War in Ukraine

(Statement of the Internationalist Communist Tendency)

We reproduce here and make our own the international Declaration that the Internationalist Communist Tendency (ICT) has just adopted. In the face of imperialist war, the affirmation and defense of consistent proletarian internationalism – that is, to the point of revolutionary defeatism against "one's own" bourgeoisie – is the first task of communist minorities. That we can, on this occasion, speak with one voice can only strengthen the internationalist camp – its class unity – and its reach into the proletarian ranks. But above all, we want to support the general, but nevertheless concrete, orientations that the ICT puts forward and that we, for our part, do not cease to put forward because they correspond to the stakes of the present historical situation and course, which are basically determined by the alternative international proletarian revolution or generalized imperialist – and nuclear – war.

Crisis and war feeding each other “ are creating fertile ground for the revival of the class war ”, the comrades rightly say. In parallel, or more precisely in close connection with this perspective, we revolutionaries must “ devote  our energies to building the international revolutionary party so that it can bring its tactics and strategy to the wider working class. ” In doing so, the united defense of proletarian internationalism and the slogan of revolutionary defeatism become, and must become, a moment of the struggle for the communist party of tomorrow.

This is also why we support and endorse the Declaration of the ICT.

The IGCL,28 February 2022

War in Ukraine: Imperialist Rivalry in a Global Economic Crisis

No War but the Class War! Neither NATO nor Putin!

(Statement of the Internationalist Communist Tendency)

The war in Ukraine goes on. Despite some hesitation by Germany, France and Italy, Putin calculated that the US and Western allies (NATO) would not give up on their economic and financial sanctions, or recognise Russia’s acquisition of Crimea via a "referendum". More importantly, he recognised Biden's (and Zelensky's) desire to incorporate Ukraine into NATO. If that happened, Russia would have the missiles in their backyard. It was a risk that Putin was not prepared to take, not only for the sake of national security, but also to maintain his "lifetime" presidency, as well as Russia’s role of gas and oil supplier to Europe. Last, but not least, Putin does not want to look as though he had lost across the board without even putting up a fight. Plan A was to use diplomatic "weapons" alongside military deterrence (movement of troops on the borders of Ukraine) to frighten the Zelensky government whilst pushing the two separatist republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in the Donbas, with their strategic ports in the Azov Sea and rich coal mines, towards self-determination.

Plan B (the actual invasion of Ukraine) was dramatically put into effect when all the assumptions of plan A failed due to Biden's negative response to all of Putin’s demands. Moreover, even though it is marginal to the strategic competition between the two imperialisms, we should also remember that the American

President is on the threshold of mid-term elections and his approval ratings are considerably down.

Therefore, pushing Russia to this "extreme" act is a sort of victory which will inevitably bring old Europe closer together, away from Russian energy blackmail (with more sales for US gas from fracking) and closer to the US as the military links within NATO are reinforced. But at the same time it is compelling Russia to extend its growing links with China. Imperialist confrontations are thus now all the more dangerous.

We are chronicling a war that was widely anticipated and that simple common sense could have avoided.

But common sense is not an economic category. It does not belong to the inalienable interests of the imperialists in question, interests which, in order to be achieved, can quite possibly lead to war. Neither does common sense govern the actions of a capitalism which is increasingly in crisis, much less imperialism as a whole which inevitably takes on aggressive forms.

A New Historical Phase

In this historical phase we have to deal with three aspects which are dramatically part of every war, whether or not in the Middle East, whether they are oil wars, strategic conquests or proxy wars.

The first aspect concerns the lack of a political movement strong enough to counter the crises of capitalism and the ensuing wars which are the temporary "solution" to its contradictions. The scattered revolutionary organisations are not, at the moment, a strong enough political reference point to pose an alternative to the barbarism of capitalism.

The second aspect is inextricably linked to the first. In the absence of a revolutionary political party, in the absence of a mass mobilisation against war and the crises of capitalism that generate wars and the ruling class ideology that justifies them, the massacre of proletarians, wage workers, used as instruments of war themselves, becomes an unavoidable consequence.

The third point concerns the weapons the bourgeoisie uses to oblige masses of workers — whose labour-power in peacetime is exploited to the last drop — to become ‘cannon fodder’ in times of war. Somehow the masses fall in with the interests of capital which are, by definition, opposed to theirs. These weapons are many and varied: they range from the use of organised religion, the idea of "exporting democracy" in order to overthrow dictatorships which, paradoxically the same powers have financed, and politically supported, if not armed to the teeth until that time. Last but not least, imperialism plays the nationalist card. In this case, nationalism of the "Great Russian" variety. Before the war the game had worked perfectly. Putin has always appealed to the unity of the Slavic people of "Greater Russia" as a single ethnic group under a symbolic single homeland. Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians, up to the Maidan uprisings (2014) that brought down the pro-Russian Yanukovych, were blood brothers for Putin. They were to be treated as part of an ethnic nationalism as false as its promoter, but functioning in the interests of Russian

imperialism.

Once the war began, the nationalist card was used for the Russian-speaking populations of Donbas, inciting them to secede from Ukraine with military support from the "Russian Motherland" to punish the renegade Ukraine.

The NATO powers have responded with increased sanctions with the aim of further embarrassing Russia, but in doing so could also embarrass important members such as Germany, France and Italy. NATO secretary Stoltenberg is threatening to intervene militarily if an allied country is threatened. Meanwhile, the Moscow-Beijing axis has been strengthened. The oil sanctions on Nord Stream 2 would be replaced by

Russia's oil and gas exports to China and the Chinese "silk road" project would continue to have Russia itself as one of its terminals.

