Saudi executions a record last year

Saphora Smith, NBC News•April 20, 2020

Saudi Arabia put 184 people to death in 2019, the highest number Amnesty International has ever recorded in a single year in the country, despite Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s public commitment to reducing the number of executions.

Amnesty International released a 59-page report Monday that found that while global executions last year hit a 10-year low, falling by 5 percent compared to 2018, executions in Saudi Arabia increased by 23 percent, from 149 in 2018.
The London-based rights group Reprieve reported this month that Saudi Arabia had carried out its 800th execution since King Salman bin Abdulaziz assumed power in 2015, and that the rate of executions has doubled under his reign.

As of last week, Amnesty had recorded 789 executions under the king.

Saudi Arabia’s Interior Ministry did not respond to a request for comment on the country's death penalty record.

The kingdom's judicial system is opaque and the numbers of people executed over the years varies slightly, as do rights groups' records as to which year had the highest execution toll prior to 2019. Amnesty International said it started publishing annual reports on executions and death sentences in 2008.
For Saudi analysts and dissidents abroad, the uptick in the number of executions is further evidence that Saudi rulers have declined to rethink the country’s commitment to human rights in the wake of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.

“All those figures point to the general deterioration in human rights across the board that we’ve monitored for some time in relation to arrests, the use of torture and other human rights abuses,” said Josh Cooper, deputy of director of London-based ALQST, which advocates for human rights in Saudi Arabia.



“The death penalty is another violation which has gone in line with that trend of a real deterioration in civil and political rights.”

It also comes after Prince Mohammed told Time in 2018 that the kingdom was working to reduce its number of executions. Asked whether there was an initiative to do so, the crown prince responded: “Yeah, of course it’s an initiative. But we will not get it 100 percent, but to reduce it big time.”

The majority of executions recorded by Amnesty in the kingdom last year were for drug-related offenses and murder. However, the rights group also documented the increased use of the death penalty as a political weapon against dissidents from the country's Shiite Muslim minority. Saudi Shiites have long complained of discrimination in the Sunni-ruled kingdom.

Last April, 37 men were executed at once, 32 of whom were Shiite. Eleven were convicted by the country’s notorious Specialized Criminal Court for spying for Iran, and 14 for participating in anti-government protests, according to Amnesty International.

The court was established in 2008 to try terror-related cases, but rights groups and Saudi dissidents say it has increasingly been used to quash dissent. They say defendants tried by the court have faced unfair trials without lawyers and some have been convicted based on "confessions" extracted through ill-treatment or torture.

Since being appointed crown prince in 2017, Prince Mohammed has presented himself as a reformer eager to transform the kingdom's deeply conservative society. He has instituted a series of social reforms such as allowing women to drive and loosening strict male guardianship laws, which prevent Saudi women from making important decisions without the consent of a male relative.

But he has also presided over sweeping crackdowns on dissent, arresting intellectuals, clerics, women’s rights activists and members of the royal family. In October 2018, the international community shuddered with revulsion when details of the Khashoggi’s murder came to light. The CIA concluded that Prince Mohammed had ordered the killing, according to a person briefed on the agency’s assessment.

Adullah Alaoudh, whose father, Salman Alaoudh, a popular cleric in the kingdom, is in custody in Riyadh and could face the death penalty, said he felt numb when confronted with Saudi Arabia’s growing list of judicial executions.

“It seems [the way] things are going, we have witnessed mass executions, have witnessed the death penalty, have witnessed everything, so I guess we’re kind of used it,” said Alaoudh, 36, who is in self-imposed exile in the United States where he is a senior fellow at Georgetown University.

Salman Alaoudh, who has millions of followers on Twitter, had argued that the country’s rulers should be more responsive to the population's desires. In 2017 he was arrested and later charged with 37 counts, including affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood, a political Islamist group founded in Egypt, that Saudi Arabia has designated a terrorist organization, according to Amnesty International.

The prosecutor has called for him to be sentenced to death, but his son said his hearings have been postponed with no date currently set.

Prince Mohammed's "grip is already tightened," Alaoudh said, "but he’s tightening it even more."

On Pandemic's Front Lines, Nurses From Half a World Away

Aurora Almendral, The New York Times•April 20, 2020

John Matthew Eusebio Villapol, a Filipino English teacher, in Madrid, April 15, 2020, where a hospital hired him because of his background in emergency medicine. (Gianfranco Tripodo/The New York Times)MANILA, Philippines — There were seven nurses in the Buendia family. One of them, Jhoanna Mariel Buendia, got a call from the Philippines on March 28, just before the start of her shift at an intensive care unit in a British hospital.

It was her father, with the news that her beloved aunt — an ICU nurse in Florida — had died of complications from COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

Buendia, 27, went to work. She suited up, strapping on her N95 mask, face shield, gown and apron and taping down her gloves, too numb to process the fact that her aunt had lost her life doing what she was about to do. It wasn’t until a few hours later, as she tended to a patient suspected to have the virus, that it became real and she burst into tears.

Nurses from the Philippines and other developing countries have long made up for shortages in wealthier Western nations. They now find themselves risking their lives on the front lines of a pandemic, thousands of miles from home.

Buendia’s aunt, Araceli Buendia Ilagan, 63, was an associate supervisor in the cardiac surgical ICU at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. She was remembered as a nurses’ nurse, turning down administrative promotions that would have taken her away from patients’ bedsides.

“I guarantee you. She was in every single room helping every single nurse with every single patient,” said Martha Baker, a registered nurse and president of Jackson Memorial’s union for doctors and nurses, who had known Ilagan since the 1980s.

“That was probably her doom,” Baker said. “To be such a good leader and such a hands-on leader. She exposed herself, perhaps at that time to patients we didn’t even know were COVID-positive.”

According to the World Health Organization, the world has 6 million fewer nurses than it needs. One result is that nurses in places like the Philippines have long gravitated toward wealthier countries for higher-paying opportunities.

Almost 16% of nurses in the United States are immigrants, and nearly a third of those — the largest share — are Filipinos. Many also come from Nigeria, India, Jamaica and Mexico, among other places. In Britain, Buendia is one of about 18,600 Filipino nurses working for the National Health Service, its second-largest contingent of migrant nurses, after Indians.

Like other medical professionals, they are at high risk of exposure. At least seven Filipino employees of the NHS, including nurses, porters and a nurse’s assistant, have died from COVID-19, according to news reports. In the United States, the virus has claimed the lives of at least five nurses and a doctor from the Philippines.

“The common denominator is that we’re all scared,” Buendia said of herself and her three housemates, who are also Filipino nurses.

They all work at the same hospital in York and have been in England since September.

Howard Catton, chief executive of the International Council of Nurses, a federation of national nurse associations, said migrant nurses had been “massively important” in helping countries like Britain, Spain and Italy fight the virus.

But he said the crisis underscored the need for developed countries to train their own nurses rather than relying so heavily on migrants.

This month, the Philippines, which says it needs about 300,000 more health care workers than it has, barred them from leaving the country, citing the need to protect them from infection and to ensure they were available to fight the virus at home.

Migration is woven into the Philippines’ culture. As much as 10% of the population works overseas, sending money home, and nursing is one of the most popular options. On average, 13,000 nurses go abroad each year. Nursing recruitment agencies pave the way for visas and certifications so they can find jobs overseas.

Even some Filipino migrants who work in other fields have had training in nursing. Last month in Madrid, the Filipino chief nurse at Hospital Hestia, Edzel Lopez, posted an urgent call on Facebook asking her compatriots to apply for nursing jobs there. Much of the hospital’s staff had been infected by the coronavirus, and bureaucratic obstacles to hiring new nurses were being swept away.

