Richard Branson’s flight and the privatization of space travel

Bryan Dyne

Richard Branson answers students' questions during a news conference at Spaceport America near Truth or Consequences, N.M., on Sunday, July 11, 2021. (AP Photo/Susan Montoya Bryan)

On Sunday, July 11, Virgin Galactic successfully sent four passengers to the edge of space using its SpaceShipTwo class vessel VSS Unity during the company’s latest test flight. The entire affair was massively promoted by Virgin Galactic’s founder, billionaire Richard Branson, who took part in the ride, and the American media, who can all now assert that Branson is the first billionaire astronaut.

By the technical definition as laid down by NASA, such assertions are correct. Branson and five others—pilots David Mackay and Michael Masucci, and passengers Sirisha Bandla, Colin Bennett and Beth Moses—were lifted to 86 kilometers (53 miles), just above the 80 kilometer limit recognized by the US space agency as the boundary between our planet’s atmosphere and outer space, before experiencing the weightlessness produced by free fall for four minutes before gliding back to Earth.

This author couldn’t help but recall Woody’s derisive comment about Buzz Lightyear when they first met in Pixar’s Toy Story: “That’s not flying, that’s falling with style.” What Branson did is not space travel, and there is not even much style in his brief and thoroughly pedestrian moment of free fall.

The real significance of Branson’s flight, however, is that it marks yet another milestone in the monetization and privatization of spaceflight and the transformation of what had been considered a global commons, in an earlier period, into a playground for the ultra-rich.

Branson, Amazon founder and Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk are only among the most obnoxious and self-promoting representatives of the capitalist class. They do not consider space exploration a scientific endeavor for humanity, but merely a way to enrich and amuse themselves and their fellows among the financial oligarchy.

The design of SpaceShipTwo itself makes this abundantly clear. It is essentially a plane that is carried to 50,000 feet by a mothership, White Knight Two, before being released and firing its rocket for less than a minute, reaching its apogee several minutes later and then coasting back to Earth. Such operations involve technology less sophisticated than the X-15 space plane from 1959, which itself was a testbed for aerodynamic control systems in the upper atmosphere, and is not designed either to go into orbit or lift a payload there.

It is worth comparing Branson’s flight to the earliest spaceflights to better understand just how low the bar has been set. When Alan Shepard became the first American in space in May 1961, he flew to 187 kilometers, more than twice the height of Branson’s flight. When Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, flew in April 1961, he actually achieved orbit on the Soviet Vostok I spacecraft, with a maximum height of 327 kilometers, four times as high as Branson, flying around Earth for 108 minutes before landing by parachute.

In other words, far from the plutocrats advancing the exploration of space, their activities represent a significant backward step compared even to the scientific, technical and social achievements of 60 years ago, let alone the colossal society-wide effort that led to the Moon landings in 1969–72.

Rather than being a demonstration that human reason is capable of understanding the world and harnessing nature to its purposes, space travel, like all aspects of social life, is being subordinated to the most noxious expressions of wealth and excess.

Such realities have not stopped glowing reviews of Branson’s flight in American newsrooms. The Washington Post breathlessly wrote, “Richard Branson completed a daring, barnstorming flight to the edge of space Sunday.” He was referred to as the “swashbuckling billionaire” by the Associated Press. The New York Times had only a modicum more of restraint, asserting, “Richard Branson at last fulfilled a dream that took decades to realize: He can now call himself an astronaut.”

They were joined by a host of media personalities and politicians who were guests at Unity’s takeoff and landing site, including New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, Elon Musk and Late Show host Stephen Colbert. R&B singer Khalid debuted a new song, titled “New Normal,” at the flight’s after-party.

Khalid, Branson and others were attempting to impart the idea that space tourism will become “normal” and routine thanks to their efforts. There are already at least 60 other “space tourists” who have paid $200,000 to $250,000 per ticket to go up and experience free fall inside the vessel for a few minutes, averaging about $1,000 per second of weightlessness. No doubt flights aboard SpaceShipTwo and other similar adventures will become normal, at least for those who are mere multimillionaires.

The bombast also promotes the idea that Branson, Bezos and Musk, and private enterprise in general, provide the way forward for space flight. Unhindered by the bureaucratic red tape of NASA and the US government, so the claims go, the billionaires will take humanity to orbit, and on to the Moon, Mars and beyond! This is the “new normal” they purport to represent.

In fact, it is a testament to the dedication and ingenuity of the hundreds of thousands of scientists, engineers and technicians the world over that so much progress has been made in space exploration over the past half-century, even as funding for space programs has been viciously slashed. The robotic missions to Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto and every other planet in our Solar System, as well as to numerous asteroids and comets, have discovered more about our planetary neighbors and space in general than in centuries of observation from under the cloak of Earth’s atmosphere.

Along with the many scientific lessons learned from such missions—Voyager, Curiosity, Cassini, New Horizons, to name a few—there is also a social lesson: space exploration will always be constricted when it is bound to the resources of one nation or even small groups of nations. The development of genuine planetary exploration, with thousands of robotic missions studying the multitudes of mysteries that still need to be uncovered and the resumption of manned missions beyond Earth’s orbit, requires a coordinated global effort.

The scale cannot be reduced to the whims of a single capitalist, no matter how rich. If a manned space program could only be propelled to the Moon by the competition between the United States and Soviet Union, it will go virtually nowhere driven by competition between Branson and Bezos. They are, moreover, wholly dependent on drawing from the successes of past and present social endeavors, from the rocket science developed by NASA’s army of researchers in the 1960s to the spaceport Branson operates in New Mexico, which the state built for the billionaire at a cost of $220 million.

There is a further and genuinely criminal aspect to the declarations of a “new normal”: hundreds of millions of people live in extreme poverty around the world, and billions have little to no regular income, while 4.06 million lives have been lost in the past nineteen months from the coronavirus pandemic.

