A Viable Human Future Depends on Living With Less

David Korten

We cannot eat money and there are no winners on a dead Earth.

Science tells us that we now have fewer than 10 years to reduce the human burden on Earth or trigger tipping points in Earth’s natural systems from which there is no return. Most discussion centers on the climate emergency, but we also have crises related to air, water, soil, species extinction, and more.

The primary cause of our crises is well known. According to the Global Footprint Network, humans currently consume at a rate 1.7 times what Earth can sustain. Yet, we have only one Earth and no hope of finding another soon—if ever. The most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirmed what we already know: we’ve run out of time and must now take drastic action to avert an even worse catastrophe.

A viable human future depends on living with less. Does that mean sacrifice? Leaving more people behind? Or is this challenge an unprecedented opportunity to achieve a better future for all? The question of how much is enough, the theme of the fall 2021 issue of YES! Magazine, poses a foundational question for our time.

Daily reports on economic indicators such as GDP celebrate increases in consumption and sound alarm bells when consumption declines. Meanwhile, daily news reports tell of one climate-related disaster after another. Rarely, if ever, do we hear serious discussion of the connection between growing GDP and growing environmental disasters.

The question of how much is enough begins an essential conversation. It is one that usually involves exploring what we as individuals can do to limit our consumption. Asking “when is less more?” invites us to look at societal choices over which we have little individual control. In examining these societal level choices, we can see areas on which we can potentially join in common cause. Let us look at several key areas where less could be more.

Deadly Weapons. Humans have long dreamed of peace, yet we consume enormous amounts of resources for war. A recent study found that the U.S. Department of Defense accounts for an estimated 80% of the federal government’s energy consumption. The defense department is also the world’s single largest institutional consumer of petroleum, which supports the world’s largest collection of guns, tanks, military aircraft, and warships. Though the U.S. military imposed the largest environmental burden of any nation’s military, the U.S. is only one nation among many with large militaries.

The statistic on the defense department energy use tells us nothing about the social and environmental costs of producing deadly weapons or the impacts of their use not just by the military, but also by local police, terrorist groups, criminal syndicates, gangs, and armed individuals. It is far past time we learned to live in peace with one another. The production and use of weapons of war is an obvious example of where less would be more.

Mis-/Disinformation. A healthy society needs responsible media to inform us and connect us with each other. Our expanded communications capabilities create an unprecedented potential for us to join in creating an ecological civilization that works for all of life. Tragically, our ever more extraordinary communications capabilities are most often used to manipulate our minds for purposes contrary to our well-being. This includes advertising that promotes wasteful, even harmful consumption, and propaganda to promote socially and environmentally destructive political agendas. These activities provide lucrative employment to support lavish lifestyles for those who serve them. Less would be more.

Financial Speculation. Money is nothing but a number that has no existence outside the human mind. It can be useful as a tool but becomes a threat to life when its only purpose is to accumulate more money. The structures of modern society make it virtually impossible to live without money, which gives enormous power to those who create it and decide how it is used. Honest money is created transparently by public institutions to serve public purposes. But we now allow private bankers and financial gamers to make claims against society’s real wealth without the burden of creating anything of value in return. The Gross World Product (a global GDP) for 2021 is projected to be around $94 trillion. Analysts project that the value of global financial services will reach $26.5 trillion by 2022. Only a small portion of that amount represents essential financial services. The rest should be considered a form of theft, and a primary driver of income inequality and environmentally burdensome, ego-driven displays of extravagance. Less financial manipulation would give us radically increased equality with far less waste.

The Bitcoin Con. Private cybercurrencies are a form of counterfeiting. Bitcoin, a cybercurrency favored by global cybercriminals and tax evaders, is an especially costly example. The energy consumed in “mining” Bitcoins equals the energy use of a small country or major city. The related computer facilities contribute to electronic waste and the current global shortage of semiconductor chips. Bitcoin and other cybercurrencies have value only because buyers expect the market to bid up the price further, or else they need it to prevent tracking of an illicit transaction.

Global Supply Chains. Until very recently in our history, we organized our economies around the labor and needs of local communities. This facilitated repair, reuse, recycling, and resilience, and allowed communities to work within the capabilities of the Earth’s regenerative systems. But global trade rules first introduced in the 1990s stripped place-based living communities of control of their markets, labor, and other resources, and allowed transnational corporations to consolidate their power without concern for the well-being of workers, customers, and nature. China has become the epicenter of a highly fragile interdependent system of global supply chains involving the massive, environmentally destructive long-distance movement of material goods by sea, land, and air. Less reliance on global supply chains would reduce this burden while helping restore the social and environmental health of local communities.

Short Stay Air Travel. Air travel has helped to bring us together as a global species, but it consumes enormous amounts of time, energy, and other resources for purposes that can often be better served in less socially and environmentally costly ways. The purposes of a great many international business meetings and professional conferences could be better served by sharing information electronically, including with video conferencing. In terms of vacation travel, a stay in a nearby resort often better serves the need for restful time off in a beautiful relaxing environment. Visits to destinations on your bucket list for purposes of bragging rights commonly overwhelm the destination to give you little more than a selfie in a crowd. When it comes to travel, less can be much more.

Auto-Dependent Cities. Yet another example relates to our dependence on cars. My wife, Fran, and I lived in New York City from 1992 to 1998. It was the only time in our adult lives that we had no car. Everything we needed or wanted was in walking distance or reachable by rapid public transit. We loved this healthy and friendly way of getting around. Designing every city to make it easier to walk, bike, or take public transit for daily trips could remove a significant human burden on Earth while improving life for everyone. A growing number of major cities are taking steps to become less car-dependent. Regarding car travel, less can be more.

Why do we have so many wasteful sources of consumption? Culturally, it stems from excessive individualism, and societally it stems from using money rather than healthy living as our standard of economic performance. These two forces spur the wasteful consumption that manifests in nearly every aspect of our lives.

Disruptions in our lives caused by the COVID pandemic gave us a wake-up call that both highlighted our human vulnerability and interdependence, and an economy that rewards harmful behavior and inadequately compensates those doing the most important work.

