Wednesday, April 22, 2020


INTERVIEW
Yuval Noah Harari on COVID-19: 'The biggest danger is not the virus itself'

A crisis can be a turning point for a society. Which way will we go now? Professor Yuval Noah Harari, whose company donated $1 million to WHO, explains how the decisions we make today on COVID-19 will change our future.

DW: Professor Harari, we're in the midst of a global pandemic. What concerns you most about how the world is changing? 
Yuval Noah Harari: I think the biggest danger is not the virus itself. Humanity has all the scientific knowledge and technological tools to overcome the virus. The really big problem is our own inner demons, our own hatred, greed and ignorance. I'm afraid that people are reacting to this crisis not with global solidarity, but with hatred, blaming other countries, blaming ethnic and religious minorities.
But I hope that we will be able to develop our compassion, and not our hatred, to react with global solidarity, which will develop our generosity to help people in need. And that we develop our ability to discern the truth and not believe all these conspiracy theories. If we do that, I have no doubt that we can easily overcome this crisis.
We face, as you've said, the choice between totalitarian surveillance and citizen empowerment. If we're not careful, the epidemic might mark a watershed in the history of surveillance. But how can I be careful with something which is out of my control?
It's not completely out of your control, at least in a democracy. You vote for particular politicians and parties who make the policies. So you have some control over the political system. Even if there were no elections now, politicians are still responsive to public pressure.
If the public is terrified of the epidemic and wants a strong leader to take over, then this makes it far easier for a dictator to do exactly that, to take over. If, on the other hand, you have pushback from the public when a politician goes too far, then that can stop the most dangerous developments from happening.
How do I know whom, or what, to trust? 
First, you have past experience. If you have politicians who have been lying to you for a couple of years, then you have less reason to trust them in this emergency. Second, you can ask questions about the theories that people are telling you. If somebody comes up with some conspiracy theory about the origin and spread of the coronavirus, ask this person to explain to you what a virus is and how it causes disease. If the person has no clue, which means they have no basic scientific knowledge, then don't believe anything else this person is telling you about the coronavirus epidemic. You don't need a PhD in Biology. But you do need some basic scientific understanding of all these things.
In recent years, we have seen various populist politicians attacking science, saying that scientists are some remote elite disconnected from the people, saying that things like climate change are just a hoax, you shouldn't believe them. But in this moment of crisis all over the world, we see that people do trust science more than anything else.
I hope we remember this not only during this crisis, but also once the crisis is over. That we take care to give students in school a good scientific education about what viruses, and the theory of evolution, are. And also, that when scientists warn us about other things besides epidemics, like about climate change and ecological collapse, we will take their warnings with the same seriousness that we now take what they say about the coronavirus epidemic.
Many countries are implementing digital surveillance mechanisms in order to prevent the virus from spreading. How can these mechanisms be controlled?
Whenever you increase surveillance of the citizens, it should always go hand-in-hand with increased surveillance of the government. In this crisis, governments are spending money like water. In the US, two trillion dollars. In Germany, hundreds of billions of euros, and so forth. As a citizen, I want to know who is making the decisions and where the money goes. Is the money being used to bail out big corporations who were in trouble even before the epidemic because of the wrong decisions of their managers? Or is the money being used to help small businesses, restaurants and shops and things like that?
If a government is so eager to have more surveillance, the surveillance should go both ways. And if the government says, hey, it's too complicated, we can't just open all the financial transactions, then you say: "No it's not too complicated. The same way you can create a huge surveillance system to see where I go every day, it should be as easy to create a system that shows what you are doing with my tax money."
That works by distributing the power and not letting it accumulate in one person or one authority?
Exactly. One idea people are experimenting with is if you want to alert people who have been near a coronavirus patient. There are two ways to do it: One way is to have a central authority which gathers information on everybody, and then discovers that you have been near somebody who has COVID-19 and alerts you. Another method is for phones to directly communicate, one with the other, without any central authority that gathers all the information. If I pass near somebody who has COVID-19 the two phones, his or her phone and my phone, just talk with each other and I get the alert. But no central authority is gathering all this information and following everybody.
Germans can voluntarily donate coronavirus data via a tracking app by the federal disease agency RKI
Possible surveillance systems for the current crisis go one step further, to what you would call under-the-skin-surveillance. So the skin, as the untouchable surface of our bodies, is cracking. How can we control that?
We should be very, very careful about it. Over-the-skin-surveillance is monitoring what you do in the outside world, where you go, whom you meet, what you watch on TV, or which websites you visit online. It doesn't go into your body. Under-the-skin-surveillance is monitoring what's happening inside your body. It starts with things like your temperature, but then it can go to your blood pressure, to your heart rate, to your brain activity. And once you do that, you can know far, far more about people than ever before.
You can create a totalitarian regime that never existed before. If you know what I'm reading or what I watch on television, it gives you some idea about my artistic tastes, my political views, my personality. But it's still limited. Now think that you can actually monitor my body temperature or my blood pressure and my heart rate as I read the article or as I watch the program online or on television. Then you can know what I feel every moment. This could easily lead to the creation of dystopian totalitarian regimes.
It's not inevitable. We can prevent it from happening. But to prevent it from happening, we first of all have to realize the danger, and secondly, be careful about what we allow in this emergency to happen.
Does this crisis make you readjust your image of humans in the 21st century?
We don't know, because it depends on the decisions we make now. The danger of a useless class is actually increasing dramatically because of the current economic crisis. We now see an increase in automatization, that robots and computers replace people in more and more jobs in this crisis, because people are locked down in their houses, and people can get infected, but robots can't. We might see that countries might decide to return certain industries back home instead of relying on factories elsewhere. So it could seem both because of automatization and de-globalization that, especially developing countries that rely on cheap manual labor, suddenly have a huge, useless class of people who've lost their jobs because these jobs have been automated or moved elsewhere.
And this can also happen within the rich countries. This crisis is causing tremendous changes in the job market. People work from home. People work online. If we are not careful, it could result in the collapse of organized labor, at least in some sectors of industry. But it's not inevitable. It's a political decision. We can make the decision to protect the rights of workers in our country, or all over the world, in this situation. Governments are giving bailouts to industries and to corporations. They can make it conditional on protecting the rights of their workers. So it's all about the decisions we make.
What will a future historian say about this moment? 
I think future historians will see this as a turning point in the history of the 21st century. But which way we turn is up to our decisions. It's not inevitable.
Professor Yuval Noah Harari is the author of the books Sapiens: A Brief History of HumankindHomo Deus and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. His social impact company Sapienship donated $1 million to the World Health Organization following the US president's decision to hold back funding.
Amazon extends closure of French warehouses as Covid-19 worker safety fight continues