Both Branson and Bezos have in fact increased their vast fortunes while standing atop such death. Branson was one of the many capitalists to receive a portion of the £350 billion granted to big business by the government of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson in March 2020, even as he told staff of another of his companies, Virgin Atlantic, “to take eight weeks unpaid leave over the next three months, with the cost spread over six months’ salary, to drastically reduce costs without job losses.”

For his part, Bezos has had his wealth rocket to $212 billion during the pandemic, in part as a result of the need for people to buy products online in their effort to avoid the deadly contagion. The world’s billionaires in total last year saw their collective wealth explode from $8 trillion to $13.1 trillion, an increase of 60 percent.

Such wealth was not magically created, but extracted from the backs of workers as they were forced to work through an ongoing pandemic, or “created” through the vast money-printing operation at the US Federal Reserve and other central banks, which now must be realized through stepped-up exploitation of the working class.

Rather than force workers to take unpaid leave, as Branson did, Bezos forced workers back into distribution facilities prematurely, causing the deaths of dozens if not hundreds of Amazon employees. And their fellow-billionaire Musk ordered workers back into his Tesla factory in California in April 2020 in defiance of state and federal lockdowns imposed in response to widespread walkouts by workers seeking to stop the spread of the pandemic.

The social misery and social polarization of the capitalist plague year make clear that free enterprise has failed on Earth. What reason is there to believe that it offers humanity a way forward on the level of the entire Solar System?

Over 1,200 doctors and scientists condemn UK COVID-19 policy as “dangerous and unethical”

Thomas Scripps

More than 1,200 scientists and doctors have signed the open letter to The Lancet medical journal of July 7 opposing the UK government’s plan for mass infection as a “dangerous and unethical experiment.”

Just over 120 experts had signed the letter when it was first published. A week later, that number has increased tenfold.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson chairs a Covid-19 press conference with Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance and Chief Medical Officer, Professor Chris Whitty on July 19th 2021. At the press conference Johnson gave the go-ahead, with the backing of Whitty and Vallance, to end all Covid restrictions on July 19. Credit: Andrew Parsons/No 10 Downing Street/Flickr)

On Monday, eleven of these signatories issued an emergency statement sharpening their criticisms of Britain’s coronavirus policy.

The statement correctly identifies the Conservative government’s strategy as one of “herd immunity by mass infection,” which will “place 48% of the population (children included) who are not yet fully vaccinated, including the clinically vulnerable and the immunosuppressed, at unacceptable risk.”

It indicts Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his government for “recklessly exposing millions to the acute and long-term impacts of mass infection” and accuses them of an “abdication of the government’s fundamental duty to protect public health.” The authors cite head of the World Health Organisation Emergencies Programme Mike Ryan’s comment that “the logic of more people being infected is better, is I think logic that has proven its moral emptiness and its epidemiological stupidity previously.”

At an emergency press conference organised the day the statement was released, Dr Helen Salisbury, a lecturer at Oxford University and columnist for the BMJ (formerly, British Medical Journal ) described the government’s pursuit of herd immunity by infection, rather than vaccination, as “criminal.”

Dr Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet, condemned the government’s chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty and chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance. Horton stated, “The faux deference that you saw from both of them to the prime minister [at Monday’s Downing Street press conference] in trying to shore up his decision making, I thought, was an abdication of their independent role as government advisers.”

Referring to Whitty’s claim that there was “widespread agreement across the scientific community” with the government’s position, Horton commented, “I’m afraid you have to conclude that the chief medical officer is willfully misrepresenting scientific opinion across the country, and that is extraordinary to observe.”

The massive response to the original letter to The Lancet provided a damning refutation of Whitty’s claims of consensus. Its assessment of the Johnson government’s policy is devastating. Warning of the “dangers of relying on immunity by natural infection,” it listed as risks: “creating a generation left with chronic health problems and disability,” creating “a reservoir of infection, which will probably accelerate spread when schools and universities re-open in autumn,” providing “fertile ground for the emergence of vaccine-resistant variants,” and “applying further pressure” to the health service “at a time when millions of people are waiting for medical procedures and routine care.”

The letter added that the policies would “continue to disproportionately affect the most vulnerable and marginalised, deepening inequalities.”

That these warnings are now so widely endorsed by those who know best testifies to the scale of the crime being pioneered by the UK ruling class, swiftly followed by its international counterparts.

Since signaling its intention to end all public health restrictions on July 19, the government has announced plans to end travel quarantines and school bubbles and remove mask mandates. Health Secretary Sajid Javid has admitted NHS waiting lists could rise to 13 million.

The European Championship football semi-final and final became massive super-spreader events as the government used every dirty trick to proclaim a “return to normality.”

Infections have continued to surge, on their way to the 100,000 cases a day admitted by the health secretary and far beyond. Hospitalisations and deaths are also rising markedly, both increasing by 50 percent in the last week. Last Thursday, roughly 74,000 school children were off school with a confirmed or suspected case of COVID-19.

The situation in the Netherlands points to the even larger explosion of infections to come. After restrictions on cafes, restaurants, clubs and nightclubs were lifted in June, cases of coronavirus have increased 500 percent in the last week.

Strengthening opposition among scientists reflects broader and growing opposition to these criminal policies in the population. Multiple polls show large majorities in favour of maintaining social distancing and mandatory mask wearing in indoor settings. An Opinium poll of the Observer found that 50 percent wanted the July 19 reopening date delayed.

But neither this popular sentiment nor the informed warnings of scientific experts find any political articulation. Rather, the principled statements opposing the policies of social murder have been made in the teeth of a determined campaign of censorship and the McCarthyite witch-hunting of scientists.