As we learn to think and act as an interdependent global species, we must look critically at all the forms of consumption that could be eliminated to the ultimate benefit of all. Such an examination is needed if we are to transition to an ecological civilization. I elaborate on the concept in my white paper, Ecological Civilization: From Emergency to Emergence, prepared for the Club of Rome’s discussions on a new economics for a new civilization.

We face a defining choice. We can hold to course with an economy that grows GDP to provide a few with the opportunity to make a killing as they prepare to escape to outer space. Or we can embrace the current opportunity to transition to an ecological civilization, with a living economy dedicated to supporting us all in making a secure and fulfilling living on a thriving living Earth.

Awakening to the reality that we cannot eat money and there are no winners on a dead Earth points us to the latter as the clearly better choice.

Reluctant Acceptance: Responding to Afghanistan’s Refugees

Binoy Kampmark

Do not for a minute think that this is a kind, heart-felt thing in the aftermath of Kabul’s fall. True, a number of Afghans will find their way to Germany, to Canada, to the UK, US and a much smaller number to Australia.  But this will be part of the curtain act that, in time, will pass into memory and enable countries to return to their harsh refugee policies.

Britain’s Home Secretary, Priti Patel, is none too enthused about welcoming high numbers of Afghan refugees.  “We have to be realistic in terms of those that we can bring to the country and resettle in a safe and secure way while giving them the right opportunities going forward in resettlement.”

This waffly formulation has yielded the following formula: the UK will accept a mere 20,000 staggered over five years.  Only 5,000 will be admitted in the next year, after which, presumably, the situation will resolve itself.  “What are the 15,000 meant to do,” asked Labour’s Chris Bryant, “hang around and wait to be executed?”

However inadequate Britain’s response has proven, Australia’s approach remains without peer. Every excuse has been made to delay, to obstruct, to prevent an orderly transfer of Afghan interpreters and former security personnel out of the country.  The Morrison government has become a specialist prevaricator, waiting for the horse to bolt before even finding the barn.  Instead of bothering to use strategic common sense and see the writing on the wall for the Afghan government based in Kabul, it waited months before deciding, abruptly, to close the embassy at the end of May only to then suggest it would need to put in Australian personnel to assist in the evacuation.

The number of humanitarian visas currently being offered is a paltry 3,000.  This is sharply lower than the number of Vietnamese accepted by the Fraser government after the fall of Saigon in 1975, which one estimate puts at 60,000.  In 2015, 12,000 places were offered for Syrians fleeing their country.  The Morrison government, in contrast, finds expanding Australia’s resettlement program beyond the current 13,750 places something of a heresy.

Behind the compassion argument, one constipated at best, is a marked reluctance to actually open the doors to the Afghans.  A good deal of this can be put down to the fact that Afghans have made up a sizeable complement of those maritime arrivals Australian politicians so detest as “illegals” deserving of indefinite detention in its system of Pacific concentration camps.  Many actually fled the Taliban to begin with, but that did not make immigration authorities any softer.

As the Saturday Newspaper appropriately described it, Australia’s antipathetic refugee policy has induced “a kind of moral numbness that puts decisions outside the reach of logic or decency.”  Prime Minister Scott Morrison could never be said to have been taken by surprise: “he was already in the grip of indifference”, one “necessary to live with the refugee policy he has spent years shaping.”

Despite the fall of the coalition-backed Afghan national government, Australian government officials did little to reassure the 4,200 Afghans already in Australia on precarious temporary protection visas that they would not be sent back when the time came.  Australian foreign minister Marise Payne offered an assessment on national radio that was far from reassuring. “All the Afghan citizens who currently are in Australia on a temporary visa will be supported by the Australian government and no Afghan visa holders will be asked to return to Afghanistan at this stage.”

One dark reminder of the brutal, and distinctly non-honeyed approach of Australia’s authorities to Afghan refugees comes in the form of a refugee and former member of an Afghan government security agency who aided coalition forces. For doing so, he was attacked by the Taliban.  He arrived in Australia by boat in 2013 after having suffered a grenade attack on his home and being the recipient of various warning letters from the militants. For his efforts, he was sent to Manus Island, where he was formally found to be a refugee in 2015.  In 2019, he was moved to Australia for treatment during that brief window of opportunity under the now repealed medevac legislation.

In total, he has spent eight years in detention, desperate to help his family out of the country.  He had previously asked no fewer than three times to be returned to Papua New Guinea.  “Every day Afghanistan is getting worse,” he writes in an email to his case manager from the behemoth that is the Department of Home Affairs.  “My family is in a dangerous place and I need help now please.  If you wait I will lose my family.  Why do you wait?  The Taliban want to kill my family.”

The email, read in open court, forms part of a case the plaintiff, given the pseudonym F, has taken against the Australian government, seeking his release.  He argues that his detention prevents him from “moving my family out of Afghanistan to a safe country to save them from the Taliban.” The nature of his detention prevented him “from doing anything to help” his family.

On August 3, 2021, the Federal Court judge Rolf Driver dismissed F’s claims that his detention was unlawful and refused an order “in the nature of the writ of habeas corpus requiring his release from detention forthwith”.  Judge Driver did find that the man was “a refugee and requires resettlement”, ordering mediation between him and the home affairs minister.  While Australia was not an option for resettlement, the applicant should have his request to return to PNG “acted upon”.

Morrison’s ministers are full of excuses about Australia’s unimpressive effort.  Defence minister, Peter Dutton, has constantly reiterated the idea that processing the paperwork is a difficult thing indeed, because some of the visa applicants cannot be trusted.  Having aided Australian and other coalition forces in the past, they had proved flexible with shifting allegiances.  “I’m not bringing people to Australia that pose a threat to us or that have done us harm in Afghanistan.”  With such an attitude, shutting the door to the suffering, even to those who were part of the coalition’s absurd state building project in Afghanistan, will do little to trouble an unformed, unimaginative conscience.

UK’s North-South divide and Boris Johnson’s “levelling up” fraud

Thomas Scripps

Centre for Cities research shared with the Guardian shows the scale of the economic north-south divide in the UK and the fraud of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s claimed “levelling up” agenda.