Issued on: 21/04/2020
The Amazon site in Lauwin-Planque in the Nord department of France is pictured on April 16, 2020. DENIS CHARLET AFP

Text by:FRANCE 24


Amazon is extending the closure of its French warehouses until April 25 inclusive, the online retail giant said in a written statement on Tuesday, as it argued its case to keep making deliveries in France.

Amazon made its case on Tuesday in a French court of appeal to keep deliveries on track in the country, rejecting unions' allegations that it was not doing its best to protect employees from Covid-19.

The world's largest online retailer is facing mounting scrutiny as it juggles a surge in online orders during government lockdowns to curb the pandemic and employees' safety, and France has become a major battleground.

Amazon closed six French warehouses employing about 10,000 people on April 16, following a lower court's ruling that sided with unions last week, ordering Amazon to focus only on delivering essential items like food while it revised health protocols.

Amazon's lawyers said on Tuesday that excessive restrictions on the types of goods it can deliver would penalise clients stuck in confinement and were difficult to enforce.

"We all need IT, telephone equipment, products for our young children ... we need products to be able to continue our physical activities," Francois Farmine, one the U.S. company's attorneys, told the court in the former royal city of Versailles.

Judges said they would deliver a verdict on April 24.

Union complaint


France is the only country where Amazon has shut all of its so-called fulfillment centres after unions complained that they were still too crowded and filed a legal challenge.

A growing number of unions have joined the backlash, including France's biggest, CFDT, which is seen as more moderate than the leftist SUD, which instigated the litigation.

