President Biden has inherited a terribly flawed US foreign policy. For the past few decades, the pro-corporate US foreign policy has been a catastrophic failure, especially in the Middle East. Our criminal military interventions there have resulted in the devastation of much of that area, impoverished millions, created millions of refugees, and injured or killed millions more. Moreover, this criminal policy has wasted trillions of US taxpayer dollars, injured or killed thousands of US forces, and has badly damaged US strategic interests.
The illegal US use of aggressive sanctions against nations that don’t follow its dictates has also harmed tens of millions of people worldwide. In addition, US pro-corporate trade policies as well as the US-influenced International Monetary Fund and World Bank have impoverished tens of millions in the Third World. Perhaps of even greater importance, the US-led opposition to enforceable policies that ameliorate the effects of climate chaos threatens billions of people.
Clearly these ruinous policies need to be changed. The Biden administration must seize this opportunity and implement a sane foreign policy. Below are some excellent principles that provide a guideline for such a foreign policy. These principles were laid out in the “ Cross of Iron” speech delivered by President Dwight Eisenhower on April 16, 1953. Two lengthy excerpts from this speech are shown next.
He said:
“The way chosen by the United States was plainly marked by a few clear precepts, which govern its conduct in world affairs. First: No people on earth can be held, as a people, to be enemy, for all humanity shares the common hunger for peace and fellowship and justice. Second: No nation’s security and well-being can be lastingly achieved in isolation but only in effective cooperation with fellow-nations. Third: Any nation’s right to form of government and an economic system of its own choosing is inalienable. Fourth: Any nation’s attempt to dictate to other nations their form of government is indefensible. And fifth: A nation’s hope of lasting peace cannot be firmly based upon any race in armaments but rather upon just relations and honest understanding with all other nations.”
Later in this speech, Eisenhower added:
“This Government is ready to ask its people to join with all nations in devoting a substantial percentage of the savings achieved by disarmament to a fund for world aid and reconstruction. The purposes of this great work would be to help other peoples to develop the underdeveloped areas of the world, to stimulate profitability and fair world trade, to assist all peoples to know the blessings of productive freedom. The monuments to this new kind of war would be these: roads and schools, hospitals and homes, food and health. We are ready, in short, to dedicate our strength to serving the needs, rather than the fears, of the world. We are ready, by these and all such actions, to make of the United Nations an institution that can effectively guard the peace and security of all peoples.”
Eisenhower also pointed out the implications of spending huge amounts on military weapons in terms of homes, schools, hospitals, etc. that weren’t built.
President Eisenhower plainly recognized that our security and well-being, as well as that of all people on the planet, come from cooperation, not competition. Once we understand this point, the necessary policies become clear. In summary, President Eisenhower, a military icon who knew well the horrors of war, specifically stressed respect for the sovereignty of nations, the need to make the U.N. stronger, spoke against forced changes in regimes or economic systems, called for military disarmament and supported world aid and reconstruction. Even though he wasn’t correct in describing what the US was willing to do or its path, imagine the difference had Eisenhower or any of his successors followed through on his words.
President Biden now has the opportunity to follow Eisenhower’s counsel in a world where US actions have destroyed the myth of its moral authority or of being the exceptional nation. The US must work to rejoin the community of nations by complying with international law instead of running roughshod over it. This means among other things that the US must stop threatening other nations as well as ending its illegal sanctions.
In particular, some possible steps the Biden administration could take in collaboration with the international community are:
share covid-19 vaccines with all nations at an affordable cost; may require the temporary suspension of patents;
create enforceable steps for dealing with climate chaos including a large and increasing carbon tax; and fulfill funding climate change commitments to Third World nations;
drastically reduce weapons spending, disband NATO and rely on the UN and diplomacy for settling conflicts; may require the ability to override a veto in the Security Council;
strongly support international law and human rights for Palestinians; also support enforcement of the Right of Return for Palestinians;
rejoin weapons treaties including the JCPOA (aka, the Iran Nuclear Deal) and ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons;
pay reparations for their rebuilding to nations the US has devastated;
close overseas military bases;
end unilateral sanctions, especially those against Venezuela, Cuba, Iran and North Korea; and
strongly support the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Disappointingly, it appears as if President Biden will continue to pursue the disastrous US foreign policy. It is up to us, we the people, to convince President Biden and Congress to put the public interest over corporate profits.
Despite the restrictions forced on live performance by the COVID-19 pandemic, there are some musical institutions that have successfully brought soloists and chamber music ensembles to worldwide audiences online.
Wigmore Hall in London(Photo credit–wigmore-hall.org.uk)
London’s Wigmore Hall stands out in this category. It is famous for its acoustics and, with 552 seats, ideal for chamber music. While larger venues such as New York’s Carnegie Hall (capacity 2,800) and the Metropolitan Opera (3,800) have been forced to close their doors until at least the forthcoming fall 2021 season, Wigmore Hall has presented live performances on an almost daily basis since last June, on many occasions before smaller socially-distanced audiences, and sometimes with no live audience at all.
A report in the Financial Times last week highlighted the achievements of Wigmore Hall during the past year. Its ambitious programming has attracted a huge international audience, proving that there is a demand for classical music, and the potential for a vast increase in its audience, including among the young generation. The Wigmore’s live streams, which began with a recital by pianist Steven Hough last June that has reached an audience of 800,000, are archived in its Video Library and can be viewed and listened to for 30 days after the performance.
Recitalists have included not only world famous artists like Hough and other pianists, including Igor Levit, Angela Hewitt and Paul Lewis, as well as cellist Steven Isserlis and tenor Ian Bostridge, but also younger and less well known artists, such as soprano Kitty Whately, cellist Leonard Elschenbroich, soprano Christine Rice and many others.
The Carducci, Elias, Schumann and Doric string quartets were among those that performed last year, in some cases highlighting Beethoven quartets to mark the 250th anniversary of his birth. The opportunity for close-up views, as with the Elias Quartet’s performances of Beethoven’s sublime late 13th and 14th quartets in a recital last fall, at least partly compensated for not being able to be physically present at the concert.
The regular recitals have also included music of the 20th century, including work by Benjamin Britten, Dmitri Shostakovich and others. They have also on occasion featured far less frequently performed music, such as that of the mid-20th century American composer Morton Feldman, in a recital that reached seven to eight times the number it would have held in the hall, according to the Financial Times report.