It requires a forensic level of attention to the national media to find any evidence of the recent criticisms made of the government and its advisers by Horton et al., or of the massive increase in support for The Lancet letter. Reports are for the most part buried in the inside pages and kept well outside of online top stories. The worst culprit is the nominally liberal Guardian, which makes only the briefest of references to the latest statement and does not mention at all the number of new signatories to the original letter on its page eight story in Wednesday’s print edition.

Editors are reinforcing the united front in the ruling class in favour of reopening. The scientists’ emergency statement argues that “the government is pursuing policies that will appease a political minority of its own backbenchers and lobbyists.” But the truth is that ending restrictions is the majority policy of big business, which is also represented, with a greater degree of nervousness about the socially explosive consequences, by the Labour Party along with their corporatist trade union partners.

The same conspiracy of silence greeted two BMJ editorials earlier this year accusing the government of “social murder” and creating “a maelstrom of avoidable harm.” By isolating principled scientists, the ruling elite seek to clear the field for the most violently reactionary forces. In the right-wing press and on the Tory backbenches, popular opposition to the government’s pandemic policy is decried as “idleness” or “cowardice,” and scientific criticism is vilified as the plotting of freedom-hating, “communist” would-be dictators. Similar treatment has been meted out to scientists opposing the political lie—designed to facilitate the policy of social murder and agitate for war by scapegoating China—that COVID-19 originated in a Wuhan lab.

The brutal, anti-scientific agenda of Johnson and his media attack dogs dictates developments despite expert and popular opposition because it is supported by the wealth and power of the ruling class. A scientific, rational and humane programme for combatting COVID-19 requires its own allied social force.

Students launch petition at University of Western Australia against cuts to courses

John Harris

Students at the University of Western Australia’s (UWA) School of Social Sciences have launched a petition titled “Save Social Sciences at UWA,” seeking to halt a new round of job cuts and restructuring at the university. In just four days, there has been an outpouring of support. There are nearly 5,000 signatures and hundreds of comments expressing disgust at the escalating pro-corporate restructuring of universities at the expense of scholarship and genuine education.

According to WA Today, the UWA’s School of Social Sciences is just the first to suffer in a $40 million cost-cutting program, “with almost all staff in sociology and anthropology axed and their disciplines to disappear.” Eight of nine positions are being eliminated in anthropology and sociology. Three jobs are going from political sciences and international relations, three from geography and planning, and one each from Asian studies and archaeology.

University of Western Australia in Perth [Source: University of Western Australia]

According to the Campus Morning Mail, the student-to-staff ratio is to be increased from 18:1 to 35:1 across the school. Overall, 16 academic positions are set to be axed, with 12 jobs being reassigned from teaching and research to teaching-focused. There will be seven new jobs.

In Brand, Marketing and Recruitment, some 34 positions are set to go, with a proposal to create 13 new posts. At the UWA’s library, eight jobs are to be destroyed, and four new ones created. In all the new positions, staff will be forced to compete for lower-level, worse-paying jobs.

The student petition states that the plan “directly targets for redundancy a significant proportion of the school’s highest performing, world-renowned researchers, including a professor who played a critical leadership role on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.” The cuts “will decimate postgraduate education in the School, in both quality and scope… Through the proposed redundancies and reallocation of staff roles, we are losing 28 of our supervisors and mentors, and estimate at least 43 percent and up to 65 percent of the PhDs currently enrolled in the school will be severely impacted.”

This campaign reflects a broader striving by students and young people to find ways to fight the historic offensive underway against university jobs, conditions and courses, and the wider wholesale attack on working class conditions under the cover of the COVID-19 pandemic. For years, the resistance of students, like university workers, has been stifled or derailed by the staff and student unions.

A similar struggle has been taken up by students at Sydney’s Macquarie University, where the Mathematical Society has launched a petition demanding the reinstatement of a much-appreciated lecturer, Dr. Frank Valckenborgh. A petition has been initiated also at Melbourne’s Monash University against the effective retrenchment of Dr. Jan Bryant, a highly-regarded art history and theory academic and educator.

Like the Macquarie and Monash petitions, the comments posted on the one at UWA, mostly by students, demonstrate passionate opposition to the ongoing business-driven attacks on public education, carried out for decades by successive Liberal-National and Labor governments.

The top-voted comment on the petition states: “Universities should not be so concerned with what is popular or profitable or politically expedient. Instead, the university’s purpose is the advancement of human knowledge for the betterment of humanity. To open young people’s minds and help them learn how to think, how to collaborate, how to find their place in the world. They should not just be glorified technical colleges. I am genuinely sad about what’s happening to our universities and I have grave concerns for our children. At such a crucial point in world history, we need all our great minds in full bloom. Instead we’re cutting them off at the knees.”

Another states: “Universities should represent the greatest depth of curiosity & desire to understand the nature of human existence—these cuts highlight a focus on supporting disciplines which make money at the expense of those that ask questions.”

Another comment points to the assault on education internationally: “This phenomenon is not unique to UWA and Australia. It is a crisis in the social sciences that is now developing all over the world.”

Such student-led actions need the broadest support from students, youth and workers. This means a fight in opposition to the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) and student unions, which have assisted university managements to impose the corporate elite’s demands, resulting in the destruction of an estimated 90,000 jobs in the past 18 months.

The cuts are hitting all Western Australia’s universities. Murdoch University retrenched 100 staff last year. At Curtin University, 140 “voluntary” redundancies supposedly saved the institution $21 million. In Fremantle, Notre Dame pushed for an 18 percent reduction in staff to save $15 million.

Sacrifices of pay and conditions extracted from university workers by the NTEU last year have emboldened university managements to go further, commencing a new wave of cuts across the country.

In a staff forum last week, Adelaide University vice-chancellor Peter Høj unveiled forced redundancies upwards of 130 full-time equivalent (FTE) professional staff. That comes on top of 157 “voluntary” redundancies in 2020.

