'Top 3' deadliest diseases in Russian history

HISTORY DEC 17 2019 BORIS EGOROV

During the Moscow plague, dogs and pigs devoured corpses lying in the street. They even preyed on passers-by, ripping them to shreds.

1. Plague (1654-1655)

Global Look Press

The plague spread to the capital of the Russian state from either Persia or Crimea. According to contemporary accounts, it came “like a flame driven by the wind.” In the summer of 1654, when the body count began to number in the thousands, the tsar’s court, the boyars, and all wealthy townspeople fled the city. By moving to Moscow’s suburbs and other cities, they in fact helped spread the infection throughout the land.

The mad stampede of Streltsy officers and prison guards plunged the city into chaos, looting, and banditry. “The once crowded streets became deserted ... dogs and pigs devoured the dead and went wild, so no one dared to venture out alone for fear of being gnawed to death,” wrote Patriarch Macarius III of Antioch, who was then in the Russian state.

In the end, the authorities had no choice but to fight the epidemic. Quarantines were established in the infected areas, which were surrounded by outposts and blocked off by soldiers. The houses and homesteads of those killed by the plague were ruthlessly burned down. The smoke of burning wormwood and juniper was used to fumigate objects and clothing. Troops restored order to the capital.

By the fall of 1654, the epidemic had been largely contained. The plague did not penetrate westwards, where the army of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich was laying siege to the then Polish-Lithuanian city of Smolensk; the northern territories (Novgorod and Pskov) remained untouched.

Although January of the following year saw some further outbreaks, the scale was nothing like as bad, and Moscow was not affected. The exact number of victims of the epidemic will never be known for sure, but researchers put the figure at between 25,000 and 700,000. It is believed that more than 85% of the population of Moscow perished.
2. Cholera (1830-1831)

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The deadliest disease of the 19th century first raised its ugly head in the southern regions of the Russian Empire in the 1820s, but only ten years later did it reveal its full destructive force.

In 1830, the epidemic — which had already devastated Georgia and the Volga region and would ultimately claim 200,000 lives in Russia — was viewed nonchalantly from afar in Moscow. Muscovites believed that their more northerly climate would protect them from misfortune.

“We’ll drive it away it with smoke, and take advice from doctors,” wrote the magazine Moscow Telegraph: “The best cure is a bold, lively spirit, carefulness not timidity, precaution not fearfulness.”

However, in the fall, the cheerful mood gave way to horror. As the number of victims climbed exponentially, the authorities closed universities and public places, banned all forms of public entertainment, and set up quarantine zones everywhere.

The early winter that year prevented the epidemic from entering the capital, but in April 1831 the first outbreaks of the disease were recorded in St. Petersburg, and in summer it spread like wildfire.

“This hellish malady is rampant,” wrote Alexander Nikitenko, a resident of the city on the Neva: “Go outside and you’ll see dozens of coffins on the way to the cemetery... It’s like the apocalypse has arrived, people wander among the coffins as if condemned to death, not knowing if their death knell has already sounded.”

General discontent with the quarantines and cordons (which badly affected trade) led to the so-called “cholera riots” that swept through the cities of the Russian Empire. Moreover, the Polish uprising was in full swing, giving rise to anti-Polish sentiment in society. It was rumored that Poles went around poisoning kitchen gardens and wells by night. Many innocent victims were lynched in the street by angry mobs.
3. Spanish flu (1918-1919)

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The Spanish flu pandemic that followed WWI killed up to 100 million people worldwide (about 5% of the global population), making it one of the worst outbreaks in history. Nor did it spare post-revolutionary Russia.

Having penetrated the civil war-torn country in August 1918, the Spanish flu swept through Belarus and Ukraine, hitting Kiev especially hard, and onwards to Moscow and Petrograd, where one in two residents fell ill.

A nationwide catastrophe, the Spanish flu buried up to 2.7 million people in the space of just 18 months, which amounted to 3% of the country’s total population.

In Odessa, one victim was the silent movie star Vera Kholodnaya. The pandemic made no exception for the country’s new leadership either. In March 1919, Yakov Sverdlov, the “black devil of the Bolsheviks,” succumbed to the fatal contagion.

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In 1918 ‘Spanish flu’ outbreak working-class struggle exploded

BY EMMA JOHNSON Vol. 84/No. 16 April 27, 2020 THE MILITANT
https://themilitant.com/2020/04/17/in-1918-spanish-flu-outbreak-working-class-struggle-exploded/

In February 1919 more than 60,000 union members in Seattle walked out in first general strike in the U.S. City was hard hit by “Spanish flu,” but workers did not put the class struggle on hold.

“We are all in this together” is the daily chorus pushed by the capitalist rulers in the U.S. and around the world today, attempting to cover over the reality that society is sharply class-divided and they aim to survive on our backs. Their goal is to make working people forego the class struggle and hunker down, atomized under imposed isolation. They claim we all face a virus crisis, not a social crisis whose origins are in the downward arc of the capitalist system.

As part of this campaign, an April 3 article in the New York Times argues that the lessons of the 1918-19 “Spanish flu” pandemic — an outbreak far larger and deadly that the one today — proves that social isolation and shutting down the economy is essential.

The fact is that during this time workers worldwide joined in massive class battles amid imperialist war and proletarian revolutions.

When the flu began spreading in the spring of 1918, the first imperialist world war was still raging. Workers refused to turn off the class struggle. The Bolsheviks had just led workers and farmers to power in Russia and were beating back a multisided assault from counterrevolutionary forces backed by eight invading imperialist armies.

Workers and farmers in Germany rose up in the millions in 1919 seeking to emulate the revolution in Russia. A strike wave spread across the U.S., with hundreds of thousands of workers fighting in the streets, including a general strike in Seattle.

That pandemic started in the U.S., Europe and parts of Asia and swiftly spread around the world. A highly contagious wave appeared in the fall of 1918 and successive waves continued in early 1920. Estimates of deaths vary between 20 million and 50 million, and the number of infected up to 500 million.

It first hit the U.S. in August at military bases. To fight their imperialist war, the rulers turned workers in uniform not just into cannon fodder but also incubators of the virus. Forty percent of the Navy and 36% of the Army caught it, and spread it as they trained and were transported to fight abroad.

A shortage of workers during the war had forced concessions from the bosses, improving wages and working conditions. When millions of soldiers came back to join the workforce, the capitalists tried to take all this back.

In 1919, workers responded with a strike wave involving 4 million people, one-fifth of the workforce. Hundreds of thousands of steelworkers and coal miners struck. Tens of thousands of garment workers were out for 13 weeks.

Seattle was hard hit by the flu with some 1,400 deaths. The local government closed schools, theaters, dance halls, restaurants, most public spaces and put all military bases in quarantine. This didn’t stop 60,000 union members from shutting down the city for a week. It was the country’s first general strike.

Eugene V. Debs, a leader of the Socialist Party in the U.S. and supporter of the Bolshevik Revolution, delivered a scathing indictment of the U.S. rulers’ imperialist war policy at a public rally of 1,000 people in Canton, Ohio, in June 1918. He was indicted and sentenced to 10 years imprisonment. Debs ran as the SP candidate for president in 1920 from his prison cell.

Sizable public mobilizations by women took place throughout this period demanding the right to vote. Victory was won with passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920. 

Bolshevik RevolutionLed by the Bolsheviks, workers, farmers and soldiers formed soviets — workers councils — and seized power in the October 1917 Russian Revolution.

