Wave of COVID-19 Delta variant in Europe spirals out of control

Samuel Tissot

The Delta variant is driving a surge of COVID-19 cases across Europe. Reuters reports that in the last two weeks, 42 of Europe’s 47 countries have seen a rise in cases.

A nurse holds a phone while a COVID-19 patient speaks with his family from the intensive care unit at the Joseph Imbert Hospital Center in Arles, southern France, Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2020. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole)

In the last seven days, Worldometers.info recorded an increase of 81 percent in France’s weekly cases to 35,059, Greece’s 97 percent to 16,758, Italy’s 75 percent to 10,135, Spain’s 61 percent to 143,478, Belgium’s 103 percent to 9,227, the UK’s 28 percent to 243,392 and the Netherlands 411 percent increase to 58,646. Except for the UK (52 percent fully vaccinated), these countries have less than 50 percent of their population vaccinated.

Despite months of warnings from epidemiologists across the continent, capitalist governments in every European country are ending the last of their limited measures to tackle the virus, facilitating a rapid rise of the more deadly and more infectious Delta variant.

Even though the rapid increase in the virus has only just begun, deaths throughout the continent are also on the rise. Europe recorded a 3 percent increase in the last seven days, the first week-on-week increase since mid-April. The UK, where all restrictions will be lifted on July 19, has seen a 42 percent increase in weekly deaths. Epidemiologist Neil Ferguson stated that the UK could reach 200 daily deaths by the end of the summer. Portugal also recorded 56 deaths last week, an 87 percent increase on the previous week.

Britain’s Tory government is returning to a more explicit herd immunity policy. It calls for building immunity by infection among non-vaccinated children and adults—a policy denounced as one of “moral emptiness” and “epidemiological stupidity” by WHO Emergencies Programme Director Mike Ryan.

The impact of this herd immunity policy will not just be limited to a rapid increase in deaths in the coming weeks and months. An open letter to The Lancet denouncing the murderous policy of the UK government, now signed by over 1,200 scientists, warned of “a generation left with chronic health problems and disability.”

The British government’s criminal actions must be taken as a warning to the European working class as a whole. On the continent vaccination is far less widespread, with just 32.8 percent of the population having had two doses. Facing this new wave, bourgeois governments across the continent are pursuing an identical policy of immunity by infection of those who are not vaccinated, including tens of millions of school-aged children.

Russia, with a vaccination rate of just 13.2 percent, is in its deadliest period since the pandemic began. Last week, 5,237 people died there, over 80 percent of the continent’s weekly total. Tuesday (780), Wednesday (786) and Thursday (791) saw successive records set in the country for the highest daily COVID-19 death toll. This disaster threatens to spread to other countries in Eastern Europe which have similar levels of vaccination.

Typifying the attitude of the ruling elites across the continent, at the beginning of July, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated, “Nobody wants any lockdowns, and yes, it is not up for debate. It is not being discussed.”

In order to avoid measures that will damage the profit interests of the capitalist class, European governments are responding to the rise by promoting the anti-scientific lie that vaccines alone are sufficient to tackle COVID-19. French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted on Monday, “The vaccination of all the French is the only way back to normal life.”

Since the development of life-saving vaccines, scientists have repeatedly stressed that they are not a one-stop solution to the pandemic. They must be paired with social distancing and other measures to eliminate the virus. Furthermore, the spread of infection whilst large percentages of the population are partially protected by a single dose threatens to accelerate the rate at which variants can develop more substantial resistance to the vaccines, posing an even greater threat to the European and world population.

The adoption of anti-scientific rules that effectively suspend restrictions on leisure and tourism for those who are fully vaccinated has already undoubtedly driven infections. In France, since July 9, fully-vaccinated people have been able to attend nightclubs. Nightclubs have also been opened in many parts of Spain.

In another telling episode, which exposes the acute risk facing all of Europe, on June 26 the Netherlands opened its nightclubs for those with negative tests, leading to claims that test results were fake or that QR codes were not properly checked by staff.

Following this reopening the seven-day average for cases in July has risen from 607 on July 1 to 8,376 on July 14, a 1,379 percent rise. Popular outrage led Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte to apologize for an “error in judgment” and reintroduce restrictions on nightclubs. However, with over 10,000 cases on Wednesday and workplaces, schools and restaurants all open, conditions are ripe for a continued increase in infections, inevitably followed by hospitalizations and deaths.

Increased tourism in Europe is also spreading the virus. Since the end of spring, double-vaccinated holidaymakers have been allowed to travel freely even though full vaccination does not prevent transmission. In Malta, which recorded an incredible 1,084 percent increase in weekly cases, to 912 last week, the Deputy Prime Minister Chris Fearne told tourists, “If you are vaccinated, come to Malta.”

This surge is particularly striking given that Malta has the highest rate of vaccination in Europe: 79.3 percent of its population are fully vaccinated.

María Aránzazu González Laya, the Spanish minister of foreign affairs for the big-business PSOE, told tourists, “This is a time for prudence, not for panicking. There is no reason at the moment to ask people to cancel their vacations.” This is an absurd lie: on July 13, Spain recorded 43,960 cases according to Worldometer.info, its highest number since the pandemic began. Currently 600 COVID-19 patients under 30 are in intensive care in the country.

The pandemic in Europe is at a crucial juncture. After weeks of decreasing infections and deaths, the deadlier Delta variant is now ripping through the continent at a gathering pace. Yet capitalist governments are once again refusing to take scientific measures to save lives and are ready to sacrifice hundreds of thousands more people at the altar of corporate profit.

The question of containing and eliminating the virus is above all political. Scientific measures were enforced to limit the spread of the pandemic only in March 2020, after a wave of wildcat strikes began in Italy and spread throughout Europe and the world. Following the reopening in May 2020, however, corporatist unions across Europe have worked with governments to suppress working class opposition to a herd immunity policy.