The Revolutionary Response

These are facts created by imperialism. Their moves, their goals. There is no choice for revolutionaries. We do not stand with NATO for the defence of a false democratic freedom. We do not support Russia in the name of vital strategic interests or ideological nostalgia that would like to revive the glories of a non-existent socialism despite a first, unique and inspiring, proletarian revolution in 1917. By the 1920s due to the failure of the international revolution it was isolated and defeated. In this regard, it should not be forgotten that fringes of pseudo-communists and the left around the world "cheer" for Russia when imperialist forces come to blows, simply because they oppose American imperialism. They never ask what Russia is today, or pose the question of internationalism and of the class war, and its possible revival. In terms of the outlook for the international working class, currently things are not going well. Though strikes are rising they are few and far between. Many are sectional and thus easily prevented by the trade unions from developing a deeper questioning of a capitalism in crisis. Political organisations capable of significantly putting forward a social alternative to capitalism do exist, but as yet do not have the strength to affect the wider working class which, at the moment, passively puts up with the dominant ideology of their respective national bourgeoisies. But the crisis goes on. Its impact is already creating a new wave of attacks on workers everywhere. These attacks and the increasing danger of all-out war are creating fertile ground for the revival of the class war.

Our revolutionary response to the barbarism of imperialism is to devote our energies to building the international revolutionary party so that it can bring its tactics and strategy to the wider working class and so fight against the death grip of nationalism, the revival of bourgeois-democratic ideology, and fake “socialist” myths (such as the possibility of “socialism in one country”). In this way the international working class will be able to take the revolutionary path to genuine socialism against all the capitalist exploiters, all imperialisms and their wars. In the meantime imperialism offers us only more barbaric tragedies: wars, famine, death, ethnic cleansing and genocide, refugees in search of a better world that does not exist but which still has to be built. This is the task of the world working class. Our war is the class war to rid the world of these atrocities.

Internationalist Communist Tendency, 27 February 2022

Canada’s First Black Nurses, and How to Save the System

As burn-out mounts, a history book reminds we must improve conditions as we seek new recruits.

Crawford Kilian 25 Feb 2022TheTyee.ca
Crawford Kilian is a contributing editor of The Tyee.

A detail from the cover of Moving Beyond Borders shows one of many Black recruits who, beginning in the 1940s, broke the colour barrier in Canadian nursing.

Moving Beyond Borders: A History of Black Canadian and Caribbean Women in the Diaspora
By Karen Flynn
University of Toronto Press (2011)

Canadian health care is two years into a pandemic, and its troubles are only just beginning. This book points to a solution.

Doctors, nurses, technologists and other staff are exhausted. Many are quitting, or taking early retirement, or dying. Those who remain are overworked and taking abuse and violence from some of the people they’re trying to save.

And whatever the politicians say about “living” with COVID, health-care workers will still have to care for COVID patients who die with it, as well as all the other routine duties involved in looking after an aging Canada.

The BC NDP’s new budget is a case in point. The Hospital Employees’ Union responded to it with a warning from HEU secretary-business manager Meena Brisard: “The budget includes 6.6 per cent increase to core health spending in 2022–23 but holds planned spending increases in future years below the levels needed to support health-care delivery in the face of a growing and aging population, and inflation.

“We strongly support the premier’s efforts to secure a higher level of support from the federal government for health-care spending. But we also need to plan today for the health-care system we need in the years ahead.”

The BC Nurses’ Union, meanwhile, has surveyed its members and found them alarmingly ready to leave the profession. Two out of five nurses in their 20s said they were likely to leave after the pandemic, and over a third of those in their 30s.

As for the future, the BCNU said: “As the pandemic wears on, we are asking that a plan be developed that addresses the crippling staffing shortage, unrealistic working conditions, and recruitment and retention of nurses in every part of this province.

“The results show us that nurses are more willing to stay in the profession if they are better protected from violence in the workplace, if they have unfettered access to PPE and have enough nursing colleagues to meet the demands of the health-care system.”

Even if today’s nurses stay in their jobs, the profession is still understaffed. The B.C. government is adding 602 new nursing seats to programs that now have about 2,000, but even that is unlikely to meet growing future needs — especially if attrition continues.

We’ve been here before, scrambling for more people to staff a health-care system trying to meet sharply increased demand. We will likely do it the same way now that we did in the decades after the Second World War: by recruiting overseas. But this time we’ll have to do it while also transforming the whole system.

Karen Flynn, an associate professor at the University of Illinois, published the remarkable book Moving Beyond Borders: A History of Black Canadian and Caribbean Women in the Diaspora in 2011. She interviewed 35 Black Caribbean and Canadian women who had entered nursing from the 1940s to the 1960s. Most had been recruited to work in Britain’s new National Health Service, and were trained in British hospitals. They eventually migrated to Canada, sometimes after a return to the Caribbean.

On its face, Dr. Flynn’s book might seem to be focused on Black medical history, offering a study of some of the first Black women to break into a hitherto white profession. But in 2022, it looks like a manual on how to save the whole health-care system. Her interviews go deep into the nurses’ childhoods and the mid-century cultures of Canada, Britain and the Caribbean. She learns how the nurses grew up with norms of gender and race and class, and how they dealt with both individual and systemic racism.

By showing us these women’s origins, and the system they contended with, Flynn offers guidelines for our own system, which still retains many of the weaknesses of the 1950s and ’60s. Black nurses learned how to work around those weaknesses, or even ignore them, while still delivering excellent care. We’ll have to look for similar traits in the health-care workers of the coming decades.

Recruited out of desperation

Capable though they were, Flynn’s young women were recruited out of desperation to staff a system that didn’t think much of them. Britain’s Caribbean colonies had long been impoverished and forgotten, but the new National Health System faced a critical shortage of skilled labour after the war. Canadian Black women were equally impoverished, and perhaps more aware of this inequity than their counterparts in the Caribbean.

Once in Britain, the young women encountered racism at every level, from patients who didn’t want to be touched by Black hands to matrons who referred to them using slurs.

They found themselves on the bottom of a hierarchy, with white male doctors at the top and white female nurses and matrons just below them. All nurses were expected to behave like proper white middle-class girls; that put the Black students at an instant disadvantage. One 1960s student grew a big Afro, and kept her nurse’s cap so far back on it that her matron could barely see it — a daring act of resistance.

Another act of resistance was to refute their white instructors’ biases by becoming the best students in class, and then the best nurses in the hospital. But it took infinite patience to endure the casual bigotries of their teachers and colleagues.