The Spanish hospital hired John Matthew Eusebio Villapol, a 26-year-old from the city of Tagaytay, who was working as an English teacher but had experience training Philippine army medics and working for private ambulance services.

“It was a battlefield promotion, so to speak,” Villapol said.

After a day of training, Villapol said, he was assigned half a floor’s worth of patients. He planned to report for work on his second day off, knowing they would be short-staffed however many people showed up.

“I’ll work if they’ll have me,” he said.

Buendia’s family, whose roots are in the northern Philippine city of Baguio, has sent nurses to hospitals in Florida, California, Britain and Saudi Arabia.

Buendia joined the profession to follow in her aunt’s footsteps. Ilagan helped her through college, sending money and guiding her through tough times in nursing school. She mentored Buendia from a distance as the young nurse began her career in Saudi Arabia, later moving to Britain.

Ilagan called Buendia late last month, as the gravity of the pandemic was becoming apparent in both of the countries where they worked. Coronavirus cases had begun turning up at their hospitals.

It was a conversation of familial concern, couched in the language of their shared profession. They chatted about basic infection protocol. Ilagan gave her niece tips, like how to disconnect patients from tubing in a way that would keep fluids from spattering her. They reassured each other that they were fine.

It was the last time they spoke. Soon afterward, Ilagan developed flu-like symptoms and began self-isolating at home. Four days later, her husband found her unconscious and struggling to breathe. He rushed her to the hospital, but she died before they could intubate her.

“I was so shocked,” Buendia said.

Since then, her uncle, a nurse in California, has tested positive for the virus and been hospitalized.

Buendia’s parents have been calling her from the Philippines every day, often in tears.

“They can’t sleep at night,” she said. “I reassure them that I’m fine.”

In truth, she is afraid. But she has no thoughts of giving up the work.

“That’s the reason why I’m here, to be a nurse,” she said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2020 The New York Times Company

Russia’s Fatalism Has Fatal Consequences Against COVID-19

Anna Nemtsova, The Daily Beast•April 20, 2020


MOSCOW—When Russian President Vladimir Putin finally decided to admit at the end of last month that this country had not been spared the wave of disease sweeping over its Chinese and European neighbors, and called on Russians to take seriously the threat he had ignored, he asked them “not to rely on our good old Russian avos’.”

Coronavirus Could Turn All of Russia Into a Digital Gulag

That’s an interesting word with a “colossal role” in culture, according to the scholar Anna Wierzbicka in her classic study of expressions almost impossible to translate. Basically, it is an attitude that “life is unpredictable and uncontrollable, and one shouldn’t overestimate the powers of reason, logic, or rational action,” she says: “The best one can do is to count on luck.”

But if Putin seriously wanted Russians to dispense with avos’ in the face of this deadly pandemic, that, too, was wishful thinking. Indeed, one might wonder if he was trusting in luck himself the day he visited a hospital filled with coronavirus patients last month and conspicuously shook hands with the director, who subsequently came down with the disease.

In any case, what we see on the streets of Russian cities today, especially outside Moscow, is fatalism with potentially fatal consequences.

In spite of hundreds of detentions—and fines for violating the self-isolation regime that even Muscovites consider huge—the metro is full of people and kiosks continue to sell fast food.

Muscovite Tatiana Dubrovina, an activist at the Sakharov Center, walked to a bank in the Oktyabr Pole district of Moscow’s downtown on Friday. “It looked like a parallel world. KFC sold food from a window, a cafe was open next door, people walked by, as if there were no coronavirus epidemic,” Dubrovina told The Daily Beast.

As of Monday morning, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, there have been 42,853 confirmed cases nationwide, with 361 deaths, but many people think even those counts are low.

Giant crowds waited in the metro and outside factory checkpoints for security to check their documents or temperatures last week. Emergency or not, many managers stuck to bureaucratic procedures while ignoring rules for social distancing, perhaps thinking the situation is simply out of their hands.

Generations of Russian poets and novelists have written about our blend of carelessness and fatalism in the face of a devastating crisis. Leo Tolstoy, for instance, saw these attitudes rooted in the wisdom of the people, who share a deep belief that life is like a river that cannot be resisted and demands to be accepted for what it is. A philosopher peasant in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Platon Karatayev, teaches noble Pierre Bezukhov to live “not by our mind, but by God’s judgment.”

One of today’s popular writers and poets, Dmitry Bykov, says fatalism is just as appealing to Russians now as to those who came before: “One person’s role is absolutely meaningless here,” Bykov said recently on Radio Echo of Moscow. “History takes its predestined, cyclical course and a man cannot stop that cycle, at least for now. Maybe plans and projects make sense somewhere in the world. They don’t mean anything in Russia where we make a plan in order to just step away from it later. It is interesting, I see it as a peculiar challenge.”

A 57-year-old factory worker in the small town of Kstovo, Nizhny Novgorod region, was waiting in line outside the Lukoil refinery’s checkpoint on Thursday. Like many of the people there, he wore no mask. “They do not have them at our pharmacies,” he told The Daily Beast. So, he reasoned, why bother?

Thus far there are 14 confirmed COVID-19 cases in Kstovo, a town with a population of 67,623 near the Volga river. “Our guys don’t worry about the Chinese virus,” he said, “Our bodies are well sterilized—we are more worried about losing a job here. Lukoil is the best employer in town.”

The Bolshoi Theater closed down for quarantine in mid-March but more than 100 of its artists continued to work and organize the “We Are Together” concert that was aired on the Rossiya 1 TV channel on April 11. When COVID-19 test results arrived, it turned out that 34 theater employees had the virus.

Back on March 18, Putin said of the COVID-19 epidemic, “Thank God, we have everything under control, in general.” By that time Italy, Iran, Spain, and China had reported thousands of dead. But the Russian military continued to rehearse for the annual Victory Day parade, a huge affair marking the defeat of Nazi Germany 75 years ago.

The training was canceled only last week. On Monday, a report by a Russian state news agency, TASS, said that all the Russian soldiers who had previously rehearsed for the parade are now in quarantine. All the military equipment involved, and the trains that carried the troops, are now being disinfected. How many of the soldiers contracted the disease is not yet known.

Through much of the 19th century, fatalists were lionized in Russian literature. Grigory Pechorin, an adventurous young officer in Mikhail Lermontov’s novel A Hero of Our Time is one of the best known examples. Expelled from St. Petersburg for taking part in a duel, Pechorin goes to battlefields in the Caucasus where he courts death but soon grows bored with bullets whistling by.

Irina Yukhnova, a professor of philological science, studied the phenomenon of fatalism in Lermontov’s novel. “Pechorin is a pure fatalist, he believes he is in the hands of destiny,” Yukhnova told The Daily Beast. “But what was considered courageous at war did not help during a pandemic,” she noted.

Lermontov, the author, was brought up by his grandmother, who, perhaps saving the young man’s life, was a strong believer in isolation during epidemics. As a teenager, Lermontov survived a devastating cholera pandemic that killed more than 190,000 people in Russia. Moscow schools closed in the fall of 1830. Ugly gossip crawled from house to house and mobs beat Polish residents on the streets, blaming foreigners for poisoning the water in the city. But Lermontov’s grandmother made plans to save her family, not letting fate play its course; she stocked up on food and locked the gate of the family residence to wait out the devastating epidemic.

It was during this same cholera epidemic in 1830 that the poet Alexander Pushkin traveled to the provinces on business. He wanted to sell his family’s property in Boldino, east of Moscow. Pushkin planned to spend just a month away from his gorgeous fiancée, Natalya Goncharova, but the murderous spread of cholera grounded the poet for three months.