German military readies itself for war in space

Johannes Stern

Defence Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer and Inspector General Eberhard Zorn, Germany’s most senior military officer, launched the Bundeswehr’s new Space Command this week.

Kramp-Karrenbauer and Zorn (AP Photo/Michael Sohn)

The new unit is based at the headquarters of the Centre for Air Operations in Uedem and is subordinate to the Luftwaffe (Air Force). The command currently has 80 posts but is to be expanded rapidly to 250. The first head of the command is Colonel (General Staff) Marco Manderfeld.

The establishment of the command underlines how swiftly and comprehensively the ruling class is pushing for the return of German militarism. At the official ceremony, Kramp-Karrenbauer celebrated the creation of the unit as a “military-historical step for the future of the Bundeswehr.” The aim, she said, was to bundle the capacities of the air, space and cyber dimensions and thereby “strengthen the ability to act in the space dimension.”

The defence minister openly stated what was at stake: the pursuit of the interests of German imperialism through a strong military presence in space. Germany is an export-oriented, highly industrialised nation, she said, and “therefore our prosperity and security are highly dependent on space.”

“For a long time now, our civilian and military satellites have been a resource without which nothing works,” Kramp-Karrenbauer continued. The Bundeswehr itself has six satellites of its own in low-Earth orbits, she said. “As always when a resource becomes vital,” “its security becomes an issue.” It was a matter of “being operationally capable in space.”

NATO had already adopted a space strategy in mid-2019, identifying space as an operational domain alongside land, air, sea and cyberspace. Although Germany has been arming itself for cyber warfare since 2017, it has so far been primarily dependent on the capabilities of the USA in “space” operations. This is now to change.

In a direct challenge to the other major powers, Kramp-Karrenbauer stressed, “Space is no longer the exclusive domain of the space-faring nations.” All of them were “now present there,” and emerging and developing countries also had “developed space programmes today.” Germany must not be left behind. For this reason, “the various capabilities available in the Bundeswehr for the security of our infrastructure in space are now being brought together in the Space Command.”

For Germany, “space operations are always defensive operations,” the defence minister asserted. The Bundeswehr wanted to “ensure the peaceful use of space.” This is pure propaganda. Such space plans are part of the comprehensive rearmament and war offensive of German imperialism, which—at least for the moment—is mainly directed against Russia and China.

“The rapid development of the militarisation of space, driven by Russia and China, among others, has already drastically changed the situation,” the official website of the Ministry of Defence states. The Bundeswehr was reacting “with the new command, to new threat situations such as these.”

The NATO powers, in particular, are pushing ahead with the militarisation of space—with unforeseeable consequences. At its last summit in June, the alliance decided that in the future, an attack in space could also trigger the alliance’s mutual support provisions. This means that “the same applies to space as to land, sea, air and cyberspace,” explained NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg. “An attack on one is an attack on all—and can be answered by all.”

To be clear about the implications of this: Were the US or one of the extremely anti-Russian governments in Eastern Europe to claim Russia and/or China had attacked one of their satellites in space and invoke the mutual support provisions, Berlin would be obliged under Article 5 of the NATO treaty to go to war against a nuclear power.

While insane, this is perfectly in line with the plans that the ruling class is preparing behind the backs of the population.

With the establishment of the Space Command, the Defence Ministry is implementing the “Cornerstones for the Future of the Bundeswehr” adopted by Kramp-Karrenbauer and Zorn on May 18. This blueprint for the massive military build-up of the German army states that “the dimension of air and space will be strengthened by establishing a Bundeswehr Space Command under the auspices of the Luftwaffe.”

The command is indispensable for modern warfare. In the future, conflicts “will be conducted and decided across all dimensions—land, air/space, sea as well as cyber and information space.” The Luftwaffe was therefore also “setting up an ‘Air Warfare Centre’ to combine responsibility and competencies in the areas of doctrine and further development.” In addition, it is working on “sustainably increasing material readiness.”

Whole passages of the document read like a modern version of Hitler’s doctrine of total war, albeit this time to be waged with nuclear weapons.

The Bundeswehr must be able to “conduct military operations against an equal opponent in a battle of combined arms, and in future also in a battle of combined dimensions—in the entire spectrum up to high-intensity combat,” it says in the chapter “Requirements for the Bundeswehr.” This requires “military capabilities for deterrence in the entire spectrum, including nuclear participation.”

In addition, the German armed forces must be “capable of making flexible military options available to the political leadership and of providing forces and capabilities competent of taking action in all dimensions in accordance with the situation.” They would have to be able to “act quickly and without disruption across dimensions and exist simultaneously across the entire spectrum of dimensions.” The “guiding principle” must be “organise as you fight.”

These “Cornerstones” are a warning. Previous papers, such as the “Concept of the Bundeswehr,” adopted in 2018, have already shown that German imperialism will stop at nothing to militarily assert its interests in the 21st century. This now officially includes Berlin’s drive to become a military power in space.

Pension at 68: Workers in Germany to pay for the pandemic with poverty in old-age

Elisabeth Zimmermann & Marianne Arens

Three months before federal elections, a German government advisory committee has posed the possibility of raising the pension age to 68. It calls for linking retirement to rising life expectancy and reducing statutory benefits. The committee argues, “shocking growing financing problems in the statutory pension insurance system from 2025” are to be expected.