England’s largest cities outside of London have the lowest life expectancy and productivity in western Europe, according to the think tank. People in Manchester, Newcastle and Birmingham live two years less than the European average. In Liverpool, life expectancy is four years lower.

All major British cities outside of London come bottom of the table in western Europe for productivity. Newcastle, Sheffield and Nottingham have just over half the productivity—measured by Gross Value Added (GVA) per worker—of Brussels and Amsterdam.

Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson, left, and Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak, second right, walk during a visit to Teesport in Middlesbrough, England, Thursday, March 4, 2021. Britain's Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Prime Minister Boris Johnson visited the north east following the Budget announcement that the Treasury and other government departments will be sited on an economic campus in Darlington and that Teeside and The Humber would be among eight new freeports in England. (AP Photo/Scott Heppell, pool)

Data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) puts these finding in the context of a clear economic divide between the north and south of the country. Its latest figures show that the North East, North West, Yorkshire and the Humber, East Midlands and West Midlands all have lower life expectancies than regions in the South. The biggest gap is between the North East and London, at 2.9 years for men.

The North East, Yorkshire and Humber, East and West Midlands also have lower GVA per head than the southern regions, with the North West broadly on par with the South West. The biggest gap is again between the North East (£20,129) and London (£48,857). London is a massive outlier, reflecting its overbearing status in the UK economy, but the next biggest gap, between the North East and the South East (£29,415), is still a 32 percent deficit.

Paul Swinney, director of policy and research at the Centre for Cities, said of Johnson’s promises to “level up” the north in light of these figures, “As an indication of the scale of the challenge faced, when a similar challenge was embarked upon in the former East Germany in the 1990s, the cost was estimated to have reached £1.7 trillion—a far larger amount of money than that being offered here in the UK currently.”

Swinney’s statement puts a sharp point on what is already widely known. The Economist made a similar comparison last year, writing, “North of a line from the Severn estuary to the Wash, and south of Hadrian’s wall, lies an area that (measured by purchasing-power parity) is as poor as the American state of Alabama or the former East Germany.”

It noted that, unlike the area of former East Germany which is home to just 20 percent of the German population, the northern regions of the UK are home to 47 percent of Britain’s population.

The magazine cited research carried out by Professor Philip McCann of the University of Sheffield, published in 2019, comparing the UK’s internal geographic inequality to similar countries on 28 different measures. Inter-regional inequality was above average on all measures and top on six.

As statistics on life expectancy demonstrate, regional economic disadvantage translates into serious social deprivation. Workers in the northern regions have fewer qualifications and less gross disposable income than the UK average, although income differences narrow substantially after housing costs are taken into account.

Unemployment rates in the northern regions in February 2020 were higher than all southern regions except London. The same was true of poverty rates in 2019/20. Of the worst ten local authority regions for child poverty in 2018/19, seven were in the North West and the other three in the North East, West Midlands, and Yorkshire and the Humber.

The pandemic has graphically demonstrated the consequences of these conditions. All the northern regions suffered higher age-adjusted levels of COVID-19 mortality than all the southern regions, except London, which had the highest.

The damage to the north of the country has been wrought over the last four decades. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979 as the representative of a ruling class determined to solve a mounting social and economic crisis through a crushing defeat of the working class. Her government jettisoned the old policy of maintaining national industry through subsidies, protectionism and nationalisation, seeking new profits in the unfolding process of economic globalisation by smashing up globally uncompetitive industries, building up the finance sector and encouraging an explosion of social inequality.

This programme required all-out class war, especially in the industrial heartlands in the north of the country. A wave of closures and unemployment, enforced with brutal state violence, shattered communities, which have been starved of resources ever since. Their fate was a particularly sharp expression of an offensive waged against the entire working class.

The decade of austerity after the financial crisis of 2008-9 compounded the damage. Centre for Cities note that day-to-day spending in deprived urban authorities in the north of England has seen the largest spending cuts of any area of government since 2010. Seven of the cities with the largest cuts were in the North East, North West or Yorkshire. On average, northern cities suffered cuts of 20 percent, versus 9 percent for cities in the East, South East and South West (excluding London).

Labour’s role in this process was filthy, adopting the Thatcherite policies of the Tories in government and blocking any struggle against them in opposition. Their betrayal was so complete that Johnson was able to win a slew of formerly safe Labour seats in the north in the 2019 general election.

But the Tories can only pour salt on these new political pastures. Johnson’s pledge to “level up” the North is risible. The small sums allocated to a “towns fund” (£3.6 billion), a “levelling up fund” (£4.8 billion) and a “city region sustainable transport fund” (£4.2 billion) are a “drop in the ocean”, to quote Swinney.

Even this pittance has been allocated in a transparent attempt to boost Tory electoral fortunes, focused on areas represented by parliamentary seats held narrowly by either the Tories or Labour.

The regionalist politics of figures like Labour Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham, who makes great play of the north-south divide and London-centric government, offers no alternative. They do not speak for the common interest of “the north”, or even of their local cities, because no such common interest exists. The whole of the UK is fundamentally divided by class, which produces far sharper disparities than any geographic divisions.

A closed down Sure Start children's centre and adjoining play area in Ardwick, Manchester. The Bushmore Sure Start site was one of two children's centres closed in Ardwick in 2013 by Labour-run Manchester City Council (credit: WSWS media)

In Yorkshire and The Humber, the top ten percent of earners receive 4.8 times more income than the bottom ten percent after housing costs, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. The figure is 4.6 times for the North West and the East Midlands, 4.5 for the West Midlands and 4.3 for the North East. The ratio for the top one percent would be many orders of magnitude higher.

By far the largest disparities are in London (8.7), the South East (5.9) and the East (5.2), reflecting the fact that most of the South’s advantages are enjoyed by a small sliver of the population. The working-class majority are engaged in the same daily struggle to get by as in the rest of the country. In fact, after housing costs, median income in London is just 1 percent higher than the national average.