Those turned out to be the most prolific months in the Pushkin’s life. He wrote a poetic masterpiece every couple of days, completed most of his novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, and started and finished a series of plays including A Feast in Time of Plague. In his poems, he clearly understood the danger, describing this scene of a distraught lover at a funeral: “Watch, but watch you from afar off / When they bear her corpse away!”

Yukhnova says the poet was restless that fall, and in fact tried to break quarantine several times. “Pushkin tried to escape from Boldino, but every time he was stopped at checkpoints and turned back.”

Russian poets and literary critics have been organizing “Boldino Readings” in Pushkin’s house for the last 50 years, in memory of those fruitful months when Pushkin was quarantined.

Victor Shenderovich, a satirist and playwright, suggests that recalling the work of writers—their moods, their perceptions—during past epidemics may help during the present one.

Pushkin wrote to his friend: “Hey, look, melancholy is worse than cholera; one kills just the body, the other kills the soul… The cholera will end any day. If we stay alive, we’ll be happy again sometime.”

AUSTERITY KILLS
Russia’s Underfunded Hospitals Emerge as Key Vector for Virus

Jake Rudnitsky and Henry Meyer,
Bloomberg•April 20, 2020



(Bloomberg) -- Underfunded and poorly equipped, Russia’s regional hospitals and clinics are emerging as hot spots for transmission as the coronavirus outbreak spreads beyond the capital into the hinterlands.

In Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth-largest city, a single doctor who became infected by a neighbor in his apartment building led to 78 cases in City Hospital Number 1, which is now under quarantine, regional governor Evgeny Kuyvashev said on his Instagram account Monday.

Russia’s regions accounted for more new cases overnight than Moscow as the capital shows signs that it may be beginning to approach the peak of the epidemic. While overall infections rose by 4,268 to 47,121 as of Monday, the number in Moscow was up by 2,026 compared to 3,570 on Sunday.

“The absolute number may be small in these regions, but the current rate of growth should make regional leaders think twice,” Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova told President Vladimir Putin at a televised videoconference Monday. Medical facilities are the main vector for spreading the virus, said Golikova, who oversees the government’s health care policy.

With Russia imposing restrictions nationwide as the illness spreads across the world’s largest country, Putin has held frequent televised conference calls with regional heads to highlight how seriously the Kremlin takes the threat. At one meeting last week, he criticized “irresponsibility and slovenly work” for the surge of cases in some regions and warned that failure to act quickly in preparing medical facilities for the epidemic will be treated “as criminal negligence with all the consequences that come with it.”

Russia’s sprawling regions are for the most part much poorer than Moscow, where Mayor Sergei Sobyanin has quickly built up capacity to handle the spike in hospitalizations. Medical facilities often face shortages of protective gear and staff that leave them ill-equipped to prevent contagion.

In the remote northwestern Komi region, a doctor infected dozens at his hospital and led to its quarantine. Putin replaced the governor in the region, which has the highest rate of infection per 100,000 people outside of Moscow.

“Medical staff across the country are being deployed without proper protection, there aren’t even enough basic masks,”said Semyon Galperin, head of the non-profit Doctors’ Defense League. “We’ll see increasing numbers of doctors and nurses falling ill. Our clinics and hospitals today are breeding grounds for coronavirus.”

Moscow, which is entering its fourth week of shutdown, has seen the number of severely ill stabilize over the last 10 days, Sobyanin told Putin on Monday. With 26,350 cases, it has more than half of all of Russia’s recorded infections though the proportion is falling as the virus takes hold in the country.

Golikova estimates that Russia’s regions are two to three weeks behind Moscow, a hint that the shutdown could stretch into May. Putin has already canceled public celebrations of Russia’s World War Two victory on May 9, which is the country’s most important patriotic holiday.

The fundamental reason for recurring cases of mass infections at hospitals is “the dilapidated state of our medical facilities and the lack of protective wear,” said Andrei Konoval, co-chairman of independent medical trade union Destviye, or Action, which has branches in 50 of Russia’s 85 regions. Staff shortages mean hospital administrators keep employees working even if they come into contact with infected colleagues, he said.

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WHY CORONAVIRUS COULD SPARK A CAPITALIST SUPERNOVA

By John Smith
APRIL 5, 2020
Republished from Open Democracy. This article is part of Open Democracy’s 'Decolonising the economy' series.

“Global yields lowest in 500 years of recorded history. $10 trillion of negative rate bonds. This is a supernova that will explode one day,” tweeted Bill Gross, the ‘bond king’, in 2016.

This day has come closer. Capitalism now faces the deepest crisis in its several centuries of existence. A global slump has begun that is already devastating the lives of hundreds of millions of working people on all continents. The consequences for workers and poor people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America will be even more extreme than for those living in Europe and North America, both with respect to lives lost to coronavirus and to the existential threats to the billions of people already living in extreme poverty. Capitalism, an economic system based on selfishness, greed and dog-eat-dog competition, will more clearly than ever reveal itself to be incompatible with civilisation.

Why is supernova – the explosion and death of a star – an apt metaphor for what could now be about to unfold? Why could the coronavirus, an organism 1000th the diameter of a human hair, be the catalyst for such a cataclysm? And what can workers, youth and the dispossessed of the world do to defend ourselves and to ‘bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old’, in the words of the US labour hymn, Solidarity Forever?

To find answers to these questions, we need to understand why the ‘global financial crisis’ that began in 2007 was much more than a financial crisis, and why the extreme measures taken by G7 governments and central banks to restore a modicum of stability – in particular the ‘zero interest rate policy’, described by a Goldman Sachs banker as “crack cocaine for the financial markets” – have created the conditions for today’s crisis.


GLOBAL CAPITALISM’S ‘UNDERLYING HEALTH ISSUES’

The first stage of a supernova is implosion, analogous to the long-term decline in interest rates that began well before the onset of systemic crisis in 2007, which has accelerated since then, and which fell off a cliff just as coronavirus began its rampage in early January 2020. Falling interest rates are fundamentally the result of two factors: falling rates of profit, and the hypertrophy of capital, i.e. its tendency grow faster than the capacity of workers and farmers to supply it with the fresh blood it needs to live. As Marx said, in Capital vol. 1, “capital’s sole driving force [is] the drive to valorise itself, to create surplus-value… capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”

These two factors combine to form a doom loop of awesome destructive power. Let us examine its most important linkages.

Many things both mask and counteract the falling rate of profit, turning this into a tendency that only reveals itself in times of crisis, of which the most important has been the shift of production from Europe, North America and Japan to take advantage of the much higher rates of exploitation available in low-wage countries. The falling rate of profit manifests itself in a growing reluctance of capitalists to invest in production; more and more of what they do invest in is branding, intellectual property and other parasitic and non-productive activities. This long-running capitalist investment strike is amplified by the global shift of production – boosting profits by slashing wages rather than by building new factories and deploying new technologies. This enables huge mark-ups, turbo-charging the accumulation of vast wealth for which capitalists have no productive use – hence the hypertrophy of capital.

This, in turn, results in declining interest rates – as capitalists compete with each other to purchase financial assets, they bid up their price, and the revenue streams they generate fall in proportion – hence falling interest rates. Falling interest rates and rising asset values have created what is, for capitalist investors, the ultimate virtuous circle – they can borrow vast sums to invest in financial assets of all kinds, further inflating their ‘value’.