‘De-skilling’ professionals

Black nurses who migrated to Canada carried the prestige of their British training and experience, but found themselves in a very different culture: jobs they did routinely in Britain were now the preserve of doctors only; the nurses themselves were “de-skilled” with tasks that should have belonged to nurses’ aides and orderlies. Some moved on to better careers in U.S. cities like Detroit.

No doubt much has changed in Canadian health care since the 1960s, but racism remains ingrained against Indigenous people in the system. And after all these years, it’s still a persistent problem for Black Canadian nurses.

The Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario recently published the report of its Black Nurses Task Force, saying: “RNAO recognizes that racism is a public health crisis that contributes to health and socioeconomic disparities and must be urgently dismantled. RNAO launched its Black Nurses Task Force in June 2020 to acknowledge, address and tackle the anti-Black racism deeply ingrained in the nursing profession.”

Health-care professionals should read the report, as well as Dr. Flynn’s book, while taking detailed notes. It’s no longer enough to recruit people of colour on the principle that “any warm body will do.” Recruitment will require understanding the cultural backgrounds of potential health-care workers, and assessing their ability to work within a system while also dismantling its racist, classist and sexist components.

Recruit the best

Regardless of race, class or gender, every health-care worker should be scouted like a promising high school hockey player, recruited into top schools and rigorously trained. Hospitals and clinics should compete for such graduates, offering excellent pay, working conditions and support.

Many will be Indigenous, Black or from overseas; immigrant health-care workers should be welcomed like foreign investors, not like unqualified imposters. Varied backgrounds, training and skills should be judged as advantages. It should be cheap and easy for immigrants to train to meet local standards.


Nurses Are in Crisis, and Banging Pots Isn’t Going to Fix It READ MORE

Like the British in the 1940s, we may well need to attempt to draw from lower-income countries who already lack enough workers for their own needs. Rather than grab the best for ourselves, we could help fund their medical and nursing programs and train their teachers, on a scale that would enable such countries to export health-care workers, like the Philippines and Cuba. We could then recruit the graduates we need, while their classmates work in hospitals around the world.

Yes, it would be expensive. It would upset the status of the doctors and administrators now at the top of the hierarchy, and the cost would annoy taxpayers who think they’ll never get sick. Some people would still come out of hospital complaining about the food or the beds instead of marvelling that they’re still alive thanks to the care they got.

But however costly it may be to train and employ workers in our future health-care system, it will be vastly cheaper than burning them out and throwing them away. The pandemic has shown us that inequality — whether from racism, sexism or classism — is a health threat at least as serious as COVID-19 itself. A society that cares about its caregivers will be far happier and healthier than one caring only for those at the top.

‘I Was a Racketeer for Capitalism’
Now is an apt moment to read up on a US marine named Smedley Butler.

Crawford Kilian 22 Feb 2022TheTyee.ca
Crawford Kilian is a contributing editor of The Tyee.

Smedley Butler died on the eve of the Second World War: 

‘An idealistic boy grown into a monster, he served his country by ruining other countries beyond repair.’ 

Photo via Wikimedia.

Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire
By Jonathan Katz
St. Martin’s Press (2022)

The life and confessions of Smedley Butler make interesting reading as schemers subvert the electoral process in the U.S., and as Canadians behold the assault on their own government by capital occupiers backed by mysterious money and tactical assistance.

Who is Smedley Butler? Once upon a time, he was America’s archetypal warrior, a U.S. Marine general who became the model for soldiers in Hollywood movies. He was literally present at the creation of the American empire, from Latin America to the Philippines — a professional toppler and installer of regimes who shaped over a century of imperial policy and administration.

Butler was even approached to lead a coup against his old friend Franklin Delano Roosevelt. For the masters of high finance who tried to recruit him for that job, democracy had become an inconvenience to be tossed away.

Today Butler is almost forgotten, an embarrassment even to the marine corps. That’s because he described his 30-year career by calling himself a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. He gave anti-war speeches on college campuses and died of cancer in 1940, the day before Hitler invaded Russia.

Jonathan Katz has resurrected Butler from 80 years of obscurity in this surprising and very well-written book. He has also explored a part of American history that Americans prefer to forget, and examined the 21st-century consequences of 19th-century presidents’ imperial ambitions.

Smedley Butler was a lucky man, born into a prosperous Philadelphia Quaker family; his father was a congressman. When the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, Butler was only 16. Despite his age and his family’s Quaker pacifism, he was eager to help liberate Cuba from the Spanish empire. He managed to get himself into the U.S. Marines and (after very little training) shipped to Cuba as a second lieutenant. Of all places, he came ashore at Guantánamo, where he took part in some combat.

Enforcer for the banks

Then he was caught up in a whirlwind: he went to the Philippines, where the Filipinos were resisting their new masters; he fought in China as part of an international force to suppress the Boxer Rebellion. In Latin America, he was in the U.S. invasion of Veracruz during the Mexican Revolution, guarded Panama during the digging of the canal, and eventually invaded most of the nations of Central America as well as Haiti and the Dominican Republic. And this was in just the first 20 years of his hitch.

Butler was advancing proudly racist American policies everywhere he served: Chinese, Filipinos, Central Americans and Caribbean islanders were ipso facto inferior peoples, useful as cheap labour or not at all. American investors in such countries expected the marines to protect their investments, and they did. American banks almost worked from a script: lend money to a government, wait until it has trouble repaying it, then send in the marines to oust the government and find a puppet president who will rob his country to pay the banks. (This was when the term “banana republic” first appeared.)

Katz describes Butler’s forays in Central America as rollicking adventures, young American men roaming Nicaragua and Honduras with guns and having a great old time. Butler saw a problem though: his marines were too few to police all of America’s new colonies and client states. He began to think of how to recruit local toughs and train them as “national guards.” When he got chances to implement his idea, he launched the careers of many dictators, from the Somozas of Nicaragua to Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and the Duvaliers of Haiti. As Roosevelt said of Somoza, “He’s a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”

As the de facto ruler of Haiti during its first marine occupation, Butler established the detested practice of corvée — obliging Haitians to pay a tax or do unpaid labour instead. In the world’s first Black republic, which had fought a great revolution to free itself, this looked like the return of slavery. Nonetheless, it continued for years.