Bottle collectors, a common sight in Germany (Photo: Sascha Kohlmann / CC BY-SA 2.0)

The Scientific Advisory Council of Federal Economics Minister Peter Altmaier (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) published its “Proposals for a Reform of Statutory Pension Insurance” on June 7. In a press release, the Advisory Council criticises the fact that “sharply increasing subsidies from the federal budget are flowing into the pension fund,” accounting for more than a quarter of the budget. This number will “rise to over 44 percent by 2040 and over 55 percent by 2060.” Inevitably, therefore, the council argues that retirement age will have to be raised to 68 or above. At the same time, the size of the payout that retirees receive must be reduced.

Since the report was issued, the attack on pensions has not stopped. There are already calls to raise the retirement age to 69 or 70. In the spring, several economic institutes proposed bringing it up to 69, citing the size of the national debt incurred during the coronavirus pandemic. Germany’s central bank, the Bundesbank, also supported this demand.

With an eye on the election, leading politicians from almost all parties quickly and vociferously distanced themselves from these proposals. Federal Finance Minister and Social Democratic Party (SPD) lead candidate Olaf Scholz described them as “horror scenarios” that were “wrongly calculated and anti-social.” Left Party co-chair Susanne Hennig-Wellsow told the DPA press agency, “This is the anti-social hammer.” However, the broad outlines of the proposal are supported by all parties.

During the pandemic, the government has issued massive aid packages in order to boost the profits of the banks and corporations. While the number of billionaires has increased, the next government will have to take out a net loan of almost 100 billion euros to finance spending during 2022. At the same time, all parties advocate a return to the policy of a “balanced budget” without any new borrowing. The legally mandated “debt brake,” which was suspended during the pandemic, is to come back as soon as possible.

This requires budget cuts and sharp attacks on social services. Federal subsidies for pensions, which amount to more than 70 billion euros a year, are targeted in particular. These subsidies are financed with general tax revenues and have therefore long been a thorn in the side of employers, the super-rich and top politicians. The pressure to end them has intensified in the pandemic.

As early as last autumn, a “Commission on a Reliable Intergenerational Contract” appointed by the federal government put forward new proposals aimed at abolishing the “double limit” (which caps contribution rates and provides for a minimum pension level).

In its report, the Commission proposed to raise retirement contributions for employees, currently at 18.6 percent of a person’s wage, to between 20 and 24 percent. At the same time, the “standard pension” would be reduced.

The “standard pension” is not to be confused with the pension actually paid out. It is an average amount calculated based on a ratio of a statutory pension after 45 years of contributions to average income. It takes neither deductions due to missing years of contributions nor tax contributions into account. The effective pension amount, on which very many people have to live, is well below half the average wage. If the “experts” have their way, it will be lowered even further.

Criticism of these planned cuts by the SPD, the Greens, the Left Party, and the main trade unions is purely for show due to the election campaign. In the face of protests from social organisations, even Economics Minister Altmaier piously assured that no one would introduce the “pension at 68.” Meanwhile, more and more publications by advisory bodies are testing the waters by floating the idea, making clear what is being prepared behind the backs of the working class.

The phoniness of the opposition expressed by politicians can be seen just by looking at what has happened to government pensions over the last thirty years. Since the era of Helmut Kohl (CDU) in the 1980s and 90s, every labour and social affairs minister has worked to erode statutory pensions systematically. Of these eight ministers, six were Social Democrats.

This began with the first Kohl government, whose Labour Minister Norbert Blüm then claimed, “Pensions are safe.” With the reintroduction of capitalism in East Germany in 1990, some 14,000 state-owned enterprises and hundreds of thousands of jobs were destroyed by the Treuhand, a process that the forerunner to the Left Party, the PDS, supported. Unemployment and low-wage work lead directly to old-age privation because of poverty-level pensions.

When the SPD-Green Party federal government of Gerhard Schröder (SPD) and Joschka Fischer (Greens) took the helm in 1999, it initiated unprecedented social cuts through the “Hartz” laws, attacking welfare and labour rights and creating a huge low-wage, temporary and part-time sector. This was accompanied by a sharp assault on pensions.

Walter Riester (SPD), then labour minister and former deputy chairman of Germany’s largest industrial union the IG Metall, created a breach in the pay-as-you-go statutory pension insurance scheme with his capital-based “Riester pensions.” It quickly became clear that low earners with small statutory pensions and no entitlement to a company pension could not afford Riester's capital-based private pensions, because they had to spend everything they earned to keep themselves and their family’s heads above water. The pension insurance companies and their managers, however, have profited.

On February 3, 2006, the grand coalition of the CDU/CSU and SPD decided to raise the retirement age from 65 to 67. The driving force behind this was Vice-Chancellor and Labour and Social Affairs Minister Franz Müntefering (SPD). Subsequently, the Merkel government furthered the by gradually introducing the taxation of pensions.

Other steps taken by the Merkel government, supposedly introduced in order to honour the lifetime efforts of hard-working people, include the ability to draw a pension at 63 and the creation of a so-called basic pension. Both, however, are subject to tough standards. Only workers who can prove 45 years of paid contributions can access their retirement funds at 63 and they must forgo 10 percent of their total earned for the rest of their lives.

From 2012 to 2029, the retirement age will gradually rise from 65 to 67. There are already calls for it to be raised to 68 by 2042.

In the face of growing unemployment, such a step constitutes an additional pension cut. This will happen in a situation where company closures and mass layoffs are driving ever-larger sections of the working class into so-called poorly paid “mini-jobs,” long periods of unemployment and low-wage positions. Already one in five, that is more than four million workers, must slave away for an hourly wage of just 9.35 euros. It is obvious that these people can pay little or nothing into pension insurance or savings accounts.

The previous attacks on the statutory pension have already led to rampant old-age poverty. The number of senior citizens at risk of poverty is growing year by year, and women, single people, the low-skilled and immigrants are particularly affected.