Falling interest rates therefore have two fundamental consequences: the inflation of asset bubbles and the piling up of debt mountains. In fact, these are two sides of the same coin: for every debtor there is a creditor; every debt is someone else’s asset. Asset bubbles could deflate (if productivity increases), or else they will burst; economic growth could, over time, erode debt mountains, or else they will come crashing down.

Since 2008, productivity has stagnated across the world and GDP growth has been lower than in any decade since World War II, resulting in what Nouriel Roubini has called “the mother of all asset bubbles,” while aggregate debt (the total debt of governments, corporations and households), already mountainous before the 2008 financial crash, has since then more than doubled in size. The growth of debt has been particularly pronounced in the countries of the global South. Total debt for the 30 largest of them reached $72.5tn in 2019 – a 168% rise over the past 10 years, according to Bank of International Settlements data. China accounts for $43tn of this, up from $10tn a decade ago. In sum, well before coronavirus, global capitalism already had ‘underlying health issues’, it was already in intensive care.

Global capitalism – which is more imperialist than ever, since it is both more parasitic and more reliant than ever before on the proceeds of super-exploitation in low-wage countries – is therefore inexorably heading to supernova, towards the bursting of assets bubbles and the crashing of debt mountains. Everything that imperialist central banks have done since 2008 has been designed to postpone the inevitable day of reckoning. But now that day has come.

10-year US Treasury bonds are considered the safest of havens and the ultimate benchmark against which all other debt is priced. In times of great uncertainty, investors invariably stampede out of stock markets and into the safest bond markets, so as share prices fall, bond prices – otherwise known as ‘fixed income securities’ – rise. As they do, the fixed income they yield translates into a falling rate of interest. But not on March 9, when, in the midst of plummeting stock markets, 10-year US Treasury bond interest rates spiked upwards. According to one bond trader, “statistically speaking, [this] should only happen every few millennia.” Even in the darkest moment of the global financial crisis, when Lehman Brothers (a big merchant bank) went bankrupt in September 2008, this did not happen.

The immediate cause of this minor heart attack was the scale of asset-destruction in other share and bond markets, causing investors to scramble to turn their speculative investments into cash. To satisfy their demands, fund managers were obliged to sell their most easily-exchangeable assets, thereby negating their safe-haven status, and this jolted governments and central banks to take extreme action and fire their ‘big bazookas’, namely the multi-trillion dollar rescue packages – including a pledge to print money without limit to ensure the supply of cash to the markets. But this event also provided a premonition for what is down the road. In the end, dollar bills, like bond and share certificates, are just pieces of paper. As trillions more of them flood into the system, events in March 2020 bring closer the day when investors will lose faith in cash itself – and in the power of the economy and state standing behind it. Then the supernova moment will have arrived.


THE LEFT’S IMPERIALISM-DENIAL, AND ITS BELIEF IN THE ‘MAGIC MONEY TREE’

The gamut of the left in imperialist countries – the Jeremy Corbyn-led wing of the Labour Party in the UK; the motley crew of left-Keynesians such as Ann Pettifor, Paul Mason, Yanis Varoufakis; supporters of Bernie Sanders in USA – are united on two things: they all acknowledge, to one degree or another, that imperialist plunder of colonies and neocolonies happened in the past but do not acknowledge that imperialism continues in any meaningful way to define relations between rich and poor countries.

And they believe in one or other version of the ‘magic money tree’, in other words, they see the decline of interest rates into negative territory not as a flashing red light showing the extremity of the crisis, i.e. not as the implosion phase of a supernova, but as a green light to borrow money to finance increased state investment, social spending, a Green New Deal, and even a bit more foreign aid. In fact, there is no magic money tree. Capitalism cannot escape from this crisis, no matter how many trillions of dollars governments borrow or central banks print. The neoliberals rejected magical thinking, now they embrace it – this shows the extent of their panic, but it does not make magical thinking any less fantastical. The trillions they spent after 2007-8 bought another decade of zombie-like life for their vile system. This time they will be lucky to get 10 months, or even 10 weeks, before the explosion phase of the supernova begins.


CORONAVIRUS – CATALYST FOR CATACLYSM

The coronavirus pandemic occurred at the worst possible time: growth in the eurozone had shrunk to zero; much of Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa were already in recession; the sugar-high from Trump’s huge tax-giveaways to US corporations was fading; the US-China trade war was causing serious disruption to supply chains and was threatening to entangle the EU; and tens of millions of people joined mass protests in dozens of countries across the world.

Interest rates are now deep in negative territory – but not if you are Italy, facing an enormous increase in its debt/GDP ratio, not if you are an indebted corporation trying to refinance your debts, not if you are an ‘emerging market’. Since March 9, corporate interest rates have gone through the roof; in fact few corporations can borrow money at any price. Investors are refusing to lend to them. Corporations are now facing a credit crunch – in the midst of global negative interest rates! That’s why the ECB decided to borrow €750 billion from these same investors, and use it to buy the corporate bonds which these same investors now refuse to purchase, and why the USA’s Federal Reserve is doing the same on an even bigger scale. Italy’s (and the EU’s) fate now depends on the willingness of the Bundesbank to replace its private creditors. Their refusal to do this would be the final stage of the EU’s death agony.

During the middle two weeks of March, imperialist governments announced plans to spend $4.5 trillion bailing out their own bankrupt economies. An emergency online summit of the G20 (the G7 imperialist nations plus a dozen or so ‘emerging’ nations, including Russia, India, China, Brazil, and Indonesia) on 26 March, declared “we are injecting over $5 trillion into the global economy.” These are weasel words; by ‘global’ they actually mean ‘domestic’! The response of the ‘left’ in the imperialist countries is to clap its hands and say, we were right all along! There is a magic money tree after all! – apparently not realising that this is exactly what happened post-2008: the socialisation of private debt. Or that, unlike post-2008, this time it will not work.

Yet, as imperialist governments belatedly mobilise – and monopolise – medical resources to confront the coronavirus crisis in their own countries, they’ve abandoned poor countries to their fate. The left in the imperialist countries (or we could just say ‘imperialist left’, for short) has also ignored the fact that there is nothing in these emergency cash injections for the poor of the global South. If you are an ‘emerging market’, well, fuck off and join the queue for an IMF bail-out! As of March 24, 80 countries were standing in this queue, waiting for some of its $1tr lending capacity. $1 trillion sounds like a lot of money, and indeed it is, but, as Martin Wolf, chief economic correspondent for the Financial Times, points out, “the aggregate external financing gaps of emerging and developing countries are likely to be far beyond the IMF’s lending capacity.”

Furthermore, as Wolf suggests, the purpose of IMF loans is to help with “external financing gaps” – in other words, to bail out imperialist creditors, not the peoples of debtor nations; and they invariably come with harsh and humiliating conditions that add to the crushing burden already pressing down on the peoples of those countries. In this sense, they are just like the vast government bailouts of private capital in the rich countries – but without anything added on to finance welfare payments or partially replace wages. The aim of the latter is to purchase the docility of the working class in the imperialist nations, but they have no intention of doing this in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

On March 24, the United Nations issued an appeal for $2bn to fight the coronavirus pandemic in Africa, Asia and Latin America. This money, which the U.N. hopes to raise over the next nine months, is 1/80 of the annual budget of the U.K.’s NHS, and less than 1/2000 of the $4.5tr they plan to spend keeping their own capitalist economies alive. It is also less than 1/40 of the money which imperialist investors have taken out of ‘emerging markets’ during the first three weeks of March, “the largest capital outflow ever recorded,” according to IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva.