The flu pandemic didn’t lead Russian workers to turn their back on the class struggle and turn to social isolation. Led by their new government, they began to reorganize society in the interests of the vast majority. At the same time, they built the Red Army led by Leon Trotsky to fight the counterrevolutionary assaults organized by the White Army, backed by eight imperialist powers, including Washington, which landed troops in Vladivostok. Some 2.7 million people in Russia fell to the Spanish flu, including Yakov Sverdlov, one of the central leaders of the Bolsheviks.

Throughout 1919 the Red Army battled Washington’s forces in Siberia, which were backing the counterrevolutionary troops of Russian Adm. Alexander Kolchak. Kolchak and the U.S. forces were defeated by the revolution and Washington withdrew its troops in January 1920.

One of the factors that led to their defeat was a longshoremen’s strike in Seattle in the fall of 1919 that prevented the government from loading arms and munitions for Kolchak.

The lesson is — we aren’t “all in this together.” The working class needs to prepare to defend itself.

Carnivals of the damned: the US far right fights the lockdown

Vashti Fox 28 April 2020

The wave of far-right anti-lockdown protests show how capitalist politics can create monsters. Worse might be on the way.


To listen to Donald Trump’s daily coronavirus press briefings is to be reminded of Edgar in Shakespeare’s King Lear: “False of heart, light of ear, bloody of hand; hog in sloth, fox in stealth, wolf in greediness, dog in madness, lion in prey”. He careens wildly between sly, vicious and mad. It would be easy to mistake Trump for a crazed fool. But to quote Shakespeare again, “Though this be madness ... there is method in it”.

Since his first bid for the White House, Trump has encouraged and leaned on different elements of the far right to strengthen his position. The latest example is the series of far-right protests demanding an end to coronavirus restrictions across the country.

In Ohio, Michigan, Colorado, New Hampshire, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Texas and California, groups of protesters, some in their thousands, have mobilised to pressure state governors to end health measures designed to limit the spread of the virus. According to Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, the protests are a “great convergence” of different far-right forces.

The demonstrators’ homemade signs are indicative. Some espouse anti-vaccination and 5G conspiracy theories, others anti-communism, while others declare the virus to be God’s will. Perhaps the most common attitude on the protests is that social distancing is a form of “tyranny” and that states don’t have the right to interfere with the market and business. “Land of the free”, declared one of the signs in Denver, Colorado. Some of the protesters have carried semi-automatic weapons, others Confederate flags and Trump 2020 paraphernalia. They look like carnivals of the damned.

Trump tried to present the mobilisations as spontaneous, the understandable exasperation of ordinary working folk. “They’ve got cabin fever. They want their lives back. These people love our country. They want to get back to work”, he said. The Wall Street Journal followed suit, publishing an opinion piece, “The lockdown rebellion: ordinary Americans protesting to reopen the economy face only contempt from elites”.

In reality, the protests are funded by elites and organised by a variety of far-right organisations. In Michigan, the mobilisation was organised by the Michigan Conservative Coalition, a body funded by the DeVos family – scions of the religious right and members of Trump’s administration. In Michigan, the proto-fascist Proud Boys helped organise the protest.

According to Guardian columnist Jason Wilson, a protest in Idaho was promoted by the Idaho Freedom Foundation, which receives funds from the Koch brothers, Donors Capital Fund and Castle Rock, a foundation partly funded by the fortune of the late Adolph Coors, a right-wing beer magnate. Trump encouraged protesters, tweeting: “Liberate Michigan”, “Liberate Minnesota” and “Liberate Virginia”. Cass Mudde, also in the Guardian, drew out the logic of singling out these states:

“Almost 95 percent of Americans are under ‘lockdown’ at the moment; 42 states have issued stay-at-home orders. This includes many states with Republican governors, however late and reluctantly they came to that decision. But the protests largely target states with Democratic governors. Moreover, the three states singled out by president Trump in his tweets are key targets of his 2020 campaign – holding Michigan and flipping Minnesota are crucial for his re-election. He hopes to swing Virginia by mobilizing right-wing voters on gun rights and the lockdown.”

Yet there is more to this than electoralism. Across the world, a section of capital is chafing at the health restrictions. They want businesses to reopen and profit making to restart. To hell with the lives of workers and the poor. They are prepared to let the virus rip. The protests can bolster this position politically, which is why right-wing sections of the US media and corporate elite have offered their support.

Some have dismissed the protests as marginal quackery. It’s true that it is hard to take seriously a protest movement arguing that fluoride, sunshine and Jesus will save people from the virus. Nevertheless, far-right movements can affect broader politics. And, as we have seen, they can have a symbiotic relationship with the powers that be. Furthermore, in a period of extreme crisis, such as the one we are entering, it is possible that the far right will build on the grievances of ordinary people forced into unbearable economic hardship. Historically, when the left has been small and unable to provide an alternative to the crisis-ridden capitalist system, fascist organisations have grown on such a basis.

It is vital that the true dynamics of these far-right protests be exposed. The actions of the nurses in Denver were exemplary. They stood in front of carloads of far-right protesters dressed in their scrubs and face masks, exhausted after hours of saving bodies ravaged by the virus, and refused to stand down. This kind of staunchness in the face of the far-right threat is something the left should draw inspiration from for the struggles ahead.

What should socialists demand in this crisis?
Corey Oakley 29 April 2020 RED FLAG AU.


Australia may or may not have done enough, at least for now, to suppress the COVID-19 threat and prevent a health catastrophe along the lines of those currently unfolding in the US, Europe and much of the rest of the world. But whatever happens on the health front, there is no escape from the global economic catastrophe, which will upend economic and social life in Australia for years to come.

Mass unemployment, savage cuts to wages and conditions, the wiping out of superannuation funds that millions rely on for retirement, the destruction of tens of thousands of businesses – all these things are now unavoidable. We are entering a global economic meltdown at least as severe as the Great Depression, and one which, in terms of its basic dynamic, has no precedent in the history of capitalism. Nothing is going back to normal.

Australia escaped the worst of the 2008 financial crisis. There will be no escape this time. Every aspect of the globalised world economy is being upended. The world trading system is collapsing. Supply chains everywhere are breaking. Whole industries have become unviable overnight. Of the vast number of businesses closing their doors, a huge number will never reopen. The world as we knew it is gone, and what emerges from this crisis will be almost unrecognisable – socially, economically and politically.

In this context, what should socialists and the left propose?

There is a strain of thought on the left that the crisis, demonstrating as it does the absolute catastrophic failure of capitalism in its current form, will organically open the road to a new social democratic moment – one in which the world agrees that we need to replace unbridled market policies with a new system of social ownership, nationalised industry and production for use rather than profit.

If only it were so simple. The capitalist class, as it has done in every crisis in the history of the system, will fight to defend its power at all costs. This may mean enormous transformations of the way the economy works. In World War Two, it wasn’t just the USSR that had a command economy. Western Governments also took control of huge swathes of industry from private capitalists and repurposed them to serve the war machine. This transformed economies, but not in the interests of workers. The ideology of the market and the short-term interests of individual capitalists were sacrificed to maintain the national capitalist system.

Today, the institutional and ideological decay of world capitalism is far more advanced than during the crises that spawned the two world wars. The United States is the greatest military and economic power the world has ever known, but also a political basket case whose political parties and state and civil institutions are in permanent disarray and held in contempt by the mass of the population.

The system would be doomed if it were not for its one great advantage – the devastating political weakness and lack of organisation of the working class. The ruling class of the West may not be able to establish a positive political authority, but in the face of working class passivity and the corrupt and conniving complicity of the institutions of working class politics – most importantly the trade unions – it can continue to implement policies that enrich the tiny minority at the top while leaving the rest of us to rot.