Last year, the NTEU dragooned staff at Adelaide University into accepting a 3.5 percent pay cut, loss of annual leave loading, postponement of a pay increase of 1.5 percent and a “purchased leave” scheme. The NTEU falsely claimed this would save 200 FTE jobs.

At Melbourne’s La Trobe University, another 300 jobs are on the chopping block under a change plan to be released this month. Over 300 “voluntary” redundancies have already been instituted there since the beginning of 2020, assisted by a similarly destructive NTEU deal. If the latest cuts proceed, La Trobe will have lost 15 percent of its permanent workforce, on top of a significant reduction of its casual staff.

Years of funding cuts, particularly since the last federal Labor government’s “education revolution,” made universities dependent on exploiting full-fee paying international students, but that market has been shattered by the still-worsening global pandemic.

The current Liberal-National government has utilised the crisis to impose its “Job-Ready Graduates” legislation, which slashed funding for social science students, while hiking their fees. This is taking the pro-business restructuring of universities to a new level, more directly servicing the vocational and research requirements of the wealthy elite.

Conflict or Cooperation in U.S.-China Relations?

Lawrence Wittner

The United States and China, the world’s mightiest military and economic powers, are currently heading toward a Cold War or even a hot one, with disastrous consequences. But an alternative path is available and could be taken.

Beginning in 2018, U.S. government policy toward China turned sharply hostile, bringing relations between the two nations to their lowest point in the last four decades. The Trump administration fostered military confrontations with China in the South China Sea, initiated a trade war with the Asian nation, blamed China for the COVID-19 pandemic, and sharply denounced its human rights record. In a July 2020 public address, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called for “a new alliance of democracies” to resist China, declaring: “The free world must triumph over this new tyranny.”

For the most part, the Biden administration has continued this hard-line policy. Soon after taking office in 2021, U.S. officials stepped up political and military engagement with Taiwan, which China considers part of its territory, while Secretary of State Antony Blinken used his first meeting with Chinese officials to publicly berate China. At the beginning of June, the U.S. Senate passed the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, explicitly designed to compete with China by pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into advanced U.S. technology. This action followed the release of a proposed Pentagon budget that identified China as “the greatest long-term challenge to the United States.” Promising to “prioritize China” as the U.S. adversary, the Defense Department called for heightened funding to upgrade U.S. “forces, global posture, and operational concepts” by “investing in cutting edge technologies that will deliver new warfighting advantages to our forces.”

One of the new U.S. warfighting marvels is the hypersonic missile, which, although still in the development phase, has already attracted billions of dollars in funding from the U.S. government. The missile travels faster than five times the speed of sound, has greater maneuverability than other nuclear-armed missiles, and can strike the Chinese mainland.

The Chinese government has not shied away from confrontation, either. Xi Jinping, taking office in 2012 as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and, in 2013, as President of China, has launched his nation on a more assertive, nationalist course in world affairs. This has included turning disputed islands in the South China Sea into Chinese military bases and steadily building up Chinese military forces. The latter have been employed for dangerous confrontations with U.S. warships in the South China Sea and for flights into Taiwan’s airspace. Thanks to a robust research program, China has successfully tested both medium range and intercontinental hypersonic missiles. Moreover, ignoring external criticism, Xi’s government has clamped down on dissidents, imprisoned over a million Uyghurs in “reeducation camps,” and crushed the democracy movement in Hong Kong.

The dangers of this growing confrontation are enormous. The United States and China have developed unprecedented military might, and a conventional war could easily spiral into a catastrophic military conflict. Even if war were averted, their escalating arms race, which already accounts for more than half the world’s military expenditures, would be a colossal waste of resources. Furthermore, a major conflict between these two nations with the world’s largest economies, interlocked through investment and trade, could trigger a global economic collapse.

Fortunately, though, there is plenty of opportunity on the world scene for the United States and China to cooperate and, thereby, not only avert disaster, but serve their common interests.

Avoiding climate catastrophe is certainly a key area in which they would be well-served by cooperation. Not only are the people of China and the United States threatened by climate change, but, as the two nations are the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, they can make or break world climate agreements.

Cooperation is also essential when it comes to prevention of infectious diseases. The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed how easily disease can spread and disrupt the lives of people around the world and, particularly, how no nation is safe until all are safe. In this area, too, it is vital to mobilize the advanced medical and scientific resources of the United States and China in a cooperative effort to safeguard global health.

Moreover, both countries have a great deal to gain, as does the world, by their agreement on a nuclear arms control and disarmament program. Minimally, they could increase the transparency of their nuclear holdings, develop arms control verification procedures, and freeze China’s nuclear stockpile in exchange for further cuts in U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals. This would not only dampen the U.S.-China military confrontation, but free up enormous resources for more productive programs, at home and abroad.

Other areas are also ripe for cooperation. Economic agreements could reduce global poverty, outlaw multinational corporate malfeasance, and regulate trade, while crime-fighting measures could address cyberattacks and piracy. Even the arena of human rights has room for cooperation, for, just as the Chinese government has violated international standards through harsh domestic repression, the U.S. government has much to answer for when it comes to systemic racism and police violence. If both nations were willing to end their propaganda war with one another and curb these abuses, they could join in accepting and championing global enforcement of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Cooperation between the two nations is not as far-fetched as it might seem. In past decades, the U.S. and Chinese governments worked together on projects like stopping Ebola, reducing the production and consumption of hydrofluorocarbons, averting global financial catastrophe, and assuring food safety. Furthermore, there has recently been agreement by the governments of both nations on U.S.-China cooperation in fighting climate change.

At the moment, however, there is much more emphasis on military and economic conflict. As a result, unless there is a change of direction, the risks of global catastrophe will multiply.