The maximum extent of relief for the collateral effects of the coronavirus epidemic on the peoples of poor countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America was indicated by World Bank president, David Malpass, who said after the G20 summit ended that his board is putting together a rescue package valued at “up to $160 billion” spread out over the next 15 months – a minuscule fraction of the economic losses that the coming global slump will impose on the peoples of the absurdly-named ‘emerging markets’.


“WE HAVE A REVOLUTIONARY DUTY TO FULFILL" – LEONARDO FERNANDEZ, CUBAN DOCTOR IN ITALY

So, what is to be done? Instead of applauding the bailout of big corporations, we should expropriate them. Instead of endorsing a temporary moratorium on evictions and the accumulation of rent arrears, we should confiscate real estate so as to protect workers and small businesses. These, and many other struggles to assert our right to life over the rights of capitalists to their property, are for the near future.

Right now the priority is to do whatever is necessary to save life and defeat the coronavirus. This means extending solidarity to those who are most vulnerable to the pandemic – homeless people, prisoners, asylum seekers enduring ‘hostile environments’ – and to the dispossessed and victims of imperialism in the slums, shantytowns and refugee camps of the global South. Raghuram Rajan, former governor of the Bank of India, points out that “pending a cure or a reliable vaccine, the world needs to fight the virus into submission everywhere in order to relax measures anywhere.” The Economist concurs: “If covid-19 is left to ravage the emerging world, it will soon spread back to the rich one.”

The coronavirus pandemic is just the latest proof that we need not so much an NHS, but a GHS – a Global Health Service. The only country that is acting on this imperative is revolutionary Cuba. They already have more than 28,000 doctors providing free health care in 61 poor countries – more than the G7 nations combined – and 52 in Italy, 120 more to Jamaica, and are helping scores of other countries to prepare for the pandemic. Even the far-right Bolsonaro government in Brazil, which last year expelled 10000 Cuban doctors, branding them terrorists, is now begging them to return.

To defeat coronavirus we must emulate Cuba’s medical internationalism. If we are to defeat this pandemic we must join with its revolutionary doctors and revolutionary people, and we must prepare do what Cuba did to make this internationalism possible – in other words, we must replace the dictatorship of capital with the power of working people. The coronavirus supernova makes socialist revolution – in imperialist countries and across the world – into a necessity, an urgent practical task, a life and death question if human civilisation is to survive and if the capitalist destruction of nature, of which the coronavirus epidemic is merely the latest symptom, is to be ended.



Thanks to Andy Higginbottom, Shih-yu Chou, and Walter Daum for comments on earlier drafts of this article.

DONALD TRUMP AND ERIK PRINCE'S PRIVATIZATION OF WAR


(Pictured: Corporate mercenaries in Afghanistan)

By James Richard Marra

During my career as a business analyst, I learned much about why and how some businesses succeed while others fail. Failure may result from higher wage levels, employee health insurance costs, or market conditions. Nevertheless, it generally occurs due to poor management: owner incompetence, arrogance, and greed, insensitivity to fundamental business factors and best practices, or a flawed understanding of their markets and competitors.

I bring this up because the neofascist governance in Washington and its corporate partners are wooing Americans toward another imperial catastrophe in the Middle East, this time involving Iran. For these capitalists, much is never enough. So as expected, the military-technology-surveillance complex (MTSC) wishes to expand its profitable productive capacity into new or under-exploited war-commodity markets. The success of this expansion depends upon careful attention to geographic, material, and operational considerations. Best business practices demand that the MTSC develops a sound plan by first consulting experts in these areas. These factors might include those identified by the famous military theorist Carl von Clausewitz. For von Clausewitz, the three pillars of warfare are strategy, operations, and tactics. Within the MTSC’s production and marketing plans, these required military functions are transformed into profitable exchange values - money. If this program is managed well, the sky is the limit. If not, failure will likely come.

With these thoughts in mind, we might consider the case of Erik Prince, the ex-Navy Seal and founder/CEO of the failed and criminally mercenary service provider Blackwater. In 2018, Prince, the brother of Education Secretary, and public-education privatizer, Betsy DeVos, approached the Trump Administration with a proposal to privatize the Afghan War. Prince’s dog-and-pony show claimed that the war could be waged more economically and efficiently, while deploying fewer troops in smaller specialized units.

Neofascists, like Steve Bannon, invited further discussion and exploration. This is not surprising because fascism of any sort, including today's neofascism, is an artful alliance of an anti-conventional and zealous "Leader," a hyper-nationalistic culture, and an exceptionally exploitative form of capitalism. Trump's fascism gets its "neo" in part from the fact that today's capitalism is largely unfettered, "neoliberal," finance-and-service-dominated, and monopolized. This current form differs from the manufacturing capitalism that dominated the world economy from the 1920s to the 1980s. Furthermore, history reminds us that, while Hitler disliked “industrialists,” he admired Henry Ford to the extent that, in 1938, he bestowed upon him the Grand Cross of the German Eagle.

Now, capitalism opposes worker control over their labor power. The military command structure epitomizes this, as unions are banned and the demands made upon military labor (soldiers) go unquestioned. Likewise, fascist governance requires that workers absolutely obey the will of the political Leader, as it is transformed into the productive operations in which workers participate.

Both Prince and Bannon recognized a profitable business opportunity enabled by the structural efficiencies fascism offers within a privatized war market. In this model, military needs are continually identified and marketed by the Leader and the MTSC through their political minions and the capitalist media. Once workers are indoctrinated to the benefits of war, the MTSC transforms those needs into corresponding commodities. Vast amounts of capital are provided by taxes largely levied upon the working class. Politically trumped up fears of the working class not only provide a market incentive, but also mobilize workers’ labor power, both on and off the battlefield.

Trump’s military and other members of the MTSC balked at Prince’s scheme. Generals Mattis, Kelly, and McMaster ensured that Prince’s folly was a non-starter. Given this, a question arises: How could a neofascist mercenary's neofascist proposal to a neofascist Leader fail? Prince is neither an idiot nor a novice. His operational capabilities have been successfully field-tested, are marshaled by a highly skilled cadre of special-forces experts, and bolstered by significant international technical and political support.

It occurs to me that Prince’s business failure significantly resides in his misunderstanding of the contemporary war market and its players. He doesn’t understand his competitors’ collective business model, its functional role within the neofascist governance, or its monopolistic structure. Prince’s arrogance leads him to believe he can slither his way directly to the top of the neofascist food chain, biting off a prime piece of the war market without complaint from the big players. That might work if the market were immature, and competition largely relevant to profitability. But today’s market is both mature and well organized. Leading participants synergistically avoid price wars, fight unions and organizing efforts, fund think tanks and lobbyists, contribute to the campaign coffers of servile politicians, and meet together at national and global conferences to determine market rules.

Dominant corporations viscously defend themselves from the competitive risks presented by new and less mature companies. Thus, corporations join in a “co-respective” market behavior that largely guarantees their continuing control and profitability.

Alex Hollings asks:


So why didn’t Trump...a business man that values bottom-line savings, sign off on it?...Steve Bannon, Trump’s recently fired chief strategist, was said to support Prince’s plan, but the Generals Mattis, Kelly, and McMaster have all dismissed it. For those in Bannon’s corner, they argue it’s because he’s the outsider, free from the political pressures of the military industrial complex.

A congressional aide attending the meeting reported, “The adults hate it.”

There is another potential problem, although one that might offer a silver lining for Prince: the laws that govern American wars. These pesky laws make it more difficult for any privatized war business to control production, supply, and operational management. For a privatized war commodity to be successful, businesses require that civilian leadership regularly deliver new war-needs, which would motivate market demand. While both Democrats and Republicans are quick to fund occasional “short” wars, that isn’t enough. What is needed is a government that will go to war as unhesitatingly and continually, as Hitler did devouring the nations of Europe. A fascist leadership is ideal because it considers war to be among the noblest of human endeavors, and resists conventional or legal restraints imposed by “decadent” liberal democracies.