The likes of Burnham are the advocates of a small affluent layer of the Northern population who want a larger share of the profits clawed out of all workers by British capitalism. They want investment in the North not to improve the lot of the local working class, but to create more opportunities for their exploitation. This is summed up by the planned setting up of freeports in the East Midlands, Humber region, Liverpool City Region (including Port Salford, in Greater Manchester, as a customs site) and Teeside, as part of the Tories’ post-Brexit economic agenda.

Freeports are special economic zones in which certain taxes and regulations are suspended. They have become synonymous the world over with corporate parasitism and super-exploitation. Burnham acknowledged these “risks”, which “had to be watched”, but described the Port Salford plans as “an exciting proposal” and a “boost” to the region’s ambitions.

“Levelling” the UK is not a geographic, but a class question. As Swinney’s figure of £1.7 trillion indicates, regional inequalities and imbalances can only be solved through a frontal assault by the working class on the super-rich and the major corporations and banks, expropriating their fortunes and using the resources to meet social needs.

Scientists identify new hominid species Homo longi, or “Dragon man”

Frank Gaglioti

The announcement of a new hominid species Homo longi, possibly a parallel and contemporaneous species of Homo sapiens, has made the story of human evolution even more complex.

The lead scientists were from the Center for Excellence in Life and Paleoenvironment, Chinese Academy of Sciences Professor Xijun Ni, Hebei GEO University in Shijiazhuang Professor Qiang Ji in China, along with an international team of scientists in the United Kingdom and Australia.

They published their findings on June 25 in the open access journal The Innovation , under the headline “Massive cranium from Harbin in northeastern China establishes a new Middle Pleistocene human lineage,” along with two other articles, “Late Middle Pleistocene Harbin cranium represents a new Homo species” and “Geochemical provenancing and direct dating of the Harbin archaic human cranium.”

The designation of a new species was made from a rare near-complete hominid skull in China with a remarkable history of discovery. The skull was originally found on a riverbank approximately 90 years ago by a Chinese man building a bridge across the Songhua River in Harbin near the North Korean border, when the area was under Japanese occupation. The Chinese man, an indentured labourer, hid the skull in a well and only revealed its location on his deathbed to his grandchildren. Unfortunately, he did not disclose the exact location of his find. This meant that the scientists were not able to find supplementary evidence from the skull’s geological surrounds. It is remarkable that the skull was rediscovered at all so a scientific analysis could take place.

Map shows the location where the skull of Homo Longi was found (Credit: The Innovation)

“We found our long-lost sister lineage. I said, ‘oh, my gosh!’ I could not believe that it was so well preserved. You can see all the details. It is a really amazing find!” Professor Ni told the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

The skull is rather large, 23 centimetres long and more than 15 centimetres wide and with a braincase capacity of 1,420 millilitres, a volume comparable to modern humans. H. longi has almost square eye sockets, thick brow ridges, a wide mouth and oversized teeth. Only one molar was found intact. The individual is considered to have been fairly large and was about 50 years old.

“Homo longi is heavily built, very robust. It is hard to estimate the height, but the massive head should match a height higher than the average of modern humans,” said Ni.

The Harbin cranium in standard views (Credit: The Innovation)

Dating using strontium isotopes found in sediment deposits in the nasal cavity came up with an age between 138,000 and 309,000 years. Radioactive uranium dating established a minimum age of 146,000 years.

“Because of a long, difficult and confused history since the discovery, the information about the exact geographic origin and stratigraphical context of the cranium has been lost, impeding its accurate dating,” stated Key Laboratory of Virtual Geographic Environment Qingfeng Shao, a fellow researcher.

The skull has features that are a mixture of modern and more archaic humans. The large brain case resembles that of Homo sapiens, while its more archaic features, such as square eye sockets, thick brow ridges and large molar, ruled it out as a modern human.

Ni used a complex algorithm comparing 55 traits with 95 fossil human skulls. The analysis placed the “Dragon man” with other Chinese hominid fossil skulls from the Middle Pleistocene (130,000 to 789,000 years ago), including Dali, Jinniushan, Hualongdong and Xiahe fossils, as a sister species of Homo sapiens. These are fossils that have not been designated to any species.

A life-reconstruction of the Harbin cranium (Credit: The Innovation)

During the Middle Pleistocene, a number of human species coexisted, including Homo erectus, H. neanderthalensis (Neanderthals), H. heidelbergensis, Denisovans and H. sapiens.

Ni and his team consider that H. longi along with the other hominid species evolved as a result of a “founder event” as humans dispersed out of Africa.

According to Ni, “Founder event dispersal usually involves a small number of individuals that dispersed to a new locality through a long dispersal distance and established a new isolated founder population. ... These Homo lineages probably had a strong capability of dispersing for long distances but remained in relatively small and isolated populations.”

Such founder events enabled the evolution of numerous human species due to isolation in the Middle Pleistocene contemporaneous with H. sapiens.

“The beautifully preserved Chinese Harbin archaic human skull adds even more evidence that human evolution was not a simple evolutionary tree but a dense intertwined bush. We now know that there were as many as 10 different species of hominins at the same time as our own species emerged,” Mark Maslin, professor of earth system science at University College London, told the Guardian .

London’s Natural History Museum Professor Chris Stringer, who worked on the discovery, elaborated the skull’s significance in a comment to the BBC. “In terms of fossils in the last million years, this is one of the most important yet discovered. What you have here is a separate branch of humanity that is not on its way to becoming Homo sapiens (our species) but represents a long-separate lineage which evolved in the region for several hundred thousand years and eventually went extinct.”

The scientists’ analysis has proved to be fairly controversial, with some researchers asserting that the Dragon Man should be designated as a Denisovan.

Denisovans were identified from DNA extracted from a tiny fossilised finger bone found in the Denisova cave in Siberia in 2008. DNA analysis showed that Denisovans had interbred with modern humans, contributing five percent of the genome of modern Melanesians. They are considered a close relative of Neanderthals. Scientists estimate they lived 280,000 to 55,000 years ago. Because the Denisovan fossil evidence is so fragmentary, it has been designated a “genome in search of a fossil record.”