While the Wigmore has been forced to interrupt its live programming during the latest lockdown, as COVID-19 rages in London and throughout Britain, it has tentative plans to resume by the spring, with additional recitals by Levit once again, soprano Diana Damrau, pianist Mitsuko Uchida and others.
Wigmore Hall is by no means the only venue or organization that has continued to present programming during the pandemic. Indeed, the majority have done so, although for orchestras and opera companies this has taken the form of films of past performances. The Metropolitan Opera continues its online presentations of performances recorded in recent years, as well as from the more distant past. The company began video broadcasts in 1977.
While orchestras in Detroit, San Francisco and elsewhere have made recordings of past performances available online, many chamber music venues in the US have presented live streamed music. These include the venerable Peoples’ Symphony Concerts in New York City, which is presenting almost a full lineup of its typical annual number of 18 concerts. Music Mondays, another small but admirable effort in New York, is continuing with its monthly series of free concerts, online instead of at its usual Manhattan venue. In addition, some summer music festivals, such as Music Mountain, in northwest Connecticut, have put some programs online.
The Wigmore series, however, is by far the most large-scale and impressive of these efforts, as reflected in the international audience it has reached.
The success of this series, as well as other efforts, also highlights the financial pressures facing nonprofit venues that work to present classical music and expand its audience. The Wigmore has raised donations from listeners, and is on track to raise 1 million pounds [$US1.4 million] by the time of the one-year anniversary of its first recital from last June. This compares to pre-pandemic annual revenue of 7 million pounds, 4.5 million in ticket sales and 2.5 million in grants and donations. Online performances are of course less costly to present, but are still estimated to cost 3,000 pounds per recital, plus artists’ fees.
Pianist Angela Hewitt in Toronto 2017 (Photo credit–Mykola Swarnyk)
European musical presenters receive far more in public subsidies than their counterparts in the US, who in many cases receive virtually nothing. The top one-tenth of one percent, multimillionaires and billionaires, generally reserve their largess for the biggest companies like the opera, and there too, their “generosity” has strict limits, as shown by the Met Opera’s demands for 30 percent pay cuts from its staff, and the lockout of its stagehands that began last month.
The success of Wigmore Hall shows all the more urgently the need for full public support for classical music and all of the arts, directing the resources of society away from profit and towards meeting the material, cultural and spiritual needs of all.
The IG Metall trade union has agreed to the destruction of 3,500 jobs at truck and bus manufacturer MAN in Germany and Austria. Further job cuts at the Volkswagen subsidiary are already planned. The company employs 36,000 worldwide.
On Tuesday, the executive boards of MAN SE and MAN Truck & Bus SE, together with representatives of the union and the works council, signed a “key points paper” that is intended to achieve an “improvement in earnings of up to €1.7 billion,” not least through job cuts.
MAN plant in Steyr (Photo: Christoph Waghubinger / CC BY-SA 4.0)
Hardest hit are the plants in Steyr, Austria, with 2,200 jobs, and Plauen, Germany, with 150 jobs. The Steyr plant is to be sold and the Plauen site closed. Workers in Plauen have been offered new jobs at the VW plant in Zwickau, 52 km away. A plant closure could be decided as early as the first half of 2021, IG Metall Zwickau leader Thomas Knabel told the press.
IG Metall stresses that it has been possible to avert the 9,500 redundancies originally announced in the group’s strategy paper and reduce them to 3,500 jobs cut.
First, this is a well-known ruse of the trade unions. Corporations announce a high number of jobs to be cut so that the ultimately lower number can then be presented as a “success” by the unions. Second, even the figures mentioned are a smokescreen to hide the facts from the workforce.
The figure of 9,500 also included international locations and numerous temporary workers have already left in recent months because their contracts were simply not renewed. A few months ago, there were 4,000 workers at the Nuremberg plant. Currently, there are 3,600 workers, and by the end of 2022, there will only be 3,100. The 400 temporary workers who have left the company are not included in the reduction figures.
· In Salzgitter, 1,900 regular employees are to remain at the end of 2022 out of around 2,400 jobs at present, a reduction of 20 percent. “A reasonable amount,” as the IG Metall deputy secretary in Salzgitter-Peine Brigitte Runge puts it.
· In Munich and Dachau, according to the agreement, only 7,500 of the current 9,000 jobs will be occupied at the end of 2022. It is to remain the main production plant for trucks, with cab outfitting and assembly.
· The Nuremberg site is to develop drive technologies in the future. The workforce there is to shrink from 3,700 to 3,100 jobs.
· In Wittich, only 60 permanent employees are to remain.
These are some of the reduced numbers that IG Metall wants to claim as a “victory.” At the same time, however, it is preparing further cuts in upcoming negotiations, which are being kept confidential.
“The contents of this key points paper are to be implemented with a future collective agreement as well as in factory-level agreements,” the group’s press release says. The word “future collective agreement” should set alarm bells ringing for all workers—because IG Metall always takes this to mean job and wage cuts and a deterioration of working conditions. Supposedly, this is to ensure competitiveness and so save the production locations. The opposite is the case; these future collective agreements pave the way for the gradual closure of entire plants and locations.
What the now-agreed key points paper—the saving of €1.7 billion—means in concrete terms can only be guessed at from the announcement of the agreement:
· €550 million are to be saved in “material and personnel costs” in the group. What this means for working conditions and pay will only become clear in the forthcoming negotiations, but nothing good can be expected.
· €700 million are to be saved through the supply chain, i.e., job cuts and wage reductions for those working there.
· €450 million are to be “earned” in additional “distribution services.” Here, too, there is nothing concrete known.
Another hackneyed ritual is the threat of compulsory redundancies. As usual, the MAN group threatened this, and the works councils and trade unions were “up in arms” against it, only to finally agree to the cutbacks by other methods. This time was no exception. Saki Stimoniaris, chairman of the general works council and a member of the company’s supervisory board, had initiated labour court proceedings in September last year against the redundancies announced by the executive board. A “location and employment safeguard” from 2016, which excluded them, was valid until the end of 2030.
Like all such agreements, they are not worth the paper they are written on. Such agreements are only valid if they are not needed by the workers because the profits are flowing. But as soon as the profits dry up and the workers need a guarantee of employment and location, this is no longer the case.