However, today’s renewed calls for limits upon the now imperial presidency from the American left illustrate the business risk represented by not appreciating the vicissitudes involved in political strategy. Prince’s short-term thinking led him to largely ignore the fact that presidents come and go. Public opinion changes with the lifting of a TV remote, and politicians the chase political winds like a bloodhound after a jackrabbit through a lush Kentucky meadow. Prince failed to appreciate that his business success hinged on controlling the dance card at a capitalist senior prom to which he is not invited.

My references to “neofascism” may annoy some folks: "You’re calling Trump a neofascist just because you don’t like his politics!” Although I find Trump's politics uniquely vile, that fact doesn’t inform my understanding of a “Futurist”-inspired fascism. To understand Futurism, let's allow it to speak for itself.

Futurists wish to


...sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and boldness.

...extol aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, the double-quick step, the somersault, the box on the ear, the fisticuff.

...to destroy the museum, the libraries, to fight against moralism, feminism and all opportunistic and utilitarian malignancy.

...glorify war - the only health-give [sic] of the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive arm of the Anarchist, the beautiful ideas that kill, and contempt for woman.

These pleasantries might well have come from Donald Trump or one of his torch-bearing neo-Nazi devotees. But, they are offered by the founder of the Futurist movement, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, in Futurist Aristocracy (1923), edited by the Italian Futurist Nanni Leone Castelli. As such, they illuminate a frightening Futurist thread between contemporary Trumpian neofascism and its historical roots. Benito Mussolini was a Futurist of sorts, and was seen by many contemporaries, Italian or otherwise, as the epitome of the aggressive and spontaneous Futurist hero. Here are a few priceless insights from Benito Mussolini’s (with Giovanni Gentile) 1932 article “Doctrine of Fascism.”


[Fascism]...repudiates the doctrine of Pacifism....[W]ar alone brings up to their highest tension all human energies and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to meet it.

For Fascism the tendency to Empire, that is to say, to the expansion of nations, is a manifestation of vitality...

Fascism attacks the whole complex of democratic ideologies and rejects them both in their theoretical premises and in their applications or practical manifestations. [F]ascism denies that the majority, through the mere fact of being a majority, van [sic] rule human societies; it denies that this majority can govern by means of a periodical consultation; it affirms the irremediable, fruitful and beneficent inequality of men, who cannot be leveled by such a mechanical and extrinsic fact as universal suffrage.

Against individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State; and it is for the individual in so far as he coincides with the State, which is the conscience and universal will of man in his historical existence.

Fascism, in short, is not only the giver of laws and the founder of institutions, but the educator and promoter of spiritual life. It wants to remake, not the forms of human life, but its content, man, character, faith. And to this end it requires discipline and authority that can enter into the spirits of men and there govern unopposed.

These happy thoughts tighten the historical thread that connects Mussolini’s historical fascism to Trump’s regime, as transmitted through pseudo-intellectuals like Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka. This fascist mentality now commands the most powerful military force in human history. Trump’s behavior in both deed and word is a litany of fascist, and therewith Futurist, virtues.

Possessing the legal and political prerequisites for endless warfare, war enterprises need capital to fuel ongoing accumulation. War profiteers understand that citizens purchase war commodities in the sense that they accede to the Constitutional requirement that they pay war costs through taxation. In the current war market, temporary wars no longer provide the required market potential or capital. Fighting temporary wars no longer makes market sense. Instead, the working class must purchase a product that is always urgently needed, requiring continuing maintenance, like the family car. To ensure the needed profitability, war is sold as an indispensable civic need, based upon a continually present danger. That danger comes conveniently from “terrorists,” a term whose meaning is so muddled that it can apply to anyone, anywhere, anytime, anyhow.

With the proper social and political indoctrination, and product marketing, citizens happily surrender their Constitutional right to decide against whom, where, when, and how they sacrifice themselves to the god of imperial war. They are invited by a monopoly of war service providers to choose between column A or column A. Americans now enjoy a neofascist Leader in the White House, and a semi-fascist congress willing to pass mushrooming military budgets. If there were a Constitutional challenge to this state of affairs, the matter would be decided by a Supreme Court infested with neoliberal sycophants. Thus, endless war, as always under capitalism, becomes a good business investment, and therefore good governance.

Under Trump's neofascism, the Leader commands the “supply side” of the war market. Taxes on war businesses are deeply cut, while those enterprises become decreasingly deregulated and increasingly empowered. Under contemporary capitalism, the distinction between the sales effort, which invents new needs, and commodity production is largely dissolved. With the rise of a privatized war market, the traditional relationship between democratic governance and the “invisible” divine hand that supposedly guides markets is, to echo Mussolini, "repudiated." The MTSC is now fully absorbed within the structural operations of the governance, and vice versa. The business role of the Leader is to manage a permanent war-marketing project that inspires the continuing development of new war commodities. Thus, the US Defense Department is “deconstructed” (to use one of Bannon’s favorite words), only to emerge refreshed as the Fannie Mae of American global capitalist dominance.

In sum, Prince’s business proposal was ill conceived, misinformed, and poorly timed. It suffered from management problems that most failed businesses experience. While Prince, like Trump, may have obtained some measure of business success by bullying the defenseless and lying about much, both have left an ultimate legacy of business failure and bankruptcy. Unfortunately, Trump was provided a place at the head of the capitalist table by a rapacious Republican Party and its white nationalist supporters. It will remain to be seen if Prince learns some lessons and abandons his unprofitable arrogance in favor of sound business judgment. For the sake of the American working class, I hope that won’t happen.

MONEY HAS ALWAYS BEEN THERE: CORONAVIRUS RESPONSE REVEALS CAPITAL’S LIES
By Olivia Wood
APRIL 5, 2020
Republished from Left Voice.


In the past weeks, companies and governments alike have begrudgingly been forced to provide minimal relief to workers suffering under the coronavirus pandemic. Inboxes are filled with emails from dozens of corporations about the steps they are taking to “protect” their employees and the public; these emails are nothing but damage control in the face of public demands.

Corporations and governments of all sizes are realizing that under such extreme conditions, they cannot hide the disastrous consequences of their actions like they once could. The need to “flatten the curve” is of course vital to protecting everyone’s health, but the capitalists are only struggling to flatten the curve of suffering under their own hegemony in order to keep people from connecting the dots. The old arguments — blaming the working class for their own financial irresponsibility or lack of work ethic — don’t work as well when entire sectors are getting shut down.

Already, we are seeing rapid changes in political consciousness across sectors. Many people now support measures — like free healthcare, guaranteed paid leave, and universal basic income — that they considered “too radical” only a few weeks ago. They are realizing that all people deserve more. And now they are demanding it.

Just in the last few weeks, airlines have been repeatedly revising their refund policies. Employers have been allowing more and more people to work from home. Health care providers are beginning to offer telehealth, and insurance companies are starting to provide coverage for telehealth where they didn’t before. These changes didn’t come from the goodness of their hearts. They came in response to a rapid loss in profits, fear of public backlash, and mass public outcry, both through piles of individual complaints and mass organized actions.

Many workplace protections that we are accustomed to today — such as the 8-hour workday, minimum wage laws, and unemployment and disability benefits — as inadequate as they are, were won in the 1930s when mass movements and organized labor put pressure on the capitalist class. By offering small, affordable concessions now, subsidized by government bailouts, companies hope to appease the newly agitated workforce and foreclose the possibility of even stronger organized revolt.

