World Bank details economic and social impact of coronavirus in Sub-Saharan Africa

Jean Shaoul

Governments in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), one of the world’s poorest regions, are ruthlessly imposing the burden of economic devastation created by the coronavirus pandemic onto working people, with minimal if any social support for those who are most affected.

The number of COVID-19 infections has risen rapidly since October, exacting a horrendous human toll. It has reached a total of 3.3 million cases with nearly 500,000 active cases and 83,755 deaths on the whole of the African continent—with more than half occurring in South Africa—which is roughly twice the previous peak in July and August. Infections and deaths are expected to rise further. Even these numbers vastly underestimate the scale of infection and death, due to the lack of testing facilities and systems for recording fatalities.

Death rates in 20 African countries are higher than the global average of 2.2 percent, with deaths rising by more than 30 percent in the past month in Nigeria, Egypt and South Africa.

Mother of two Amsale Hailemariam, a domestic worker who lost work because of the coronavirus, washes her family's clothes outside her small tent in the capital Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on Friday, June 26, 2020. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

John Nkengasong, head of the African Union’s Africa Centres for Disease Control, warned that the second wave was threatening to overwhelm the continent’s limited healthcare systems. Officials in Nigeria, Senegal, Sudan, South Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo said their hospital capacity and oxygen supplies were running out.

The pandemic has decimated economies and livelihoods due to declining global demand and local restrictions and lockdowns.

The World Bank’s 2021 Global Economic Prospects, published this month, states, “Sub-Saharan Africa has been hard-hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, with economic activity in the region shrinking by an estimated 3.7 percent last year.” In the two largest economies, Nigeria and South Africa, economic output fell even more sharply by 4.1 and 7.8 percent.

The World Bank’s report, 2021 Global Economic Prospects

Given Sub-Saharan Africa’s population increase, this is equal to a 6.1 percent decline in average per capita income—already a staggeringly low $1,585 for the whole of 2019 that was in turn a reduction of 0.25 percent from 2018. While the report predicts a moderate economic recovery in 2021, this will not be enough to stop per capita income falling.

The decline in per capita income means that average living standards will be set back to the levels of 10 years ago in a quarter of Sub-Saharan African countries, with even more severe setbacks in Nigeria and South Africa—the two largest and most industrialised economies that are home to one-quarter of the region’s population. It will continue to push tens of million more people into extreme poverty in 2021, in the region that already had more than 150 million food insecure people in 2019.

The pandemic has taken a major toll on livelihoods, food security and human capital. The countries worst affected were those with large outbreaks such as South Africa, those heavily dependent upon travel and tourism—sectors that have largely come to a halt in Cape Verde, Ethiopia, Mauritius and the Seychelles—as well as commodity exporters, particularly oil, such as Angola, Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea and South Sudan.

There have been massive job losses, particularly in urban areas where most people work in the informal sector as day labourers and among female workers. The restrictions on personal mobility have severely disrupted economic activities, with the result that despite some reopening of the economy employment remains well below pre-pandemic levels. The worst affected countries are Kenya, where job losses as a percent of employment before the pandemic have reached 60 percent, Gabon 61 percent, DR Congo 42 percent, South Sudan 39 percent and Central African Republic (CAR) 33 percent.

There was a dramatic fall in income from other sources as well. Almost one in three household businesses in Kenya, Nigeria and Ethiopia closed at the beginning of the pandemic, with revenue declining for more than 70 percent of household enterprises in Gabon, South Sudan, Malawi, Uganda, Mali, Madagascar and Zambia. Agricultural income also declined due to falling farm prices, the closure of weekly markets and limited transportation. Remittances flows plummeted by 9 percent due to the global economic recession, particularly affecting Mali, Nigeria, Uganda, Burkina Faso, Malawi, Zambia and Kenya.

This precipitous fall in income has led to a reduction in consumption, with about one in 10 of households in Mali and Zambia, four in 10 in Kenya and more than eight in 10 in DR Congo forced to cut back on consumption. While selling assets and drawing on savings to pay for basic needs are common strategies among better off households, the World Bank points out that they have long-lasting negative impacts on income-generating activities.

The lockdown restrictions and weather-related disasters, including floods, droughts and locust infestations, have led to a surge in food prices in Angola, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal. The surge in food prices has increased food shortages, hunger and social inequality, often dramatically. Food insecurity tripled in Nigeria, Ethiopia, Uganda and Malawi compared to 2019, while in Malawi, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa and Sierra Leone, more than half of households ran out of food in the 30 days before the World Bank’s survey, with urban households disproportionally affected. School closures exacerbated the problem by limiting children’s access to school meals.

Major contributors to hunger have been the conflicts—often ethnic in character—and insurgencies. Efforts by people to flee the violence have led to around 3 million internally displaced people (IDP), with the greatest increase in Burkina Faso, with 419,000 IDPs and Cameroon, Mozambique, Niger and Somalia reporting more new displacements in the first half of 2020 than in the whole of 2019.

The pandemic has severely impacted access to education, with schools closed in every country surveyed and replaced with remote learning activities, such as reading textbooks and listening to educational radio programmes. The uptake of these solutions varied widely, with nine in 10 children engaged in educational activities in Burkina Faso and six in 10 in Nigeria, but only three in 10 in Mali and less than two in 10 in Malawi. In most countries, school closures disproportionately affected children living in rural or poor households with little or no access to internet.

Exchanges rates have fallen by about 5 percent across the continent, exacerbating inflation in Angola, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal. Foreign Direct Investment flows collapsed by 30 to 40 percent last year, along with unprecedented capital outflows. Government debt rose by an average of eight percentage points to 70 percent of GDP, while Zambia was forced to default on its debts.

The African continent has been left floundering by the advanced countries in the rush to secure vaccines for their populations. While 600 million doses have been allocated to Africa by Covax, the public-private partnership set up by the World Health Organisation to pool orders for poorer countries, the continent is still waiting for their allocation to arrive and, apart from South Africa lack, the resources to source directly from Big Pharma. The African Union announced recently that it had secured 270 million doses—a drop in the ocean—for its 1.2 billion population which it hopes to begin rolling out in April, with the aim of vaccinating 60 percent of its population within two to three years.