Amazon's lawyers said that the Seattle-based group, controlled by billionaire Jeff Bezos, did its best to provide employees with health precautions, including sanitary gels and face mask
s.

In the hearing that took place in a room commonly used by criminal trial courts, Farmine said the unions' goal was to shut activity altogether, which in turn would penalise small businesses that use the platforms to sell their goods.

"The aim is ... to block this company," he said. "It's extremely dangerous, because if the manager of this company can't operate his activities, extremely serious consequences can follow," he added, hinting at a possible divestment from France.

The unions' leading lawyer, Judith Krivine, said that staff representatives had been open to talks with management to find a way to keep delivering certain goods while making sure social distancing was guaranteed to prevent coronavirus contagion.

"Since the beginning of the pandemic, Amazon's results are almost comparable to what they do at Christmas and we're being told that the situation they've been put in is unfair, untenable, unbearable," she said. "Let's keep it decent, please."

But not all of Amazon's workers support the unions' lawsuit, with about 15,000 signing a petition urging the reopening of distribution centres.

"The unions didn't ask us what we thought," said Priscilla Soares, one of two employees at Amazon's site in Lauwin-Planque, near Douai in northern France, who started the petition.

"At first, Amazon wasn't prepared for this" but quickly implemented safety measures, she said.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP and REUTERS)
World marks 50th anniversary of Earth Day amid ‘green’ Covid-19 lockdown


Issued on: 22/04/2020

Text by:FRANCE 24Follow

The world on Wednesday marks the 50th anniversary of Earth Day in an unprecedented lockdown due to the coronavirus crisis. Confinement has led to a massive drop in emissions across the world and can help scientists understand exactly how much of climate change is man-made.

An unplanned grand experiment is changing Earth. As people across the globe stay home to stop the spread of the new coronavirus, the air and seas have cleaned up, at least temporarily. Smog has stopped choking New Delhi, one of the most polluted cities in the world, and India’s getting views of sights not visible in decades. Nitrogen dioxide pollution in the northeastern United States is down 30 percent. Rome air pollution levels from mid-March to mid-April were down 49 percent from a year ago. Stars seems more visible at night.

People are also noticing animals in places and at times they don’t usually. Coyotes have meandered along downtown Chicago’s Michigan Avenue and near San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. A puma roamed the streets of Santiago, Chile. Goats took over a town in Wales. In India, already daring wildlife has become bolder with hungry monkeys entering homes and opening refrigerators to look for food.

As much of the world has spent weeks, if not months, in lockdown in the run-up to the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, Earth has become both cleaner and wilder.

“It is giving us this quite extraordinary insight into just how much of a mess we humans are making of our beautiful planet,” conservation scientist Stuart Pimm of Duke University said. “This is giving us an opportunity to magically see how much better it can be.”


Chris Field, director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, assembled scientists to assess the ecological changes happening with so much of humanity housebound. Scientists, stuck at home like the rest of us, say they are eager to explore unexpected changes in weeds, insects, weather patterns, noise and light pollution. Italy’s government is working on an ocean expedition to explore sea changes from the lack of people.

“In many ways we kind of whacked the Earth system with a sledgehammer and now we see what Earth’s response is,” Field says.

How much of it is manmade?

Researchers are tracking dramatic drops in traditional air pollutants, such as nitrogen dioxide, smog and tiny particles. These types of pollution kill up to 7 million people a year worldwide, according to the Health Effects Institute.

Compared to the previous five years, March air pollution is down 46 percent in Paris, 35 percent in Bengaluru, India, 38 percent in Sydney, 29 percent in Los Angeles, 26 percent in Rio de Janeiro and 9 percent in Durban, South Africa, NASA measurements show.

"The sudden drop in emissions, like other drops in the past, will allow us to figure out how fast the planet can recover," Edson Ramirez, a glaciologist at the University of San Andres in La Paz, where the lockdown has resulted in a 90 percent drop in road traffic, told FRANCE 24. It is important to know, because the numbers can allow the scientific community to understand how much of an effect human activity can have in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

“We’re getting a glimpse of what might happen if we start switching to non-polluting cars,” NASA atmospheric scientist Barry Lefer said.