These concessions are not enough to prevent the serious physical, emotional, and financial harms that people around the country (and the world) are facing, but they do reveal just how many policies that were previously called “not feasible” or “too expensive” could have been rapidly implemented in our workplaces and in our lives all along.

This partial list of concessions demonstrates that while there are no lasting solutions under capitalism, working people can still win valuable gains that improve their lives and strengthen their ability to fight for even more. 

Many of these items are courtesy of @frnsys‘s compendium of concessions that they shared on Twitter.

Workplace Benefits


Some companies, such as REI, are continuing to pay their workers while stores are closed. At the same time, Congress has refused to provide paid sick leave for most employees, and other companies like Ann Taylor and American Eagle have failed to provide the paid leave they promised.


Many schools and workplaces are now allowing students/workers to connect from home, even in cases where teleworking accommodations were previously denied to disabled students and workers because these accommodations were not considered “reasonable” under the ADA.

Economic Interventions


Interest and payments on federally-subsidized student loans have been suspended.


Some U.S. citizens — excluding gig workers, many college students, sex workers, and others– will receive a one-time check of $1,200, adjusted based on number of children


The U.S. federal government is now subsidizing state-run unemployment insurance by $600 per week per person.

Shelter and Public Health Protections


California is commandeering hotels to house the homeless and create extra space for COVID patients, as well as sending 450 trailers around the state to provide additional shelter. Notably, this is not the case in places like Las Vegas, where homeless people are in a “socially distanced” parking lot.


Several municipalities have suspended evictions.


Many health insurance companies are now providing coverage for digital medical care (telehealth) and teletherapy, regardless of the person’s previous coverage plan

Law and Order


A county jail in Ohio released hundreds of inmates, although the terms of their release vary


The Portland police department is no longer responding to calls unless lives are in danger.


Bexar County, Texas is officially suspending arrests for all minor offenses, and many other locales are informally changing their responses


TSA has created an exception to rules regarding the amount of liquids that can be taken in a carryon bag to allow for large bottles of hand sanitizer. (Of course, this was already an arbitrary rule)

Services and Utilities


Comcast and T-Mobile are lifting all internet data caps for 60 days


Several municipalities have suspended utility shut-offs, and Detroit turned the water back on for families who had previously had their water service cut off.


Cities like New York and San Francisco are implementing government-sponsored childcare


Some internet service providers are providing free internet service for children who are now attending school from home. 

These concessions are not enough — not even close. We need to have universal paid leave, a quarantine wage, a layoff freeze, and the cancellation of rent and debt. These concessions are nothing but crumbs being thrown by the bourgeoisie in the hopes that it will be enough to quell our rage. However, these concessions do reveal that all of these reforms that governments and business leaders have for so long insisted are impossible to implement are, in fact, things that they always had the power to do. The money has always been there.

More than 10 million people have filed new claims for unemployment benefits in the last two weeks alone. The crisis is only going to get worse, and we need massive changes now. The way that the necessary concessions will be won is not by sitting idly by and hoping that the capitalists will take mercy on us. As the price gouging around food and medical equipment, landlords’ insistence on continuing to collect rent, and the many employers forcing workers to labor in unsafe conditions demonstrate, capitalist pity is hard to come by in the face of profits. We need to have widespread collective action to win the things we need to survive the coronavirus crisis. We should look to the powerful examples of workers at Amazon, Whole Foods, and General Electric who, this week, walked off the job, went on strike, or staged protests in their workplace to gain safer working conditions or, in the case of GE, switch over production from airplane parts to the much-needed ventilators.

It is important, as the crisis continues and worsens, to draw certain conclusions about what is happening and why. The concessions listed above are protections that could have always been in place, the bailout bill shows that there is always money, and the increased safety measures show that businesses always had the ability to improve conditions. These things didn’t happen before because they didn’t want to do them. They are giving us crumbs now because they are afraid; they are afraid of us. They know that we have the power to shut down production, to attack capital, and to take power for ourselves. They are hoping that if they give us some crumbs now, then we will forget and forgive them. But we won’t, and we can’t. These concessions should only add to our anger, because now we know, without a doubt, that they could have done this the whole time and chose not to. The money has always been there.

CAPITALISM NEEDS ANOTHER BAILOUT. IT'S TIME TO LET IT SINK.

By J. E. Karla
APRIL 16, 2020

HAMPTON THINK

There’s an old saying that leftists have predicted seven of the last three economic downturns. We know that capitalism is doomed to crisis, but we are often disconnected from how that crisis actually comes to pass. Now that we face a looming depression that’s surprised nearly everyone, it’s a great time to try thinking about production a little like a businessperson. It actually yields some pretty communist results.

The trick to thinking this way is pretty simple: businesses exist to make money, and the finer points of Marxist political economy notwithstanding, they make money by bringing in more revenues than expenses. These expenses can be broken down into the costs of goods and services, costs of revenue, operating costs, taxes and interest.

The costs of goods and services were the very things Marx focused on in his critiques of political economy – the costs of raw materials supplied by nature and the human labor-power used to transform them. This is the source of all value, and even capitalists understand that the surplus here pays for everything else. That’s why “gross profit,” total sales minus these costs, is their primary measure of profit. Even service businesses – airline, hotels, lawyers, etc. – have to make their money from gross profits generated by a commodity manufacturer somewhere else in the system.

With production gutted right now, this surplus isn’t getting generated, and that’s why the entire system is in big trouble. Demand-side problems caused by everybody isolating are bad enough, but Marxists know it’s the production side that runs the whole thing. On a micro level it’s true that their costs of goods and services aren’t being accrued right now, but debts on materials already purchased and perishable materials rotting in warehouses threaten to sink enterprises, nonetheless. Add in their other costs, and their options without a bailout are to dig into savings, sell off assets, or go bankrupt – an option with cascading consequences throughout the supply chain.

These other costs include “costs of revenue,” including salaries for managers, payments on long-term purchase agreements for raw materials, and – crucially – all of the income for service businesses. They also include operating expenses such as the costs of making sales and the overhead for the business. If businesses are renting space, paying mortgages on idle facilities, on the hook for service contracts or supply arrangements, having to ship mostly empty trucks, or still getting utility bills without the sales to cover them they either have to default and go bankrupt, or get outside help. As for taxes and interest, the government is going to want their money sooner or later, and not paying the bank now means the debtor can’t borrow after the pandemic, when credit will be more necessary than ever.

The system as a whole definitely does not have the reserves to cover all of these costs for very long, and they can’t sell assets for enough money to cover them either. They’re still trying, of course, which is why pretty much all asset prices dropped in recent weeks. Capitalists have been trying to get whatever they can to pay as many bills as possible, and their slide has only been halted by the promise of incoming bailout funds.

So, the only alternatives the businesspeople of the world can see are either a global decimation of production with no real prospect of restarting in the foreseeable future – an economic depression – or bailouts. The word “bailout” refers to the process of rescuing a sinking ship by dumping water from a leak overboard, a process that only works if you can collect and dump water at a faster rate than the ship takes on.

Central banks and governments are – as a result – furiously printing money in the hopes that it will be enough to keep the system afloat. At the same time they are also hoping that the consequences of uncharted economic policy won’t make things worse in ways they haven’t anticipated. Will it work? Nobody knows, but it’s a good time for one of our customary predictions of doom.