He also invented what we now know as counter-insurgency. Butler made friends with villagers in rebel-held areas, treating them well and exploiting their conflicts with rebels. It worked well enough in Haiti to end armed resistance, but less well in later American wars like Vietnam and Afghanistan.

Probably his worst act in Haiti was to walk into the Haitian parliament with some of his men and simply shut it down at gunpoint. It would not meet again for years, and Haiti’s continued political instability can be traced largely to that incident.

When the U.S. entered the First World War, Butler was bitterly disappointed to be left in charge of Haiti. After almost 20 years of beating up small countries, he wanted to test himself against a European enemy. But he didn’t get to Europe until the closing days of the war, and found himself in charge of a camp in France for servicemen returning to the U.S.

Katz argues that the experience may have changed Butler: He was dealing with American combat survivors, men suffering terrible physical and mental wounds. Perhaps they reminded him of his own bullet wounds and the nervous breakdown he’d had in the Philippines. Butler became their advocate, pestering the higher-ups to provide better care for returning veterans. He had always understood that his Latin American adventures had been to benefit investors and banks; now he began to wonder about the motives behind wars between empires.

‘Gruff but lovable’

Still, he remained in the service for another decade. Assigned to a new marine base in San Diego, Butler became a technical advisor for Tell It to the Marines, a 1926 Hollywood movie starring Lon Chaney. He taught Cheney how to behave like a marine, and Chaney behaved like Smedley Butler, a “gruff but lovable” guy. The movie was a big hit and created an archetype for future Hollywood war films.

By the late 1920s, Butler was back from another hitch in China, this one spent watching Japanese encroachment and clashes between Nationalists and Communists — and protecting property in Tianjin owned by Standard Oil. He also received unexpected gifts from two villages, one where his marines had rebuilt a bridge, and the other where he had kept the Nationalist army from entering and looting. Butler knew it; it was a “Boxer Village” where he’d been shot almost 20 years before while killing many of the villagers. He now gained a new respect for some of the people he’d been fighting, and new doubts about what he’d been doing with his life.

In some financial trouble as the Depression hit, Butler found he could make money as public speaker. To 700 guests at a Pittsburgh banquet, he described how he’d kept a Nicaraguan president in office by declaring opposition candidates to be bandits; then he followed up with the story about dissolving the Haitian National Assembly at gunpoint. The audience ate it up, but author Sinclair Lewis turned it into a national scandal because such outrages were still going on.

Butler’s career was dead in the water, and another speech sank it. He described how Mussolini, driving a friend of Butler’s through northern Italy, had run over and killed a child. Mussolini had dismissed the accident: “It was only one life.”

That speech got Butler a court martial, which was eventually dropped. He then retired and began a new career as a critic of U.S. policy. The Bonus Marchers arrived in Washington in the summer of 1931, veterans out of work and demanding promised back pay for their wartime service. Butler urged them to stay until their demands were met. A few days later, Gen. Douglas MacArthur ordered troops to attack the marchers’ shantytown.

Bizarrely, Butler was approached a few years later by people who wanted him to lead another veterans’ march on Washington — for the purpose of ousting Roosevelt and installing a new “secretary of general affairs” as dictator. The bankers behind the scheme, he was told, were torn between Butler and “a more authoritarian general: Douglas MacArthur.”

Butler blew the whistle and testified before the new House Un-American Activities Committee (which would later focus on communists only). But nothing happened. People laughed it off. As Katz observes, “Americans had been trained to react in just that way” — to laugh off real plots by those same bankers, plots which Butler had carried out with considerable force.

‘War is a racket’

In his last years Butler published a booklet, War Is a Racket, in which he saw bankers and industrialists as the racketeers. In an article for a socialist magazine, he described his career as “a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.”

Jonathan Katz has brilliantly structured his book with chapters about his own visits to the places where Butler served, from Guantánamo to China, Haiti to the Philippines. Katz shows how those countries still live with his legacy of brutal local police and military forces, dictators and oppression. If you seek his monument, look at Duterte’s Philippines or Ortega’s Nicaragua.

Smedley Butler emerges in Katz’s book as a kind of tragic villain. An idealistic boy grown into a monster, he served his country by ruining other countries beyond repair, and eventually seeing how much harm he had done. If the Americans today fret about migrants from Central America and Haiti, or the revived hostility of China, they can now see the origin of those threats.

Canadians, too, might find in this tale a reminder that for many who are rich and powerful democracy is an OK notion until it gets in their way. Then the plotting and scheming starts. Smedley Butler was not the last racketeer for capitalism.

In the Streets of Moscow, Russians Are Shocked by Putin’s War

Vladimir Putin claims that he is “demilitarizing” Ukraine by invading it with tanks and bombs. In Moscow, ordinary Russians don’t understand what their government is planning — but they’re shocked by the assault on a neighboring country.

A protester with a mask reading “No War” is apprehended by police. (Moskvichmag.ru)

BYALEXEY SAKHNIN

JACOBIN
02.27.2022

Unlike the residents of Donetsk, Kharkiv, and Odessa, on February 24, Muscovites did not hear explosions in their city. Russian citizens learned about the outbreak of war, which the spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry described as “an attempt to prevent a global war,” from the news.

The president’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, sounded confident that “Russians will support the operation in Ukraine just as they supported the recognition of the DNR and LNR,” referring to the Donetsk and Luhansk Peoples’ Republics. But on the evening of the first day of the war, several thousand Muscovites gathered on Tverskaya Street to express their disagreement with him. The police blocked Pushkin Square, but people moved in fairly dense crowds along the boulevards, Tverskaya, and the surrounding alleys. Young faces predominated.