Among pensioners the poverty rate is increasing the most. According to the Paritätischer Wohlfahrtsverband charity, poverty increased in 2019 among all affected population groups, but the largest long-term rise was among retirees. The poverty rate of this population has grown since 2006 by sixty percent, rising to 17.1 percent. This does not take into account the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

It has also just been revealed that over one million people older than 67 are still working, most of them because they are forced to do so for financial reasons. Of the approximately 38 million people in employment, 1.04 million were 67 or older last year. Almost 600,000 still had a regular job at age 70 or older. 72,000 were over 80 years old. The figures come from an answer by the federal government to a parliamentary question from the Left Party. Of the more than one million older workers, 800,000 are “mini-jobbers” who earn just 450 euros a month.

As the retirement age rises, fewer people get to draw their pension at all. Almost 20 percent of all those who died in 2019 were younger than 69 (19.8 percent). 17 percent of all deceased had not reached the age of 67 and 14.4 percent even died before they turned 65.

Nevertheless, the bourgeois media drum relentlessly for the retirement age to be raised.

The Berliner Zeitung of June 30, 2021 headlined its editorial, “Pension at 68: There is no way around a longer working life.” As in previous screeds, demographic trends are used to justify pension cuts and raising the retirement age.

The Berliner Zeitung criticised the timidity of those in power to make what it deems the necessary changes to the pension system. Regarding the proposals of the Scientific Advisory Council, it says, “The economists warn of a 'funding shock' that could soon hit pensions. This was to look into the abyss. The baby boomers will soon be retiring, and at the same time, people are getting older and older--and thus drawing pensions for longer. By 2035 at the latest, two working people would have to finance one pensioner.”

“Due to demographic developments in Germany, the statutory pension insurance system is threatened with a financing problem in the long term,” was the message in a broadcast by Deutschlandfunk on 24 June 2021, because “fewer and fewer working people will have to pay for more and more pensioners.”

The supposedly decisive argument revolving around “demographic developments” is a bald-faced lie. Whether or not sufficient old-age support can be paid depends less on the average age of a society or the birth rate than on the productivity of society's labour. Objectively, globalisation and modern technology have laid the foundations for all people -- including children, pensioners, the sick and the disabled -- to live in the best possible health, with an adequate standard of living and material security.

That this is not the case is because the means of production under capitalism are not utilised for the satisfaction of social needs, but the personal enrichment and profit maximisation of a few individuals. Hundreds of millions of euros have been, and are being, swallowed up by the corporations and banks through the coronavirus bailout packages of the German government and the European Central Bank.

The associated rise in share prices and the pervasive exploitation of the working class by keeping production going while mass deaths result from the virus have obscenely increased the wealth of the bankers, capitalists and the super-rich. The money needed to finance these bailouts is to be squeezed out of the working class. The brutal attacks on pensioners already in the pipeline are part of this.

Corporations and their shareholders also benefit from the numerous tax breaks in their favour. Corporate taxes alone have fallen by more than half in Germany, from a nominal 60 percent in 1981 to 29.6 percent in 2011. The share of corporate tax receipts in total tax revenues was just 5.4 percent in 2017.

One pandemic fuels another: US overdose deaths hit all time high in 2020 with 93,000 dead

Genevieve Leigh

Drug overdose deaths in the US rose nearly 30 percent in 2020, resulting in a total of 93,000 deaths, according to preliminary statistics released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The figures translate to an average of more than 250 overdose deaths each day, or roughly 11 overdoses every hour in the heart of world capitalism.

This June 17, 2019, file photo shows 5-mg pills of Oxycodone. (AP Photo/Keith Srakocic, File)

The rise in deaths marks the largest single-year increase of overdose deaths on record, eclipsing previous years by thousands. The thirty percent rise in deaths in 2020 equates to 21,000 more deaths than in 2019. Prior to last year, the largest year-to-year increase was 11,000 in 2016—a figure which stunned experts at the time and is just barely over half of the increase in 2020.

The new figures have shocked public health experts, including professionals who have been tracking drug overdose trends for decades.

Daniel Ciccarone, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who studies heroin markets, commented to the New York Times on the revelations: “It’s huge, it’s historic, it’s unheard-of, unprecedented, and a real shame.”

Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, told the Wall Street Journal: “I can remember thinking 30,000 was an astounding number ... Now we’re three times that. It’s crazy.”

To put these figures in historical context, according to the CDC, there were about 9,000 overdose deaths in 1988, around the height of the crack epidemic.

The new figures also mark the most deaths on record from opioids in particular, as well as the most overdose deaths from stimulants such as methamphetamine. Finally, it marks the most deaths from one specific synthetic opioid family known as fentanyls. Fentanyl is 50 times more potent than heroin and is more and more frequently being mixed into other widely used illicit drugs. Fentanyl was involved in more than 60 percent of the overdose deaths last year, CDC data suggests.

According to the new data, overdose deaths rose in every state but two, South Dakota and New Hampshire. The data suggests that at least ten states endured a 40 percent or higher rise in drug overdose deaths from the previous 12-month span. These include Arkansas, California, Kentucky, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Carolina, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia and West Virginia. In Kentucky alone, overdose deaths rose 54 percent last year, to more than 2,100, up from under 1,400 the year before.

The drug epidemic has a severe and profound impact on nearly every facet of US society. There is, first and foremost, the devastating toll that these deaths have on friends, family, co-workers and other loved ones. Children whose parents are caught up in the throes of addiction or die from it are inundating an already overwhelmed foster care system.

Understaffed and overrun hospitals, already dealing with the crippling pressure of the COVID-19 pandemic, cannot cope with the flood of overdose patients. In many towns overdoses are among the most common emergencies that confront first responders. There is no doubt that these deaths, on top of the impact of the pandemic, have taken a deep emotional toll on them.