As this crisis unfolds, that will continue to be its modus operandi. Look after profits, even if you have to bleed the country dry. Look after the rich, even if you have to abandon every market policy you claimed was sacred. In the coming months and years there will be a huge battle between those sections of capital that want to hold onto the idea of the free market at all costs, and those that recognise the necessity of massive state intervention if capital as a whole is to be saved.

But that contest will be nothing compared to the war the bosses will wage on the rest of us to make sure that, however the economy is reorganised, workers are made to pay for it. The job of the left is to build an alternative pole, one that champions the interests of workers and students and pensioners and the millions of unemployed workers that the system is currently throwing on the scrap heap.

What demands would such a movement take up? First, to take the market and the profit motive and money out of as much of the economy as possible. Basic human needs must be met as a human right. This means a total rethinking of the way the economy is organised. We should demand a complete government takeover of all basic services and insist they all be delivered for free.

For decades, governments of all stripes have tried to turn child care and education into user-pays institutions, claiming that parents and kids are the beneficiaries and therefore should pay all the costs. The coronavirus crisis has made it crystal clear that the capitalist system relies on the child care and schooling system both to raise the next generation of workers and to enable the current generation to work. Scott Morrison essentially admitted this when he made the unilateral decision to make child care free for the duration of the crisis. Child care should be a public system like the public schools.

The health sector has not been as hard hit as it might have been (and still could be) by COVID-19, but the experience is a warning about how disastrous the health care-for-profit model is. In a crisis, it becomes obvious that governments should take command of all health care facilities. That is what has happened in Victoria and elsewhere in recent weeks. But we shouldn’t be paying private hospitals to rent their beds and equipment and staff. We should be taking them over and integrating them into the public system. In the best of times, a dual system of public and private health means people with more money have more right to live. That’s obscene. In a health crisis, all an independent private system means is that the capacity of the system as a whole to respond is hampered by private interests.

The area of health care omitted from general discussion is aged care. This almost totally privatised sector is notorious for abusing its residents and exploiting its staff. It needs to be immediately nationalised, moved into the public health system and held to the same standards as hospitals, rather than be treated as “waiting to die” wards.

All utilities need to be nationalised or renationalised. Gas and electricity were once publicly owned. They should be again. The decades-long experiment with privatisation has been a disaster. Now, the coronavirus crisis exacerbates it. Not only should these utilities be renationalised, but all bills for consumers should be abolished. No one should have to think about whether they can afford to turn on a heater in winter because they don’t know if they can pay a bill. No one should have to forgo food because they know a utility bill is due. Internet and mobile phone data are now also basic essential utilities. They should be provided to everyone, free of charge. Access to the internet or the ability to make a phone call should not depend on your income.

Public transport should be taken back into public hands and made free. Trams, trains and buses are running almost empty. They run because the government says they have to, and they are paying millions to private companies to do it. Why? These are public services that need to be provided regardless of whether they turn a profit. They should be taken out of the sphere of the market and run to service the public, not make money for some private corporation.

In addition to basic public services being made, once again, public services, the left should be demanding nationalisation of all unviable major industries, as opposed to government bailouts. Virgin Australia is the obvious case. Instead of handing over billions to enable a corporate outfit to take over Virgin, the government should take it over directly, and then operate it as a low cost domestic airline that has cheap fares and pays its employees well and ensures good conditions.

Just taking things into public ownership is not enough. All nationalised industries should be run with as much democratic control as possible, rather than by an elite of highly paid bureaucrats. Workers need expanded rights to organise around health and safety, to shut down sites as they see fit, organise inspections and so on.

There is also the broader issue of how to deal with the huge unemployment numbers Australia is now facing. So far, the government has raised Newstart by $550 per fortnight – good, but it should be raised to what the government implicitly admits is the lowest livable income, the $1,500 per fortnight JobKeeker payment.

But the JobKeeker payment is also being revealed to be deeply problematic. Many employers haven’t even applied for it, because keeping their workers’ heads above water doesn’t help their bottom line. Others are exploiting it in various ways. Some small businesses can’t afford it because the government payment kicks in a month after payments are due, or they don’t want to pay in advance because they aren’t sure if they will meet the eligibility requirements.

What the left should be demanding instead is a government job guarantee. $1,500 a fortnight is a pretty pitiful amount – if the CEOs were being thrown on the scrap heap like workers are, it would be many times higher. So a government job guarantee should offer a higher basic wage. But the essential thing is that instead of tying each worker to the whim of their current employer, the government should be saying to every unemployed worker: we will give you an income, and if we can, we will give you a job.

It might not be possible overnight for the government to employ every person who has lost their job, but over time it would be easy. A massive expansion of spending on schools, health care, child care, aged care etc. would require a lot more jobs. The government could start a huge public works program of railways, tunnels, local infrastructure etc. – the kind of things that have been farmed out to the private sector in the past, but which could now be undertaken directly by governments employing thousands of people on proper wages and with decent conditions that could then be generalised across industries such as construction. A government-run public works program could encompass so many socially necessary things, retooling industry to deal with the COVID-19 crisis, but also reorganising the economy to deal with the ongoing climate crisis.

How would you pay for all this? Most discussions of this issue start with a massive blunder – they conflate the ability of society to pay for something with the question of whether the market would like it in the current context. But this relies on the old economics that the coronavirus experience has exposed as meaningless. The truth is, an economy can produce as much as its productive forces allow. It can distribute the goods it produces according to its technological and logistical capacity. These things have nothing to do with the market or prices. The conviction that they do is ideology – the ideology that in normal times makes us accept the fact that yes, there are lots of homeless people, and yes, there are lots of empty homes, but it is acceptable that the homeless people not be given the empty homes because that would break the economy.

Well now, every day, things are being done that break the economic model far more than giving a few alms to the poor ever would have. These extraordinary measures are being taken to save the profit system. The only reason transformative measures cannot be taken to maintain and improve the living standards of the vast majority and end the vicious income and wealth inequality that has marked the past 40 years is the political outlook of our political rulers. We need to build a left that can challenge them on every level, fighting for our rights in workplaces, but also putting forward a vision of how society could be reorganised in the interests of the vast majority.

Rosa Luxemburg warned us against national unity

Sandra Bloodworth 01 May 2020 RED FLAG AU.



The despicable Scott Morrison and Donald Trump invoke the macabre metaphor of war to describe this crisis we are living through. UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres says: “We are at war with a virus…This war needs a war-time plan to fight it.” That metaphor is a deliberate ploy. What better way to encourage workers and the poor to accept the inequalities intrinsic to capitalism? Morrison wants us to believe that now “there are no more unions or bosses” – and Sally McManus, Secretary of the Australian Countil of Trade Unions, sings Morrison’s praises because he deigns to speak to her.

Rosa Luxemburg, a revolutionary opposition leader in the German Social Democratic party – a massive, more radical version of our Labor Party – savagely denounced the party leaders’ capitulation to just such appeals when the actual World War I broke out. Almost the entire leadership ditched their former anti-war stance, invoking the rhetoric of a nation united as they urged workers to go off to the slaughter of war.

Luxemburg’s passionate reply to their betrayals, summed up her pamphlet, The Crisis in the German Social Democracy. It’s known as the “Junius Pamphlet” because she published it under that pseudonym, while she was imprisoned for antiwar activism. Luxemburg’s words echo across the century. It should be our reply today to the Labor Party and trade union leaders. Just substitute pandemic and economic crisis for war:

“What then has changed [since] the war broke out? Have private property, capitalist exploitation and class rule ceased to exist? Or have the propertied classes in a spell of patriotic fervour declared: in view of the needs of the war we hereby turn over the means of production, the earth, the factories and the mills therein, into the possession of the people?

