same policy as right-wing state governments. In the face of enormous opposition from teachers and parents, with positive tests of private school students being reported, the state government canceled the return to classes in the state’s public school system. In October, Dino promoted the policy of herd immunity, declaring that he would conduct a serological inquiry to verify the “collective immunity” of the population.

The lie of an alleged concern for workers during the pandemic in the states governed by the PT and PcdoB, supposedly counterposing support for science to the herd immunity policies of the federal government of Jair Bolsonaro, was completely exposed by the admission—on the same day that the health secretary of Bahia announced a return to classes—that there existed a state of public calamity caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in Ceará and Bahia.

The back-to-school campaign is driven by the capitalists’ need to force workers back into workplaces. Fortaleza had registered a fall of 84.5 percent in the monthly enrollment of beginners in the state school system between March and October. In São Paulo, the number of public student school enrollments between January and September fell by 94 percent compared to last year, underlining a trend in school dropout rates. In the first half of the year, a very high number of dropouts was recorded, connected to financial pressures on poor families, with school-age family members sent out to work to make up for the loss of income during the pandemic.

The Northeast is one of the regions most affected by poverty and social inequality. According to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), 42 percent of people living in Ceará are below the poverty line, classified as those living on between US$36 and US$105 per month. The entire region suffers from similar poverty rates, with 53 percent living under these conditions in the state of Maranhão, the highest number in the Northeast. In 2017, more than a third of the entire Brazilian population did not have access to sewage systems and the figure was a staggering 91.7 percent for the population of Piauí.

Ceará faces one of the most devastating impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil. It is the state with the third highest number of deaths, despite being eighth in terms of population, with 8.843 million inhabitants. It had recorded 9,416 deaths as of Tuesday. This corresponds to a mortality rate of 103.1 per 100,000 inhabitants, one of the highest in the country.

In some regions of Ceará, the weekly average for new cases increased by more than 50 percent during the month of October, while deaths increased more than 30 percent. Last Saturday, the IntegraSUS system registered for the first time in four months more than a thousand cases per week in Fortaleza.

The ruling elite is implementing the same murderous policies throughout the country. At the end of last month, Infogripe, an Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) group, stated that 10 Brazilian capitals show signs that the spread of the virus is once again on the rise. So far, Brazil has registered roughly 5.8 million confirmed cases and 165,000 COVID-19 deaths, trailing only the United States in fatalities.

In São Paulo’s capital, a 48.7 percent increase in hospitalizations was reported over the past two weeks. The state governor, João Doria of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB), has been touting an early vaccine since the middle of the year for political gain. He was accompanied by the director of the state Coronavirus Contingency Center, João Medina at a press conference on Monday, where Medina said: “There wasn’t a real lockdown during the first wave and there shouldn’t be one in this second moment, because the increase in the number of cases shouldn’t be sufficient to saturate the health system the way it’s organized now.”

On October 22, the Scientific Committee of the Northeast Consortium issued an alert about the possibility of the second wave of COVID-19 reaching the region in the next few months. In the report, the committee points to the advent of the region’s high season, with the arrival of tourists from Europe, and this month’s municipal elections as major factors threatening an increase in cases and deaths. The reopenings and the precarious conditions faced by the majority create the perfect conditions for a new and even more deadly surge.

The serious risks posed by a second wave did not prevent the Brazilian educators’ trade union from covering up for Governor Camilo Santana’s policy in Ceará, while suppressing and diverting teachers’ opposition. Following the same line as unions throughout the country, the APEOC (Union of Teachers and Servants of Education and Culture of the State and Municipalities of Ceará), linked to the PT-controlled CUT union federation, filed a public civil action requesting that in-person learning remain suspended for the rest of the year. Meanwhile, the union is organizing a series of meetings for this year’s wage negotiations, in which they are using the slogan “Enough Bolsonaro/Do it Camilo.”

Last week, the APEOC declared that it would send Santana a proposal for the end of the school year calendar, at the same time that it declared its opposition to the policy of reopening schools being carried forward by the governor.

The following day, the union’s president, Reginaldo Pinheiro, met with Fortaleza’s 2020 mayoral candidates to announce the inauguration of an online education platform. During the meeting, he expressed the union’s readiness to promote hybrid education as a means to reduce costs and attract private investments. He said that “Considering all this reality of revenue retraction, the moment is urgent. In the document, we point out a concern with the year 2021, which must first reconcile the remote and in-person activities, and for that it must have more investment and security for the teachers.”

The trade union’s legal maneuvers and empty statements of opposition, made at the same time that it negotiates with the government, expose the deceptive policy of APEOC and of the unions throughout Brazil, which are carrying out similar policies.

The return-to-school campaign faces huge opposition from educators and families. Mobilizing this opposition to prevent a catastrophic resurgence of the COVID-19 pandemic requires a break with the trade unions and the PT and other parties that support the ruling elite’s murderous policies. Teachers should form rank-and-file committees, in alliance with workers across Brazil and internationally, to demand the shutdown of in-person learning and all non-essential production—with full income compensation—and to organize a struggle against the capitalist system to place the defense of life over the drive for profit.

The mental health of young adults is being ravaged by the pandemic—the suffering needs to stop

Kate Randall

Since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, medical experts have predicted that the resulting social isolation and economic stress would negatively impact mental health. Many months into the pandemic, with a surge in COVID-19 cases affecting virtually every US state as a result of the murderous “herd immunity” strategy pursued by the ruling elite, a new study shows that there is a veritable tsunami of depression flooding over the nation’s young adult population.

This age group, part of Gen Z, have seen their lives implode in 2020. They have missed high school and college graduations, had their schools shut down or been forced into dangerous conditions in them, have been isolated from their friends and robbed of social interaction. They have lost jobs, had their pay cut, or been forced to work in unsafe conditions in restaurants, retail, the service industry and factories.