In imposing these terrible conditions on working people, the ruling classes across the continent, as well as political commentators and the World Bank, are well aware they are sitting on a social powder keg. It is this that underpins the rapid turn to repression, authoritarianism and ethnic and religious provocations in a desperate attempt to divide the working class and prevent a unified internationalist and socialist opposition to their reactionary policies developing.

Coronavirus death toll in Germany reaches 50,000

Marianne Arens

More than 50,000 people have died from COVID-19 in Germany since the pandemic began. Exactly one year ago, on January 25, an employee of the Webasto company in Bavaria was the first to test positive for the coronavirus in Germany.

At the time, the World Socialist Web Site wrote: “The potential spread of the virus mere weeks after it was identified [in Wuhan] speaks both to the virulent nature of the virus and the highly integrated nature of modern economic and social life.” Such a catastrophe is avoidable, we added: “Medical science has advanced to the point where it is capable of identifying new viruses within weeks and developing vaccines within months.”

However, the WSWS also warned: “[N]o capitalist government has adequately prepared. ... The defence of human civilization against the threat of global pandemics, just like climate change and the growing threat of ecological disasters, requires a level of planning and global cooperation of which capitalism is incapable.”

Refrigerated container with the bodies of coronavirus victims at the main cemetery in Hanau (AP Photo / Michael Probst)

This warning has been confirmed cruelly and beyond a doubt in the first year of the epidemic. The pandemic is assuming ever more threatening dimensions. New virus mutants such as the coronavirus B.1.1.7 detected in Britain are spreading across Europe at breakneck speed. But both federal and state governments, as well as the European Union, refuse to consistently implement the necessary strict lockdown and a global, comprehensive vaccination programme.

An EU Coronavirus Summit ended January 21 without tangible results. Before that, on January 19, Chancellor Angela Merkel and German state leaders extended the current measures until February 14 but did not agree on remote working or mandatory production and factory closures. “I don’t want us to have to shut down our entire economy,” Federal Labour Minister Hubertus Heil (Social Democratic Party, SPD) had categorically declared shortly before.

The next morning, Baden-Wuerttemberg’s Minister-President Winfried Kretschmann (Greens) announced that his state would reopen schools on February 1. Similarly, the state premiers of Rhineland-Palatinate (Malu Dreyer, SPD), Lower Saxony (Stephan Weil, SPD), North Rhine-Westphalia (Armin Laschet, Christian Democratic Union, CDU) and several other premiers announced different variants of face-to-face teaching at primary schools, undermining the recent decisions.

The Berlin Senate (state executive, a coalition of the SPD, Left Party and Greens) informed all day-care centres about the planned implementation of resolutions in Berlin. Within the framework of “emergency care,” an average weekly utilisation of the day-care centres of 50 percent is planned. Then the letter says, “If a 50 percent occupancy rate is not reached, children of parents who do not work in an essential area can also be admitted.” In practice, this will undoubtedly lead to facilities having at least 50 percent capacity utilisation and having to care for even more children than they already do!

At the same time, the new virus strain is spreading particularly rapidly among children. For example, experts in Britain have shown that the new virus was more rampant among 11- to 16-year-olds in November and December than in any other age group. Another large-scale study by Oxford scientists has proven beyond doubt the effectiveness of school closures in combating the pandemic. In the meantime, according to the Coronavirus Crisis Staff, two children in Hanover have also fallen so seriously ill that they have to be ventilated.

The warning voices of serious virologists and physicians are becoming increasingly clear. In an interview with Der Spiegel, Charité virologist Christian Drosten warns of a third wave with tens of thousands of new infections daily and stresses that restrictions must not be relaxed under any circumstances because of the B.1.1.7 virus mutation. Otherwise, “within a short time, many more people will become infected than we can even imagine now. Then we will no longer have case numbers of 20,000 or 30,000 but in the worst case 100,000 per day.”

Drosten says he would welcome a strict lockdown, as called for by the #ZeroCovid movement, to drastically reduce the spread of the pandemic. He says, “I do believe that would be possible, with great effort. Of course, the virus would flare up again and again, as it does in China and Australia. But it would be desirable to aim for zero now at least. Especially because I have dire fears about what might happen otherwise in the spring and summer.”

Finally, his clear statements about children being just as contagious as all other people are damning. When it comes to pandemic measures, Drosten therefore recommends in particular restricting the opening of schools and day-care centres.

Even before his study on the viral load in children, he “did not think it possible that children would be spared from SARS-CoV-2,” he says. “From a purely biological point of view, the mucous membrane in the nasopharynx doesn’t change that much as they grow up. So, children must also become infected—and are infectious. That such fundamental doubts could arise about this was a mystery to me and remains so to this day.”

What the virologist does not understand, however, is a fundamental fact: bourgeois politicians are not primarily committed to “reason” or the lives of working people, but to the capitalist economy and the profits of the banks and corporations. The opening up of schools is an eloquent example of this. It is necessary in order to force parents back into manufacturing and other businesses. To push them through, politicians of all parties have been denying for many months that children could also infect themselves and others.

In July 2020, the Saxony state government had justified the reopening of all schools after the summer holidays with a pseudo-scientific study supposedly proving that children were “not the drivers of infection, but rather brake blocks” (as Saxony Education Minister Christian Piwarz, CDU, repeated at the time). At the end of November, Ties Rabe (SPD), Hamburg’s school senator (state minister), still claimed: “[S]chools are somewhat overestimated in terms of the dangers.” It was “remarkable,” the senator said, that “by far the most pupils were not infected in school, but outside.”

To keep the profits flowing, only a few days ago, Jörg Hofmann, the first chairman of the IG Metall trade union, spread the fairy tale that workers were infected mainly in the family sphere and in their free time. When asked what would happen if industry had to “shut down completely,” Hofmann replied, “Then our economic power would collapse.”

Then the IGM leader claimed, without presenting any evidence, “We can see that where the hygiene measures developed in cooperation with politicians are strictly implemented in the companies, the infection figures are lower than in the private environment.”