The 2016 agreement on safeguarding jobs at MAN also contains a “right of termination,” known as the “bad weather clause.” This allows for dismissals for operational reasons if sales slump by 40 percent. Before the labour court, the company cited the slump in sales during the coronavirus pandemic and the European Union’s stricter CO2 regulations, which have been in force since 2019. The cutbacks were already on the horizon even before the pandemic, because the group did not achieve its targeted return on sales.
Proceedings in the labour court over the compulsory redundancies are still ongoing, with a verdict not expected until the summer. After Tuesday’s agreement, however, MAN works council head Stimoniaris was already proudly rejoicing. “We take responsibility for our MAN.” The “secret of the success of this proud company,” he said, was that the group could always rely on each individual.
Stimoniaris’ reliability in 2019 cost the MAN Group almost half a million euros, with this functionary pocketing exactly €482,040 for his work on the supervisory board.
After the group announced last year that it would cut 9,500 jobs, the leaders of IG Metall and the VW group immediately stepped in to find a mechanism to quell the anger in the ranks of the workforce.
This was the role played by the key points paper, which involved not only the MAN works council and the executive board of MAN Truck & Bus, but also Jürgen Kerner from the IG Metall executive board (who is also deputy chairman on the MAN supervisory board), Gunnar Kilian, the VW personnel director appointed by IG Metall, and Matthias Gründler, the chairman of MAN’s parent company Traton. All participants agreed from the beginning that workers’ livelihoods had to be subordinated to the strategic corporate goal of achieving an operating return of 8 percent on sales.
Workers can only defend their jobs and wages through a united, independent movement that opposes the capitalist system, which always subordinates workers’ interests to shareholders’ greed for profit. This movement must include colleagues in all international factories. For example, MAN has factories in Krakow, Poland (opened in 2007, with 580 workers) and Starachowice (in the MAN group since 1999, with 3,000 workers), to which production is now to be partially transferred.
Spain’s Constitutional Court, empowered to determine the constitutionality of all laws in the country, has ruled that the 1939-1978 fascist regime under General Francisco Franco did not commit crimes against humanity. The ruling constitutes an endorsement by a top European Union court for a four-decade fascist regime and its policy of mass murder and repression.
Adolf Hitler and Francisco Franco meeting in 1940 (Wikimedia Commons)
It is part of the unfolding global ramifications of the January 6 coup in Washington spearheaded by Donald Trump, with much of the Republican party and of the state apparatus. Emboldened by the US Democratic Party’s calls for “unity” with the fascist coup plotters, the adoption of far-right agenda by European governments, and the role of pseudo-left groups in downplaying the fascist threat, the Constitutional Court can publicly deny the atrocities committed by Spanish fascism.
Workers and youth internationally must be warned. If the crimes of fascism are being rehabilitated, it is because powerful sections of the ruling class are plotting to carry out a preemptive counterrevolution against the mass opposition against social inequality and murderous “herd immunity” policies.
On Wednesday, the Constitutional Court ruled 9 to 3 to reject the appeal filed by Gerardo Iglesias over tortures he suffered under the Franco regime. Iglesias, the former secretary general of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) and founder of PCE-led United Left, appealed the decision of a regional judge not to hear his complaint in May 2018.
Gerardo Iglesias described Honrado as “real beast” in a 2018 press conference. According to the complaint, Iglesias was subjected to police torture on three occasions—in 1964, 1966 and 1974—due to his political and trade union activities.
The Court argued against Iglesias’ appeal on the basis that the statute of limitations on the “presumed crimes” has been reached. In addition, the 1977 Amnesty Law, which was backed by the PCE during the Transition, protects all crimes committed by the fascist regime.
Iglesias then argued that they represented crimes against humanity, for which there is no statute of limitations. The judges responded by shamelessly arguing that crimes against humanity did not exist in the Spanish Penal Code at the time—that is, when the fascist regime still held power and was committing these crimes—and provocatively asserted that the alleged crimes do not fit the category.
It is unquestionably established, however, that the torture of Iglesias is part of the crimes against humanity committed by the fascist regime of General Francisco Franco. Despite the attempts to enforce collective amnesia of its crimes, the Spanish ruling class, both under the dictatorship and the current post-Franco regime, have had to face the fact that its crimes were recorded in countless ways—in tens of thousands of books, films, songs and artworks. Moreover, just over half of the Spanish population was born before the Spanish fascist regime founded by Franco fell.
The Francoite regime’s crimes include:
· The killing of around 200,000 political oppositionists, intellectuals and left-wing workers during the Civil War. Approximately 75,000 were extra-judicially executed behind fascist lines.
· The deliberate targeting of civilians in bombing raids which killed around 10,000 civilians.
· Support to Nazi Germany in its war of extermination against the Soviet Union during the Second World War. It sent 45,000 fascists, the so-called Blue Division, to the Eastern Front.
· Detention of between 700,000 and one million people in 300 concentration camps from the Spanish Civil War into the 1940s. Many died of malnutrition and starvation.
· The use of approximately 400,000 left-wing workers as slave laborers for infrastructure construction.
· The theft of 300,000 babies from poor or left-wing mothers.
· Outlawing all trade unions and political parties and criminalizing strikes and protests.
· Widespread torture of political detainees in police stations and jails.
· Censorship of left-wing newspapers and books.
· Suppression of national minority languages and traditions, including those of Catalans, Basques and Galicians.
To date, only one person has been judged over these crimes: Baltasar Garzón. In 2008, the former judge opened an inquiry into the crimes against humanity committed by the fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War and the years that followed. He was accused of abusing his judicial authority. On this basis Garzón’s career, spanning over three decades, was terminated.
That the Constitutional Court can claim that all the above are not crimes against humanity exposes the rotten character of left populist Podemos, the main government coalition partner of the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE). Confident that it will not be opposed by what the ruling elite passes off as left in Spain, the Court can make the most reactionary and grotesque assertions.
To date, Podemos has not even posted a Tweet, let alone made a statement on the reactionary ruling. This is despite the fact that the PCE, to which the torture victim Gerardo Iglesias belongs, is part of Podemos.
The ruling has barely received any media coverage. The last thing Podemos wants is to raise the issue of the fascist threat and the international ramifications of the ruling, concerned, above all, it would spark a movement against its own government.