Overdose deaths are just one facet of what was overall the deadliest year in US history. With about 378,000 deaths attributed to COVID-19 in 2020, more than 3.3 million Americans died last year.

COVID-19 was the third-leading cause of death in the US in 2020, after heart disease and cancer, according to preliminary mortality data. A category ambiguously named “unintentional injuries,” which include drug overdoses, was the fourth leading cause of death.

Overdose deaths combined with COVID-19 deaths have driven down life expectancy to such an extent that some experts believe 2020 will officially register the largest drop since 1943, during World War II. The CDC is expected to report preliminary 2020 life-expectancy data next week.

However, a report released from the CDC earlier this month found that approximately 19 percent more Americans died in 2020 than in 2019. Perhaps most shockingly, researchers also discovered that mortality rates for young adults aged 25 to 34 have skyrocketed in the last decade, reaching levels not seen since 1953.

Researchers determined the rising death rate for adult workers was driven by a sharp increase in deaths from drug overdoses, alcohol, suicide, and cardiometabolic conditions (including both heart disease and metabolic disorders such as diabetes).

Any objective observer reviewing these statistics would assuredly conclude that the social situation facing workers in the US, and indeed around the world, reveals a profound sickness in American society, the heart of world capitalism. Drug abuse and overdoses and other “deaths of despair” are symptoms of a society in deep crisis.

Since the onset of the pandemic, governments around the world responded to the unprecedented public health emergency by pumping trillions of dollars into Wall Street and corporations to prop up world capitalism. In order to pay back this money, workers were forced into plants and factories to continue production.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson perhaps best epitomized the response of the entire global ruling elite when he blurted out bitterly last November: “No more f***ing lockdowns, let the bodies pile high in their thousands!” … And pile up they did.

Workers were forced into impossible situations, often choosing between risking their lives and the lives of their families or giving up their livelihoods. In the last year poverty has soared and hunger has skyrocketed. Thousands of families were evicted from their homes and many more are currently hovering on the brink of eviction as moratoriums continue to be lifted and governments insist that things “return to normal.”

Over the last year and a half, the callous and indifferent attitude of the ruling class to workers has been more starkly exposed than at any time in recent history.

As for the institutions that are ostensibly meant to defend workers and improve their conditions, the trade unions, not a single one organized any resistance to the policies of the ruling class. On the contrary the trade unions acted as junior partners in the facilitation of the reckless and criminal “back-to-work” policy initiated by Trump and continued under Biden.

For many of the tens of thousands of people who had already been struggling with addiction, or who were in recovery, these crushing conditions, social isolation, and the further atomization of the working class were enough to push them to relapse. For many others, including many young people whose plans and lives were totally derailed by the events of 2020, the circumstances led many to turn to drugs, which resulted in tragic premature deaths.

The devastating revelations about drug overdoses in the US underscore the complete inability of the capitalist system, in the country where the financial aristocracy has amassed untold wealth, to put those resources to use in dealing with an acute social crisis. American capitalism can no more deal with the opioid crisis than it can deal with the even greater pandemic of COVID-19.

The necessary resources—doctors, nurses, counselors, drug treatment programs, anti-overdose drugs like Narcan—should be made freely available through a massive social mobilization that would cost only a fraction of what the Pentagon squanders each year on the means of death and destruction.

But this is impossible under a political system dominated by two right-wing capitalist parties that do the bidding of Wall Street and the pharmaceutical companies—including some which directly profited from pumping opioid drugs into impoverished inner city and rural communities.

The working class must break through the political monopoly of corporate America. It must connect the global wave of emerging strikes and rebellions against the trade union straitjacket, and build an independent mass political movement of its own, based on a socialist program.

Workers everywhere are on the move, fighting against the social conditions that laid the groundwork for the horrific drug epidemic ripping through the US. The measures required to confront the drug crisis in the US cannot be carried out without a frontal attack by the working class on the wealth of the corporate and financial elite and its stranglehold on the entire economic and political system.

New poll shows growing majority of youths in the United States now hold a negative view of capitalism

Dominic Gustavo

A new poll conducted by Axios and Momentive has found that more than half of young adults in the US view capitalism negatively, part of a years-long trend in the US that has seen growing hostility to capitalism juxtaposed with growing support for socialism.

College students at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan

The poll, conducted June 11–15, surveyed 2,309 American adults, with the data weighted by age, race, sex, education and geography to reflect the demographic composition of the United States. It found that a majority of Americans (57 percent) still have a positive view of capitalism while 36 percent said they had a negative view. A similar poll conducted in January 2019 found slightly higher support for capitalism—61 percent as against 36 percent.

The most striking shifts were seen among the youth. Among those 18–34 years old, 49 percent viewed capitalism positively against 46 percent who viewed it negatively. By comparison, in 2019, 58 percent viewed capitalism positively, and 38 percent negatively.

Among Gen Zers (ages 18–24), a majority (54 percent) viewed capitalism negatively. Even among those 18–34 years old who identified as Republicans, just 66 percent had a positive view of capitalism, as compared with 81 percent who said that they viewed it positively in 2019.

On the flip side, 41 percent of respondents had a positive view of socialism, while 52 percent had a negative view. When divided by age however, the numbers were quite different. 52 percent of Gen Zers (ages 18–24), and 50 percent of young adults aged 25–34 had a positive view of socialism.

Overall, 66 percent of those polled said that the federal government should pursue policies that attempt to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor, while 58 percent said, “Unfairness in the economic system that favors the wealthy” was a bigger problem than “Over-regulation of the free market that interferes with growth and prosperity.” It is telling that even these meager reformist proposals, which are supported by an overwhelming majority of the population, have little to no chance of ever being implemented under the capitalist order.

These statistics are a reflection of the beginnings of a profound shift in consciousness among the population and particularly among the youth in the United States, the nerve center of world finance capitalism and the bulwark of imperialist reaction.