“Have they relinquished the right to make profits out of these possessions? Have they set aside all political privileges, will they sacrifice them upon the altar of the fatherland, now that it is in danger? It is, to say the least, a rather naive hypothesis, and sounds almost like a story from a kindergarten primer.”

Labor politicians are grovelling to sit in Morrison’s “national cabinet” where “war time plans” to protect big business interests are crafted. Our union leaders have, by and large, rushed to join the bosses in demanding sacrifices from their members such as wage cuts while Morrison prepares “reforms” to further destroy union rights.

So Luxemburg’s fury resonates:

“The cessation of the class struggle was, therefore, a deplorably one-sided affair. While capitalist oppression and exploitation, the worst enemies of the working class, remain; socialist and labour union leaders have generously delivered the working class, without a struggle, into the hands of the enemy for the duration of the war. While the ruling classes are fully armed with the property and supremacy rights, the working class, at the advice of the social democracy, has laid down its arms.”

The obsequious Anthony Albanese says “Cooperation is always better than conflict”. Luxemburg’s words should be hurled in his face:

“In refuting the existence of the class struggle, the social democracy [read Labor Party] has denied the very basis of its own existence... What role could it expect to play in the war, once having sacrificed the class struggle...? The social democracy has destroyed its mission...as an active political party, as a representative of working-class politics. It has thrown aside the most important weapon it possessed, the power of criticism of the war from the peculiar point of view of the working class. Its only mission now is to play the role of the gendarme over the working class.”

As long as capitalism exists we will revisit similar crises, and every time governments and corporate bosses will demand that workers, the poor and oppressed pay the price. Big business is sacrosanct, demanding and getting huge bail out packages. But hundreds of thousands being thrown into unemployment are facing the prospect of living on $40 a day in September, and millions are eking out a life with no income. And every time, the demands for sacrifice by our side are backed up by leaders of the labour movement.

Each crisis has different specificities, but the political and social issues are so similar we can learn from earlier revolutionaries. In fact, Luxemburg paints a picture eerily prophetic of today’s multilayered crisis of environmental catastrophe, a pandemic which could have been prevented, and the resultant unprecedented economic disaster:

“Friedrich Engels once said: ‘Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.’ What does ‘regression into barbarism’ mean to our lofty European civilization? Until now, we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without suspecting their fearsome seriousness.

“A look around us at this moment shows what the regression of bourgeois society into barbarism means. This world war is a regression into barbarism... the annihilation of civilization... Today, we face the choice exactly as Friedrich Engels foresaw it a generation ago: either the triumph of [capitalism] and the collapse of all civilization as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration – a great cemetery. Or the victory of socialism.”

Luxemburg the revolutionary would be murdered in January 1919 by her old party, the Social Democrats, but not before she helped to found German Communist Party. It would lead a revolutionary struggle before the final victory of capitalism in 1923 and the rise of fascism. Luxemburg never wavered in her confidence that the working class could overturn capitalism and build a socialist society. Her words are a clarion call for those who a century later yearn for a decent world, for an end to capitalism:

“The victory of socialism will not descend from heaven. It can only be won by a long chain of violent tests of strength between the old and the new powers. The international proletariat...will thereby learn to try to take its history into its own hands; instead of remaining a will-less football, it will take the tiller of social life and become the pilot to the goal of its own history.”

Class war in the Spanish Flu pandemic


Sandra Bloodworth 20 March 2020 RED FLAG AU
Lots of people are thinking about the Spanish flu right now. That pandemic of the past didn't just cause mass death. It also led to class struggle.


“We were supposed to be evolving, and the millennium was only a question of time. And what happened? It was found that instead of being perfect, civilization was turned into a shambles. What an interruption to theories and optimistic fantasies. Heaven was to arrive – and lo, it was hell that came!”
– Presbyterian Messenger, late 1919

The Spanish flu, which devastated the world in several waves between 1918 and 1920, was not particularly Spanish. In fact, it likely originated in the US. The first record of the condition was in an April 1918 public health report informing officials of 18 severe cases and three deaths in Haskell, Kansas. By May, hundreds of thousands of US soldiers had sailed across the Atlantic, spreading the deadly flu across Europe and into Africa and Asia. It was not the illness’s origin that gave it its title, but the response of authorities to the disaster.

The authors of a 2005 paper delivered to the US Institute of Medicine Forum on Microbial Threats found: “Every country engaged in World War I tried to control public perception [of the flu outbreak]. To avoid hurting morale, even in the nonlethal first wave the press in countries fighting in the war did not mention the outbreak”. But because Spain was not at war, its press reported the unfolding disaster, with the Spanish king being an early, much publicised victim. Spain was the first country in which political realities permitted the pandemic’s acknowledgement, rather than its origin.

Much like today, most governments in 1918 tried to downplay the threat, pretending that their country wouldn’t be in danger. In the US, a law was passed that made it punishable by 20 years in jail to “utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the government of the United States”, including cursing or criticising the government, even if it was true. One congressman was jailed.

The architect of massive government propaganda proclaimed: “Truth and falsehood are arbitrary terms ... There is nothing in experience to tell us that one is always preferable to the other ... The force of an idea lies in its inspirational value. It matters very little if it is true or false”.

Does Trump hear echoes of this wisdom as he lies and says that everyone can have a test if they want, when there is a patent lack of clinics to do even the minimum? Or when he asserted that the virus would be under control in a few days when it was just beginning to spread?

The report’s authors conclude of 1918-19: “[A] combination of rigid control and disregard for truth had dangerous consequences. Focusing on the shortest term, local officials almost universally told half-truths or outright lies to avoid damaging morale and the war effort. They were assisted – not challenged – by the press, which although not censored in a technical sense cooperated fully with the government's propaganda machine”.

In Philadelphia, when the public health commissioner closed all schools, houses of worship, theatres and other public gathering places, one newspaper thundered that this order was “not a public health measure” and reiterated that “there is no cause for panic or alarm”. But these reassurances rang hollow as neighbours, friends and spouses died horrible deaths.

Dead bodies remained in homes for days, until eventually open trucks or horse-drawn carts were sent down city streets and relatives were told to bring out the dead. The bodies were stacked without coffins and buried in mass graves.

Between 50 and 100 million had died by the time the virus finally petered out in 1920, according to epidemiological studies. This was out of a world population of just over 1.8 billion. A similar mortality rate today would mean 175-350 million deaths. Epidemiologists claim it lowered life expectancy in the US by 12 years. In Australia, around 15,000 died in a population of 5 million.

These figures reduce to mere numbers what was unimaginable horror. A physician at one typical US army camp wrote:

“These men start with what appears to be an ordinary attack of LaGrippe or Influenza, and ... a few hours later you can begin to see the Cyanosis extending from their ears and spreading all over the face, until it is hard to distinguish the colored men from the white. It is only a matter of a few hours then until death comes ... It is horrible ... to see these poor devils dropping like flies ... We have been averaging about 100 deaths per day ... We have lost an outrageous number of Nurses and Drs. It takes special trains to carry away the dead. For several days there were no coffins and the bodies piled up something fierce ... It beats any sight they ever had in France after a battle.”

With no effective drugs to treat the virus, scientists concluded:

“Some nonmedical interventions did succeed. Total isolation, cutting a community off from the outside world, did work if done early enough. Gunnison, Colorado, a town that was a rail center and was large enough to have a college, succeeded in isolating itself. So did Fairbanks, Alaska. American Samoa escaped without a single case, while a few miles away in Western Samoa, 22 percent of the entire population died.

“More interestingly – and perhaps importantly – an Army study found that isolating both individual victims and entire commands that contained infected soldiers ‘failed when and where [these measures] were carelessly applied,’ but ‘did some good ... when and where they were rigidly carried out.’”