Podemos only acknowledges the far-right danger when mass anger erupts, but otherwise tries to maintain total silence on the issue. One of the few times it spoke out on the issue was last December, when WhatsApp chats were leaked of a group of dozens of retired generals proclaiming their loyalty to Franco and calling for mass murder of left-wing voters to “extirpate the cancer.” One former general wrote: “I think what I’m missing is to shoot 26 million people!!!!!!!!”
Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias remained quiet for days, only to emerge in prime-time public television after mass anger erupted in social media. He brazenly insisted that “What these gentlemen say, at their age and already retired, in a chat with a few too many drinks, does not pose any threat.”
All these fascist threats are part of an intensifying coup plot by sections of the Spanish ruling class, now emboldened by the developments in the US and internationally, aiming to establish a dictatorship to impose the banks’ “herd immunity” diktat.
This reactionary court ruling of the Constitutional Court underscores that European workers should support the demand of the Socialist Equality Party (US) for an open, public, live-streamed investigation of all aspects and all the allies of the January 6 fascist coup in Washington. The exposure of the coup plotters in Washington will only strengthen the demands for a full exposure of the coup plotters in Spain.
Over the past week three people in New Zealand have tested positive for the more contagious South African variant of COVID-19. They had earlier returned negative test results prior to being released from two weeks of mandatory isolation in Auckland’s Pullman Hotel, one of several hotels that are serving as managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) facilities for people returning from overseas.
The entrance to the Christchurch Airport Novotel, which was converted into a managed isolation and quarantine facility. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
A 56-year-old woman recently returned from Europe left the hotel on January 13 and began developing mild symptoms two days later while travelling in the Northland region. She tested positive for the virus on January 23. On January 26 two more Aucklanders, a father and daughter, who had left the hotel around the same time, also tested positive.
The cases highlight the ongoing risk of a serious outbreak in New Zealand, despite Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s government being lauded in the international media for supposedly stamping out the coronavirus. Under pressure from workers, Ardern imposed a relatively strict lockdown in March–April 2020, which limited the number of COVID-19 deaths to 25. However, as the pandemic continues to rage out of control in large parts of the world, with 2.2 million dead so far, no country can be considered isolated from the virus.
There is no evidence that the three returned travelers transmitted COVID-19 to anyone else in New Zealand, but the situation remains highly uncertain. Some school principals told Radio NZ yesterday that they were making plans for a return to remote learning in case a new community outbreak is detected. For now, the government has not announced any lockdowns or other restrictions.
The new cases quickly revealed that the Labour Party-led government has failed to properly equip the health system to respond rapidly to an outbreak. Newshub reported on January 25 that “there were wait times of more than six hours and police were called to turn people away” at understaffed COVID-19 testing stations in Northland. Leanne, who had visited the same locations as the Northland case and had developed symptoms, said: “Having a whole year now of experience with this virus should have prepared us far better than this.”
As of Friday more than 36,000 tests had been completed since the positive cases were confirmed.
Vaccines are not yet available and Stuff reported yesterday that “the Ministry of Health does not yet have a vaccination target for border, MIQ and health workers, or a time frame in which it will aim to vaccinate 70 percent of the population.” COVID Response Minister Chris Hipkins told the media that vaccination was “likely to be a year-long process.”
In the meantime, MIQ hotels present a clear risk of further outbreaks. There are currently more than 4,000 people staying in 32 MIQ facilities, and more than 4,000 staff. Yesterday there were 67 positive COVID cases among the returned travelers.
The source of infection for the three cases who stayed in the Pullman Hotel is still unconfirmed. Officials suspect they caught the virus from another person, or from a surface, shortly before the end of their two-week isolation period. The hotel is not taking any new returnees and people currently staying there are being mostly confined to their rooms while the cases are investigated.
Candice Botha, whose two daughters have been staying at the Pullman after returning from South Africa, told Stuff yesterday that one of them had contracted COVID-19 at the hotel and the pair will now have their isolation period extended. Botha said they had witnessed a “clear lack of social distancing” at the hotel, including guests playing basketball and running around.
There have been many warnings about inadequate staffing and safety procedures at the MIQ facilities. On January 21, Stuff reported that a woman quit her job at a MIQ hotel in Christchurch because “she didn’t feel enough was being done to stop workers getting COVID-19 from guests.” There were multiple instances of people not wearing masks, touching surfaces and mixing with others.
Microbiologist Duncan McMillan, who was isolated at the Novotel hotel near Auckland Airport, wrote to Minister Hipkins saying it was “as leaky as a sieve.” He said Defence Force personnel, who have been deployed to guard MIQ facilities, were not properly trained: “They have no idea on how to be careful to the extent that is necessary, and there is seemingly little oversight by trained microbiology professionals.”
Auckland Professor of Medicine Des Gorman told Radio NZ it was “dumb good luck” that the 56-year-old Northland woman had not been a “super-spreader,” like approximately 15–20 percent of coronavirus cases. He said New Zealand remained “very, very vulnerable” with an unvaccinated population and “a very leaky border.”
Gorman called for a temporary border closure to high-risk countries while quarantine facilities are improved, saying: “If you’re coming back from the UK then you shouldn’t be at the Pullman in the middle of Auckland city.”
University of Auckland scientist David Welch told the Conversation on January 27 that the Northland case was the ninth incursion of the virus into the community from a returned traveler since August 2020, when an outbreak in Auckland caused a number of deaths.
Welch wrote that the use of “makeshift” MIQ facilities in the country’s biggest city, “rather than purpose-built facilities,” combined with “the increasing prevalence of the new variants worldwide meant it was inevitable we’d eventually see [the virus] in the community. Unless there are major improvements at the border, we can expect more cases.”
Epidemiologist Nick Wilson has called for purpose-built MIQ facilities and earlier this month told Newstalk ZB it was “crazy” to use hotels in Auckland. He also strongly criticised the practice of using buses to transport MIQ guests from central city hotels to a sports field across town for exercise, telling Stuff: “The authorities are not recognising how infectious this pandemic virus is—and with the new variants it is even more so.”
Another outbreak could have devastating consequences if it is not quickly suppressed. The public health system is severely under-resourced after decades of austerity, and already crowded hospitals could be overwhelmed—as has happened throughout Europe, Brazil, the United States and elsewhere.
Auckland Mayor Phil Goff and Minister Hipkins both stressed this week that a lockdown in the city is unlikely, with Goff telling the media it would be considered as a “last resort.” Prime Minister Ardern has previously assured big business that her government will aim to avoid further nationwide lockdowns, so as not to disrupt profit-making.