The ‘Zuma Riots’ and the Decadence of Capitalism

Lekgantshi Console Tleane

In scenes reminiscent of the 1980s uprisings, South Africa has exploded into chaos following the incarceration of former president Jacob Zuma, prompting the deployment of the army in black townships. It will be the first time that the army is deployed to deal with political unrest since the end of juridical apartheid.

Zuma’s supporters had warned that there would be unrest if he were to be jailed after being sentenced to fifteen months incarceration for contempt of court.

The former president’s incarceration followed a recent precedent setting majority judgment handed down by the Constitutional Court, which serves as the country’s court of last instance, for defying that court and refusing to continue his testimony before the Commission of Enquiry to investigate Allegations of State Capture. His subsequent application to a lower court to stay his incarceration was dismissed before he handed himself to an incarceration center. It remains to be seen if a parallel application to the Constitutional Court for it to rescind its judgment will succeed.

Whether he will continue his sentence or not Zuma joins the long list of former heads of state on the African continent who received jail sentences after they had either lost power through coups or democratic elections. Prominent in the list are Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, and not long ago, Mohammed Morsi of Egypt. The list includes both left leaning leaders and right-wingers.

The sentence has divided the South African public, including Zuma’s own political party, the ruling African National Congress. Legal and political commentators are equally divided on the appropriateness and long-term implications that the sentence will have on the political and security landscape of the country, as well as legal jurisprudence. Already, the country is engulfed in flames; both literally and figuratively.

Those who argue that Zuma must serve his sentence cite what seems to be a strong case against his nine-year presidency that was surrounded by allegations of kleptocracy. His supporters on the other hand, and there are indeed many, argue that he is a victim of vengeance from his successor and former deputy president, Cyril Ramaphosa, and his allies. They also claim that he is a victim of the strong bourgeois lobby that does the bidding for capital, ranging from business owners through to the liberal commentators and the mainstream media.

Almost all mainstream journalists and liberal commentators have expressed frustrations at the police’s failure to preempt or at least stop the vandalism and looting of business premises that has accompanied the riots. However, what all of them continue to misunderstand is the phenomenon of Jacob Zuma.

The common and lazy refrain by all mainstream journalists and liberal commentators, including many university professors, who should provide better analysis, is to repeat the obvious and simplistic refrain which goes as follows. There is a prima facie case that Zuma led a kleptocracy. That when invited to continue his appearance before the Commission of Enquiry to investigate Allegations of State Capture, Zuma gave the presiding judge the middle finger. Also, to add salt to injury, Zuma refused to make representations to the Constitutional Court when the Commission took its case to the court. Instead, he uttered public criticisms against both the commission and the court. Hence, frustrated with all these, the court sentenced him to jail.

On the other hand, the same journalists and commentators have all but turned into the cheering club for the incumbent president, Cyril Ramaphosa. They are joined in this by capital, which sees in him a messianic figure who is ‘ridding South Africa off the corruption of the wasted Zuma years’.

In this polarized environment, any attempt by a non-mainstream journalist or commentator to advance a different argument from the simplistic Aristotelian dualism of a ‘bad Zuma’ and a ‘good Ramaphosa’ produces a dilemma like that faced by progressive journalists and commentators after the 2002 September 11 attacks.

It will be recalled how all attempts to argue that Saddam Hussein was not behind the attacks, and that he did not have weapons of mass destruction, were met with a sort of ‘shutting down’ of dissent not seen in many years. George Bush’s Aristotelian dualism of ‘you are either with us or against us’ was repeated sheepishly by liberal commentators.

Even when admitting that, yes, Saddam had unleashed chemical weapons on Iranian civilians during the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988), and that he was a ruthless dictator in his own right, but that he was not responsible for the September 11 attacks and therefore attacking Iraq was not justified; all these disclaimers were shut down.

Similarly, any attempt to point out that, yes, Zuma did many things wrong, but that does not make his rivals within the ruling African National Congress clean and friends of the working class; such attempts fall on deaf ears of liberalism.

But what does all this have to do with the current riots following Zuma’s incarceration? How can the incarceration of such a discredited former president lead to seeming support by working class communities?

Besides Zuma, how do we make sense of the support that other political leaders both within the ruling ANC and outside of it still enjoy, especially within working class communities? These being individuals who are suspected of large-scale public-sector corruption, including Zuma’s ally and suspended Secretary General of the ANC, Ace Magashule, the opposition Economic Freedom Fighters leader, Julius Malema, and the those like Andile Mngxitama, the leader of the Black First Land First party, who is also allied to Zuma.

In what may be termed lazy political analysis some have referred to the above individuals as fascists. Nothing could be further from a considered analysis.

The Zuma factor can best be understood against the backdrop of the political settlement that was reached between the ANC and the apartheid government, which both Zuma and Ramaphosa were central in formulating even though the former now craftly distances himself from, leading to the first democratic elections in 1994 and the birth of the ‘new’ South Africa, with Nelson Mandela as the founding president. Two years later, the country’s constitution, hailed by many as the world’s most liberal constitution, was adopted.

These two developments, the 1994 settlement and the neoliberal political, economic and social dispensation ushered in by the constitution, are at the centre of what may seem to be affinity to individuals such as Zuma. But why?

Far from having their socio-economic situation improving, the black working class has found itself forever trapped in the circle of poverty. This even though the country’s economy is said to be one of the biggest on the African continent. The official unemployment rate was 32.6% during the first quarter of 2021. Of this, the official unemployment rate among youth (15-34 years) was 46,3% in Quarter 1 2021. The rate was 9,3% among university graduates. Needless to emphasize that the majority of those unemployed and living in poverty remains black.

Black working-class communities continue to suffer from poor or insecure water supply, poor sanitation, substandard health care, and poor public education. Housing and public infrastructure for black working-class communities remains a dark blemish for the ‘new’ South Africa. Crime, alcohol and drug abuse, all the direct results of poverty, remain high in black townships. Overall, the living conditions of many black working-class communities remain substandard.