The first cargo vessel carrying infected seamen arrived in Australian waters in October 1918, prompting the government to impose a seven days quarantine on ships from South African or New Zealand ports. Over the next three months in the Sydney quarantine stations, 300 cases were treated, with “numerous” deaths.

The unfolding tragedy was met with dishonesty and incompetence. The director of quarantine claimed to be convinced that by June 1919 they had created a situation of “absolute immunity”. The left wing historian Humphrey McQueen, who studied the pandemic in Australia, comments, “Dr J. H. L. Cumpston based this view on the fact that four weeks elapsed ‘between the arrival of the last infected ship and the first shore case notified.’ This would be strong evidence indeed if he did not elsewhere have cause to complain of medical officers on troop ships falsifying their records to avoid protracted quarantine.”

Some states closed their borders quickly, others later, leading to squabbling about who was responsible for new outbreaks and what could traverse borders. Shipping companies, in league with various governments, tried to subvert quarantine rules, resulting in acrimonious disputes about who was entitled to which trade. None of this conflict even considered what was best for the sailors and the population at large.

A big difference with Australia today was the restless spirit among returned soldiers who had looked into the gates of hell, urged on with promises of a golden future after the war. And workers had unions that actually saw their reason for existence as improving the lot of their members.

Industrial militancy had been strong since a general strike in 1917. Feelings among militant workers intensified in response to the contradictions between government measures intended to contain the spread of the flu, such as a ban on large gatherings, and employers’ demands to work in appalling conditions. In spite of government orders that only 20 people should be in a room together, for instance, the owners of the ship Loongana insisted on 24 sleeping in what a Board of Health inspector described as “dog kennel accommodation”.

Strong, militant unions did not accept any of this without vigorous resistance. The waterside workers and seamen were in the forefront of danger, with ships arriving carrying potentially infectious people. And they were also in the forefront of militant class consciousness.

In January 1919 seamen on the Arawatta moored in Moreton Bay walked off and refused to sign on again until they got conditions won by New Zealand crews. This included a 35 shillings a month wage increase, insurance of 500 pounds for families of workers killed by the flu, and full pay if they were quarantined or in hospital. Seamen refused to continue on the Cooma from Brisbane without these claims being met, in what was a wildcat strike. Shipping companies responded by leaving at least four ships in Queensland lying idle.

Transport workers in Sydney met and put all the same demands to employers. Waterside workers followed suit, also demanding cleaner facilities for meal breaks and washing and an extension of insurance protection to nurses, ambulance bearers and other occupations more likely to be at risk.

For the sake of business, some employers granted many of the claims, but the government would only guarantee wages of those in quarantine or hospital.

The 1919 Fremantle Wharf riot, also known as “bloody Sunday” or the “Battle of the Barricades”, was sparked by anger at ship owners’ reckless disregard for the health of waterside workers, inflamed by wider bitterness about low wages, casualised work and terrible conditions. A memorial fountain, sculpted by Pietro Porcelli in Perth’s Kings Square, pays tribute to Tom Edwards, killed by a cop during the riot. In the book Radical Perth, Militant Fremantle, Bobbie Oliver describes the events:

“On 4 May 1919, over a thousand wharf labourers (or lumpers as they were known), their wives and children had mobbed the wharf, thrown bricks at the Premier, faced armed police and seen one of their own killed and others injured ...

“For several days after the event, police officers feared for their safety on the streets of Fremantle. The funeral of Tom Edwards ... brought not only Fremantle but also the whole state to a standstill.”

The Dimboola had sailed into Fremantle in April carrying infected passengers. The state government, pressured by the prime minister to subvert their own quarantine period, organised scabs to unload it. They built the barricades that gave the event its name, to protect themselves. The Freemantle Lumpers Union, bearing the paradoxical acronym FLU, mobilised on the fateful day to stop scabs brought in boats down the river.

In May 1919 the Seamen’s Union went on the attack after confrontations and strikes in Queensland over wages, attempts to enforce quarantine of ships and the demands other ports had raised. Conflicts in a number of ports culminated in a four-month-long maritime strike. The seamen’s journal in Queensland suggested employing the “steel-fisted irony of the wobblies”, in McQueen’s words. If seamen got flu in any number, “they must immediately stroll up to the owner’s office and sneeze violently altogether at once. The owner will then immediately ... personally conduct you to his private hospital, calling at hotels en route, where you will receive every attention”.

With no vaccine and a health system even more woefully inadequate than today, the confused and outright despicable responses of governments and employers, determined to defend profits above all else, resulted in appalling misery for the mass of workers. Governments and employers determinedly resisted workers’ demands to be treated with some dignity.

Ideologically they attempted to combat the anger and radicalism by linking the crisis to the scourge of Bolshevism, see it as an opportunity to discredit the Russian Revolution, which had inspired millions to believe in the possibility of a better world.

One pamphleteer observed that the historical synchronisation between “epidemics of disease and epidemics of crime and social disorders” was being repeated as “the mysterious physical poison of influenza” emerged simultaneously with “a vast deluge of moral and mental poison, under the name of Bolshevism”.

Workers could not win everything, but they made substantial gains in pay and support for those unable to work. Critically, their struggles ensured the continuance of a militant minority determined to fight for workers’ rights and against the scourge of capitalism. This is an important lesson for today.

A Snapshot of the 1918 Global Influenza Pandemic in Russia

Posted on March 19, 2020 by Joshua Sanborn

Sister of Mercy working at beginning of World War I (Photo: Florence Farmborough)

Judging by my social media feed, several folks with an interest in Russian history have been asking themselves “Hmm, I wonder what happened in Russia during the 1918 global influenza pandemic?” Many moons ago, when researching medical care and medical personnel during World War I for my book Imperial Apocalypse, I had the same question. At that time, I found very little work on the question, either in English or in Russian, though I may have missed something then or something might have been published more recently. (And if there is something out there, please reach out and let me know. I’m interested!)

I did some archival research on this question, though it was limited both by the fact that the flu struck right after the period (summer of 1918) at which I was wrapping up my story and by the scattered nature of some of this material. As is often the case, much of the research I did ended up on the cutting room floor, and I had only a couple of sentences in Imperial Apocalypse that dealt with it:

“As 1917 turned to 1918, and then throughout the rest of the Civil War, the Whites, Reds, and warlords all failed to create the conditions of state support and personal security necessary for vibrant economic institutions to re-emerge. People were hungry and cold. Then, increasingly, they starved and froze to death. As they weakened, they sickened further. Each month saw an increase in the number of people hospitalized, and epidemic diseases became more prevalent. In the summer of 1918, cholera ripped through cities like Iaroslavl. By October, the global influenza pandemic was hitting other towns in the Golden Ring like Rybinsk and the Soviet leadership in the Kremlin alike. Many Russians no sooner recovered from one disease than the next one struck.” (p. 256)

My mention of Rybinsk, a town just north of Iaroslavl, was of course not accidental. One of the sources I found was a set of records from a “flying detachment of the Red Cross for the fight against epidemics in the city of Rybinsk” from the summer and fall of 1918. (GARF f. R-4094 op. 1 d. 137). I entered these data into a spreadsheet to see the ways that disease hit at least one medical facility in at least one city in this critical period. My basic takeaway was that, in Rybinsk at least, the flu was just the latest and not the most lethal of the epidemics to affect the town. The flu first made its appearance into the records in October 1918 as the “Spanish Illness,” though by December it was more correctly labeled as “Influenza.” In October, 17 people were treated, 7 were released, and 10 were still in the clinic. In November, 10 more people became ill, 14 were released, 1 was still in care, and 5 had died. In December, 7 more cases appeared, but by the end of the month all 8 patients had recovered and been released. In sum, then, 34 people in Rybinsk were treated for the flu by this flying detachment, and 5 of them died. This was, of course, terrible. But just before the flu arrived, there had been a cholera epidemic in the city. From July-September, 284 people were treated by the detachment for cholera, with fully half (142) dying of the disease. Earlier still, in May, June, and July, 55 people had gotten typhus, though only one died.