The shifting attitudes cannot be understood except in the context of the experiences that the population has gone through over the past year and a half. The COVID-19 pandemic and the disastrous response to it by the ruling class has exposed more nakedly than ever before the brazen criminality, corruption and moral depravity of the capitalist system, leading the Socialist Equality Party to rightfully refer to it as a “trigger event,” which has accelerated and exacerbated all of the degenerate tendencies of modern capitalism.

Over 600,000 have died in the US as a result of deliberately homicidal policies pursued by the ruling class—represented by both Republican and Democratic administrations—which have sacrificed the elderly, the infirm, the poor and above all the working class to satisfy the insatiable greed of the financial oligarchy.

In addition to the mass deaths, the economic repercussions of the pandemic have led to the impoverishment of millions more, while the rich have profited enormously from the catastrophe.

While the working class has faced unemployment and the cutting of wages and benefits, the past year saw the wealth of the oligarchy skyrocket to unfathomable levels. The population is now treated to the obscene spectacle of billionaires such as Jeff Bezos openly flaunting their wealth and power with a highly publicized planned trip into space.

For the youth, crushed by student debts which many have no prospect of paying off, and with increasing numbers of teens now being forced to enter the labor market to support their families, the “American Dream” is dead in the water. The brutal reality facing masses of youth in the US was reflected in a shocking report by the CDC which found that mortality rates for young adults aged 25–34 have reached levels not seen since 1953.

The ruling class is well aware that its policies have and will continue to produce mass opposition among the working class. Its response has been of a twofold character.

The attempted coup of January 6, 2021, which saw the supporters of ex-President Donald Trump—aided and abetted by sections of the military, police and intelligence apparatus as well as Republican congressmen—storm the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, was the sharpest expression of the emergence of a fascist movement in the United States, complete with its very own “stab in the back” myth (the lie of a “stolen election”) and its hated scapegoats, immigrant workers and China.

In the final analysis, this phenomenon is the expression of the drive of the most ruthless and viciously reactionary sections of the ruling class towards open dictatorship, aimed ultimately at crushing the resistance of the workers.

On the other hand, the ruling class has adapted to the changing moods among the population by bringing forward a whole caravan of phony “socialists” such as Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), with the aim of duping the workers. They provide an invaluable service for the bourgeoisie by harnessing the growing hostility of the population towards the capitalist order and redirecting it behind the Democratic Party, the party of the imperialist bourgeoisie.

The growing antipathy towards capitalism among the population and especially among the youth is a significant development, particularly in the United States, a nation in which all of the official institutions—from the public schooling system to the mass media to the academics and other bribed ideologists—are utilized to inundate the population with reactionary anti-communist propaganda.

It should be noted that these changing attitudes have occurred despite the best efforts of the pseudo-left to stupefy the people with identity politics—reactionary ideologies such as critical race theory which hold that the main division, the main conflict in modern society is between whites and blacks, or men and women, or gays and straights.

Growing sections of the population are coming to understand, albeit in an undeveloped form, that the main cleavage in society is that between the working class, the vast majority of the population who create all of the wealth, and a tiny minority of capitalist exploiters who have subordinated all of society to their narrow interests.

But it must be understood clearly that this merely represents the opening stages of the struggle for class consciousness. The development of socialist consciousness is not an automatic process. It is not enough to simply be opposed to the evils of capitalism. Youth and workers who wish to overturn the capitalist order must make a conscious turn towards revolutionary Marxism.

There is no doubt that the most progressive and idealistic elements of the youth will turn towards socialism as the terminal crisis of capitalism continues to produce its inevitable disasters. However, in order for these sentiments to find conscious expression, it must be understood clearly what socialism is, and what it is not.

Fighting for socialism has absolutely nothing in common with the promotion of reformist half-measures such as “Medicare-For-All” or the so-called “Green New Deal,” measures which are half-heartedly promoted by bourgeois charlatans such as Ocasio-Cortez, who in any case have no intention of actually putting them into practice.

Revolutionary socialism calls for nothing less than the liquidation of the capitalist system. The capitalist class must be expropriated—that is, the enormous wealth hoarded by these criminals must be confiscated and placed at the disposal of the working class to be used for the benefit of all of society. Socialism calls for the means of production, all of the machinery of the modern economy including the corporate conglomerates and the banks, to be placed under the democratic control of the working class as public utilities. This would include the dismantling of the gigantic military-industrial complex and the use of the enormous resources contained therein for the betterment of society.

Flooding in Germany and Belgium leaves over 100 dead

Elisabeth Zimmermann

Severe thunderstorms and heavy rainfall have led to severe devastation and at least 93 fatalities so far in the German regions of Rhineland-Palatinate (50) and North Rhine-Westphalia (43). At least nine people have also been killed in Belgium.

The actual death toll could be much higher. According to reports, 1,300 people are currently missing. On Friday morning, the Interior Minister of Rhineland-Palatinate, Roger Lewentz (Social Democratic Party), said, “One must say at present, while clearing basements we keep coming across people who have lost their lives in these floods, so I can’t say anything at all about the number where we will end up in the end.” It is a catastrophe, he said, and the situation remains dramatic.

Destroyed houses are seen in Schuld, Germany, Thursday, July 15, 2021. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)

After days of rain, the levels of the Rhine, Ruhr, Moselle and other small rivers and streams rose. Some of them turned into raging rivers and flooded entire towns and cities. In some cases, the water rose so quickly that residents were unable to escape to safety.

The district of Ahrweiler in the Eifel region of Rhineland-Palatinate was particularly hard hit. The town of Schuldei has been devastated. Four houses were swept away by the water, many more have been damaged and are in danger of collapse.