These conditions have been breeding grounds for marauding gangs of criminals, many of whom are now at the center of the current riots. Take a young person who has been moved into crime by abject poverty and is high on drugs and place him/her next to another disillusioned young person who has seen their future destroyed by the uncaring capitalist system, you have a destructive pair which sees no value in anything they destroy, including public amenities such as libraries.

Years of oppression, exploitation and systematic dehumanization have produced an army of young people who are filled with nothing but hopelessness and anger. For them, it matters not the indignity of being seen on international television stealing a bed from a department store. It is a bed that they have only dreamt about. No pun intended.

On the other hand, those who enjoy some forms of formal employment do so under exploitative conditions based on the super-accumulationist practices of the ruling class. Equally, those in non-formalized employment, the precariat as some theorists would prefer to call them, are always reminded about the fact that ‘half a loaf is better than no bread’.

This working-class frustration at the continued exploitation and precarity has led to pent-up anger at the entire political and economic system at the center of country’s governance. In the absence of a credible working-class party, the working class is drawn to any voice and figure that purports to express the aspirations of the exploited.

Enter Jacob Zuma. Towards the end of his presidential term Zuma began to mold himself as a working-class hero. A president who cared about the poor but whose aspirations were being frustrated by monopoly capital.

Given his own working-class background and lack of education Zuma turned into a hero that ordinary people could identify with. His troubles with the law became a mirror on which ordinary people could see themselves through, as they got their electricity cut due to non-payment, suffering credit blacklisting, and many other tight handcuffs around their hands due to their class position.

In this regard, it matters little whether the self-appointed working-class hero comes out dressed in working class garments or singing a revolutionary song and therefore can invoke nostalgia for the betrayed liberation struggle, or if they come out as crude right-wingers like Donald Trump or the Philippines’s Rodrigo Duterte.

Analyzed correctly, the current state represents the inherent crisis of capitalism. The system produces discontent, and such discontent may express itself in ways that may be viewed as reactionary. Again, as argued above, in the absence of revolutionary working-class parties that can direct the frustrations of the poor section of the society, criminal gangs and the backward sections of the lumpen proletariat take over the uprisings and may direct them in destructive ways.

Instead of addressing this crisis, which they do not have the wherewithal to understand in the first place, the bourgeoisie and all the agents and instruments of containment – the mainstream media, liberal commentators, and the direct spokespersons of capital in the form of politicians and parliamentary parties – formulate and advocate diversionary interventions. The most potent and seductive of these is to point to the kleptocracy in the public sector.

Such claims are amplified through volumes of research reports by avowed ‘progressive’ commentators who are in fact bourgeois liberal in orientation and the content that they produce than they in fact realize. Of late, this group includes defenders of racism who have found a new niche by appropriating the plight of the black working class, claiming that racism is not the problem, while corruption is.

There emerges a naked reductionism, diverting and reducing every challenge to corruption. Yet, what is now clear is that neoliberalism in South Africa has reached a crisis point. While many radical analysts may have warned repeatedly about this eventuality, no one knew when the tipping point would happen.

On the other hand, the current crisis, and now the riots, are but a manifestation of the factional battles produced by and playing out in the arena of capitalism. They are manifest through the factional battles within the ANC. In reality though, the factional battles within the ANC, which has drawn us into the current riotous crisis, are reflected through the entire parliamentary party-political canvas. Each of the parliamentary parties identifies with one of the two factions within the ANC which have crystallized around two individuals – Zuma and Ramaphosa.

The unfortunate thing in all this is that the working class has now been drawn into a battle that has nothing with them. In a similar manner that Marx so out eloquently argued in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, none of the contesting parties within the South African parliamentary system has any interest whatsoever in the actual plight of the working class.

Neither the neoliberalism of Ramaphosa nor the Bonapartism of Zuma is, and will ever be of benefit for the working class. As argued elsewhere before by this writer, both strands represent the narrow and self-serving interests of factions of capital; an established monopoly capital and a frustrated petty bourgeois nationalism respectively.

Given these stark scenarios the immediately task of the working class is, first, to refuse to be seduced by any of the factions. Second, the working class in South Africa must realize that it is on its own and must, of necessity and in fulfillment of its historical task, fashion its own working-class party.

Equally, radical analysts must fashion alternative debates and find platforms and ways of collaboration with the working class. To use the metaphor of a horse, they may look over the fence but must never cross over and be involved in the ugly and unprincipled strife within the arena of capitalist decadence.

The question that those who are genuinely interested in the condition of the working class must answer is whether the current riots may be turned into an insurrection or, better still, a revolution. For now, it seems not. Unless, and until the consciousness of the working class has been raised and this class wrestles the initiative from self-serving provocateurs and turn this into a working-class revolution.

War in Afghanistan spills over into Tajikistan, heightening Kremlin’s fears

Clara Weiss

As the US is completing its troop withdrawal from Afghanistan after two decades of a bloody and criminal war, numerous reports indicate that the ongoing conflict has already begun spilling over into neighboring Tajikistan. Last Monday, 1,500 Afghan soldiers fled across the border into Tajikistan, an impoverished former Soviet republic, to escape the advance of the Taliban. Tajikistan has a border with Afghanistan stretching 1,357 kilometers, or 804 miles.

According to the BBC, the soldiers, who were later flown back to Kabul, were desperate for food and water. Another 1,000 civilians reportedly also fled into Tajikistan. Political commentators are warning that many thousands more refugees may seek refuge in Tajikistan and other neighboring countries in the coming weeks and months as whatever has remained of social infrastructure in Afghanistan is experiencing a catastrophic collapse. One commentator in Foreign Policy warned that millions of people in Afghanistan could face famine within the next 12 months and that the country could become “the world’s next Yemen.”