These numbers offer only partial insight into the dynamics of the epidemic, of course. Epidemics strike unevenly in geographic terms, as we are currently learning. Was Rybinsk more or less affected than other regions? These were the records of a single medical detachment. Were there other medical institutions operating in Rybinsk? If so, did they treat infectious cases or send them directly to the flying detachment? There is narrative evidence given by officials in these records that many of the cholera cases they treated were at death’s door because families tried as much as possible to care for them at home, often infecting themselves in the process. Did they try to do the same with the flu? If so, were there many cases unaccounted for because they got better (or died) without ever seeing a doctor? Did the fact that many young men (a particularly hard-hit group in this pandemic) were serving in the military mean that civilian areas saw a lower impact? I don’t know the answer to any of these questions. All I really feel confident in saying is that the social and medical impact of the influenza pandemic likely affected Russia differently than many other areas because of this larger context of mass epidemics and, even more broadly, of state and social collapse.

One more point of interest is that in November, 1918 a request was made to a Smolensk clinic to send weekly reports on the “Spanish disease” both to the oblast department of health and to the regional administration of the Red Cross. Perhaps at least some of those records survive. Maybe, once our current pandemic crisis eases, some historian will be able to fill in some of the many gaps of knowledge we have. In the meantime, stay healthy, my friends!

About Joshua Sanborn

David M. '70 and Linda Roth Professor of History Department of History Lafayette College (Pennsylvania, USA)

View all posts by Joshua Sanborn →

http://russianhistoryblog.org/2020/03/a-snapshot-of-the-1918-global-influenza-pandemic-in-russia/

Why the Second Wave of the 1918 Spanish Flu Was So Deadly
The first strain of the Spanish flu wasn’t particularly deadly. Then it came back in the fall with a vengeance.

DAVE ROOS UPDATED:APR 29, 2020

PhotoQuest/Getty Images


The horrific scale of the 1918 influenza pandemic—known as the "Spanish flu"—is hard to fathom. The virus infected 500 million people worldwide and killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million victims—that’s more than all of the soldiers and civilians killed during World War I combined.

While the global pandemic lasted for two years, a significant number of deaths were packed into three especially cruel months in the fall of 1918. Historians now believe that the fatal severity of the Spanish flu’s “second wave” was caused by a mutated virus spread by wartime troop movements.

When the Spanish flu first appeared in early March 1918, it had all the hallmarks of a seasonal flu, albeit a highly contagious and virulent strain. One of the first registered cases was Albert Gitchell, a U.S. Army cook at Camp Funston in Kansas, who was hospitalized with a 104-degree fever. The virus spread quickly through the Army installation, home to 54,000 troops. By the end of the month, 1,100 troops had been hospitalized and 38 had died after developing pneumonia.

As U.S. troops deployed en masse for the war effort in Europe, they carried the Spanish flu with them. Throughout April and May of 1918, the virus spread like wildfire through England, France, Spain and Italy. An estimated three-quarters of the French military was infected in the spring of 1918 and as many as half of British troops. Yet the first wave of the virus didn't appear to be particularly deadly, with symptoms like high fever and malaise usually lasting only three days. According to limited public health data from the time, mortality rates were similar to seasonal flu.

How the Spanish Flu Got Its Name

Interestingly, it was during this time that the Spanish flu earned its misnomer. Spain was neutral during World War I and unlike its European neighbors, it didn’t impose wartime censorship on its press. In France, England and the United States, newspapers weren’t allowed to report on anything that could harm the war effort, including news that a crippling virus was sweeping through troops. Since Spanish journalists were some of the only ones reporting on a widespread flu outbreak in the spring of 1918, the pandemic became known as the “Spanish flu.”

Reported cases of Spanish flu dropped off over the summer of 1918, and there was hope at the beginning of August that the virus had run its course. In retrospect, it was only the calm before the storm. Somewhere in Europe, a mutated strain of the Spanish flu virus had emerged that had the power to kill a perfectly healthy young man or woman within 24 hours of showing the first signs of infection.

In late August 1918, military ships departed the English port city of Plymouth carrying troops unknowingly infected with this new, far deadlier strain of Spanish flu. As these ships arrived in cities like Brest in France, Boston in the United States and Freetown in west Africa, the second wave of the global pandemic began.

“The rapid movement of soldiers around the globe was a major spreader of the disease,” says James Harris, a historian at Ohio State University who studies both infectious disease and World War I. “The entire military industrial complex of moving lots of men and material in crowded conditions was certainly a huge contributing factor in the ways the pandemic spread.”

Virus Killed the Young, Old and In-Between

Victims of the Spanish flu at a barracks hospital on the campus of Colorado Agricultural College, Fort Collins, Colorado, 1918.
American Unofficial Collection of World War I Photographs/PhotoQuest/Getty Images

From September through November of 1918, the death rate from the Spanish flu skyrocketed. In the United States alone, 195,000 Americans died from the Spanish flu in just the month of October. And unlike a normal seasonal flu, which mostly claims victims among the very young and very old, the second wave of the Spanish flu exhibited what’s called a “W curve”—high numbers of deaths among the young and old, but also a huge spike in the middle composed of otherwise healthy 25- to 35-year-olds in the prime of their life.

“That really freaked out the medical establishment, that there was this atypical spike in the middle of the W,” says Harris.

READ MORE: How Florence Nightingale’s Hygiene Crusade Saved Millions

Not only was it shocking that healthy young men and women were dying by the millions worldwide, but it was also how they were dying. Struck with blistering fevers, nasal hemorrhaging and pneumonia, the patients would drown in their own fluid-filled lungs.

Only decades later were scientists able to explain the phenomenon now known as “cytokine explosion.” When the human body is being attacked by a virus, the immune system sends messenger proteins called cytokines to promote helpful inflammation. But some strains of the flu, particularly the H1N1 strain responsible for the Spanish flu outbreak, can trigger a dangerous immune overreaction in healthy individuals. In those cases, the body is overloaded with cytokines leading to severe inflammation and the fatal buildup of fluid in the lungs.

British military doctors conducting autopsies on soldiers killed by this second wave of the Spanish flu described the heavy damage to the lungs as akin to the effects of chemical warfare.
Lack of Quarantines Allowed Flu to Spread and Grow

A nurse checking on a patient at the Walter Reed Hospital Flu Ward during the influenza pandemic, circa 1918. Harris & Ewing/Underwood Archives/Getty Images

Harris believes that the rapid spread of Spanish flu in the fall of 1918 was at least partially to blame on public health officials unwilling to impose quarantines during wartime. In Britain, for example, a government official named Arthur Newsholme knew full well that a strict civilian lockdown was the best way to fight the spread of the highly contagious disease. But he wouldn’t risk crippling the war effort by keeping munitions factory workers and other civilians home.

According to Harris’s research, Newsholme concluded that “the relentless needs of warfare justified incurring [the] risk of spreading infection” and encouraged Britons to simply “carry on” during the pandemic.

The public health response to the crisis in the United States was further hampered by a severe nursing shortage as thousands of nurses had been deployed to military camps and the front lines. The shortage was worsened by the American Red Cross’s refusal to use trained African American nurses until the worst of the pandemic had already passed.