The same young faces prevailed ten years ago on Bolotnaya Square and Sakharov Avenue during the anti-Putin protests of 2011–12. But the atmosphere has changed radically over the years. In 2012, the “angry citizens” were proud of their gushing “creativity”: hundreds of slogans, banners, and chants. Their authors were competing in wit. Now people mostly moved in silence. They chanted a single slogan: “No to War!” At least 955 people were detained in the evening.

There were not as many protesters as at the biggest rallies in recent years, but not as few as one would expect on a Thursday evening, the first day of the war, when confusion and depression everywhere reigned. But most of these people were, if not hardened protesters, in one way or another a part of the opposition milieu. The politicized middle class is predictably dissatisfied with the radical moves of the country’s leadership. But what about the vast majority of Russians not involved in this antiwar movement? I spoke to some of them.
Who Needs War?

“Of course I am against the war,” says a mother walking with her children in Tagansky Park. “Who needs war? I feel very sorry for the people. I cried all day today. I’m afraid for my children. What will happen to them?”

Her two children, who look about six and eight years old, meanwhile, happily run around us. But at one point the boy stops, snuggles up to his mother, and asks, “Mom, can Snoop become a service dog so that he can protect us?”

I walked from Taganskaya Square to the Pokrovsky Monastery near Abelmanovskaya Zastava. I approached all kinds of people: young girls, grannies selling flowers, workers in yellow municipal vests, and pilgrims going to worship St Matrona of Moscow. I asked a few simple questions. Almost everyone readily answered. There were those who came up to me themselves. Many spoke hastily, as if they were finally breaking a vow of silence.

“Very bad!” said two girls of about eighteen. “Very bad!”

The enthusiasm and support that the president’s spokesman hoped for is absent. Out of thirty or forty respondents, only one — a young man of conscription age — spoke about patriotic support for the Russian authorities’ actions: “This is our land. It must be protected. If they send me, then I will go where I am told to.”

But when I asked him what awaits us in the near future, he answered without much patriotic pathos: “I think some foreign social networks will be banned. As for the rest. . . . Bread for 500 rubles, a euro for 500 [the exchange rate is currently around 1 to 100]. Our government makes a lot of mistakes. But once we’ve started, we need to see this through to the end.”

Everyone else voiced feelings ranging from fear to resentment. I did not meet anyone psychologically prepared for disturbing news from the front. People simply could not explain why Russian troops were digging into Ukrainian territory. No one gave them any convincing answers. Older people remembered 2014 and the Crimean spring.

“It was somehow easier then,” said a man in his forties whom I stopped outside a branch of Sberbank. “There was a sense of unity. And a sense of justice, or something. Back then our people were offended — and we stood up for them. And we took what was ours. And now I do not understand. Why did we invade?”

“Sociologists say that the military action in Ukraine, which began today, came as a surprise to Russian society and formed a situation of mass shock. Analysts are pointing out that people turned out to be unprepared for a military confrontation,” admits the pro-Kremlin Nezigar channel on Telegram.
No One Asked Us

Two guys are coming out of a café. I turn to them with questions about the war, the exchange rate, and the consequences. They, like everyone else, don’t understand this war. “We don’t want to think about it. We don’t think about it. That’s why we can’t say anything intelligible,” says one of them.

The other adds: “It’s like something divine . . . something cosmic. What can you do about it? It just goes without saying, for Christ’s sake. We should get out of here. Go to the countryside, to the woods. We should light fires. And not think.”

This motif came up very often in my sociological experiment. People encounter something that exceeds their ability to understand. War. Something that does not fit into their moral coordinates. It’s not a defensive war. It has no particular reason. And they shrug off this news that they are unable to do anything about.

“I forbade my mother to watch the news,” says a middle-aged woman. “I told her to watch My Fair Nanny. It’s a good show! But don’t read the news! It’s bad for you.”

A couple of college freshmen told me that today their classmates are unwilling or afraid to discuss politics. “There’s a feeling that they just don’t notice. They try not to notice.” A lot of people have the same impression.

“It amazes me that everyone is silent, as if this is normal” says an indignant worker with a mustache from the municipal energy company. “They’re just glued to their cell phones, that’s all!”

But this feeling of general indifference may be deceptive. Almost all my respondents told me they had discussed the shocking news in one way or another. Many admitted to spending “all day” on it. But the heated conversations with loved ones contrasted with a city that (for now) continues to go through its daily routine. And many feel like they are the only ones here experiencing anxiety, powerlessness, and loneliness. Although, in the passing crowd, almost everyone is probably experiencing these feelings right now and for the same reason.

No one has asked these men and women — or anyone else in the country — what they think. Do they think they should send Russian tanks and planes into the former fraternal republic? Are they willing to make sacrifices for the sake of what Putin calls the “denazification of Ukraine”? Do they believe that the country’s security requires extreme measures? It was only one day into the war, but many already felt the need to talk about it, to voice their opinions. At least just to be heard.

“Will you really write that I am against the war?” an old woman outside a grocery store naively asked me.
The Main Problem

“It’s as if there are no other things [the state] could be doing!” the elderly flower seller told me in a low voice.


Yesterday, my neighbor’s son had a major accident because the road just collapsed from underneath him. Well really, is it so necessary for them to start a war somewhere? Wouldn’t it be better to lay the asphalt normally? Here I am, an old woman, standing here peddling. My pension is not enough. Well at least I lived somehow. And now? Like under the Germans, is it war again?

Six women in their fifties stand in a circle near the Marksistskaya metro station with their bags on pedestals.

“Yes, it’s alarming, of course,” said the most boisterous among them. “And I am very afraid. For our husbands, for our children. They may be drafted. But we hope that it will all come to an end soon. That our people will quickly restore order there. But there’s a war, guys. . . . It’s the twenty-first century, and we’re at war. If it starts on a large scale, it will affect everyone.”

“So we’re not going to be flying to Egypt anytime soon?” I ask the woman who was just talking about her recent trip.

“Of course we will, God willing” she answers. “Everything will be all right. Everything will be fine! I think we have a strong army, and it won’t affect us, the civilians, anytime soon. We have a great president. So it’s not the main problem . . .”