Yet it is precisely the trade unions that contribute significantly to covering up coronavirus outbreaks in workplaces. This was recently shown by the figures that only came to light in connection with the tragic death of Berlin tram driver Sven B. According to these figures, 245 employees of the BVG (Berlin Rapid Transit Company) alone have been infected with COVID-19.

With 50,000 coronavirus deaths passed last week, this makes one thing clear: the official coronavirus policy has failed. For a year, governments have pursued a de facto contagion policy in the interests of business and trade unions have supported them. Two results can be noted: On the one hand, the Dax stock index has recovered, and on the other hand, the epidemic has recently become even more dangerous with aggressively rising death tolls.

The coronavirus pandemic is thus not a purely medical issue, but a social and political one. A political struggle is needed to solve it. Such a struggle must start from the premise that the pandemic is a global problem that requires an international solution. It must not be left to the banks and corporations and their politicians, who profit from the decimation of the old and weak and use the pandemic to blackmail workers.

Greece loosens coronavirus lockdown, massively rearms military

Katerina Selin

Despite the dangerous spread of the new virus mutations and the deadly development of the pandemic throughout Europe, Greece is easing its lockdown measures. On 11 January, elementary schools and daycare centers reopened, followed last Monday by retail stores, hairdressers and beauty salons.

Citizen Protection Minister Michalis Chrysochoidis, who had the relaxations accompanied by an increased police presence, justified the move, saying, “If we continue with the strict bans, we will destroy ourselves financially and psychologically.” By this he does not at all mean the losses to small business owners and workers who have received almost no financial support during the lockdown. Rather, Chrysochoidis is concerned about the profits of the ruling class, for which his government will accept a renewed increase in the COVID-19 death rate without batting an eye.

With the partial opening, the social plight of workers and employees in the private sector is being used as a battering ram. In a recent survey conducted by the Alco Institute for the Private Sector Trade Union Confederation (GSEE), 56 percent of respondents said they had lost income during the pandemic, and 22 percent even had wage cuts of more than 31 percent, which has major consequences given Greece’s low wages. The majority of respondents, 60 percent, have not been able to work from home, exposing themselves to the risk of infection at work. More than half of those surveyed are pessimistic about the coming months, with nearly 40 percent unsure whether they will be able to keep their jobs.

Burial of a COVID-19 victim in Thessaloniki on December 5, 2020 (AP Photo/Giannis Papanikos)

The government has the backing of the nominal opposition party, Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left), in its policy of opening up the economy. Party leader Alexis Tsipras, who himself saw to the interests of the economic and financial oligarchy for four years as prime minister, expressed his support for looser restrictions for retail. He troubled himself to deliver a few platitudes, such as calling for more financial aid and higher health spending, but from his mouth this is nothing but hot air. In December, Syriza was criticized when it demanded a coronavirus bonus for the police—incidentally just after the anniversary of the murder of the teenager Alexandros Grigoropoulos by a policeman in 2008.

In the media, the drumbeat for the rapid reopening of schools is already rising. This is a “priority,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis of the right-wing Nea Dimokratia (ND) declared Tuesday. The target date is the first of February.

Scientific advisers to the Health Ministry were given targeted press coverage to justify the relaxations. Charalampos Gogos, professor of pathology and infectious disease research at the University of Patras and member of the government’s special committee, rehashed the old lie that school openings pose the least epidemiological risk because “young people carry lower viral loads than other groups.” He also advocated opening ski resorts and soon, restaurants.

The argument used to justify the relaxations is the initial fall in official infection rates in Greece, a result of the weeks-long lockdown and little testing. Last Monday, state television spoke of a “stable” epidemiological situation, concealing the fact that Monday’s figures of 237 new infections were accompanied by exceptionally low testing numbers of only about 3,700 PCR tests and 4,500 rapid tests. A day later, on Tuesday, the testing rate tripled as did infections, which went up to 566. The number of patients on ventilators also remains consistently high at around 300. So far, at least 32 people in Greece have tested positive with the new UK COVID-19 mutation.

Overall, more than 5,600 people have already died from the virus in the country of about 11 million people. The deadliest months were November and December, with up to 120 victims a day. According to the Greek statistics office Elstat, mortality in these months has increased by 30 to 40 percent compared to the previous year. The 48th and 49th weeks of last year (November 23-Deccember 6) set a sad record with about 3,300 deaths each.

In view of the dramatic situation in neighboring European countries, the propaganda of a “stable” COVID-19 situation in Greece is not only deceptive, but extremely dangerous. The government is deliberately trying to downplay the pandemic, even though more than 200,000 people are infected in Europe every day and more than 6,000 people die from COVID-19.

The underfunded and understaffed public health system, which has almost collapsed in recent months and had to make triage decisions, continues to hang by a thread. The vaccination campaign which began in Greece at the same time as other EU countries in late December is making slow progress, as it has almost everywhere in the world. As of January 23, only 154,273 people had been vaccinated. The first group included people over 85, health workers and government and party leaders. On Friday, Greece started to vaccinate the second group that includes people in the age of 80 until 84.

Under these strained conditions, the government is placing the entire burden of the vaccination campaign on the existing public health system. Instead of investing the necessary sums to ensure enough staff and equipment in the largest mass vaccination campaign in history, it announced Wednesday that public health centers will be transformed into vaccination centers. In Greece, health centers perform an important function in relieving hospitals and providing better outpatient health care. If they take over vaccinations now, they will no longer be able to provide that vital service.

An angry statement from the Association of Hospital Doctors of Greece (OENGE) says: “With which staff exactly are the vaccination centers to be staffed, for which a 12-hour shift is planned? With exhausted hospital staff? With endless hours of intensive overtime work to fill the huge gaps that are increasing with the thousands of people in the health workforce getting sick? With employees who haven’t had a vacation in months? With which doctors? Will a doctor treat COVID-19 patients one day and vaccinate healthy citizens the next?” Physicians criticize the continuing lack of new hires and the missing infrastructure to safely implement vaccinations.

The shortage and exhaustion of doctors and nurses and the deliberate neglect of public health in a pandemic seems like madness, but it is calculation. Instead of fighting the coronavirus, the government agenda for the new year focuses on arming the police and military apparatus.