READ MORE: When Black Nurses Were Relegated to Care for German POWs
Medical Science Didn't Have the Tools

But one of the chief reasons that the Spanish flu claimed so many lives in 1918 was that science simply didn’t have the tools to develop a vaccine for the virus. Microscopes couldn’t even see something as incredibly small as a virus until the 1930s. Instead, top medical professionals in 1918 were convinced that the flu was caused by a bacterium nicknamed “Pfeiffer’s bacillus.”

After a global flu outbreak in 1890, a German physician named Richard Pfeiffer found that all of his infected patients carried a particular strain of bacteria he called H. influenzae. When the Spanish flu pandemic hit, scientists were intent on finding a cure for Pfeiffer’s bacillus. Millions of dollars were invested in state-of-the-art labs to develop techniques for testing for and treating H. influenzae, all of it for naught.

“This was a huge distraction for medical science,” says Harris.


GALLERY 9 IMAGES

By December 1918, the deadly second wave of the Spanish flu had finally passed, but the pandemic was far from over. A third wave erupted in Australia in January 1919 and eventually worked its way back to Europe and the United States. It’s believed that President Woodrow Wilson contracted the Spanish flu during the World War I peace negotiations in Paris in April 1919.

The mortality rate of the third wave was just as high as the second wave, but the end of the war in November 1918 removed the conditions that allowed the disease to spread so far and so quickly. Global deaths from the third wave, while still in the millions, paled in comparison to the apocalyptic losses during the second wave.
See all pandemic coverage here
BY DAVE ROOS

Mike Davis: Reopening the Economy Will Send Us to Hell

People desperately need to go back to work and save what they can of their lives. But Mike Davis argues that a rapid reopening of the economy would only result in unspeakable tragedy for millions.

Medical workers prepare with personal protective equipment (PPE) before entering a residential building on April 27, 2020 in a neighborhood of the Brooklyn borough of New York City. Spencer Platt / Getty

As we head into the fifth month of the outbreak millions of working families feel like they have been kidnapped and sent to hell.

As unemployment (officially reported) soars toward 30 percent or more, an estimated 20 million more people will fall helplessly below the poverty line. In a recent Pew poll, 60 percent of Latinos reported losing jobs or wages, as did more than half of all workers below the age of thirty. In addition to their jobs, millions will lose everything they had spent their lives working for: homes, pensions, medical coverage, and savings accounts.

Most of us have already lived through a brutal preview of economic collapse: the 2008–09 “Great Recession.” In a span of eighteen months a majority of black and Latino families lost all their net wealth and college grads from non-privileged backgrounds found themselves marooned, seemingly for life, in the low-wage service economy. That’s why so many millions flocked to Bernie Sanders’s New Deal banner. But the threat ahead is mass immiseration and hunger on a scale unseen since 1933.

People desperately need to go back to work and save what they can of their lives. But heeding the siren call of the MAGA demonstrators, puppets on strings manipulated by hedge funds and billionaire casino owners, to “reopen the economy” would only result in tragedy. Consider these points:

Sending millions of people back to work without protection or testing would be a death sentence for thousands. Thirty-four million workers are over fifty-five; ten million of them over sixty-five. Millions more suffer from diabetes, chronic respiratory problems, and so on. Straight from home to work to ICU to morgue.

Millions of our “essential workers” face intolerable hazards because of the shortage of protective equipment. It will be weeks, at best, before there will be an adequate supply for medical workers. Workers in warehouses, markets, and fast food have no guarantee of ever receiving masks, unless legislation compels it. If this is a war, Trump’s refusal to use existing laws to federalize the manufacture of masks and ventilators is a war crime.

The proposal to test people’s blood and then issue back-to-work certificates if they have the right antibodies is mere fantasy at the moment. Washington has allowed more than a hundred different firms to sell serological kits without human trials or FDA certification. The results they give are all over the map, just a mess. It may be weeks or longer before public health workers have reliable diagnostics to use. Even then it would take months to test the workforce and it’s doubtful that enough people would have the antibodies to safely staff all the closed businesses.

The most heroic assumption is that a vaccine could be available by spring 2021, although no one knows how long its conferred immunity would last. Meanwhile, hundreds of research teams and smaller biotech firms are working on medicines that will reduce the risk of respiratory failure and serious heart or kidney damage. But this sprawling scientific experiment lacks coordination and funding from Washington.
Indefinite Lockout

In a sense, we are living in an indefinite lockout, facing an administration that sets a higher priority on destroying the US Postal Service than it does on organizing a crash program to produce the tests, safety equipment, and antivirals that will allow the United States to return to work.

Trump’s accomplices are monsters like Amazon, which in two weeks made Jeff Bezos $25 billion richer, and UnitedHealth Group, the world’s largest health insurance company, whose profits increased by $4.1 billion in the first three months of the pandemic. Medical insurers have experienced a windfall, since most of their enrollees are now unable to book operations or obtain vital treatments.

A volcanic rage is rapidly rising to the surface in this country and we need to harness it to defend and build unions, ensure Medicare for all, and knock the bastards off their gilded thrones.

How We Got Here

Last New Year’s Eve, while we were lifting our glasses, hugging our mates, and singing a few verses of a song written several centuries ago by a Scots revolutionary, Chinese doctors were notifying colleagues around the world that a rapidly increasing number of acute pneumonia cases, clustered around the city of Wuhan, was the result of infections caused by a previously unknown virus.

Within a week it had been gene-sequenced and unmasked as a “coronavirus.” Until 2003, research on this family of viruses had principally responded to the serious diseases they cause in a variety of animals, including livestock and poultry. Only two were known to infect humans, and since they produced only mild colds, researchers at the time considered them insignificant.

Then in 2003 a new viral epidemic started with a traveler in a Chinese airport hotel who passed his infection on to everyone with whom he had contact. Within twenty-four hours the virus had flown to five other countries. Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) killed one out of every ten victims.

The SARS pathogen was identified as another coronavirus, passed from bats to small lithe carnivores known as civets, long valued in southern Chinese cuisine. SARS reached thirty countries and caused a full-scale international panic. But it had an Achilles’ heel: it was only contagious at the stage when infected people displayed symptoms like dry coughing, fever, and muscle aches. Because it was so easily recognized, the SARS virus was finally contained.

A similar virus, a kind of mummy’s curse spread by tomb bats to camels, emerged in 2012 and has killed 1,000 people, mainly in the Arabian Peninsula. But it’s mostly spread by direct contact with camels and thus has not been considered a candidate for starting a pandemic.

The Stealth Virus

Researchers hoped that the current killer, a virus known as SARS-C0V-2 and sharing most of its genes with the original SARS, would likewise be simple to identify through correlation with patients’ symptoms. They were disastrously mistaken.

After four months of circulation in the human world, we now know that the virus, unlike its predecessors, flies on the same wings as influenza: spread easily by people without visible signs of illness. The current pathogen has turned out to be a “stealth virus” on a scale far exceeding influenzas and perhaps unprecedented in the annals of microbiology. The Navy has tested almost the entire crew of the stricken aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt and discovered that 60 percent of those infected never displayed visible symptoms.

A large universe of undetected cases might be considered good news if infections produced durable immunity, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. The dozens of antibody-detecting blood tests that are now in use, all uncertified by the FDA, are producing confusing and contradictory results, making the idea of a back-to-work antibody ID card impossible at the moment.

But most recent research (which can be reviewed at the National Institutes of Health pandemic website, LitCovid) suggests that conferred immunity is very limited and coronavirus could become as entrenched as influenza. Barring dramatic mutations, second and third infections will likely be less dangerous to survivors, but there is as of yet no evidence that they will be any less dangerous to uninfected people in high-risk groups. So COVID-19 will be the monster in our attic for a long time.