University of Cambridge Professor Marta Mirazon Lahr, a paleoanthropologist, pointed to the similarities between a fossil Tibetan jawbone and Dragon Man.

“The Denisovans are this fascinating mystery population from the past. There is a suggestion (from DNA evidence) that the jawbone found in the Tibetan Plateau might be a Denisovan. And now because the jawbone from Tibet and Dragon Man look like each other—now we might actually have the first face of the Denisovan,” Mirazon said.

The H. longi skull is considered to be very close to the Xiahe mandible that was discovered in 1980 in the Baishiya Karst cave located on the northeastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau in Xiahe County. An analysis of protein from the jawbone showed marked similarities with Denisovans. Researchers were not able to obtain DNA from the bone.

“I think it (Dragon Man) probably is a Denisovan,” Chris Stringer told Science magazine.

Other researchers think Ni and his team have acted prematurely and do not have enough evidence to designate Dragon Man as a new hominid species. They do not agree with the analysis that the Dragon Man was closely related to the Xiahe jawbone because there are no overlapping traits, as the Dragon Man skull lacks a mandible.

DNA studies show that modern humans are more closely related to Neanderthals than Denisovans. If the Xiahe jawbone is from a Denisovan, then Dragon Man’s closest relative is likely the Neanderthals, not H. sapiens.

Paleoanthropologist María Martinón-Torres at CENIEH, the national center for research on human evolution in Spain, speaking to the Science magazine, said: “It’s premature to name a new species, especially a fossil with no context, with contradictions in the data set.”

Ni and his team have not yet tried to extract DNA or protein from the skull or tooth but this is obviously important future work in order to resolve some of the controversy surrounding the Dragon Man.

A new tool for analysing and dating fossils is an examination of protein, especially collagen. This is a protein that is found in bones and other tissues and is able to endure over time more readily than DNA. In the Xiahe jawbone, all its DNA was degraded, but scientists were able to extract collagen, demonstrating the jaw was probably from a Denisovan.

Ni commented on the controversy surrounding their discovery. “The results will spark a lot of debate, and I am quite sure that a lot of people will disagree with us. But that is science, and it is because we disagree that science progresses.”

Surge in COVID deaths adds to pressure on Iran’s clerical regime

Jean Shaoul

Saturday saw Iran’s highest single-day COVID-19 death toll of the pandemic, as 684 people succumbed to the disease and more than 36,400 new cases were confirmed.

This latest surge in infections, driven by the highly contagious delta variant, is Iran's fifth, bringing the total number of cases to more than 4.5 million and deaths to 102,000, numbers even Iran’s health officials admit is an underestimate of the real toll. Worse is yet to come, with deputy health minister Iraj Harirchi acknowledging, “Infections and hospitalization numbers have stabilized in 14 provinces... but fatalities are expected to be on a relatively rising trajectory in coming days.”

One of the top doctors in Mashhad, Iran’s second largest city, declared that such is the gravity of the situation that no families in the city are without a patient or someone who has died in the pandemic. Without citing statistics, he said infections and deaths “are very high” and younger people are dying. Video clips of hospitals full of patients lying on the ground or in courtyards and long lines at pharmacies are circulating widely.

People wait for their turn to receive Covid-19 vaccine at a vaccination center in Iran Mall shopping center in Tehran, Iran, Monday, Aug. 9, 2021. So far only 3 million people out of Iran's population of 80 million have had both vaccine doses. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)

By far the worst affected country in the Middle East, Iran has suffered decades of US sanctions that have had a devastating impact on its health care system, preventing access to medicines and supplies to treat coronavirus cases, cancer patients, and other deadly diseases. But fraud, mismanagement and profiteering by Iran’s pharmaceutical companies are widespread, with multiple reports of the hoarding and stockpiling of vital medical supplies.

Like its counterparts internationally, the Iranian government has put profits before lives and shunned comprehensive measures that would ensure the closure of all non-essential work, schools and universities. Instead, it has imposed short-term, piecemeal measures that most recently have included a ban on private travel between provinces until August 27 and a five-day closure of government buildings, banks and non-essential shops that ended Saturday.

Only 5.4 million of Iran’s 85 million population have been fully vaccinated, with more than 16.3 million people awaiting their second jab. Vaccination centres are swamped with kilometre-long lines of people queuing for their jabs, largely imported from China, Russia, India, Cuba, Japan and via the global COVAX initiative. Some of these vaccines may be less effective against the delta variant. A study by the Statistics and Information Technology Management Center found that 2,072 Iranians out of the 2.85 million fully vaccinated at the time of the study had died, a far higher rate than elsewhere.

In the run-up to last June’s presidential elections, amid growing popular anger over the Rouhani government’s mismanagement of the economy, the pandemic and the lack of vaccines, the vaccination issue became deeply politicised. The so-called hardline or principalist faction around Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which answers directly to Khamenei, used it as an opportunity to attack the faction around President Hassan Rouhani who negotiated the nuclear accord with the Obama administration that was suspended by Trump, and to engineer the shoe-in of its favoured candidate, the conservative chief justice Ebrahim Raisi.

Strangled by US sanctions that made it impossible to import vaccines, Khamenei banned the import of vaccines from the US, Britain and France, denouncing them as untrustworthy and forcing the Iranian Red Crescent Society to refuse 150,000 vaccines donated by Pfizer. One of those who signed an open letter in January warning against importing western vaccines was Bahram Eynollahi, chosen by Raisi as his health minister.

While various state bodies vowed to produce domestic vaccines, the attempt has generally failed as only one million doses of COVIran Barekat have been administered after several unexplained delays to large-scale production. This has forced the authorities to partially reverse the ban on Western vaccines, manufactured outside the US and UK, with Raisi announcing that the import of 30 million doses has been finalised. A further 60 million doses are needed.

The pandemic has exacerbated Iran’s economic problems. The international Financial Action Task Force has blacklisted the country for failing to adopt financial transparency measures. Nearly a quarter of Iran’s young population are out of work, annual inflation is heading towards 50 percent and the currency has fallen from 40,000 rials to the dollar in 2017 to nearly 250,000 in Tehran’s unofficial exchange markets today. Around 40 percent of the population, more than 32 million people, live below the poverty line.

