ANC government roiled by angry protests as South Africans protest worsening social conditions

Jean Shaoul

South Africa has been rocked by four days of angry protests and riots across the country, in what has been described as the worst disturbances since the end of the hated apartheid regime and minority white rule and the assumption of power by the African National Congress (ANC) in 1994.

South Africa’s two most densely populated provinces, Gauteng, home to Johannesburg, the country’s commercial capital and largest city, and the capital Pretoria, and the eastern province of KwaZulu-Natal, were the worst affected. But protests have spread to Northern Cape and Mpumalanga provinces.

As protesters far outnumbered the police, people looted stores, warehouses, store depots and factories, making off with electrical goods, clothes and foodstuffs, while others set fire to shops and offices. The BBC aired a film clip of a mother dropping her toddler from a burning building into the arms of a group of people below.

Soldiers patrol outside a shopping mall in Vosloorus, east of in Johannesburg, South Africa, Wednesday, July 14, 2021. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe)

Several of the country’s major highways were blocked after trucks were set alight, prompting South Africa's largest oil refinery to announce the suspension of its operations, blaming the civil unrest and disruption of supply routes in and out of KwaZulu-Natal. This has led to long queues forming outside petrol stations and shops in the eastern port city of Durban and Johannesburg.

The violence has reportedly affected healthcare clinics and the faltering vaccine rollout programme, with medical supplies and medications looted, even as South Africa’s third wave of Covid infections rips through the country. According to official statistics, the virus has killed at least 64,000 people, although excess mortality figures indicate that another 100,000, if not more, have died directly or indirectly due to the pandemic.

At least 72 people have died and more than 1,300 people have been arrested during the protests. While most of those who died were killed by live fire from the police, ten were killed during a crowd crush at the Ndofaya shopping mall in Soweto, Johannesburg, and others were crushed in a warehouse when a stack of goods fell on looters.

The protests were initially triggered by last week’s jailing of former president Jacob Zuma, ordered by the Constitutional Court for contempt of court for initially defying its order to appear at an inquiry into corruption during his presidency from 2009 to 2018. Fearing his actions and those of his cronies were impacting adversely on South Africa’s business interests at home and abroad and costing the ANC electoral support, as reflected in major losses in the 2016 municipal elections, President Cyril Ramaphosa’s faction in the ANC had forced him to resign.

The 79-year-old Zuma is a veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle that he joined when he was 17, serving a 10-year prison sentence on Robben Island in the 1960s alongside Nelson Mandela. Zuma was also a member of the Stalinist South African Communist Party (SACP) until 1990. He has played a major role in the ANC ever since. This, his professed support for the poor farmers and workers, and a significant degree of patronage, has enabled him to retain a measure of popular support, despite being mired for years in scandals and facing a long-postponed trial for fraud, corruption and racketeering.

Zuma and his faction attacked the judicial decision, accusing the court and his political opponents of political bias and imposing a prison sentence without trial that was unconstitutional. After initially refusing to turn himself into the police and calling on his supporters to oppose the sentence, he had given in at the last moment on Wednesday and reported to the authorities. On Monday, the Constitutional Court agreed to hear his petition to rescind its imprisonment order, although it has yet to declare its ruling.

The protests by Zuma’s supporters, largely in his home province of KwaZulu-Natal, rapidly morphed into a wider movement against the ANC government. Millions are angered over its mismanagement of the pandemic and vaccine rollout and an escalating economic crisis that has left many people without jobs, income or financial support from the government, as the top echelons of the ruling party have enriched themselves at public expense.

With one of the highest levels of income inequality in the world, South Africa’s most affluent 20 percent of the population take more than 68 percent of income. According to government statistics, a pale reflection of reality, one third of workers are without work, leading to the pauperisation of millions, while the government has frozen public sector wages, refusing to pay a wage increase due from April 2020 under the 2018 three-year agreement.

While Ramaphosa was forced to acknowledge the widespread anger over social conditions that have turned the country into a powder keg, this did not stop him ordering the army to help the police disperse the crowds, suppress the protests and arrest looters. Addressing the nation on television on Monday, only the second time since the riots broke out, he said, “Let me be clear: we will take action to protect every person in this country against the threat of violence, intimidation, theft and looting.” By this he meant that the army would act to protect big business and the South African bourgeoisie from the enraged masses.