They Knew This Was Coming

But the disease is not an eruption of the totally unknown, a biological asteroid. Although its transmissibility was unexpected in a coronavirus, the pandemic otherwise corresponds closely to the scenario long described for an avian flu outbreak.

For nearly a generation the World Health Organization (WHO) and all major governments have been planning how to detect and respond to such a pandemic. There has always been a very clear international understanding of the need for early detection, large stockpiles of emergency medical supplies, and surge capacity in ICU beds. Most important has the been the agreement of WHO members to coordinate their response along guidelines they all had voted to accept. Early containment was crucial: comprehensive testing, contact tracing, and the isolation of suspected cases. Large-scale quarantines, sealing off cities, shutting large sectors of the economy — these should be only last-ditch measures, made unnecessary by extensive planning.

Along these lines, after the arrival of avian flu in 2005 the US government published an ambitious “National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza” based on the finding that all levels of the American public health system were totally unprepared for a large-scale outbreak. After the swine flu scare in 2009, the strategy was updated, and, in 2017, a week before Trump’s inauguration, outgoing Obama officials and incoming Trump administrators jointly carried out a large-scale simulation that tested the response of federal agencies and hospitals to a pandemic arising in three different scenarios: swine flu, Ebola, and Zika virus.

In the simulation the system, of course, failed to prevent the outbreaks or, for that matter, flatten the curves in time. Part of the problem was detection and coordination. Another was inadequate stockpiles and supply chains with obvious bottlenecks, such as depending on a few overseas factories to produce vital protective equipment. And behind all this lay the failure to aggressively take advantage of revolutionary advances in biological design over the last decade in order to stockpile an arsenal of new antivirals and vaccines.

In other words, the United States was not ready, and the government knew it was not ready.

Dominoes of Disaster
By the end of January 2020 three things had happened. First, the WHO quickly distributed hundreds of thousands of test kits designed by German scientists but otherwise was pushed to the sidelines while each nation bolted its doors and ignored previous commitments to mutual aid.

Second, three East Asian nations with well-prepared medical arsenals and single-payer health systems — South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan — successfully contained outbreaks with minimal mortality and moderate periods of social isolation. After early disasters that allowed the virus to escape on air flights and forced the lockdown of Wuhan, China mobilized on an unprecedented scale and quickly extinguished all COVID-19 hotspots outside Wuhan.

Third, our Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) decided to create its own diagnostic kit rather than use the one distributed by the WHO. The CDC’s production lines were contaminated with viruses, however, and the test kits were useless. The entire month of February, when it was still possible to prevent the exponential increase of infection through testing and contact tracing, was squandered.

This was the first disaster. The second was in March, when severe and critical cases began to crowd hospitals. As institutions began to run out of respirators, N-95 masks, and ventilators, they turned to their states and then to the federal government’s National Strategic Stockpile, which had been designed specifically for use during an outbreak like COVID-19.

But the cupboard was almost bare. It had been largely depleted during the national panic over swine flu in 2009 and several subsequent emergencies. The Trump administration had been repeatedly warned of its statutory duty to restock it, but had other priorities such as slashing the budget of the CDC and killing the Affordable Care Act.

As a result, millions of American workers have been going into battle in hospitals, nursing homes, public transit, and Amazon warehouses without essential protection that costs only pennies to manufacture. Nothing is as emblematic of the Trump administration’s total dereliction of duty than the fact that on the same day that the president was bragging of the United States’ “unmatched scientific and technological superiority,” the New York Times was devoting a page to “How to Sew a Mask at Home.”

Republished from Labor Notes.

ABOUT THE AUTHORMIKE DAVIS is the author of several books, including Planet of Slums and City of Quartz.

Workers at Amazon, Whole Foods, Instacart, and Target Are on Strike and Need Your Solidarity

BY MINDY ISSER

In a historic strike, workers at Amazon, Whole Foods, Instacart, and Target are striking today and asking customers to stage a one-day solidarity boycott. They’re fighting for what they deserve — and we should have their backs.
A worker leaves Whole Foods with Amazon Prime delivery packages on March 18, 2020 in Jericho, New York. Bruce Bennett / Getty

With the coronavirus pandemic turning from a health crisis into an economic crisis, workers in the United States are suffering more than they have in decades. Unemployment claims in recent weeks have hit 30 million — easily the highest on record. Lines at food banks are stretching on interminably. Businesses are shuttered — some, no doubt, indefinitely.

But some industries are doing just fine. Grocery stores, online retailers, and delivery services are booming. Since the pandemic reached the United States, Amazon announced it would hire nearly 200,000 new workers, and Instacart 550,000 new workers. And while these essential workers are lauded as “heroes,” the conditions at their workplaces show the profound lack of respect their employers actually have for them.

Today, workers at Amazon, Whole Foods, and Target are walking off the job. Their demands include compensation for all unpaid time off since the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, hazard pay or paid sick leave, personal protective equipment (PPE) and cleaning supplies, and transparency on the number of cases in each workplace. The coalition of workers is also asking customers to boycott Amazon, Instacart, Whole Foods, and Target today.

Since the start of the crisis, multiple workplace actions have broken out at these big retailers — workers have gone on strike at Amazon distribution and fulfillment centers in Minnesota, Staten Island, and Detroit (among others); Whole Foods workers have staged a nationwide sick-out; and Target employees have spoken out publicly about their workplace conditions. But now, workers at these companies — along with employees at Instacart, FedEx, and Walmart — have united in a coalition with a shared set of demands. (Some Postmates, Trader Joe’s, and Shipt workers are also planning to join the strike today.)

So far, the businesses have reacted to workers’ actions with both carrots and sticks. In late March, Amazon announced temporary raises, and yesterday, after the coalition’s press release went out, Whole Foods said it would begin requesting that customers wear masks, even providing them for free. These are small gestures that don’t come close to meeting workers’ demands, but they show companies are watching workers’ actions — and responding to them. Then there are the sticks: last month, Amazon fired Chris Smalls, the organizer of the Staten Island walkout, and Trader Joe’s sent an anti-union memo after the Trader Joe’s Union Twitter account went live. Business Insider revealed the other week that Whole Foods is tracking all of its stores for unionization risks on a “heat map.”

The bosses of these companies, of course, are doing just fine. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon and Whole Foods, is the richest man in the world. The other companies’ CEOs aren’t doing too badly, either: the CEO of Target, Brian Cornell, raked in $21.6 million last fiscal year, and the CEO of Walmart, Doug McMillon, brought home $22.1 million. The pay at all of these companies hovers between $10 and $20 an hour. And while some provide health insurance, it’s often too expensive for workers to actually use — an obvious problem during a global pandemic.

Organizing inside of these companies has always been a heavy lift: locations are spread out across the country, and workers cycle in and out of employment (Amazon has a 104.4 percent turnover rate). Both of these realities make it hard to find and identify worker leaders (crucial to any good organizing drive), and for worker leaders to stay in their jobs long enough to effectively organize. For delivery workers, it’s especially difficult: they don’t have a set workplace, and they are misclassified as independent contractors, barred from unionizing.

But the labor movement has no choice but to try to reach these workers. As more businesses close, more unemployed workers will get funneled into the grocery, online retail, and delivery industries — and these sectors will form economic choke points that could be used to win major concessions for all workers.

Although it’s unclear how many workers will strike today, it’s crucial that they’re beginning to build ties with one another. The new coalition, along with Amazonians United and other nascent organizing committees, is a sign that things are shifting from one-off strikes and sick-outs to building organizations that can hopefully win long-term power for some of the most exploited workers in the country. No matter what happens today, it’s clear that workers’ consciousness is being raised — and that many are ready to struggle for what they deserve.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mindy Isser works in the labor movement and lives in Philadelphia.