A much surer alternative would be to simply use state power to suspend contractual obligations, debts, rents, utility charges, and taxes – plugging the hole instead of bailing out the ship. They could then provide a universal basic income and guarantee delivery of necessary services without payment. They could compel the continued delivery of vital goods through government order and compensate all the necessary workers at a level commensurate to the benefit they are providing to society. They could further streamline things by eliminating unnecessary marketing and management positions.

At most a much smaller bailout might be needed to pay for ramping up operations after the pandemic has passed. In return, the government could claim an equity stake in all of these enterprises, using their ownership to serve the public interest.

Some caveats aside, the name for such a system is socialism, and the businesspeople of the capitalist class would rather endure a depression or kill millions of people than tolerate even a limited experience of socialism. Even the plausibility of such an arrangement – virtually every element of that description has been officially proposed or adopted somewhere in the last few weeks – terrifies them, because it makes it clear how close a socialist society really is. We could, conceivably, have it tomorrow.

The biggest caveat, of course, is that the existing bourgeois state will never do this. And smashing it while building a new one makes the task much harder. But the state’s legitimacy is eroding more and more every day, and a protracted depression is sure to swell the ranks of the proletariat, creating the very solution to our primary problem. Even if they pull off the bailout, they’ll only leave the system as a whole less prepared for the next crisis.

That's why the same business guys so enamored of up-by-the-bootstraps tales of rugged settler individualism are so desperate for government checks right now. We may have called more shots than we’ve made, but that’s only because we have always known one thing they are just now learning: capitalists are trapped on the high seas of crisis, surrounded by a world ready to throw them overboard, soon.

CORONAVIRUS AND THE PATH BEYOND POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY
By Connor Harney

APRIL 3, 2020

“We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, we must justify our right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
- Richard Buckminster Fuller

It has been a little over a week since President Trump deemed my co-workers at Whole Foods and I critical infrastructure during the global Coronavirus pandemic, and already, any sense of appreciation that title conferred—both in being categorized as essential in combating COVID-19 and better everyday treatment by customers—has already dissipated. In the place of that gratitude, our customers seem as entitled as ever toward the labor we thanklessly provide. At the same time, any supply-chain issue or corporate-rationing policy out of our control means we face their ire, rather than the faceless executives and middle management responsible.

Taking aside that this global outbreak has everyone on edge, this sort of behavior is not at all surprising given the highly-stratified nature of class in the United States. There is a massive gulf in wealth, even among those that work. That is, the pay differential between say a software engineer and grocery stocker like myself is immense: the stock clerk can expect a median pay of just over 12 dollars an hour and the software developer, on the other hand, can expect just under $58. Even the lowest paid developer makes twice that of the clerk. Of course, none of this takes into account benefits connected to employment in the U.S. like healthcare and retirement, which widens this gap even further.

As Zizek wrote recently, “the impossible has happened, our world has stopped,” and yet, as we are expected to provide a sense of normalcy for the rest of country during what can only be described as a breakdown of all norms, workers in the service sector still struggle for basic human dignity. It was only after public shaming that my company offered paid sick leave, and only for the extent of the pandemic. Even our hazard pay is laughable, two dollars more an hour to put ourselves and our families on the front lines of this biological battle.

Given that, it has been nearly a decade since Fight for $15 began their campaign to raise wages and unionize typically-unorganized workers. And as the minimum still sits at under eight dollars, it should come as no surprise that conceptions of the nature of the work constitute a major dividing line among American workers. As a society, we fetishize technology, and its presence looms large over our national consciousness. For that reason, those who work in that sector of the economy find themselves held in high esteem by the public.

Unfortunately, this reverence is almost always accompanied by a zero-sum view, whereas only certain workers deserve dignity. Just like the literal wealth of the nation, there is only so much goodwill to go around—low-skilled workers, or the ones that make sure that everyone is clothed, fed, and sheltered, are barred from pride in their work that those in other sectors are allowed. This belief in the lowly nature of the service worker is by no means a new one.

Dolores Dante, a waitress interviewed by Studs Terkel in the early-1970s for his famous book Working, speaks to this long-standing state of affairs when she described her response to those who would say she was “just a waitress.” According to Dolores, “people imagine a waitress couldn’t possibly think or have any kind of aspiration other than to serve food,” but for her the job fulfilled a sense of purpose to the point that: “I don’t feel lowly at all. I myself feel sure. I don’t want to change the job. I love it.”

As human beings, we need to engage with the material world for our survival. Under capitalism, the way we meet our material needs is determined by factors like where we live, our level of education, skills we have, jobs available on the labor market, as well as the social networks we are a part of. All of these things set the stage for where and how we work. That a game of chance governs our career trajectories should highlight how arbitrary the barriers to respectability we create are: the Dolores Dantes of the world should find dignity in their work.

However, the strongly-held belief in the connection between “skill” and compensation remains an obstacle to a world where such self-worth for service workers is publicly embraced. In many ways, this problem comes out of the notion of the United States as reaching a new level of economic development—a concept that would not have been foreign to our waitress. During the 1970s, manufacturing began to shift from the core to the periphery of the capitalist world system, and what are often called the service and knowledge economies emerged as the dominant growth sectors. With a certain optimism, Daniel Bell and other thinkers responded to these changes by predicting the coming of the Post-industrial society.

Under these new social arrangements, making things no longer mattered. That the U.S. could provide the bare necessities of life was a foregone conclusion. The focus of the new economy would be on ideas and technical know-how. What this view did not consider is that, rather than a transcendence of industrial society in one country, it represented more its international universalization. This was at least Harry Braverman’s response to the idea of Post-industrial society. In Labor and Monopoly Capital, released in the same year as Bell’s book, he argues that the theory is just another in a long line of “economic theories which assigned the most productive role to the particular form of labor that was most important or growing most rapidly at the time.”

Most importantly, rather than a decline in Taylorism or scientific management in the world of work, the rise of the service economy symbolized its universal application. He describes the segmentation of work similar to that used on an assembly line as “a revolution…now being prepared which will make of retail workers, by and large, something closer to factory operatives than anyone had ever imagined possible.” Not only was American society still reliant on that manufacture of commodities, other workplaces were beginning to look more like the shop floor.

Even so, the link between knowledge and the so-called new economy placed a certain import on those with higher levels of education—as it was often assumed the technology used in the growth sectors of the American economy required more formal learning. Such a view still prevails, but considering the level of technology that has been integrated into our daily lives and the abundance of people with advanced degrees working behind Starbucks counters and driving for Uber, it should be left in the past along with the myth of the post-industrial society the current pandemic has clearly laid bare.

Instead, we should use the current crisis to break down barriers between working people—highlighting the work of all that keeps our economy in motion. Moving past these antiquated notions, we can come together to forge new social bonds to fight for an economy that works for the working class and not just the rich.

The Autonomous City: A History of Urban Squatting 

Alexander Vasudevan

Verso Books, May 16, 2017 - Political Science - 304 pages

A radical history of squatting and the struggle for the right to remake the city

The Autonomous City is the first popular history of squatting as practised in Europe and North America. Alex Vasudevan retraces the struggle for housing in Amsterdam, Berlin, Copenhagen, Detroit, Hamburg, London, Madrid, Milan, New York, and Vancouver. He looks at the organisation of alternative forms of housing—from Copenhagen’s Freetown Christiana to the squats of the Lower East Side—as well as the official response, including the recent criminalisation of squatting, the brutal eviction of squatters and their widespread vilification.

Pictured as a way to reimagine and reclaim the city, squatting offers an alternative to housing insecurity, oppressive property speculation and the negative effects of urban regeneration. We must, more than ever, reanimate and remake the urban environment as a site of radical social transformation.