He announced a two-week extension of the limited lockdown measures to counter a brutal third wave of Covid infections at the weekend that include a ban on gatherings and the sale of alcohol, a 9pm to 4am curfew and school closures, seeking to lay the blame for disrupting the vaccination programme on the protesters.

Ramaphosa warned that the country faced the danger of sliding back to the ethnic infighting of the early 1990s when, under apartheid, “sinister elements stoked the flames of violence in our communities to try and turn us against each other.”

Ramaphosa’s faction more openly courts international finance and big business to invest in South Africa and has pledged to root out the corruption endemic within the ANC that has made foreign capital and the international financial institutions reluctant to deal with the country. He has sought to use the courts against his ANC opponents, arguing that what is at stake is the “rule of law.” By this is meant that rule of capitalist law that has allowed Ramaphosa to build up a massive personal fortune, and which sanctions the financial elite’s expropriation of the wealth created by the working class in the form of profit and dividends to shareholders and allows big business to hide its criminality behind the “corporate veil.”

This does not mean that workers should support the nakedly corrupt Zuma or his backers. The factional infighting within the ANC expresses the protracted crisis gripping the entire South African bourgeoisie. The ANC came to power in 1994 in a bid to rescue South African capitalism in a period of rapid transition. As globalisation of production became widespread, the nationalist and autarkic apartheid regime was no longer fit for purpose, amid fears that the rising militancy of the South African working class could spell the end of capitalist rule in the country.

The ANC was chosen as the mechanism to suppress the revolutionary strivings of the black working class, with a black capitalist class being formed to take its place alongside the white capitalists, through programmes of “Black Economic Empowerment” (BEE). This was sanctified politically through the SACP’s Stalinist two-stage theory, which proclaimed the formal end of apartheid as a democratic revolution and a necessary stage before any struggle for socialism.

Ramaphosa’s career, no less than Zuma’s, expresses the trajectory of the ANC and its politics. Once heading South Africa’s largest trade union, the National Union of Mineworkers, he was elected as ANC general secretary in 1991. Soon becoming a multi-millionaire, as a shareholder in the Lonmin mines in Marikana, in 2012 Ramaphosa called on the authorities to take action against striking miners. This greenlighted the security forces firing on the strikers, killing 34 and wounding 78 others.

The path of the ANC from opposition to co-option has been replicated across Africa and the Middle East. The national bourgeoisie, dependent upon imperialism and fearful of revolution from below, cannot resolve the fundamental democratic, economic and social problems confronting the masses. Only the working class can do that. It means breaking with the capitalist politics of the ANC and adopting a socialist and international programme in the closest unity with their class brothers and sisters in the African continent and in the imperialist centres, to take power and overthrow capitalism.

UK: Johnson government’s ending mandatory face masks on public transport faces major opposition

Tony Robson

London Mayor Sadiq Khan has announced that face coverings must be worn on London's transport network after the ending of restrictions on July 19 by the Conservative government.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Transport Secretary Grant Shapps had both stressed that government guidance was for passengers to only to wear masks voluntarily on busy services. Khan’s announcement that Transport for London (TfL) would insist that mask-wearing continues on the London Underground, bus, tram, DLR, Overground and TfL Rail network, and in taxis and private hire vehicles, prompted Shapps to claim that he had always “expected, and indeed, wanted” some train, bus and rail companies to insist on mask-wearing on their services.

In reality the hands of both have been forced, not only by massive public opposition, with a YouGov poll showing that seven in 10 people favoured maintaining face coverings on public transport, but above all the threat of industrial action by transport workers.

Passengers on a London Underground Jubilee Line train in June 2021 (WSWS Media)

An indication of the breadth of opposition is provided by an online petition opposing ending the mandatory wearing of face coverings on public transport, which gathered over 120,000 signatures. The petition is on the Organise platform, which allows workers to create petitions anonymously over workplace concerns. It is linked to a letter addressed to Health Secretary Sajid Javid and transport providers, highlighting concerns over the transmission of the virus in enclosed spaces with inadequate ventilation on buses, trains and taxis. It states, “Workers have no choice than to be close to strangers on public transport, and it's especially worrying for workers who are clinically vulnerable, or live with people who are. The staff working in the transport industry need protecting, as do older and more vulnerable people who rely on public transport to get around.”