Workers and their families face frequent electricity shutoffs, while water supplies are erratic at best, forcing nearly 10 million people in several provinces, including Khuzestan, Markazi and Baluchestan, to abandon their homes and farms in the last eight years and move to the big cities in search of work, as well as leading to last month’s protests in the oil-rich province of Khuzestan.

Iran has also been hit by the forest fires that devastated the eastern Mediterranean region. Large swathes of the forest in the Zagros Mountains that stretch from southern Turkey to southwestern Iran have been destroyed, with the government making no serious efforts to battle the fire. The IRGC sent firefighting planes and helicopters to combat fires in forests near Antalya and Mersin in Turkey, causing outrage in Iran’s fire-devastated regions.

Contract workers in Iran’s state-owned oil industry have gone on strike in support of higher wages and an end to subcontracting that enables employers to evade paying the minimum wage and other benefits. Iran’s ruling elite is acutely conscious that the 1978 oil workers’ strike, amid a wave of mass protests by workers, students, and the urban poor, was key in toppling the blood-soaked US-backed regime of Shah Reza Pahlavi.

Iran has also seen a spate of attacks on its nuclear facilities and basic infrastructure, attributed to Israeli attacks and sabotage.

It is these conditions that brought Raisi to the presidency with the votes of just 30 percent of Iranians after the Guardian Council, at the behest of the Supreme Leader, disqualified all but seven of the 592 candidates. As well as his close links to the IRGC, whose supporters now control all branches of the state, Raisi has a track record of repression, most notably in 1988 when as Tehran’s deputy prosecutor he ordered the mass execution of thousands of political prisoners.

But all factions of the Iranian bourgeoisie view the resumption of the 2015 nuclear accord, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and the lifting of more than 1,600 sanctions that have targeted Iran’s oil exports as the way out of the economic, social and political crisis confronting the country. Tehran paused talks in Vienna, pending Raisi’s inauguration earlier this month. Raisi has expressed his support for the JCPOA, but the two sides remain far apart.

In addition to pressing Tehran to curtail its nuclear programme, Washington is reportedly seeking to wring further concessions on its conventional missile programme as well as demanding it surrenders its influence in the Middle East, bowing to the US quest for hegemony.

It is for this reason Tehran has largely refrained from inflammatory comments on the US debacle in neighbouring Afghanistan, hoping to take advantage of the collapse of Washington’s puppet regime at the bargaining table. While Raisi said the US withdrawal amounted to a “military defeat,” he pledged that Iran, which hosts around three million refugees, would seek to ensure stability in the country.

Tehran would encourage “all groups in Afghanistan to reach a national agreement.” He added, “While consciously monitoring developments in the country, Iran is committed to neighbourly relations,” implying Tehran would recognize a Taliban-led government in the country.

Similarly, Iran had sought to avoid escalating Israel’s covert maritime war on the country, aimed in part at least at torpedoing the resumption of the JCPOA. However, once the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times revealed Israel’s long-running attacks on Iranian vessels earlier this year, Iran had no option but to mount a naval offensive targeting merchant ships linked to Israel. This culminated in the drone “suicide” attack on MV Mercer Street that killed the Romanian captain and the British security officer three weeks ago.

In a bid to further boost his bargaining position, Raisi said, “Our foreign policy will not be limited to the nuclear deal… We will have interaction with the world. We will not tie the Iranian people’s interests to the nuclear deal,” indicating that he wants to further strengthen ties with Russia and China, in line with Tehran’s “look to the east” policy.

Chilean Morenoites promote illusions in Constitutional Convention

Mauricio Saavedra

Maria Rivera, leader of a group known as the International Workers Movement (MIT), the Chilean section of the Morenoite International Workers League-Fourth International (LIT-CI), is being promoted by the mainstream media under conditions of a volatile political and social situation.

Rivera, who won a seat in the Constitutional Convention running as an independent in the motley anti-party People’s List, has been given an extraordinary amount of airtime over the last two months, appearing in several debates and on talk shows, something that would have been unheard of prior to the anti-capitalist demonstrations in 2019 and the political chasm that it has laid bare.

Screenshot of Maria Rivera on “Mentiras Verdaderas” broadcast on La Red

She has appeared in a debate with right-wing and Social Party constituents on CHV Noticias, and she appeared in “Mentiras Verdaderas” of the television platform La Red. Rivera appeared on “Aquí se Debate” transmitted by CNN Chile. She gave a three-quarter-page interview to the arch-conservative El Mercurio, spoken to La Nación, the “left” El Ciudadano and several other periodicals.

Behind this media attention are the calculations of the Chilean bourgeoisie as it tries to rebuild legitimacy for the thoroughly discredited capitalist state through the establishment of the Constitutional Convention. New political forces are being created and others strengthened to deal with the electoral annihilation suffered by the old and deeply hated political caste that emerged in the transition from military to civilian rule three decades ago. All of the state institutions and the traditional political parties remain deeply unpopular.

This crisis of rule has only sharpened since the COVID-19 pandemic, as the coalition of right-wing parties of Sebastián Piñera’s administration have done next to nothing to alleviate the pandemic’s impact upon the working-class sectors amid the worst health, social and economic crisis in decades.

With the old center-left coalition—which included the Socialist Party, the Christian Democrats, the Radicals and the Party for Democracy—also in tatters, the bourgeoisie is actively promoting a gamut of so-called independents and non-party-aligned forces that emerged to hold a strong position in the constituent assembly. Many have become involved in politics for the first time as a result of the historic protests and the horrific crackdown that followed. Untested and relatively unknown, these elements are being sized up by the ruling class to determine which will be useful in ensnaring the working class back into parliamentary politics.

This is especially urgent because the working class has to date abstained in large numbers from the electoral process. There was an average turnout of only 22 percent in primaries held in July in the runup to this year’s presidential elections.

The Frente Amplio (FA), or Broad Front, formed an electoral alliance with the Stalinist Communist Party (PCCh) and advanced two candidates in the pseudo-left primaries. FA ran Gabriel Borić, former student leader and a deputy in the lower house, who received one million votes to the 692,862 obtained by Daniel Jadue, PCCh member and mayor of Recoleta, a community in Santiago.