India’s far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has seized upon the “violence” and “anarchy” that erupted in Delhi during a Jan. 26 Republic Day protest against its pro-agri-business laws to launch a long-prepared campaign to repress the farmers’ agitation through state intimidation and violence.
Representatives of different religions walk in a march in support of the ongoing farmers' protest, in Kolkata, India, Dec. 12, 2020. (AP Photo/Bikas Das)
This campaign is being spearheaded by the Delhi Police—which are under the direct authority of Home Minister Amit Shah, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s chief henchman—and the BJP state government in neighbouring Uttar Pradesh (UP). The latter is led by Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu high priest, ardent Hindu supremacist and political thug.
On Thursday, UP Chief Minister Adityanath ordered district authorities and police to forcibly end all farmer dharna (sit-down protests) in India’s most populous state. Even before this, on Wednesday night, police had brutally attacked a group of farmers while they were sleeping and destroyed the encampment they had maintained since Dec. 19 at Baduat on the Delhi-Saharanpur national highway.
On Thursday evening, police attempted to evict farmers from the much larger protest site on the Delhi-UP border at Ghazaipur. Backed by a massive deployment of security forces and an order under Section 144 of the Criminal Code banning all gatherings of more than four people, the authorities demanded the protesting farmers evacuate their site. This they refused to do, despite a government-ordered cut-off of the protesters’ electricity and water supply, resulting in a tense stand-off.
Indian security forces, who are notorious for their brutality, are no doubt waiting for further reinforcements and, most importantly, a direct order from the Modi government to mount an all-out assault. Such action would invariably result in a bloody clash, with potentially explosive political consequences.
According to media reports, farmers flocked to the Ghazaipur encampment yesterday in response to a vow to defy the BJP government’s evacuation order that has since gone viral from Bharat Kisan (Indian Peasant) Union leader Rakesh Tikait. “There is a conspiracy against us. I will not surrender even if the police fires bullets at us,” declared Tikait.
The Delhi Police have issued First Information Reports (thereby opening criminal investigations) that identify 37 farmer protest leaders as implicated in the violence that erupted during Tuesday’s tractor parade and march. Those named include Tikait, political scientist and former Aam Aadmi (Common Man’s) Party leader Yogendra Yadav, environmental and social justice activist Medha Patkar, eight other Bharat Kisan Union leaders, and representatives of the umbrella group the Samyukta Kisan Morcha and other kisan sabhas (farm unions).
The FIRs claim that “the rioters/protesters and their leaders had a pre-planned objective” to defy the numerous restrictions police had imposed on the Republic Day protest, including that they strictly adhere to police-designated routes far from the city centre. This, the FIRs assert, led to numerous crimes include rioting, criminal conspiracy, and attempted murder.
Delhi Police Commissioner S. N. Shrivastava has said his force is using facial recognition technology and CCTV and video footage to identify those who engaged in rioting. “Those involved in the violence will not be spared and the farmer leaders will be questioned,” he declared.
Not only is the Delhi police, under the thumb of home Minister Shah; its ranks are rife with supporters of the government and its Hindu right allies. Delhi police savagely attacked last winter’s mass protests against the government’s anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act, and stood by, and in some cases participated in, the three days of anti-Muslim violence that convulsed north-east Delhi in late Feb. 2020.
Yesterday, Delhi police facilitated a violent, BJP-instigated assault on farmers at their protest encampment at Singhu on the border between Haryana and the Delhi National Capital Territory.
Police had denied water trucks and journalists access to the Singhu protest site. But it was a different story when it came to pro-BJP goons, who were armed with stones and sticks, chanting their support for the police and demanding the farmers be expelled for “insulting” the national flag. Police allowed them to enter and set upon the farmers, then intervened with lathi charges and tear gas volleys to protect the goons.
“They are not locals, but hired goons,” 21-year-old farmer Harkirat Mann Beniwal, told The Tribune. “They were throwing stones, petrol bombs at us. They attempted to burn down our trolleys also. We are here to resist them. We won’t leave.”
As it did on Tuesday, the Haryana government cut off telecom, internet and SMS services in much of the state.
Underscoring that its campaign of repression has only begun, the BJP government used Friday’s opening of the budget session of India’s parliament to reiterate its commitment to the three pro-corporate farm “reform” laws it rushed into law last September, and to vilify the protesting farmers.
In an address to a joint session of parliament, Indian President and BJP minion Ram Nath Kovind boasted that the farm laws provide “new facilities and rights to the farmers” and enjoy widespread support among them. In a barbed, lying reference to Tuesday’s events he declared, “The national flag and a holy day like Republic Day were insulted in the past few days.” This was followed with an admonishment to the farmers that oozed with hypocrisy and ruling class malice. “The Constitution,” intoned Kovind, “that provides us freedom of expression, is the same Constitution that teaches us that law and rules have to be followed seriously.”
Other BJP leaders, including Minister of State for Home G. Kishan Reddy, have been even more menacing, denouncing the farmers for “sedition.”
The government responded to the launch of the farmers’ Delhi Chalo (Let’s go to Delhi) agitation on Nov. 26 with a massive show of force—including mass arrests, the invocation of Article 144 across Haryana and parts of UP, and widespread cellphone and internet service cuts—with the aim of smothering it from the outset. It was able to prevent opponents of its farm laws from reaching the capital. But it was thrown into political crisis when there was an outpouring of support from workers and toilers across India for the tens of thousands of farmers who, having defied the state security gauntlet, encamped themselves on Delhi’s borders.
In the ensuing two months, the BJP government maneuvered, hoping to split and wear down the farmers with endless rounds of negotiations in which they offered to make minor amendments to the three farms laws. At the same time, it sought to lay the groundwork for state violence by smearing the agitation as China- and Pakistan-supported and infiltrated by Sikh separatists, and by supporting public interest litigation petitions to have the protest declared illegal by the Supreme Court on the grounds it was impeding traffic.
Now Modi and Amit Shah have seized on Tuesday’s events to activate and legitimize their longstanding plans for state repression by painting the mass agitation against the government’s three pro-agribusiness laws as violent and illegitimate.
In this, the corporate media has been a key accomplice. It has promoted lurid claims of the farmers plunging Delhi into violence and anarchy on Republic Day.