This is even evident in the vaccination campaign itself: The surplus vaccine doses, which are in danger of spoiling because of missed vaccination appointments, are to be administered not to vaccination personnel, workers, teachers or young people on the evening of a day of vaccinations, but—to soldiers and police officers, as Mitsotakis announced on Tuesday.

In mid-December, Parliament passed the 2021 budget, which includes a drastic increase in military spending and a reduction in health spending. The defense budget will increase by a third—from 3.4 billion euro last year to 5.5 billion this year. The total rearmament plan for the next few years is 11.5 billion euro. Among other things, Greece is purchasing 18 French “Rafale” fighter jets, four new frigates and four American “Seahawk” helicopters.

The health budget, on the other hand, has been cut from 4.83 billion euro (2020) to 4.26 billion (2021). Only 131 million euro are budgeted for the fight against the pandemic (786 million last year). With only 5 percent of its gross domestic product, Greece spends the least on health compared with other EU countries. Now another 572 million will be cut.

The unity of the ruling class is also visible in the government’s war policy. While the budget was passed with the votes of the ruling party, an increased majority of 189 deputies voted in favor of the military budget, including Syriza. The government also announced the extension of the military service from 9 to 12 months starting this May and to increase the army to 133,000 soldiers—an expansion of about 30 percent.

Domestically, the ruling class continues its authoritarian policies against the working class and is preparing for a storm of social opposition. Citizen Protection Minister Chrysochoidis, to whom the police report, and Education Minister Niki Kerameos have introduced a joint bill to establish a campus police force in universities. It would be empowered to make arrests, initiate proceedings and refer them to the prosecutor’s office. The police officers will not carry weapons but will carry batons and handcuffs. Their goal is to intimidate and persecute leftist students and student organizations. Chrysochoidis spoke of “a minority in the universities” spreading “terror.”

There is strong opposition to the new university policing law. On Thursday, students took to the streets in Athens and several other cities. “Students are not criminals!” was written on their banners. Teachers, parents and school students also participated. In Thessaloniki, riot police used batons and tear gas against the demonstrators.

The attacks on students are a serious warning, especially against the backdrop of Greek history. The fall of the military dictatorship, which ruled from 1967 to 1974 with US support, began with the uprising at the Athens Polytechnic University and was bloodily suppressed on November 17, 1973.

Trudeau and Biden to strengthen Canada-US military alliance and trade-war bloc

Roger Jordan

On Friday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau became the first foreign leader to speak with US President Joe Biden. The readouts of the call released by both sides, together with a flurry of commentary in the bourgeois press prior to and after Biden’s inauguration, underscore that Ottawa and Washington plan to expand their global military-strategic partnership so as to more aggressively challenge their great-power rivals, above all Russia and China.

The White House noted that the call focused on “the strategic importance of the U.S.-Canada relationship and reinvigorating our bilateral cooperation.” Trudeau’s office stressed America and Canada’s “shared values and interests on the global stage,” and announced a plan for the two leaders to meet again in a month’s time to expand “the deep and enduring friendship between Canada and the United States.”

These statements are not merely standard diplomatic niceties. On the contrary, the Canadian ruling elite wants to take advantage of the change in administration in Washington to repackage its collaboration with the United States in a more “progressive” wrapping.

Trudeau and Biden in Dec. 2016 (AP)

Behind this, North America’s twin imperialist powers are preparing a dramatic intensification of their economic and military collaboration, an expansion of trade war measures, and an acceleration of preparations for military conflict with their great power rivals.

The main form these policies will take is a concerted push, particularly on the part of the Canadian ruling elite, for a “North America First” agenda. The fact that numerous senior advisers and policy experts have utilized this formulation in interviews and comments in recent weeks confirms how, in its fundamentals, the collaboration between the Biden administration and Trudeau government will rest on the same reactionary nationalist and protectionist basis as Trump’s “America First” program.

The “North America First” slogan is aimed above all at Russia and China, who are seen as direct competitors and strategic threats by Ottawa and Washington. Military strategists and defence experts have long been discussing the need to modernize the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD), a bilateral Cold War-era mechanism uniting Canadian and US military forces. A key element in NORAD modernization is Canada’s integration into Washington’s ballistic missile defence shield and the deployment of new nuclear-capable missiles, steps whose logic is to place both countries on a course toward waging a “winnable” nuclear war with Beijing or Moscow.

These plans were discussed by Trudeau and Biden. “The Prime Minister and President agreed to expand cooperation on continental defence and in the Arctic, including the need to modernize NORAD, and discussed their Foreign Affairs and National Defence ministers and secretaries of State and Defense meeting at the earliest opportunity,” stated the Trudeau government’s release on the bilateral call.

This is a continuation of the strategy the Canadian ruling class pursued during Trump’s presidency. After Trump’s election victory in 2016, the Globe and Mail, Canada’s “newspaper of record,” declared emphatically that Canada needed to be behind “Trump’s walls.” Throughout Trump’s presidency, Trudeau and his Liberal government avoided making any criticism of the fascistic-minded occupant of the White House, even when his preparations for a coup to establish an authoritarian regime became undeniably clear.

While the Canadian bourgeoisie connived with and accommodated to Trump’s authoritarian actions, his “America First” nationalism and unpredictability created problems for Ottawa. Economically, his threat to tear up NAFTA and his imposition of tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum cut across corporate Canada’s intimate trading relationship with the US, which is the destination for around three-quarters of all Canadian exports. Ideologically, Trump’s open embrace of right-wing extremists and fascists made it difficult for Trudeau and his Liberals, who place great store in their “progressive” credentials for propaganda purposes, to sell the Canada-US alliance to an overwhelmingly skeptical public.

With Biden’s entry into the White House and the Democrats’ control of Congress, Canada’s political establishment hopes that these challenges can be overcome. Like the Democratic Party establishment, they intend to use “democratic” rhetoric and identity politics to sugar-coat an aggressive pro-war foreign policy. As the Trudeau government noted in its readout of the call with Biden, both leaders have a “shared commitment to promoting diversity and inclusion.”

This imperialist agenda enjoys all-party support within Canada’s parliament. This was illustrated in November when the trade union-backed New Democratic Party tabled a parliamentary motion, which won support from all parties, congratulating Biden on his electoral victory and looking forward to close cooperation with the new administration.