A man walks past a mural in the Hollywood section of Los Angeles, Thursday, Nov. 12, 2020 (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

Many of those living with their parents before the pandemic are even less likely now to be able to move out. Those living on their own have seen the excitement of having their own place for the first time turn into numbing isolation. American families are facing devastating poverty due to lost jobs and hours, translating into hunger, poverty and eviction.

Parents with young children, or those living with grandparents, must live in fear of passing the deadly contagion on to them. Like all of the population, they have seen relatives and friends suffer through COVID-19 illness and even death. Contrary to the lies spread by the Trump administration and quack scientists, young people can and do contract the coronavirus and face horrible consequences and death. If they do survive, they may suffer long-term health consequences.

The nationwide survey of young Americans, ages 18-24, examined depressive symptoms among these young adults, including thoughts of suicide, generalized anxiety and disruption in sleep. It was conducted and authored by researchers from Northeastern University, Harvard University/Harvard Medical School, Rutgers University and Northwestern University and published by the COVID-19 Consortium for Understanding the Public’s Policy Preferences Across States.

Overall, across four national waves (in late May, late June, late August and mid-October), researchers found alarming rates of depression, with nearly half of this young adult population—47.3 percent—showing at least moderate depressive symptoms in October, the highest level since June. This is close to 10 times the pre-pandemic rate.

The survey also examined the proportion of respondents who described at least occasional thoughts of being better off dead, or of harming themselves during the two weeks prior to taking the survey. As with depression, such suicidal and self-harm symptoms have skyrocketed among young adults, reaching 32.2 percent in May, and 36.9 percent in October, a more than tenfold increase over an epidemiologic study from 2013-2014, which found 3.4 percent reporting such thoughts.

These staggering figures show that an entire generation of young people are being emotionally ravaged by a pandemic which has unnecessarily claimed the lives of nearly a quarter-million Americans and threatens to become even more deadly in the coming months. Government authorities at all levels have pursued a policy of criminal neglect of the physical and mental health of the population.

In October, survey respondents were asked to identify particular consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic that might have impacted them or their households. The most commonly reported consequence was closure of school or university (51 percent), followed by working from home (41 percent), a pay cut (27 percent), losing employment (26 percent), inability to make rent/mortgage payments (16 percent), and stopping/reducing work to take care of children (15 percent).

The survey findings show the comparative effects of these consequences of the pandemic on mental health. They show that social isolation, economic pressures and the stress on parents while working from home and tending to their children’s remote learning have been key factors in the explosion of mental health problems among young adults.

The largest increase in depressive symptoms was observed among those whose homes were or potentially were impacted (inability to pay rent or mortgage, eviction), with more than 60 percent of these respondents reporting moderate rates of depression. Close to 50 percent of this group also reported suicidal thoughts. Close to 70 percent of those facing eviction reported either suicidal thoughts or generalized anxiety symptoms.

Although there are slight variations among demographic groups, no geographical region, gender, ethnicity, or education level has been spared in this mental health crisis among 18- to 24-year-olds.

Interestingly, although there were disparities in moderate depressive symptoms among young adults by region in June, by October the symptoms were similar in the US Northeast, South and West. This is an indication that all regions of the country are facing similar challenges as the pandemic surges.

Young women showed slightly higher levels of depressive symptoms than men, with higher levels of generalized anxiety, mild and moderate depression and disrupted sleep. Young Asians saw the highest levels generalized anxiety, mild and moderate anxiety and suicidality compared to whites, blacks and Latinos.

While those without college reported slightly higher levels of mental health symptoms compared with those with some college, the difference was not significant.

The mental health impact of the pandemic on not only young adults, but the population as a whole, has been disregarded by both the Trump administration and President-elect Joe Biden. Neither Trump nor Biden has provided any roadmap for confronting any health aspect of the pandemic.

Among younger children, state and local authorities are pushing the reopening of schools so their parents can get back to work. At the university level, they are working to keep campuses open and to maintain the operation of the lucrative college sports industry.

The Trump administration, along with many governors—both Democratic and Republican—have pushed for opening schools and keeping them open with the justification that this is in the best interests of the mental health of youth. Such arguments should be rejected with contempt.

The pandemic has imposed tremendous social and economic hardships on the American population, but much of these effects could be alleviated or lessened with an infusion of government funds and programs. Mental health services have been slashed to the bone under both Democratic and Republican administrations. At a time when these services are needed more than ever, there is no proposal to revive them to provide the mental health care so desperately needed.

Non-profit suicide and mental health hotlines are inadequate substitutes for a comprehensive social program to fund mental health services to assist families that are struggling with educating their children at home, paying their rent and utilities, and buying groceries.

While a virulent virus will inevitably create physical and mental health challenges, the ruling elite in America has allowed it to run rampant as it seeks to keep schools open while forcing workers into dangerously unsafe factories.

In their young lives, 18- to 24-year-olds have seen an unending explosion military aggression of US imperialism—from the wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq to Syria and Yemen, to name just a few. Now they are seeing at home how an invisible virus is being allowed to unleash its wrath under conditions where the scientific and social resources are available to fight it, but the profit-drive of the ruling class demands that the population suffer.

The mental health crisis created by the malign neglect and homicidal policies of the ruling elite can only be confronted by the organization of the working class, independent of the two big business parties and the trade unions that defend and accept their murderous back-to-school and back-to-work policies. Along with developing a vaccine and treatments for the coronavirus, the scientific advances in treating mental health must be marshaled, under the guidance of the working class, to assist those suffering under the weight of the pandemic.