Tajikistan itself has been devastated by the impact of capitalist restoration and is the most impoverished of all former Soviet republics. Almost half of the population lacks access to clean running water and a third of the country’s GDP comes from remittances sent by Tajiks working under horrendous conditions as migrants in Russia. The country is highly unstable politically and was just recently embroiled in a bloody border conflict with Kyrgyzstan that killed over 50 people.

Afghanistan-Tajikistan border bridge (Credit: BRFBlake)

Since last week, the Taliban have made further advances in Afghanistan, and are now claiming to control 85 percent of the country’s territory. The Tajik government has ordered the mobilization of 20,000 military reservists and requested help from Russia to guard the country’s borders. However, a report by Eurasianet indicates that the border is already de facto under the control of the Taliban.

The outlet quoted Anatoly Sidorov, the head of the Joint Staff at the Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organization, as saying on July 8,“They [the Taliban] have set up observation posts, checkpoints, and security posts [along the entire border]. It is all marked with white flags, there is everything there in open view, including weapons. They are not hiding anything.” Both the Afghan government and the Tajik government have refused to respond to requests for comments on the situation by Eurasianet.

The spill-over of the military conflict in Afghanistan into Tajikistan, which is home to a Russian military base with 7,000 soldiers, has provoked enormous concerns in the Kremlin. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated last Wednesday, “We are closely watching what is happening in Afghanistan where the situation has a tendency to swiftly deteriorate including against the backdrop of the hasty exit of American and other NATO troops.” He also made clear that, if necessary, Russia would use its troops stationed in Tajikistan to secure the country’s border. However, Russian press commentators assume that the Kremlin would only act in case of an open military assault from Afghanistan.

The spill-over of the conflict to neighboring countries and the emerging humanitarian catastrophe underscore that the US troop withdrawal, coming after three decades of unending wars in the Middle East is far from bringing an end to the crimes of imperialism in the region. Rather, it is serving as a catalyst for an escalation of geopolitical, ethnic and religious conflicts that have been fueled for decades.

From its beginning, the war in Afghanistan was part of the efforts of US imperialism to bring the entire core region of Europe and Asia (called “Eurasia” by geostrategists), especially the Middle East and Central Asia, under its full control in the aftermath of the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. While invading Iraq and Afghanistan in the Middle East and Central Asia, the US has systematically encircled Russia on its western borders, drawing many countries of the former Soviet bloc into NATO and staging coups in the Black Sea region in Georgia in 2003 and most recently Ukraine, in 2014.

In Central Asia, the US orchestrated a coup in Kyrgyzstan in 2005. Having emerged from the restoration of capitalism by the Stalinist bureaucracy, and deeply dependent upon imperialism, the Russian oligarchy has been incapable of responding to these ongoing interventions and aggressions outside of a combination of appealing to the imperialist powers and the promotion of nationalism and militarism, which has only served to further fuel military and ethnic tensions, including within its own borders.

Now, the Kremlin fears that the shift in US foreign policy and the rapid rise of the Taliban will further destabilize the entire region and strengthen Islamist tendencies across Central Asia and in Russia itself.

From 1994 to 2009, the Kremlin has waged two bloody wars against separatist, Islamist tendencies in the North Caucasian republic of Chechnya, which sought to break away from the Russian Federation. These forces were encouraged by US imperialism, especially in the 1990s, with the aim of fostering the break-up of Russia along ethnic lines.

Since then, Islamist forces from the North Caucasus, especially the Caucasus Emirate, are known to have developed close ties with the Taliban, al Qaeda and ISIS, all of which have been able to recruit a significant number of fighters from Chechnya.

In 2014, an active-duty US special operations officer told ABC News that “a fair percentage of the overall enemy population” in the early period of the Afghan war were “Chechens.” Radical Islamists from Chechnya are also known to have joined various US-backed militias that have been fighting against the Assad government in the civil war in Syria.

Moreover, the Kremlin is well aware that the US troop withdrawal, far from signaling an end to US imperialist aggression, is part of a broader reorientation of US imperialism toward preparations for a great power conflict, targeting above all China, but also Russia. Especially over the past decade, China has developed extremely close economic ties with the countries in Central Asia, including Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, often outstripping the previously dominant influence of Russia.

Having already been drawn into the maelstrom of the imperialist encirclement of Russia, geopolitical tensions in the region will now be further fueled by the open US war preparations against China. Russia and China, too, have competing interests in Central Asia that are often only barely reconciled, based on the common goal of limiting US influence.

Against this background, the Kremlin has been particularly alarmed by news reports indicating that the US is looking into opening a new military base in a former Soviet republic to keep troops stationed in Central Asia. In May, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing anonymous sources in the US government and military leadership, that “U.S. military commanders want bases for troops, drones, bombers and artillery to shore up the Afghan government, keep the Taliban insurgency in check and monitor other extremists. Options being assessed range from nearby countries to more distant Arab Gulf emirates and Navy ships at sea.” According to the newspaper, the US is eyeing “Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, which border Afghanistan and would allow for quick access.”

The Russian Nezavisimaya Gazeta commented at the time that these reports “seem to have seriously alarmed the Russian leadership” and that the “Kremlin clearly regarded the news reports on this as a preliminary political probe.” Following the American press reports, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu travelled to Dushanbe and Tashkent, and Tajik President Emomali Rakhmon was invited to Moscow for a state visit.

In the American ruling class, a new military base is still being debated. The military policy blog War on the Rocks recently published a piece strongly arguing against a new military base in Central Asia. The think tank journal Foreign Policy published a comment by Phil Caruso, a member of the US Council on Foreign Relations, warning that the US would not be able to defend its interests in the region after the withdrawal “without bases nearby.”