Tensions remain, however, including over the incoming president’s plans to include “Buy American” provisions in his administration’s infrastructure building/economic stimulus initiative. As part of his effort to cultivate an image as a fighter against climate change, Biden on his first day in office canceled federal authorization for the Keystone XL oil pipeline, effectively killing the project, which was to transport Canadian bitumen oil from Alberta’s tar sands to the US Gulf Coast for export worldwide. Although Trudeau expressed his “disappointment” at this decision when he spoke to Biden, a minority section of Canada’s ruling elite is demanding a far more forceful response. Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, whose government invested well over a billion dollars in the failed project, has called for Ottawa to impose retaliatory tariffs if Biden doesn’t reverse his decision to scuttle Keystone XL.

Notwithstanding the substantial economic gains the Keystone pipeline would have brought to Canada’s oil sector, the majority of the ruling elite believes it has no choice but to quietly accept Biden’s decision. As Trudeau himself put it prior to his call with Biden, “We have so much alignment—not just me and President Biden, but Canadians,” i.e., Canada’s ruling elite, “and President Biden.”

One of the areas where Canada desires to strengthen its “alignment” with the Biden administration is on Washington’s anti-China policy. The political establishment hopes that Biden will prove more effective in countering China’s rise than Trump. Whereas the former president’s resort to brash threats and provocations created political problems for Ottawa and proved largely ineffective in combatting Beijing’s economic and geopolitical rise, Biden’s intention to establish a coalition of “democratic” nations to diplomatically, economically, and militarily intensify pressure on Beijing is being touted as a more expeditious approach. The outgoing Chief of Defence Staff, General Jonathan Vance, summed this up most clearly with his appeal earlier this month for Canada to develop a “grand strategy” with its traditional Western allies to confront China and Russia, a task which he added had been difficult to accomplish under Trump.

Trudeau and Biden discussed China during their call, specifically the related cases of the two Canadian citizens, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, currently detained in China, and Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou. Meng, the chief financial officer of the Chinese tech giant, has been under house arrest in Vancouver for more than two years. She was detained by Canadian authorities on bogus charges of violating US sanctions on Iran, at Washington’s behest as part of its provocative efforts to bully Beijing into making economic and geostrategic concessions.

Behind the “democratic” phrase-mongering for public consumption, Canadian and US policy experts have made clear that confronting China will require a further acceleration of the drive to war, which has already seen the Trudeau government announce a more than 70 percent 10-year hike in military spending.

David MacNaughton, who served as Canada’s ambassador to Washington during much of the Trump presidency, told the Globe last week that Ottawa should press its case for corporate Canada’s guaranteed access to the US market under a “North America First” policy, by pledging to increase spending on NATO and NORAD, and by taking an even tougher stance towards China. “The Americans,” said MacNaughton, “are going to expect us to play a larger role in defence and security than we have in the past. We should expect that, and they are going to press on China … and we can’t say, ‘Sorry we will talk to you about that later’.”

An opinion piece co-authored by Kevin Lynch, formerly the country’s top civil servant, entitled “What Canada can do for Biden,” urged Ottawa to collaborate with Biden to “shorten” US supply chains, i.e., reduce its economic dependence on China, and pursue “North America First” trade, climate change, and energy policies. Underlining that this protectionist economic agenda is inseparably bound up with geostrategic bullying and military force, the article continued, “Canada could help change the American dialogue by making early defence spending commitments including specific increases in support of NORAD, Arctic sovereignty and peacekeeping.”

Missouri residents confront growing joblessness, hunger, evictions

Cole Michaels

As throughout the United States, the coronavirus pandemic is ravaging the population of the state of Missouri. Hunger, unemployment and homelessness reached record levels in 2020, while the total wealth of US billionaires soared by over $1 trillion in the first nine months of the year. The already threadbare social welfare system in the state is leaving thousands of people unable to receive needed assistance.

Food banks have been relying on CARES Act funds to be able to purchase food to serve their communities. For example, Douglass Community Services in Hannibal—a city in northeastern Missouri that was the boyhood home of famed author Mark Twain—received its last CARES Act check at the start of November. That month they were able to purchase about $7,000 worth of food, only enough to feed area residents for one month. The food bank supplies individuals with three to five days of food at a time.

Stacey Nicholas, Douglass Community Services community outreach initiatives director, said that they have been forced to rely upon local donations. “We rely on those local funders because the heart of it is, we can’t wait for someone in Washington D.C. or Jefferson City to come to northeast Missouri and save us. We have to save ourselves.”

Volunteers pack boxes of food outside of a food bank (AP Photo/Ashley Landis)

Indeed, help from the federal government is paltry. The recently passed $900 billion coronavirus relief package will do little to address growing hunger in the United States. America is experiencing the worst levels of hunger since 1998, when the Census Bureau began compiling data about household food insecurity.

Missouri’s hunger statistics are damning. One in six children doesn’t get enough to eat each day, and over 1 million residents got help from a food bank or food pantry in 2019. The St. Louis Area Foodbank has distributed over 40 million meals since March 16, and reported a 46 percent increase in requests for assistance in 2020. President and CEO of the food bank Meredith Knopp said that the organization conducted surveys that showed that 70 percent of people utilizing the food bank in 2020 were seeking help for the first time. Kansas City food bank Harvesters has reported a 40 percent increase in need this year.

In southeast Missouri, SEMO Food Bank reported that there has been a 40 percent increase of people in need this year. “So far this year, we’ve spent over twice as much as we’ve spent for all of 2019 in purchasing food so, we’re still seeing a number of families who are trying to recover, really, from that initial shock or that initial loss of jobs whenever the pandemic began,” said SEMO Food Bank Chief Advancement Officer Lisa Church.

Mass unemployment and the miserable levels of state aid available are sowing increasing devastation throughout the region. In the neighboring state of Kansas, the unemployed are having to wait weeks or months to receive unemployment benefits, according to a report in the Associated Press. The state government has blamed the slow distribution of funds on technology issues, pointing to its 40-year-old computer system that handles jobless aid. For Kansas workers, unemployment benefits received through three federal assistance programs—Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (PEUC), Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) and the CARES Act—were cut off on December 26.