The woman stammers. Her stream of optimism can’t find an outlet. Her friends shake their heads: “No, Lena. This is fucked up. This is the main problem now.”

This piece was first published by Moskvichmag.ru, and translated into English for LeftEast.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alexey Sakhnin is a Russian activist who was one of the leaders of the anti-Putin protest movement from 2011 to 2013. He is a member of the Progressive International Council.

The return of nature in the Anthropocene. A critique of the ecomodernist 'good Anthropocene' (draft 2019 forthcoming) docx

Dr Anne Fremaux PhD in Political Ecology-French Agregation of Philosophy-

2019, In Arias-Maldonado, M., & Trachtenberg, Z. (Eds.). (2019). Rethinking the Environment for the Anthropocene: Political Theory and Socionatural Relations in the New Geological Epoch. Routledge.

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Critical Theory,

Theodor Adorno,

Geotechnical Engineering,

Ecology,

Bruno Latour

 .

The concept of Anthropocene seems to represent a new opportunity for Earth scientists and social (de)constructivists to definitely abolish the distinction between nature and society, to affirm human power on the planet and to allege the definitive ‘end of nature’. Indeed, the fact that humanity is about to be acknowledged as a new geological force represents the last chance for the Promethean triumphalism, embodied by geo and eco-constructivists (Neyrat, 2015), to prosper upon the wreckage of its own ecological collapse. This position can be summarised in McKibben terms: ‘we now live in a world of our own making’. I will argue, against this view, that to acknowledge that nature and society are more and more intertwined around us - and inside us - is not enough to abandon the analytic distinction between aspects deriving from human societies and those deriving from nature’s ‘non-identity’ (otherness). In other words, natural objects have still agency and human societies themselves are materially anchored in biophysical conditions that transcend them. The contradiction between the claim that humans are new “planetary managers” or “Earth engineers” and our obvious inability to control our environmental impacts on the planet constitutes one major sign of natural agency, or what I call ‘the return of nature’. Moreover, I will show that the concept of Anthropocene aims at pursuing an unapologetically anthropocentric world picture in order to justify further capitalist exploitation of the Earth (Crist, 2013). The Anthropocene promoters, driven by a complex mix of economic, scientific and political motives, tend to encourage the hubristic modern faith in technology to fix problems created by technology itself. Against the arrogance contained in this concept, I argue that the repeated failures of ecological modernisation and environmental managerialism should be an opportunity to re-think our place on the planet and to accept the fragility and vulnerability of the human species in the face of complex and unpredictable natural phenomena. In short, what needs to be developed is not a new form of human hubris but our capacities for gratitude, humility, respect and restraint.

https://www.academia.edu/28123924/The_return_of_nature_in_the_Anthropocene_A_critique_of_the_ecomodernist_good_Anthropocene_draft_2019_forthcoming_docx?auto=download&email_work_card=download-paper

Data scientist builds a detailed network map of 'The Witcher'

by Ingrid Fadelli , Tech Xplore

The social map of The Witcher. Characters are represented by nodes, their size

 corresponding to their node degree (the number of connections), and their 

coloring and labeling show those individuals who have already appeared in the

 first season of The Witcher’s Netflix TV adaptation (red) from the rest of the

 characters yet to appear (gray). The network links are proportional to the 

number of times two characters were mentioned within a five-sentence distance

 from each other in the novel. Credit: Milán Janosov.

"The Witcher," a fantasy novel series by Andrzej Sapkowski, has become increasingly popular, following the release of several videogames and a spin-off series by Netflix. The latest season of the show, uploaded on Netflix in December 2021, was watched by users worldwide for 2.2 billion minutes in its debut week alone.

Milán Janosov, lead scientist at Datopolis with a Ph.D. in Network Science from Central European University recently tried to summarize the plot and character relationships in "The Witcher" using network science. In a paper published on Nightingale, arXiv and ResearchGate, he introduced the first visual network map outlining the hidden patterns, storylines and character relationships in the fantasy series.

"I started reading "'The Witcher' early last year, shortly after I got hooked to the Netflix show, and the storyline just sucked me in," Janosov told TechXplore. "It was a somewhat similar experience to watching 'Game of Thrones' a few years ago, which had also inspired one of my research articles. When I was about to finish watching the new season of Witcher, I started to wonder how I could get more out of this."

Although "The Witcher" videogames are also highly popular and iconic, Janosov was more drawn to the storylines and relationships outlined in the books and Netflix series. On a quest to understand the iconic series' world more in depth, he thus set out to create a social map of 'The Witcher.'"

The first step for his research was to collect data that he could then use to create the network map. He started by looking at the Netflix show's subtitles, but soon realized that he would need more than that and decided to analyze the whole text of the book series, too.

"To build a network, I also needed a complete list of the characters who appeared in the series," Janosov said. "After collecting these initial pieces of information, my job was fairly simple. I wrote a computer program that screened through every single sentence of all the books and took a note every time it matched a character's name into a sentence."

Using his computer program, Janosov derived the mentions for every character in sentences. This allowed him to determine how close or far two characters were, in terms of how often they were mentioned in similar parts of the texts (e.g., whether two characters were mentioned in the same sentence, two sentences apart, and so on).

"As it turns out, these proximities are pretty good indicators of whether two characters have actually met or were featured in the same plots," Janosov said.

The social map of The Witcher. Characters are represented by nodes, their size 

corresponding to their degree centrality, and their colors encode the network communities

 to which they belong. The network links are proportional to the number of times two

 characters were mentioned within a five-sentence distance from each other in the novel. 

The most significant 50 individuals are labeled. Credit: Milán Janosov.

After looking at the proximity between character mentions, Janosov defined the elements in his network. More specifically, he decided to represent every character with a node, linking nodes when characters were mentioned in the same "context" or part of the text.