Within the right wing, the Chile Vamos coalition held primaries on the same weekend in mid-July. Not one of the four candidates matched either Borić’s or Jadue’s votes. Sebastián Sichel, a relatively unknown who served as Piñera’s Minister for Social Development, came the closest winning 659,570 ballots.

The FA coalition is itself an unstable and ever-changing amalgam of middle-class radical, feminist, ecological and libertarian parties that emerged from the student rebellions of the last decade. Many of its student leaders have since integrated themselves into posts in academia, the union bureaucracy, the civil service and the legislature. Hence their significant vote among a more well-off constituency, predominantly made up of the young, professional middle class.

The primaries also demonstrated the Frente Amplio’s flagging support in poor and marginalized working-class sectors of Santiago. While the upper middle class eastern communities of Las Condes, Vitacura, Lo Barnechea registered between 40 and 55 percent participation in the July primaries, in the working-class Santiago communities with multidimensional poverty of up to 25 percent, less than a quarter voted. This class divide is repeated across the country.

This was also revealed in a publicity stunt that could have ended much worse than it did. At the end of July, Borić visited anti-government protesters languishing in the Santiago 1 penitentiary for up to 22 months either awaiting trial or serving hefty sentences. The pseudo-left presidential candidate intended to take advantage of growing demands for an amnesty for thousands of predominantly working-class prisoners detained on trumped up charges for participating in the 2019 protests.

Rather than being treated the hero, Borić was heckled and jeered by the relatives of the framed-up protesters. Undaunted, he proceeded inside the jail—without being invited—and was accosted before guards interceded and got him out. The following day a group calling themselves “Political Prisoners of the Revolt” leaked a communiqué rebuking the candidate.

“We prisoners were not informed of his visit. It seems to us a profound lack of respect that a person, who played an active part in the enactment of repressive laws and the hardening of penalties associated with the social outbreak, visited,” the prisoners declared.

“The aggression (Borić suffered) is a consequence of his actions and his political dilettantism that has led him to make pacts… that have led to the terrible living conditions that forced the people to rise up against so much injustice, among them: the Agreement for Peace, the anti-barricade law, anti-sabotage law.”

The student protests initiated in October 2019 over public transport fees became a mass anti-capitalist movement involving millions of students, youth, workers and the middle class against decades of extreme social inequality, police violence and, in particular, as a reaction to President Piñera’s authoritarian crackdown. A state of emergency was called for the first time since the military dictatorship, with armed forces patrolling the streets.

The protests became increasingly confrontational as the entire repressive apparatus was unleashed against workers and youth, with dozens killed or disappeared, hundreds suffering severe traumas, injuries and mutilations. Cases of beatings, sexual violence, rape and torture began to be committed with impunity—34 cases of which are today based on charges of “crimes against humanity” presented at the International Criminal Court by the crusading Judge Baltasar Garzón against Piñera and civilian and military authorities.

It was under these conditions that Borić and a number of other FA congressmen joined with the parliamentary extreme right, centre and left parties in an “Agreement for Social Peace and a New Constitution,” as a cynical means of diffusing the situation and sidetracking anti-capitalist sentiment into calls to reform the authoritarian charter. In the same breath, these pseudo-left forces also lent their support to a series of authoritarian bills criminalizing social protest.

The MIT lends its support to the capitalist state

Maria Rivera of the Morenoite MIT is a lawyer and founder of the defense group “Defensoría Popular” involved in providing legal defense to framed up prisoners from Maoist guerrilla outfits, such as the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR) and the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front (FPMR), as well as several anarchists. Previously a member of the MIR herself, Rivera was captured and tortured by the secret police before being exiled to Argentina in 1983. There she joined the Morenoite Movement for Socialism (MAS), then part of a popular front coalition with the Stalinist Communist Party of Argentina, before returning back to Chile in 1990 with the transition to civilian rule. She has remained in the LIT-CI ever since, forming the MIT as its Chilean section.

In other words, this is a person with a long track record in Latin American centrist and national opportunist politics that masquerades as socialism. Politicians of her stripe use revolutionary sounding phraseology and claim to belong to the Trotskyist Fourth International, but their historic function has been to tie the working class to various forms of petty-bourgeois and bourgeois nationalism.

In its 70 years of existence, the political tendency identified as Pabloism, along with its Latin American variant Morenoism, has sown illusions in bourgeois nationalist caudillos such as Juan Domingo Perón or bourgeois reformists of the Salvador Allende type. It has swung from backing petty-bourgeois Castroite guerrillaism to entering Popular Front-style coalitions with Stalinists, both with disastrous results. Its principal function is to keep the working class subordinated to bourgeois nationalism and the capitalist state in Latin America, which has led to bloody defeats time and again.

By participating in the Constitutional Convention, Rivera’s actions demonstrate that the Morenoites will once again attempt to tie the working class to the capitalist state. That is why her services are in demand.

In November 2019, the MIT claimed it was opposed to the Peace Accord, called for the downfall of the Piñera administration, made appeals to expropriate Chile’s wealthiest families and filed a suit against Piñera for crimes against humanity in the Chilean courts.

“We will not be in any constituent process while the prisons are filled with young people from the front line (of the social protests),” Rivera claimed. She called for the immediate release of all political prisoners, adding that the mission was “to defeat the Piñera government.”

A year later in a statement in the MIT press, Rivera was saying that “it is important to participate in the Constituent Process. … It is crucial to have candidates who represent the revolution and who refuse to sell false promises, but rather are clear in saying that the only way we can change our lives is through struggle.”

Six months later, in May of this year, the MIT was writing: “We are going to the Constituent Assembly to use this front more to fight, not to negotiate agreements with the same old (parties)…”

Yet to Resumen she said: “There is no possibility of negotiating with the traditional parties, as long as they do not adopt these demands; it makes no sense, at least I am not willing to negotiate the freedom of political prisoners…”

And to El Mercurio: “If we achieve that a popular majority makes a mobilization, a general strike, we can demand the Convention decree the release of political prisoners by the means discussed. For us this is a relentless fight. With this political prison I assure you that Chile’s problems will not begin to be solved.”