Unemployment levels are disastrous. The pandemic has set the Missouri economy back by 20 years in terms of growth of the workforce. October unemployment was at 2.98 million, a number not seen since October 2000.

Similar to the state unemployment system, Missouri’s maze-like food aid system is difficult to successfully navigate. After an initial application is filed, an applicant must be interviewed by a case worker. Due to the pandemic, these interviews have been moved from the Missouri Department of Social Services to a state call center. People have reported being unable to get through to a case worker for weeks. The problem is pervasive enough that legal nonprofits are stepping in and advocating for clients to the call center. Katherine Holley, a lawyer who works with Legal Services of Eastern Missouri , told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “We’ve been working on issues related to the call center for years. Since COVID, we’re seeing huge problems. … Because of the sheer need, I don’t think it’s staffed enough to handle all the calls.”

Little in assistance for those who cannot afford to pay rent is being offered. In December, the Missouri Emergency Rental Arrears Program was announced. ERAP will only provide a one-time payment to landlords to cover rent for up to six months of lateness dating back to April 1, 2020. The ERAP covers rent only, not utilities or fees. The eviction moratorium in St. Louis City has been extended only through January 31.

Tenants at risk of eviction are often unable to present evidence of misconduct on the part of landlords in online eviction hearings, according to a report in the Missouri Independent. Courthouses aren’t allowing tenants to submit evidence exhibits in person, nor are they providing assistance if the tenant does not have video capabilities for hearings, leaving them at risk of being unable to defend themselves against being unfairly evicted. In general, many tenants are unable to acquire legal representation in eviction hearings. The National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel found that while 90 percent of landlords have legal aid access during the eviction process, only 1 percent of tenants do.

In Fenton, a St. Louis suburb, in December, Hannah McGee’s front door was illegally removed by her landlord after she fell two months behind on her rent due to losing her job. This behavior has become increasingly common in 2020.

Attorney Rob Swearingen told a local Fox News affiliate, “We try to call landlords and inform them that they’re violating the law by illegally evicting people. You can only be evicted by a court order and with the sheriff present executing an eviction and right now that can’t be done in St. Louis City and St. Louis County. The landlord needs to realize that the landlord has committed a tort and is liable for anything that happens to this tenant, it’s more than negligence, it’s intentional infliction of emotional distress, it’s a violation of Missouri statutes and its unlawful eviction.”

Jobs continue to hemorrhage through business closures and layoffs. Restaurants, particularly in the metro areas where indoor dining bans have been enforced, are closing as they have received little or no federal assistance to stay in business. Recently announced Missouri layoffs include Butterball, the poultry products company, where 450 workers will be cut from its Carthage processing plant. Ninety-five employees (mainly emergency assistance vehicle drivers) for AAA Motor Club’s Hazelwood office, in the St. Louis suburbs, are set to be laid off. Insurance firm State Farm will close its Earth City office January 31, laying off 111 employees. Department store chain J.C. Penney will close its West Plains location by late March.

As elsewhere, the traumatic events of 2020 have taken a tragic toll on the most vulnerable among Missouri’s youth. In the space of two weeks in December in the Springfield area, two boys, one in middle school and one in high school, committed suicide. The middle school student, 13-year-old Jake Johnston, took his life inside the school building.

At the same time, more and more children and young people are slipping past whatever remains of the social safety net. An Education Week article exposed the fact that 1.5 million children have become homeless in the US in 2020, and 423,000 of them haven’t been accounted for by their schools.

According to Melissa Douglas, homeless liaison in Kansas City, Missouri, 350 of the 800 homeless students in her district have fallen out of contact. One hundred of these youth are unaccompanied, but Douglas was only able to locate 17 of that group. She told Education Week, “It’s super difficult. We’re just trying to see where families have landed because as a district, we are missing kids and they have not shown up electronically anywhere. So you’re trying to find out are they in a different district? Are they just not logging on? ‘Where are they?’ is just the question that’s being asked all the time.”

Ten years since the beginning of the Egyptian revolution

Johannes Stern

Ten years ago today, mass protests began in Egypt that led 18 days later to the fall of long-standing dictator Hosni Mubarak, electrifying workers and youth worldwide.

The Egyptian revolution was a powerful revolutionary uprising in which the working class played the central role. On January 25, 2011, tens of thousands of people took to the streets in cities across the country, including Suez, Port Saïd and Alexandria. On the so-called “Friday of rage” three days later, these growing masses of people defeated the regime’s notorious security forces in street fighting that came to resemble civil war.

Millions demonstrated across Egypt over subsequent days. Tahrir Square, occupied by hundreds of thousands of people who came to downtown Cairo, emerged as an international symbol of the uprising, but it was the intervention of the working class that ultimately delivered the decisive blow to Mubarak. On February 7–8, a wave of strikes and factory occupations erupted across the country, continuing to grow after Mubarak stepped down on February 11.

Anti-government protesters perform the Muslim Friday prayers at the continuing demonstration in Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt. (AP Photo/Tara Todras-Whitehill)

At the high point of the revolution, there were an estimated 40 to 60 strikes per day. As many strikes occurred in just the month of February 2011 as in the entire previous year. Hundreds of thousands of workers in Egypt’s key industrial centres were on strike, including Suez canal workers, steelworkers in Suez and Port Saïd, and the 27,000 textile workers at Ghazl al-Mahalla, Egypt’s largest industrial facility in the Nile Delta city of Mahalla al-Kubra.

The World Socialist Web Site assessed the developments in Egypt and Tunisia, where mass protests brought down the long-standing dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali days earlier, as the beginning of a new revolutionary epoch. In a perspective entitled “The Egyptian revolution,” David North, the chairman of the WSWS international editorial board, wrote:

The Egyptian revolution is dealing a devastating blow to the pro-capitalist triumphalism that followed the Soviet bureaucracy’s liquidation of the USSR in 1991. The class struggle, socialism and Marxism were declared irrelevant in the modern world. “History”—as in “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels)—had ended. Henceforth, the only revolutions conceivable to the media were those that were “color-coded” in advance, politically scripted by the US State Department, and then implemented by the affluent pro-capitalist sections of society.