Much about what happened on Tuesday remains unclear, but whatever violence did occur has been grossly exaggerated. Moreover, the actions of the police are being whitewashed: their provocative restrictions on the protest; the violence they visited on the farmers; and their conspicuous security lapses.
In an action that demonstrates the authorities’ nervousness in this regard, the BJP governments of UP and Madhya Pradesh have issued FIRs against six senior editors and journalists for their reporting on Tuesday’s violence, including of farmer claims that one protester lost control of his tractor and died because he was shot by police.
The government-police accusations against the 37 farm leaders are a transparent frame-up—a legal-political vendetta of the type for which the Hindu supremacist BJP is notorious.
The police-government attempt to implicate the farm leaders in violence turns reality on its head. The farm leaders bowed to all of the police’s demands concerning Tuesday’s protest, only to find that the authorities had taken numerous provocative steps, including barricading the prescribed march routes. They vehemently denounced the violence as soon as it erupted.
Moreover, throughout the agitation they have been at pains to describe it as “non-political” and have made no broader appeal for support by, for example, raising demands that address the specific needs of the agricultural workers and marginal farmers. They have thus made clear that in no way do they want to challenge the authority of the Modi government and its class war agenda, of which the farm laws are only a part.
A central element in the government campaign to smear the protest as “anti-national” is Tuesday’s mysterious appearance of a small number of protesters atop Delhi’s storied Red Fort, from which the prime minister delivers the annual independence address, and their raising of a farm union flag, as well as a Sikh religious pendant. Numerous observers have pointed out that a significant security detail is normally present at the Red Fort, and access to its roof barred by lock-and-key. Moreover, as the farm organizations have noted, the Punjabi actor who led the contingent that entered the Fort, Deep Sidhu, was until very recently publicly identified with the BJP.
While the anger of the farmers at having been forced to camp out for two months in inclement weather before being allowed to demonstrate in the capital was palpable, everything suggests that elements within the police, acting at the government’s orders, connived in the “breakdown” of “law and order” to provide the pretext for state repression.
Ominously, an increasingly important element in the BJP’s campaign to delegitimize the farmers’ protest is the stoking of anti-Sikh communal sentiment.
In what they said was a show of support for the farmers, sixteen opposition parties, led by the Congress Party, till recently the Indian ruling elite’s preferred party of government, and including the twin Stalinist parliamentary parties—the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPM, and the Communist Party of India—boycotted yesterday’s opening of the budget parliamentary session and presidential speech.
The CPM and CPI are working to harness the swelling mass opposition to Modi and his BJP to the Congress Party and various right-wing regional and capitalist parties, while confining the working class to the sidelines, so as to prevent it from intervening in the crisis as an independent political force, rallying the rural toilers behind it in the fight against the Modi government and Indian capitalism as a whole.
Barely 10 days after initiating its long-announced COVID-19 vaccinations program, Brazil is already facing shortages of vaccines, with local governments announcing the decision to delay the administering of the second dose in order to maximize the number of those covered by the first dose.
Vaccination delays have been recorded worldwide, exposing previous predictions by governments of a quick rollout as another attempt to lure the working class into accepting the herd immunity policies of the ruling class. In Brazil, delays have been blamed by congressional leaders and the corporate press almost exclusively on a retaliation by Chinese and Indian authorities against the pro-US diplomacy touted by the administration the fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro.
Cemetery workers carry the coffin of Bruno Correia, whose family said he died of COVID-19, to his gravesite at the Campo da Esperanca cemetery in the Taguatinga neighborhood of Brasilia, Brazil, July 17, 2020 (Credit: AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)
The widely held assumption voiced by editorial boards is that both China and India, responsible for a vast portion of worldwide pharmaceutical products manufacturing, were deliberately delaying the shipment of vaccines and vaccine inputs for Brazil.
The shipment delays were known a day after the country’s drug regulatory agency, the Anvisa, gave emergency approval for two vaccines in an extraordinary meeting on Sunday, January 17, broadcast live by major cable news networks. Anvisa granted emergency use for two vaccines with scheduled production in Brazil attached to a technological transfer: the CoronaVac, a traditional inactivated virus vaccine designed by the China-based Sinovac Life Sciences, and the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.
The CoronaVac was already in production in the state of São Paulo, being sponsored by local authorities, and was the first to be available in the country, with six million doses being shipped nationwide from São Paulo following the Anvisa meeting. However, on Monday, January 18, the federal Fiocruz laboratory responsible for the tests and production of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine made public that its production was still awaiting supplies from China that should be already in its possession, according to the contract with the pharmaceutical company. Shortly thereafter, the São Paulo government declared that exports of ingredients for further CoronaVac production were also facing unexplained delays.
The Bolsonaro government immediately turned to India, led by the far-right Narendra Modi, seen as a key ally in the anti-China alliance sponsored by US imperialism and portrayed by the Brazilian government as a close ally of Bolsonaro himself. India, a major producer of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, gave no immediate guarantee of rescuing the Bolsonaro administration, later shipping only two million doses to Brazil.
The Chinese shipments were cleared after the Chinese ambassador spoke on separate occasions with a host of authorities, including the House Speaker Rodrigo Maia and ministers tied to leading business sectors highly dependent on exports to China, such as Minister for Agriculture Tereza Cristina.
While no official source confirmed the retaliation by either India or China, a January 27 report by Afonso Benites in El PaÃs revealed that the toning down of criticism of Chinese 5G equipment suppliers, chiefly Huawei, by the Bolsonaro administration was one of the conditions for the clearance of the vaccine exports.
Huawei is widely expected to win major contracts for 5G infrastructure to be auctioned in Brazil later this year. However, it is facing a threat of a ban spearheaded by the Trump administration, based on the unsubstantiated assumption that its equipment was purposely vulnerable or even outright integrated into China’s spying infrastructure.
In the case of India, longtime Brazilian correspondent in Geneva Jamil Chade reported that Indian authorities explicitly blamed the worldwide vaccinations shortages on the position prevailing within imperialist governments and supported by Brazil in opposition to the abolition of intellectual property rights over vaccines, advanced by India.
The apparently quick resolution of the crisis, with the frenzied mobilization of what are deemed “moderate” and pragmatic elements within the Brazilian government and Congress, did not stop the leading conservative paper in the country, the Estado de S. Paulo, from calling for the first time for Bolsonaro’s impeachment. Two days later, it was followed by a positive nod to his removal by its main “progressive” rival, Folha de S. Paulo .