"While context is relatively easy to interpret for humans, for a computer, it is not that simple," Janosov explained. "So to capture the context of the characters mentioned, I assumed that two characters were mentioned in the same context as they were not mentioned further than five sentences from each other. While the number five is somewhat arbitrary, it was chosen for the sake of simplicty (and OCD-friendliness), because three, four or even six sentence-distances lead to very similar results too, also staying consistent for example with the typical paragraph lengths in written text."

Janosov's paper is a valuable example of how network science can be used to reveal hidden patterns in large amounts of unstructured data, such as texts, novels, or movie scripts. After reading books or other texts that are thousands of pages long, humans can get a general idea of how a story is structured. However, they will generally be unable to memorize all the characters and remember all details of the plot.

If they were to draw a map of the story, therefore, this map would most likely be biased. In contrast, network science tools can help to summarize a saga or book series in a quantitive and objective way.

"I was surprised and excited to see the different plots clustered into network communities," Janosov said. "You know that kind of Eureka moment when suddenly everything starts to make sense—who met whom, who is together, where the main conflicts and smaller spin-off plots fold out, etc., almost like in a detective movie. At this point,the skeptic may ask—why would we care so much about a fantasy novel? While the example of 'The Witcher' is certainly fun, it indeed does not seem to bear that crucial practical importance at first."

While the network map of "The Witcher" resulting from this study and other maps that Janosov created in the past are unique and interesting, his work is merely an example of how network science could be implemented in the real-world. In fact, similar data analysis tools could also be used to summarize other networks in the real world.

"In our daily lives, we are surrounded by social networks: our friends on social media, our colleagues at work, friends from school, family, sports and hobbies, and many more," Janosov said. "All these social systems are intertwined by networks of which we almost always only have a partial and subjective understanding. To overcome this lack of knowledge and sparsity of information, network science comes really handy as it provides a set of tools and a framework of thinking that can help us better understand these social networks we participate in daily, just as it helped to clear the fog around 'The Witcher.'"

Network science tools like the ones employed by Janosov could also be applied (or are already in use) in a series of real-world settings. For instance, they could be used by HR specialists to design better work environments or enhance collaboration between co-workers, by scientific organizations to optimize the sharing of research funding across different research groups, or even to analyze and improve international trade and telecommunications.

"As the Academy Awards are coming next month, I am now thinking to revisit my previous research capturing the role of luck in the success of films and music, to see how much luck counts this year," Janosov added.Turning an analysis of Asimov's Foundation into art

More information: A network map of the Witcher. arXiv: 2202.00235 [physics.soc-ph]. arxiv.org/abs/2202.00235nightingaledvs.com/a-network-map-of-the-witcher/

© 2022 Science X Network

Drowned Stone Age fisherman examined with forensic method that could rewrite prehistory

Human bones dating to the Stone Age found in what is now northern Chile are the remains of a fisherman who died by drowning, scientists have discovered.

© Provided by Live Science Archaeologists unearthed the skeleton in a 

coastal area near Chile's Atacama Desert.

Mindy Weisberger 

The man lived about 5,000 years ago, and he was around 35 to 45 years old when he died. Scientists found the skeleton in a mass burial in the coastal region of Copaca near the Atacama Desert, and the grave held four individuals: three adults (two males and one female) and one child.

The man would have been about 5 feet, 3 inches (1.6 meters) tall when alive, and his remains showed signs of degenerative diseases and metabolic stress, researchers reported in the April 2022 issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science. The bones revealed traces of osteoarthritis in his back and both elbows; the back of his skull had evidence of healed injuries from blunt trauma; his teeth and jaws were marred by tartar, periodontal disease and abscesses; and lesions in his eye sockets hinted at an iron deficiency caused by ingesting a parasite found in marine animals, according to the study.

Other marks on the arm and leg bones where muscles were once attached told of repetitive activities related to fishing, such as rowing, harpooning and squatting to harvest shellfish. If the individual was a fisherman, perhaps he died by drowning, the researchers proposed.

When forensic teams examine modern skeletons that were found without any soft tissue attached, experts can confirm drowning as the cause of death by looking inside large bones for delicate microscopic algae, called diatoms, which live in watery habitats and soil. When a person drowns, inhaled water can enter the bloodstream and travel throughout the body after the lungs rupture, even reaching the "closed system" of bone marrow through capillaries, the authors reported. Looking at diatom species in bone marrow can thereby reveal if the person ingested salt water. However, this method had never been used to examine ancient bones.

Algae, sponge spines and parasitic eggs

For the new study, the scientists decided that the modern diatom test was too "chemically aggressive," and in removing bone marrow from samples, it also destroyed small particles and organisms that weren't diatoms. Such particles could be highly significant for analyzing Stone Age bones, according to the study. The researchers therefore adopted "a less aggressive process" that eliminated residual bone marrow in their samples, while preserving a wider range of microscopic material absorbed by the marrow, which could then be detected by scanning electron microscopy (SEM).

Their SEM scans revealed a microorganism jackpot. While there was no marine material clinging to the outside of the bones, the scans showed that the marrow contained plenty of tiny ocean fossils, including algae, parasitic eggs and broken sponge structures called spicules. This variety of marine life deep inside the man's bones suggests that he died by drowning in salt water.

It's possible that the cause of death was a natural disaster, as the geologic record in this coastal region of Chile preserves evidence of powerful tsunamis dating to around 5,000 years ago, the scientists reported. But with ample skeletal evidence that the person was a fisherman, the more likely explanation is that he died during a fishing accident, they said. Damage to the skeleton — missing shoulder joints, cervical vertebrae that were replaced with shells and a broken ribcage — could have happened when waves pummeled the drowned man's body and then washed it ashore, the researchers explained.

As to why the man was buried in a mass grave, "what we can assess from similar contexts is that they probably belonged to the same family group," said lead study author Pedro Andrade, an archaeologist and a professor of anthropology at the University of Concepción in Chile. The individuals likely shared an ancestor but weren't immediate family members, as the dates of the skeletons spanned about 100 years, Andrade told Live Science in an email.

By expanding the range of the modern diatom test to include a broader selection of microscopic marine life in their search through the interior cavities of prehistoric bones, "we've cracked open a whole new way to do things," study co-author James Goff, a visiting professor in the School of Ocean and Earth Science at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, said in a statement.