This complacent and reactionary scenario has been exploded in Tunisia and Egypt. History has returned with a vengeance. What is presently unfolding in Cairo and throughout Egypt is revolution, the real thing. “The most indubitable feature of a revolution is the direct interference of the masses in historic events,” wrote Leon Trotsky, the foremost specialist on the subject. This definition of revolution applies completely to what is now happening in Egypt.

Ten years later, however, it is not the working class that is in power in Egypt, but a blood-soaked military dictatorship backed by the imperialist powers that lives in terror of a renewed mass uprising and suppresses every sign of social opposition. On January 22, the Egyptian Parliament, at the request of Mubarak’s former general and current dictator Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, extended the state of emergency another three years. Since his coup against elected President Mohammed Mursi in 2013, more than 60,000 political prisoners have disappeared into the regime’s torture chambers. Thousands have been condemned to death and executed.

Amid a renewed upsurge of class struggle around the world—fueled by the horrific consequences of the pandemic, and the bourgeoisie’s increasingly open resort to dictatorship and fascistic forms of rule, it is necessary to draw political lessons from these experiences. How could counter-revolution in Egypt be victorious, and what political tasks does this pose for the class battles to come? The key to answering these critical questions is a concrete study of the events and the role of political tendencies and programs. The chief problem of the Egyptian revolution was the lack of a revolutionary leadership.

One day prior to Mubarak’s overthrow, David North warned in another perspective:

The greatest danger confronting Egyptian workers is that, after providing the essential social force to wrest power from the hands of an aging dictator, nothing of political substance will change except the names and faces of some of the leading personnel. In other words, the capitalist state will remain intact. Political power and control over economic life will remain in the hands of the Egyptian capitalists, backed by the military, and their imperialist overlords in Europe and North America. Promises of democracy and social reform will be repudiated at the first opportunity, and a new regime of savage repression will be instituted.

These dangers are not exaggerated. The entire history of revolutionary struggle in the Twentieth Century proves that the struggle for democracy and for the liberation of countries oppressed by imperialism can be achieved, as Leon Trotsky insisted in his theory of permanent revolution, only by the conquest of power by the working class on the basis of an internationalist and socialist program.

Over the course of the Egyptian Revolution, this assessment was confirmed. All factions and parties of the bourgeoisie and their Stalinist and pseudo-leftist appendages showed their essentially counterrevolutionary character. They collaborated with the imperialists and defended Egyptian capitalism and its institutions. This is as true of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is now banned again as it was under Mubarak, as it is of Nasserist or “liberal” parties. As the ruling party before the coup, the Brotherhood conspired with the military, banned strikes and protests, and supported imperialist interventions in Libya and Syria,

One can mention a few prominent examples. Mohamed El Baradei, the former leader of the National Association for Change, became the first vice president in Sisi’s military junta. “Independent” trade union leader Kamal Abu Eita became Labor Minister. Hamdeen Sabahi, the leader of the Nasserist Egyptian Popular Current, publicly defended the junta’s massacres. When the army murdered at least 900 coup opponents, including women and children, while breaking up protests by Mursi supporters in Rabaa El-Adaweya Square in Cairo, Sabahi declared on television: “We will stay hand in hand, the people, the army and the police.”

A particularly corrupt tendency that paved the way for the counterrevolution, however, was the so-called Revolutionary Socialists (RS), a pseudo-left group in Egypt with close ties to the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in Britain and the Left Party in Germany, among others. At every stage of the revolution, they insisted that workers could not play an independent role but had to subordinate themselves to one faction or another of the bourgeoisie to struggle for their democratic and social rights.

After Mubarak’s fall, the RS fueled illusions in the military, which had taken power under the leadership of Mubarak’s former defense minister, Muhammed Tantawi. Writing in Britain’s Guardian, RS activist Hossam el-Hamalawy said, “young officers and soldiers” are “our allies,” declaring that the army “will eventually engineer the transition to a ‘civilian’ government.”

As the army cracked down on protests and strikes and calls for a “second revolution” emerged, the RS revived their earlier support for the Muslim Brotherhood. In party statements, they called the Islamists the “right wing of the revolution,” advocating a vote for Mursi in the 2012 presidential election. They then celebrated Mursi’s victory as a “victory for the revolution” and a “great achievement in pushing back the counterrevolution.”

When new strikes and protests erupted against Mursi’s anti-worker and pro-imperialist policies, the RS reoriented themselves once again toward the military. They supported the Tamarod Alliance, backed and funded by El Baradei, Egyptian multibillionaire Naguib Sawiris and former officials of the Mubarak regime, among others, and which called for the military to overthrow Mursi. In a statement, published on May 19, 2013, the RS hailed Tamarod as “a way to complete the revolution” and declared their “intention to fully participate in this campaign.”

The RS response to the July 3 military coup fully confirmed its counterrevolutionary nature. They celebrated the coup as a “second revolution,” calling on protesters to “protect their revolution.” While the military restored the Mubarak regime’s repressive apparatus, the RS once again spread the fairy tale that the military government could be pressured to obtain democratic and social reforms. In their July 11 statement, they called for pressure on the new government “to take measures immediately for achieving social justice for the benefit of the millions of poor Egyptians.”

Since then, the RS have been primarily concerned with covering their tracks. In his own article on the anniversary of the revolution published in the SWP paper Socialist Worker, Hamalawy writes of the counterrevolutionary conspiracy: “The military in secret reached out to the secular opposition (leftists, Arab nationalists, liberals), and secured its backing for a coup in July 2013. What followed were the biggest massacres in Egypt’s modern history, amid the cheering of the Egyptian leftists.”

Hamalawy studiously conceals the fact that among these “Egyptian leftists” who cheered on Sisi’s massacres were his own organization.

The crucial lesson of the Egyptian Revolution is the necessity to build a revolutionary leadership in the working class before mass struggles break out. Only in this way can the political independence of the working class be established from the bourgeoisie and its petty-bourgeois stooges, and the masses be armed with a socialist program and the perspective of permanent revolution to overthrow capitalism.