Both papers, which have repeatedly called for Bolsonaro’s resignation in favor of his vice president, reacted strongly to the crisis in their editorials. They reacted to Bolsonaro’s endorsement of the January 6 fascist coup in Washington D.C. with soporifics about the “checks and balances” of Brazilian democracy. They have found it unbearable that Bolsonaro has led Brazil into a diplomatic crisis with its main trading partner, China, without having a backup plan after being frustrated by his pro-US turn after Trump’s electoral defeat.
Estado de S. Paulo editorialized: “The most inept president in the nation’s history only hangs onto his office, which he was never up to, because there are not yet political circumstances for his constitutional removal.”
But the paper also made it clear that the Brazilian ruling class finds itself in a blind alley.
“These political circumstances depend chiefly on an understanding not regarding the many crimes against the office he has already committed, now more than enough for a robust impeachment trial, but regarding the project for the country that one intends to substitute for the angry populism of Bolsonaroism.”
Two days later, Folha editorialized in its typical spineless fashion: “For this paper, an impeachment trial is an extreme recourse, as well as slow and always traumatic. Unfortunately, there is no ignoring Bolsonaro’s indignant attitude, nor the almost 60 impeachment petitions already presented.”
On the same day, Estado struck a tone of urgency in its impeachment call with special focus on diplomatic relations, stating, “Jair Bolsonaro’s remaining in office makes impossible the recovery of the country’s image and resuming of positive and peaceful contacts with all nations.”
Last Thursday, in an unprecedented move exposing a widening crisis within the government, Vice President Hamilton Mourão said the government could fire Foreign Minister Ernesto Araújo. A fanatical ultraright anti-Chinese Bolsonaro loyalist, he was commended by Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo two days before the Washington putsch with a tweet reading: “There is no more freedom-loving FM than you. You, me, liberty. Game on.” Araújo’s head is viewed as the strongest signal that could be sent to Chinese authorities of a change of course by the Brazilian government.
In a further sign of the negotiations taking place in Congress, yesterday Mourão fired an aide who had leaked messages to the press in which he discussed with congressional aides the need to “be prepared” for an impeachment, implying the need to articulate support for a caretaker administration by the vice president.
On Saturday, the PT-controlled unions organized small motorcades in 30 cities. In São Paulo, the rally was led by Guilherme Boulos of the pseudoleft Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL), who led PSOL to an electoral breakthrough in the mayoral elections in São Paulo in 2020, placing second with 41 percent of the vote.
Attempting to give a left cover to the conflicts expressed by the corporate media, Boulos declared that “the day was coming” for Bolsonaro’s removal. On Sunday, the far-right movements, which had spearheaded demonstrations in 2015 and 2016 appealing to the military and even Donald Trump to “rescue” Brazil from the PT government, held their own rallies against Bolsonaro.
These rifts are emerging as the country records the highest rolling average of COVID-19 deaths since July of 1.055 deaths a day, along with more than 51,000 new cases a day. Brazil has already recorded over 221,000 COVID-19 deaths and 9.1 million cases, and trails only the United States in the number of dead.
The country is also on track to face its worst moment in the pandemic so far, as the north of the country faces a horrific collapse of its health care system, with patients dying for lack of oxygen in ICU units, and doctors reporting the need to administer morphine to those suffocating to alleviate their pain before death.
Brazil’s health minister, Gen. Eduardo Pazuello, was dispatched to the Amazonian capital of Manaus, the epicenter of the crisis, on Saturday, January 23. Just two days before, Supreme Court Justice Ricardo Lewandowski authorized the Attorney General’s Office to investigate Pazuello for ignoring repeated warnings by state authorities that the city’s oxygen supplies were running low.
On Friday, Pazuello declared that no less than 1,500 patients would have to be flown out of the city of two million, which is cut off by land from the rest of the country by the Amazon jungle. The transfers are certain to spread the virus to the rest of the country as a newly identified strain of the virus, which shares many of the genetic characteristics with the English and South African variants, is believed to be more contagious than the original one.
Support for impeachment has grown to include a majority of the population for the first time since the height of the pandemic in May, without a doubt a reaction to the vaccination debacle and the government’s indifference towards the suffering in Manaus. But the pompous rhetoric about this debacle within ruling circles is just a cover for their fundamental unity around the policy of herd immunity.
All factions of the ruling class opposing Bolsonaro—as well as their petty-bourgeois acolytes such as Boulos, the PSOL and union leaders—claim their opposition is driven by Bolsonaro’s criminal and sadistic handling of the pandemic. Yet none of their representatives ever mentions the only urgent measure capable of avoiding the horrific tragedy unfolding in Brazil: a full shutdown of nonessential sectors of the economy, with full income compensation for workers and ruined small businesses.
Nothing makes such unity clearer than the corporatist demand by the PT-controlled São Paulo teachers union, the APEOESP, that teachers should be vaccinated before the reopening of schools scheduled for February 8. While the union feigns concern for teachers’ health, it does not oppose the essential objective of the reopening of schools, i.e., to facilitate a deadly reopening of the economy in the name of capitalist profits being hurt by limited closures still in place.
There is no single faction of the ruling class or the self-styled opposition and its supporters in the pseudoleft willing to raise that demand. The Morenoites of Esquerda Diário, who recently doubled down on their defense of quack cures for COVID-19 such as hydroxychloroquine, posted an editorial in response to the Brazilian political crisis entitled, “Against Bolsonaro and [São Paulo governor] Doria, let us fight for a universal vaccination.” It simply repeats, with radical-sounding phrases, the criticisms in the corporate press about the vaccination debacle without ever mentioning the shutdown of production.
Stopping the carnage of the COVID-19 pandemic caused by the herd immunity policies of the ruling class requires the organization of workers into rank-and-file committees independent of the trade unions in a conscious struggle against the bankrupt and homicidal system that places profits above human lives.
Security forces used lethal force to disperse demonstrators in the northern port city of Tripoli, Lebanon’s poorest city. At least two people died, and hundreds were injured during several nights of riots.
Angry protests and clashes with security forces erupted Monday as workers, furious at the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, poured onto the streets of Tripoli and other cities around the country. A 24/7 curfew has worsened an already calamitous economic situation for working people.