The typically small Ahr, a tributary of the Rhine, became a raging torrent due to the rain. Hundreds of houses along the riverbed were damaged. At least 19 people died in the Ahrweiler district. More than 30 people are still missing. It is not yet known whether they have travelled or found accommodation elsewhere, or whether they, too, were swept away.

Many people had to hold out for hours on the roofs of their houses until they could be rescued from the air. Power outages and disruption of phone networks exacerbated the situation for those affected. Relatives, friends and acquaintances have had difficulty finding out what has happened to their loved ones. At times, even the emergency phone line numbers were unreachable.

There were either no warnings from the authorities or they came so late that the residents could not get to safety in time.

One affected person from Ahrweiler told the WSWS that he and his family were warned only two hours before the floods. The sandbags they received contained no sand. Due to the approaching flood it was too late for them to find sand themselves. Within a short time, the basement and the lower area of the house were completely flooded.

While the German weather service warned of renewed heavy rain in many areas, thousands were evacuated. In the Ehrang district of Trier, 2,000 people were evacuated, including from a hospital and a retirement home.

At least 20 fatalities have been reported so far from the Cologne-Bonn area in North Rhine-Westphalia. Several people died in flooded basements. In Cologne, firefighters found a 72-year-old woman and a 54-year-old man in a basement flooded with water. In the Euskirchen district alone, there were 15 deaths. Three more fatalities were reported by police from Rheinbach.

The Steinbach Dam is located near the town of Euskirchen. It is threatening to overflow, endangering numerous towns in the vicinity.

There were also numerous fatalities in Solingen and in the Unna district. The cities of Hagen in the Ruhr region and Wuppertal in the Bergisches Land region are badly affected. In the Hochsauerlandkreis district, virtually the entire town of Altena is flooded. In Altena, a firefighter involved in rescuing people died. He was swept away by the floods. Another firefighter lost his life during an operation in Werdohl.

Neighbouring Belgium was also affected by the flood. The army has been deployed in four out of 10 provinces to participate in evacuations and search and rescue operations. Nine people have been confirmed dead so far, all in the east of the country near the German border. One person was killed in the town of Eupen, five in Verviers, and one in Pepinstar.

There were numerous evacuations in the province of Limburg, including the border town of Roermond, where 5,000 residents were reportedly brought to safety. Further south in Maastricht, thousands of people were also evacuated. The Belgian National Water Authority warned of record flooding of the Meuse River, which would inundate large parts of the province of Limburg with nearly 900,000 inhabitants.

Authorities have also issued an evacuation order to inhabitants of the city of Liege, which, as of 2013, had a population of over 195,000 people. They urged those “who still have the possibility of evacuating to do so if they find themselves in a zone floodable near the Meuse” river.

The peak of the flooding is not expected until Friday morning. The flood in Liege has been caused in part by the malfunctioning of the Monsin dam bridge in the town. First built in the 1930s, it has been under construction for a year, and only two of the gates out of six are currently operational. This meant the dam was unable to release a sufficient quantity of water, which instead flooded the centre of the town.

There are major fears that a construction crane in the area will be pulled away by the flooding, and that if it falls it could cut a power cable which powers multiple water pumping stations. The power distributors preventively cut the current in this line on Thursday.

The Wallonian water association warned the population not to consume tap water, “even boiled,” in seven communes of the Wallonian region. The electricity and gas networks are experiencing “disturbances on an unprecedented scale,” Resa, the main energy distributor in the province of Liege, announced.

The immense extent of the damage and the high number of fatalities, which will certainly increase in the following days, have several reasons. It is a result of the climate crisis created by capitalism, which leads to increasingly stark weather fluctuations—extreme heat and drought on the one hand, extreme rain and flooding on the other. At the same time, it is a result of decades of neglected and dilapidated infrastructure.

In recent years and decades, insufficient or no investment has been made in dam safety and flood protection, despite the fact that severe flooding has occurred repeatedly. Instead, hundreds of billions of euros have been given to corporations and banks, and spending on the military has increased enormously in Germany and throughout Europe.

The same politicians who are responsible for this policy are now feigning sympathy. The Minister President of North Rhine-Westphalia and CDU candidate for chancellor, Armin Laschet, is travelling to Altena and Hagen on Thursday, to hold out the prospect of financial aid from the state. These are familiar empty promises. Many people are still waiting for promised aid from previous disasters.

The SPD Minister President of Rhineland-Palatinate, Malu Dreyer, also visited Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler, which was particularly hard hit, together with Federal Finance Minister and SPD candidate for chancellor Olaf Scholz. Scholz, who cut his holiday short, expressed his shock at the “tremendous destruction wrought by nature.”

As a sign of mourning, Dreyer announced that flags on public buildings in Rhineland-Palatinate would be flown at half-mast on Friday. “The damage of this disaster is unprecedented,” she said. Many people had lost everything and, unfortunately, the number of dead was also rising. “A first glimmer of hope in this dire hour,” however, was the promise by the federal government to quickly help the affected people. She thanked Scholz “for the strong signal of solidarity.”

Where the solidarity of Scholz and the entire ruling class really lies is well known. In the course of the so-called Corona bailout packages, hundreds of billions were transferred to the accounts of big corporations and the super-rich, which are now to be squeezed out of the working population. The military budget has also been increased by more than €10 billion in the last four years alone and is set to rise further after the federal elections in September.

French neofascist candidate Le Pen denounces Franco-German alliance

Alex Lantier

German Chancellor Angela Merkel arrived yesterday in Washington for talks with US President Joe Biden amid signs of deepening divisions between the major imperialist powers. Tensions in particular between Berlin and Paris, the central powers in the European Union (EU) but who have also fought three bloody wars over the last 150 years, are mounting rapidly.