Russian police crackdown on pro-Navalny protests

Clara Weiss

Several tens of thousands of people protested on Saturday in over 100 Russian cities to demand the release of Alexei Navalny, a right-wing opponent of the Putin government. He was detained the previous Sunday after his return from Germany on the grounds that he had violated the terms of a 2014 suspended sentence for money-laundering. Prior to his arrival in Moscow, the Kremlin publicly announced that he would be arrested upon landing in Russia.

Before his return, Navalny spent five months in Germany after falling ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow. He was flown to the Charité hospital in Berlin, thanks to the direct involvement of German chancellor Angela Merkel. Based on the findings of a German army laboratory, it was claimed that Navalny had been poisoned by Novichok, a highly deadly nerve agent. Despite the absence of any evidence, Western governments and press have insisted Putin is the culprit.

The largest protest occurred in Moscow. According to the Russian business daily Kommersant, over 15,000 people participated. A much larger figure cited by Reuters—40,000—has not been confirmed by other outlets, and even the German news magazine Spiegel, which has been heavily pro-Navalny, called it into question. Claims made by Navalny’s staff that hundreds of thousands participated across the country have not been reported by other sources.

Protests in support of Alex Navalny (Image Credit: Twitter/kirkartstudio1)

Kommersant noted that despite efforts of Navalny supporters to promote the demonstrations on the popular social media platform TikTok, relatively few youth participated in Moscow. In 2017, Navalny’s opposition was able to exploit broader social and political discontent and turn out larger numbers of youth at his protests.

This past Saturday, demonstrators’ demands were confined to anti-corruption slogans, “Putin go away” and for Navalny to be released. Nothing addressed the staggering social crisis in the country or the COVID pandemic, which has infected more than 3.5 million people and killed, based on official estimates, over 65,000.

The police cracked down heavily on the protests. According to Russian NGOs, over 3,300 people were arrested, more than 1,400 of them in Moscow. One of Navalny’s closest allies, Leonid Volkov, indicated in an interview with Der Spiegel that in many regions those detained were almost exclusively members of Navalny’s local staff.

Volkov gloated that sections of the security apparatus, especially within the police, seem to be going over to the side of the opposition. Reports in the Russian press suggest that the Stalinist KPRF, which long has been a crucial prop of the Putin regime, is now divided over Navalny, with some of its leading members backing him.

The alleged poisoning of Navalny by the Kremlin is a dubious case riddled with lies and outright contradictions. To this day, contrary to what the New York Times and other outlets tell their readers, it has not been proven that Navalny was poisoned with Novichok, much less that Putin or the Russian secret service had anything to do with his illness.

Just after his return to Russia and arrest, Navalny’s YouTube channel published a two hour video about corruption by the Putin regime. It supposedly exposed the construction of a massive “palace” for Putin with taxpayer money on the shores of the Black Sea. His team also released a list of officials close to Putin that it demands be sanctioned by the European Union. The list includes several of Russia’s richest oligarchs, such as Roman Abramovich and Alisher Usmanov.

Navalny’s video has been watched over 80 million times as of this writing. It insists that “corruption” and “theft” have marked Putin’s path from his time as a KGB (Soviet secret service) officer in East Germany in the 1980s to the head of the Kremlin. It mostly deals with facts and figures that have long been known.

The “anti-corruption” mantra—which is the axis around which Navalny’s supposed opposition to Putin orbits—is a hallmark of right-wing, pro-capitalist tendencies. It is easily manipulated and exploited by the imperialist powers, who seek to cloak their own predatory interests behind claims that they care about the democratic rights of whatever people happen to be in the country in which they wish to meddle. The Western press has deliberately kept its readers in the dark about the political orientation and history of, as the New York Times declares, this “international hero.”

For all his anti-corruption demagogy, Navalny ultimately speaks for the same class interests as Putin. It is not a coincidence that in all of his “exposures” Navalny never once mentions the term “capitalism.” Whatever the criminality of Putin’s path, it was not unique: the plunder of social wealth amidst the mass impoverishment of the working class was the hallmark of the Stalinist destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the restoration of capitalism. Navalny and the forces for which he speaks were as much a part of this process as Putin and oligarchs like Abramovich.

Navalny’s father was a Red Army officer and his mother an economist and Communist Party member. They opened a factory in the 1990s, while Navalny himself went into banking and became an entrepreneur. Expressing the social-Darwinist and even fascistic moods that became dominant within this parasitic layer, Navalny would later state, “I wanted a market economy in the most wicked form—the strongest survive, the rest are simply superfluous.”

Navalny’s hatred of the working class has found its clearest expression in his political proximity to far-right forces. He has appeared at numerous far-right marches in the past, where he has spoken, much as he does now, about “corruption” and the “crooks and thieves” at the top. In a politically filthy agitational video by the nationalist NAROD group, he compared the deportation of immigrants with the work of a dentist who removes a cavity while preserving the healthy roots of a tooth.

He advocates a right-wing program of free markets, economic austerity, cutting taxes and red tape for corporations, the privatization of semi-state-owned enterprises and the deepening of Russia’s bonds with global finance capital.

Navalny speaks for a section of Russia’s ruling and upper-middle classes that not only seeks to gain greater access to much of the wealth and resources that are now controlled by Putin and his allies, but also advocate for a foreign policy that is much closer aligned with the aims of Western imperialism. Navalny has publicly opposed Russia’s support for separatists in East Ukraine and has criticized Putin for his ties to the president of China.

The promotion of Navalny is in line with the regime-change operations employed by the US and other imperialist powers elsewhere. The coup in Ukraine in 2014, orchestrated by Washington and Berlin, also relied on far-right forces and the mobilization of sections of the oligarchy. The incoming Biden administration in Washington is stacked with figures who played a central role in this event.

The pro-Navalny frenzy of recent months has to be understood within the context of the crisis triggered by the pandemic. The imperialist powers, above all the US and Germany, have sought to use the anti-Russia campaign to divert growing class tensions outward and advance their war preparations. At the same time, keenly aware of frictions within the Russian ruling class, they seek to build up Navalny in order to destabilize the Putin government and prepare to install a regime that is more closely aligned with their geopolitical interests.