The protests spread rapidly across the country, including the capital Beirut where protesters set fire to tyres near the parliament, and the eastern Bekaa Valley and the southern towns of Jiyeh and Tyre. Demonstrators blocked major roads on Tuesday and Wednesday night.
The protests followed caretaker Prime Minister Hassan Diab’s January 14 announcement of a stringent round-the-clock nationwide curfew in a desperate attempt to control a surge of COVID-19 cases. The country of nearly 6 million people has reported almost 300,000 infections and 2,680 deaths, widely assumed to be a gross underestimate given the lack of testing facilities.
Healthcare services, already inadequate, have collapsed, with severely understaffed hospitals unable to treat patients. At least three hospitals were destroyed in the August 4 explosion at Beirut port. Hundreds of medical staff have emigrated, while those who remain are getting reduced salaries that are often paid late. Volunteers are filling the gaps. Hospitals are running out of breathing devices and oxygen supplies. There are reports of patients queuing outside hospitals for hours until their families take them home again. Patients who are admitted must bring their own food and bedding, and many who need ventilators are unable to get connected.
The explosion that hit the Beirut port, Wednesday August 5, 2020 [Credit: AP Photo/Bilal Hussein]
The lockdown was implemented without any economic support under conditions where at least 55 percent of the population are living in poverty and 25 percent in extreme poverty following the country’s economic and financial collapse and the pandemic restrictions. Last year, the economy contracted by 19 percent. As the Lebanese pound lost 80 percent of its value, causing the price of medical supplies, pharmaceuticals and imported foods to soar, the banks prevented small depositors from accessing their savings, even as their value plummeted.
Tens of thousands of people have lost their jobs—the unemployment rate is now 30 percent—while thousands of street traders and day labourers have lost their livelihoods. People are dependent upon remittances—accounting for a massive 36 percent of GDP—from family abroad, mainly in the Gulf States, which fell by more than 6 percent last year.
France24 reported that angry crowds gathered outside the homes of some of Lebanon’s top politicians in Tripoli on Thursday, torching rubbish and smashing surveillance cameras. Omar Qarhani, an unemployed father of six, said, “We want to burn down all their houses the way they burned our hearts. Let any politician dare to walk on the streets of Tripoli.” He said that the city’s politicians had done almost nothing to help, adding “They have shamed this city.”
Following a partial lockdown earlier in the month enforced via hundreds of police checkpoints and thousands of fines, the 24 hour curfew has now been extended to February 8. No one is allowed out, even to buy food or essential medical supplies. People are dependent on home deliveries by the grocery stores, a service not widely available, especially in the poorest neighbourhoods.
The Lebanese Health Ministry’s first shipment of the Pfizer vaccine is not expected to arrive before the end of next month and at best will only vaccinate one fifth of the population of nearly seven million.
This latest crackdown on protesters coincides with the publication of a report by the London-based human rights group Amnesty International, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Essex in the UK, that calls on France, the former colonial power, to halt weapons sales to Lebanon. It says that a range of French-manufactured rubber bullets, pepper sprays, tear gas grenades—some even of military grade—and launchers had played a “shameful” role in suppressing peaceful demonstrations in the country between 2015 and 2020.
Amnesty accused Lebanon’s security forces of firing tear gas canisters directly at protesters and shooting rubber bullets at chest-level during anti-government protests between October 2019 and August 2020, leading to serious injuries to the head, eyes and upper body.
Lebanon’s economic crisis is rooted in decades of corruption and looting by the ruling elite that has created one of the world’s most heavily indebted countries, with a sovereign debt equal to 170 percent of GDP, owed in the main to Lebanese banks owned by leading Sunni and Christian politicians.
In October 2019, mass protests against poverty and the government’s rampant corruption and mismanagement of the economy swept the country, forcing billionaire Sa’ad Hariri’s coalition government to resign. Diab, an engineering professor, was chosen by President Michel Aoun to head a “technocratic” and “independent” government in January 2020. His government had the support of Hezbollah—the largest parliamentary bloc—President Aoun’s Christian Free Patriotic Movement, and the Shi’ite Amal Movement led by Nabih Berri, the parliament’s speaker.
The Christian and Sunni oligarchs allied with Hariri’s Future Movement were bitterly opposed to the government and it suited them to obstruct its work at every turn and blame Diab and Hezbollah for the economic crisis, the country’s default on its sovereign debt and their failure to carry out any measures to alleviate poverty and social distress.
The lockdown measures to deal with the pandemic, while compounding the misery and stoking the widespread anger against the political elite, served briefly to disperse the protest movement.
However, last August’s massive explosion at Beirut port that killed more than 200 people and caused about $4.6 billion of damage to buildings and infrastructure, deepened the economic and political crisis. The disaster was the result of the criminal neglect and callous indifference displayed by successive governments and the ruling elite, which for years ignored repeated warnings about the dangers of storing ammonium nitrate without proper safety controls near residential areas.
Diab resigned in the wake of the explosion as it became clear that his government would be forced to bear full responsibility. French President Emmanuel Macron sought to intervene and restore the direct rule of the plutocracy via a Hariri-led government in the service of imperialism, and limit or eradicate the influence of Hezbollah. The bourgeois-clerical party, which is backed by Iran, has played a key role in supporting the Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad against the Gulf monarchs, Turkey and Washington’s efforts to engineer regime change via their Islamist proxies, as part of the US’s broader campaign to overturn the Iranian government.
Months later, Hariri has still been unable to form a government in alliance with the fascistic Lebanese Forces led by former militia leader Samir Geagea, and the Druze-based Progressive Socialist Party of Walid Jumblatt, leaving Diab in a caretaker role.
Hariri is waiting to see whether the new administration in Washington will lift the Trump administration’s conditions that precluded any Hezbollah appointees in his coalition—thereby preventing him from forming a government—as part of President Joe Biden’s supposed desire to resume negotiations with Iran.
It is impossible for workers, whose demands for economic security and social equality are diametrically opposed to the interests of all factions of Lebanon’s kleptocracy, to resolve the crisis they face without a direct challenge to capitalism and its state apparatus. It needs an international perspective that focuses on building a political leadership to unify the working class across sectarian, ethnic, and national divisions—not just within Lebanon’s borders but throughout the region—in a struggle against capitalism and for socialism.