"This can help us understand much more about how tough it was living by the coast in prehistoric days — and how people there were affected by catastrophic events, just as we are today," Goff said.

Applying this method across other archaeological sites in coastal areas with mass graves could offer game-changing insight into how ancient people survived — and often died — while living under potentially perilous conditions, Andrade told Live Science.

While there are many coastal mass burial sites worldwide that have been investigated by scientists, "the fundamental question of what caused so many deaths has not been addressed," Goff added.

Originally published on Live Science.

Dying for makeup: Lead cosmetics poisoned 18th-century European socialites in search of whiter skin


An actor wearing a contemporary version of 18th-century lead-based makeup. (Shutterstock)

THE CONVERSATION
Published: February 27, 2022

Eighteenth-century socialites have been depicted as vain, silly women who were poisoned by their white lead makeup. The Countess of Coventry, Maria Gunning — a society hostess reknowned for her beauty — is said to have refused to stop wearing foundation containing white lead, even as she lay dying. Why would women of that era knowingly choose to wear makeup that was killing them? Was beauty worth dying for? Or was the makeup not to blame?

I am a scientist who has been studying lead poisoning for 30 years, with a particular interest in women’s exposure to lead. My research shows that women metabolize lead differently from men, women exposed to lead as children have elevated blood lead levels 20 years later, and women exposed to lead are at risk of hypertension and early menopause.

The stories about white lead makeup poisoning did not make sense to me, so two years ago, I decided to start studying these cosmetics.
Dying to be Beautiful: Exploring the look and toxicity of 18th century makeup.
Historical techniques

My research group makes white lead makeup from recipes dating from the 16th to 19th centuries. If you look around the makeup counters of a department store, you will see words such as “illuminate,” “radiance,” “glow” and “luminous.” You’ll also see products that promise to reduce shine or blur imperfections. These modern products change the way light is reflected from the skin, which is perceived as enhancing beauty.

Join thousands of Canadians who subscribe to free evidence-based news.Get newsletter

We wanted to know if white lead makeup had some of these properties, so we studied the colour and level of light reflected by the makeup using an optical spectrometer.

Our most surprising finding has been that white lead makeup can look quite pretty and natural. It does not look like the bright white mask that we have seen depicted on screens and stages — it is generally much more subtle and sophisticated.

We test the makeup on ethically sourced pigskin. The pigs we use have a pale complexion that is very close to the lightest colour of human skin, which burns easily and does not tan well. The white lead makeup usually does not change the colour of this skin much at all.

A comparison of bare skin with makeup made with white lead and with titanium dioxide replacing the lead carbonate. Modern recipes that use a titanium replacement look whiter and more opaque than the ‘softer’ yellow-white of lead makeup. (F.E. McNeill), Author provided

Titanium oxide is the modern substitute for white lead. When we used titanium oxide in the makeup recipes, the colour change was dramatic. There was a shift towards blue, and the makeup appeared startlingly white. Actors wearing makeup formulations made from old white lead recipes with a titanium substitute are wearing the wrong colour.
Colour changes

We tested different historical makeup recipes to see how the colour would be affected. One recipe made no measurable change to the colour, while another changed yellow tones slightly. Adding a yellow tone to pale skin is perceived as more attractive, due to its connection to fruit and vegetable consumption. A third makeup mixture reduced redness in the skin, something that today’s colour-correcting foundation makeup attempts to correct.

All the white lead makeups we tested increased the amount of light the skin reflected — referred to as its reflectance. Skin becomes less reflective as women age, and more reflective skin is associated with a youthful complexion.

Specifically, the makeups increased the diffuse reflectance of the skin. Light reflection occurs in two ways. First, light can reflect, as from a mirror. It comes in at an angle and is reflected at that same angle. We call this specular reflection. Objects with a high specular reflection look glossy or shiny.

Second, light can reflect or scatter off rough surfaces in several directions. This is diffuse reflection. Objects with high diffuse reflection look blurred or slightly out-of-focus. The increased diffuse reflectance from the white lead makeup gives the skin a “softer” appearance, blurring blemishes — another effect produced by modern cosmetics.

The recipes we re-create in our lab create a soft-focus look that blurs wrinkles and blemishes, or the look of a youthful, dewy complexion.
Modern makeup promotes even skin tone and a glow, achieved by altering the skin’s reflectance. (Shutterstock)

The ugly price of beauty

However, prettiness does come with an ugly side: the celebration of white skin. While the overall measured colour shifts on pale skin are small, spectral changes do make the skin look lighter. These were products that would have enhanced the whiteness of skin.

Historians, anthropologists and sociologists have long studied skin whitening and the reasons people may choose to do this. Our science shows how white lead makeup could achieve this in a subtle way, like an earlier version of “no-makeup” makeup.

We have also been testing whether some makeup formulations allow lead to be absorbed through the skin. White lead cannot be absorbed easily through skin, it is only toxic if eaten or inhaled. However, if the makeup formulations changed the form of the lead, or softened the outer layer of the skin, some lead could diffuse through. This would make those makeup formulations more poisonous.

Our research is showing some evidence of differences in skin absorbance, meaning some recipes were more toxic than others. It is possible that some recipes could have been used with little problem. Other recipes, which made young women deathly ill, were probably so poisonous because the lead was absorbed through the skin.

So far, our research suggests that most white lead makeup recipes probably didn’t kill 18th century socialites by being absorbed through the skin. But some recipes were more toxic than others.

The most toxic mixture we have observed so far is the very simple formulation said to have been used by England’s Queen Elizabeth I: a mixture of white lead and vinegar. This mixture passed lead through the skin in much higher quantities than other recipes. This raises the question of whether it is worth revisiting whether some of Elizabeth I’s health problems were due to, or exacerbated by, lead poisoning.

Author

Fiona E. McNeill
Professor, Physics and Astronomy, McMaster University
Disclosure statement
Fiona E. McNeill receives funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.