Wave of revulsion at racist abuse of England football players

Robert Stevens

Last Sunday’s European Championship football final came down to a penalty shoot-out, which was won by Italy against England. Following the game, the three England players who missed penalties, Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka, suffered racist abuse on social media.

Twitter said Monday, “In the past 24 hours… we have swiftly removed over 1,000 Tweets and permanently suspended a number of accounts for violating our rules…”

The mural in Manchester dedicated to Rashford (WSWS Media)

The Guardian carried out an analysis of the scale of abuse directed at England’s black players. Across England’s three group games against Croatia, Scotland and the Czech Republic, there were “2,114 abusive tweets directed towards or naming the players and [manager Gareth] Southgate. This included 44 explicitly racist tweets, with messages using the N-word and monkey emojis directed at black players, and 58 that attacked players for their anti-racist actions, including taking the knee.”

A mural in Manchester dedicated to Rashford, who plays for Manchester United, was daubed with racist graffiti within an hour of the final game finishing.

The racist attacks immediately prompted a wave of popular revulsion, as hundreds of thousands of people sent supportive messages to the players on social media platforms.

Local residents immediately covered the graffiti daubed on the Rashford mural with bin liners. Over the next 24 hours, a large part of the wall mural was covered with hundreds of messages in support of the player.

Rashford has won the admiration of millions, above all for his activities off the football field. Many messages referred to the campaign he launched last year, in the teeth of government opposition, to demand that over a million of the UK’s poorest children be provided with free school meals over the summer holidays during the pandemic. Rashford relied on free school meals as a child. The mural includes a quotation from his mother who brought up her children holding down several jobs as a single parent: “Take pride in knowing that your struggle will play the biggest role in your purpose.”

An online petition created Monday morning demanding “Ban racists for life from all football matches in England” secured more than 300,000 signatures within eight hours. By Tuesday evening it had been endorsed by nearly one million people.

Amid official declarations by the Football Association and Prince William condemning racism, the Conservative government rushed out its own statements. This immediately backfired as one commentator after another pointed out the actual record of key government figures in cultivating racism. The main targets of public anger were Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Home Secretary Priti Patel.

Home Secretary Priti Patel (left) and Prime Minister Boris Johnson [Credit: Hannah McKay Pool via AP]

On Monday, Johnson told a Downing Street briefing that he hoped those who have been directing racist abuse at players “will crawl back under the rock from which you emerged.” Home Secretary Priti Patel said she was “disgusted” by the “vile” abuse, declaring on Twitter, “It has no place in our country and I back the police to hold those responsible accountable.”

Many noted that Johnson and Patel had both opposed England players taking the knee during the tournament as a mark of opposition to racism. Johnson refused to criticise those in the stadium at England’s tournament warm up games who booed players taking the knee, with a spokesman saying he was “more focused on action rather than gestures.” Patel went further in an interview on the newly founded right-wing news channel, GB TV, declaring, “I just don’t support people participating in that type of gesture politics.” Asked whether fans had a right to boo players taking the knee, she replied, “That's a choice for them quite frankly,” before stating that protests against the police murder of George Floyd last year had had a “devastating” impact on policing.

Johnson is a man who wrote of the Commonwealth’s “regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles.” As recently as 2018, flush from his success in the Brexit campaign, he sought to bolster support among the most right-wing layers in the Tory Party by referring to women in burkas as looking like “letter boxes” and “bank robbers.” He wrote an article on Africa in 2002 declaring, “The continent may be a blot, but it is not a blot upon our conscience,” adding, “The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge anymore.”

Most of Patel’s waking hours are spent on devising attacks on the rights of immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers.

England player Tyrone Mings wrote of her, “You don’t get to stoke the fire at the beginning of the tournament by labelling our anti-racism message as ‘Gesture Politics’ & then pretend to be disgusted when the very thing we’re campaigning against happens.”

Former England defender Gary Neville told Sky News, “The prime minister said it was OK for the population of this country to boo those players [taking the knee] who were trying to promote equality and defend against racism. It starts at the very top. I wasn’t surprised in the slightest that I woke up to those headlines [of players suffering racial abuse]; I expected it the minute the three players missed.”

Events, however, don’t just reveal hypocrisy at the highest levels of government. The public reaction to the abuse of the three players testifies to the overwhelming hostility to racism within the British population and to the Tories.

Also targeted for public anger was the right-wing media. The Sun tabloid made sure to lead off its front-page Tuesday with a full-page St George flag, with pictures of Rashford, Saka and Sancho superimposed, accompanied by a headline, “Nation Unites Against Racists: We’ve Got Your Back”.

Among the responses on Twitter were, “The Sun fuelled it. Nurtured it. The hypocrisy is stunning”; “I wouldn't use this paper to line my bins. This paper causes division with the ignorance and racism it spews on a regular basis. You're not fooling anyone with this”; and “maybe they can offer an unequivocal apology for publishing a column saying that taking the knee was ‘virtue-signalling baloney’, and a ‘grotesque woke pantomime’.”

Such an outpouring of mass sentiment is not only a latent threat to the government. It gives the lie to the claim of the various petty-bourgeois advocates of identity politics that racial divisions are more important than class divisions, and especially the assertion of a universal “white privilege”.

The scoundrel Sir Keir Starmer and his forerunner Jeremy Corbyn are both busy striking a pose of defending the England squad and making some easy political capital at Johnson’s expense. But this did not stop Labour under both leaders from working hand-in-glove with the Tories during the pandemic, while relying on the trade unions to suppress all opposition in the working class.

Events since Sunday’s match show that the Labour and trade union bureaucracy are sitting on a political and social powder-keg. The working class is more than capable of dealing a decisive blow to the most right-wing government in British history and the fascist dregs that take their cue from it. But this means breaking from these rotten organisations, and uniting all workers based on their common class interests in the fight for socialism.