By the second day of the Constitutional Convention in July, Rivera’s incendiary proclamations vanished like a puff of smoke.

“I regret that in the speech (of president of the convention, Mapuche leader) Elisa Loncón did not remember to reject or repudiate the repression and to demand the freedom of political prisoners. … Otherwise it is a progressive speech; besides it talks about deepening democracy. The truth is that this state of things must be changed and not deepen the miserable democracy we have.”

For all the revolutionary bravura, the fact is that Rivera, the MIT and rest of the pseudo-left are as terrified as the entire capitalist state is to the unchartered waters they are entering. The call for the release of the prisoners of the social revolt is an attempt to dissipate a volatile situation that can easily erupt and that they may not be able to control.

Malaysian government implodes with COVID-19 epidemic out of control

Peter Symonds

Amid an accelerating COVID-19 epidemic and deteriorating economy, Malaysia’s Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin resigned last Monday. He was replaced on Friday by Ismail Sabri Yaakob, a member of the right-wing United Malays National Organisation and deputy prime minister in the previous government.

Malaysia's incoming Prime Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob, left, receives documents from King Sultan Abdullah Sultan Ahmad Shah before taking the oath as the country's new leader at the National Palace in Kuala Lumpur. (Khirul Nizam Zanil/Malaysia's Department of Information via AP)

Ismail is the country’s third prime minister in less than four years. His installation will do nothing to end the political turmoil and instability that followed the defeat of the UMNO-led coalition at the 2018 national election. UMNO had been in power continuously since formal independence from Britain in 1957, through a gerrymander, autocratic methods of rule and domination of the media and state apparatus.

UMNO was defeated in 2018 by an electoral alliance between an opposition coalition led by Anwar Ibrahim and the United Malaysian Indigenous Party (Bersatu), a UMNO breakaway led by former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. In 1998, amid the Asian financial crisis and bitter disagreements over economic policy, Mahathir sacked Anwar as finance minister, expelled him from UMNO then jailed him on trumped-up charges.

As part of the opportunist electoral arrangement between the two political enemies, Mahathir was installed as prime minister with Anwar due to take over in 2020. The political tensions within the ruling coalition, which were evident from the start, led to its collapse as the time for Anwar’s installation as prime minister approached.

In March 2020, Muhyiddin Yassin, who had served as interior minister, split from the coalition with most Bersatu members, and cobbled together a government with the support of UMNO and the Islamist Parti Islam se-Malaysia (PAS).

UMNO’s defeat in 2018 had been the result of widespread popular discontent over social inequality, entrenched corruption, and autocratic methods of rule. That opposition has only intensified as a result of the Muhyiddin government’s gross mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Malaysia now has one of the highest infection rates and deaths per capita in the world. Daily new infections have more than doubled since June when a partial lockdown was imposed and hit a record 23,564 last Friday, bringing the country’s total to over 1.5 million cases. The death toll stands at more than 13,000.

The pandemic was initially contained after the Muhyiddin government imposed a strict lockdown shortly after coming to power and by July 2020 announced that the country had zero cases. However, as restrictions were eased, the number of infections and deaths rapidly escalated out of control.

In January, Muhyiddin secured the support of the king for the declaration of a state of emergency. That was driven more by his government’s growing political crisis than the need to contain the spread of the virus. The measures that contained the pandemic between March and July last year had not required emergency powers.

By June, the daily number of cases hit 7,000, when Muhyiddin declared a “total lockdown” which was described by critics as “half-baked.” The government permitted 18 manufacturing centres to continue to operate, mainly at 60 percent capacity, transforming factories and workers’ crowded dormitories into major transmission sites for the virus. This dangerous situation was compounded by the lack of financial support, forcing workers to go to work just to survive, and an inadequate testing and contact tracing regime.

The failure of the government to contain the virus, together with the worsening economic and social crisis, has fueled opposition, including protests by young people and a strike last month by grossly overworked junior doctors. The hospital system has been overwhelmed by COVID cases and lacks beds, staff and equipment.

Al Jazeera reported last month: “Social media has been awash with harrowing photos and videos… One video showed bodies kept in what appeared to be a hospital storeroom while the neighbouring ward was so full, patients were sitting in wheelchairs or on benches dragged in from corridors outside. Others have shown people queueing for hours at COVID-19 assessment centres following positive tests and crowded and unsanitary conditions at government-run quarantine facilities.”

An Australian National University survey of South East Asian countries found that 49 percent of respondents in Malaysia were “very worried” they might fall ill or die. Some 41 percent were “very worried” the pandemic would affect their financial situation and their children’s education.

With the economy stagnating and expected to grow by only 3-4 percent this year, UMNO seized on the mounting political crisis to pull the plug on the coalition government. Muhyiddin was forced to step down after key UMNO figures left the ruling coalition. The installation of Ismail Sabri Yaakob, a longstanding UMNO member and defence minister in the previous government, effectively puts UMNO back in power.

Bridget Welsh, a South East Asia expert with Malaysia’s Nottingham University, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC): “Malaysia has a new PM, with essentially the old politics and players. It’s back to the past: UMNO is now in PM seat, returning to power through elite bargains despite being booted out for corruption in 2018.”

Ismail is a particularly zealous proponent of UMNO’s racialist politics of favouring ethnic Malays, who constitute about 60 percent of the country’s population, over its large ethnic Chinese and Indian minorities. In 2019, while UMNO was in opposition, he reportedly called on the Muslim Malays to wage a “jihad” against the ruling coalition and accused it of being anti-Islam.

Ismail’s record of ethnic Malay chauvinism is a warning that the new government will resort to the stock-in-trade of UMNO politicians—divisive racialism and police-state methods—to deal with the widespread popular opposition that will inevitably develop.

His government is reliant on a disparate coalition for its slim parliamentary majority and will be seen by much of the population as simply a continuation of the previous Muhyiddin administration that failed to control the pandemic.