Marine Le Pen

In Paris, the right-wing daily Le Figaro ran an article yesterday titled “Among Europeans, Washington picks Berlin over Paris.” It wrote, “For several months, an invisible power play was on in diplomatic circles, in Paris and Berlin, to get the first slot. France, knowing it was the underdog, for a time hoped that Joe Biden would choose the Franco-German tandem for his first bilateral European meeting.”

The paper lamented that “Germany is considered the Americans’ best ally in Europe.” Referring to Merkel’s expected departure after this September’s German federal elections, it added: “And if Joe Biden wants, as he has said, to rally the Europeans against China, it is unavoidable that he will lean first of all on Germany, whose economic weight is far greater in the relationship between the European Union and Beijing. Even if she is on her way out, the German chancellor remains, economically, the boss of Europe.”

The escalating international crisis driven by the COVID-19 pandemic and US military threats against China are intensifying historically rooted conflicts among the European imperialist powers.

The starkest expression of this fact was the vitriolic comment published by neofascist presidential candidate Marine Le Pen in the magazine L’Opinion against Germany. She denounced President Emmanuel Macron’s ties to Merkel, branding Germany a nation whose very identity makes it impossible for France to cooperate with. Instead, Le Pen insisted, Paris should work out a military alliance with London and work with Washington against China in the Indo-Pacific region.

“Berlin is not the right partner for Paris on issues of sovereignty,” Le Pen wrote, adding: “It is towards other horizons that France, starting in 2022, must turn—first to the UK, with which she has a similar diplomatic and nuclear status; towards the United States, to renegotiate a treaty on the challenges of the Indo-Pacific and of space; and towards its many allies in the world to defend common ideals in struggle against Islamist terrorism. Finally, it must turn to its own history and national identity to finally find the necessary energy to regain its power.”

Le Pen’s comment infused the themes in her 2017 presidential bid—including her support for Brexit, her opposition to the EU, and her calls to abandon the euro, which she however dropped at the end of the 2017 campaign—with an unmistakably more aggressive and militarist tone.

Le Pen’s comments came after she hailed the publication this spring of coup threats by thousands of French reserve and active-duty officers in the neofascist magazine Current Values. The first such threats were published on the anniversary of the 1961 far-right Algiers putsch that tried and failed to maintain French colonial rule over Algeria. These threats have tacit support from top officers like ex-Chief of Staff General Pierre de Villiers, now employed at the Boston Consulting Group, where his campaigns receive hundreds of thousands of euros from major French corporations.

And, indeed, it appears that in her threat to carry out a major shift in French policy to Germany after 2022, Le Pen was speaking for important sections of the French officer corps.

Le Pen declared that Macron’s attempt to work out a close alliance with Germany was based entirely on illusions. “The first was believing that Germany could detach itself from the United States to build Europe as a military unity,” she wrote. The second was to believe in the possibility of Franco-German industrial cooperation on military equipment, which Le Pen insisted Berlin has “betrayed.” She asserted, “Paris and Berlin do not see eye to eye on any of the major weapon systems (fighter jets, battle tanks, maritime patrol craft.”

The third illusion, Le Pen wrote, “is to hope that Germany can ever change.” She baldly declared, “Politically, the identity of Germany is in and of itself an obstacle to any form of cooperation.”

Such staggering declarations are a warning to the European and international working class. Independently of Le Pen’s chances in next year’s elections, which are fairly good if she faces the widely hated Macron in the second round, such statements reveal that broad sections of the European ruling elite are convinced that it is virtually impossible to hold the EU together. Five years after Britain voted for Brexit, the disintegration of capitalist Europe is accelerating.

Le Pen presented two arguments to support her assertion that French cooperation with Germany is impossible. The first was a concise summation of insoluble, historically rooted conflicts between the European capitalist powers. These include Berlin’s fear of hostile Paris-Moscow alliances that preceded the outbreak of both world wars, and rivalry over France’s large former colonial empire in Africa. Le Pen noted that this means Berlin focuses on building heavy tank forces, while France focuses more on training special forces for wars in Africa.

She wrote, “Berlin will always adopt the politics of its geography: federating the center of Europe against Russia which, as an ally or an adversary, is always present in its calculations. … Militarily, her Atlantist conceptions make her embrace outmoded conceptions: turned to the east, with heavy armor, with limited capacity to adapt. But the French army, more aggressive, more reactive and imaginative, is based on autonomy and thus on using multiple weapon systems.”

The second argument, couched as a complaint at Berlin’s reservations about French imperialism’s nuclear arsenal and its neocolonial wars in Africa, was in reality directed against the German working class. Apart from the German ruling elite, Le Pen noted, there is deep opposition in the German population, rooted in opposition to the horrific experience of Nazism, to the development of nuclear weapons, to the NATO alliance and to war.

She wrote, “Berlin remains fundamentally antinuclear (except its elites, if the nuclear arms are under US control), neutralist (though paradoxically accepting the diktat of NATO), and pacifist (on army deployments and arms exports).”

While calling for alliance with Britain and cooperation with America against China, Le Pen did not spell out the implications of her arguments. However, if she and her backers believe that “any form of cooperation” between France and Germany is impossible, then the inescapable conclusion is that they must be preparing for war.

The escalating economic, social and political crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic and the US war drive targeting China are together reviving all the unresolved problems of European capitalism from the 20th century and raising the specter of catastrophe.

Le Pen’s anti-German outbursts do not speak for French workers any more than did Macron’s call to build an EU military that can fight China, Russia or America. However, they point to the need, as the International Committee of the Fourth International has stressed, to build an international socialist anti-war movement in the working class. The bitter lesson of the two world wars of the 20th century is that European workers’ spontaneous solidarity is not enough to halt the capitalist drive to war.