Comments on the petition page include one that reads simply “Humanity”, while others state, “Essential to protect workers and the public”, “I want to be protected, also we are in such close proximity on tubes and trains, it makes sense to protect each other. Covid has not gone away.”

Such popular sentiment in the working class finds no organised expression. The main transport train unions, Unite and the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) workers union, have responded to the Johnson government’s murderous agenda with a perfunctory call for the mandatory wearing of face masks. They are obliged to acknowledge the huge dangers posed by the government’s actions, but this is not accompanied by any call for a response from the working class. Both unions point to the established agreements with the corporations and government agencies formed from the start of the pandemic and which they claim have ensured their members’ safety. This is under conditions where rail and bus workers have suffering among the highest death tolls of any occupation, with fatalities among London bus drivers three times the national average.

Mike Lynch, general secretary of the RMT, in a July 12 letter to the governments of England, Wales and Scotland, describing the removal of mandatory face masks as “fatal folly” and asked for “reassurances” that other mitigation measures would be maintained.

Unite national officer for transport Bobby Morton described Johnson’s confirmation on July 12 of the scrapping of face coverings as “pigheaded” and “ill-conceived.”

Unite stated that it had briefed its members on their right to invoke Section 44 and 100 of the Employment Right Act, reminding them that they can remove themselves from the workplace if they believe their health is being placed in serious and imminent danger.

This is a fraud. In January, amid a covid outbreak at his garage at Cricklewood, London bus driver David O’Sullivan circulated a leaflet published by the London Bus Rank and File Committee informing bus drivers of their rights under Section 44. Unite denounced this as “unauthorised action” and sided with management during a disciplinary hearing that led to his dismissal.

Khan’s claim that his volte face is based on health considerations and the guidance of the World Health Organisation (WHO) is belied by his actions in promoting the wider abandonment of containment measures in collaboration with the government. Over the last few weeks, he has been at the forefront of promoting mass gatherings around the Euro football tournament, which the WHO has identified as “super spreader” events. He was photographed at Wembley Stadium before the semi-final between England and Denmark alongside the Health Secretary Javid, performing the elbow bump with the accompanying slogan on Javid’s Twitter account declaring: “It's coming home.” The euphoria around the progress of the England side to the final was cynically exploited by the Tories and Labour to generate a false sense of national unity and to stampede public opinion into accepting the lifting of covid restrictions.

Screenshot of Health Secretary Sajid Javid's tweet showng him and London Mayor Sadiq Khan performing the elbow bump at Wembley Stadium before the semi-final between England and Denmark. Javid accompanied the photo with the slogan “It's coming home.”

The maintenance of the face coverings mandate is dictated by the need to preserve the corporatist relations cultivated through the Tripartite Agreement between the unions, TfL, and the private operators from the start of the pandemic against the threat from below.

Far from the “honourable role” Unite now claims the Labour Mayor has played in protecting the lives of bus workers, on April 9, 2020, Unite, TfL and the private operators signed a letter of agreement denying drivers the right to wear face masks, contributing to the 30 deaths in the first wave of the pandemic. The rise in death toll to at least 60 London bus workers has been guaranteed through this ongoing corporate partnership.

On May 17, passenger numbers allowed on board London buses were doubled. Bus drivers have reported the loading signs displaying maximum capacity have been removed. There is widespread anger over the inadequate ventilation in drivers’ cabs and disputes over the claim that they have been properly sealed against exposure.

The extension of face coverings on London public transport is a partial victory which has been enforced under the threat of an emerging opposition, not just on the buses but across all sections of workers. This threat must now be made into a reality.

Every section of the working class is at risk from the “bonfire of the regulations” meant to combat Covid-19. They cannot allow even a nationwide retreat over the scrapping of face coverings to be used to salvage the Tories broader agenda of sacrificing workers health and lives in a new wave of the pandemic to ensure the profits of the corporate oligarchy.

The Labour Party and trade unions are in alliance with the government and its naked policy of herd immunity. Former Labour Health Secretary Ben Bradshaw, interviewed on BBC’s Newsnight July 5, echoed the words of Johnson stating that there will inevitably be more hospitalisations and deaths. The prominent Blairite declared that the problem was the government had not prepared the country for this. The ditching of face coverings on public transport was undermining public confidence, risking the return to work and reopening of the economy being stalled.

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.