‘Fight against climate change is possible’

For some environmentalists, the reduction in road, air and maritime traffic is a sign that fighting climate change is far more possible than what many world leaders have previously let on. "What's happened kind of overnight or in a matter of days in light of the Covid-19 has really demonstrated that there is a lot more capacity for society to change very quickly and right now we need society to change quickly and positively to tackle the climate crisis,” said climate activist and cyclist Mike Elm.

In a message for the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged governments worldwide to use their economic responses to the coronavirus pandemic to tackle the “even deeper emergency” of climate change.

So far, massive economic stimulus packages launched by the United States, China and European governments in light of the coronavirus have focused mainly on staunching the damage to existing industries and staving off the threat of a global depression.

Nevertheless, in the past week, ministers from Germany, France and other EU members have signalled their support for subsequent interventions to align with climate goals.

In an early example of governments linking post-virus rescue packages to climate goals, Austrian environment minister Leonore Gewessler said last week that state aid for Austrian Airlines should support climate policy targets.

Conditions could include a significant reduction in short-haul flights, the use of eco-friendly jet fuel and adjustments to the flight tax, a ministry spokesman said.

Guterres said governments should use their fiscal firepower to drive a shift from “the grey to green” economy.

”Where taxpayers’ money is used to rescue businesses, it needs to be tied to achieving green jobs and sustainable growth,” Guterres said.

”Public funds should be used to invest in the future, not the past, and flow to sustainable sectors and projects that help the environment and the climate.”

Sea turtles nest

Cleaner air on the back of the lockdowns has been most noticeable in India and China. On April 3, residents of Jalandhar, a city in north India’s Punjab, woke up to a view not seen for decades: snow-capped Himalayan peaks more than 100 miles away.

The greenhouse gases that trap heat and cause climate change stay in the atmosphere for 100 years or more, so the pandemic shutdown is unlikely to affect global warming, says Breakthrough Institute climate scientist Zeke Hausfather. Carbon dioxide levels are still rising, but not as fast as last year.

Aerosol pollution, which doesn’t stay airborne long, is also dropping. But aerosols cool the planet so NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt is investigating whether their falling levels may be warming local temperatures for now.


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In Adelaide, Australia, police shared a video of a kangaroo hoping around a mostly empty downtown, and a pack of jackals occupied an urban park in Tel Aviv, Israel.

For sea turtles across the globe, humans have made it difficult to nest on sandy beaches. The turtles need to be undisturbed and emerging hatchlings get confused by beachfront lights, David Godfrey, executive director of the Sea Turtle Conservancy, said.

But with lights and people away, this year’s sea turtle nesting so far seems much better from India to Costa Rica to Florida, Godfrey says.

“There’s some silver lining for wildlife in what otherwise is a fairly catastrophic time for humans,” he says.

(FRANCE 24 with AP, REUTERS)



Covid-19: Half of France’s private sector workers now unemployed

Issued on: 22/04/2020
More than 10 million private sector workers have signed up for temporary unemployment in France due to the coronavirus crisis. © Pascal Guyot, AFP

Text by:NEWS WIRES


More than 10 million employees in France -- one out of every two in the private sector -- have been laid off during the coronavirus lockdown and are now benefiting from an extended indemnity programme to weather the crisis, the government said Wednesday.

"Today in France there are 10.2 million employees whose salaries are being paid by the state," Labour Minister Muriel Penicaud told BFM television.

Around 820,000 employers, or more than six in ten, have applied for a social security programme that grants 84 percent of net pay for workers temporarily laid off because of a drop in business, a number that is increasing "day after day,"" she said.

"It's a considerable number, we've never done anything like it in our country," she said.

President Emmanuel Macron vowed that "no company would be abandoned to the risk of bankruptcy" when announcing the widespread business closures and stay-at-home orders implemented on March 17.

His government last week raised its economic relief package to 110 billion euros ($120 billion) and extended the temporary layoffs programme to individuals who employ nannies or cleaners who can no longer come to work.

Penicaud said entire sectors of the economy have effectively been shut down, with nine out of ten workers in hotels and restaurants as well as in construction now unemployed.

"We see how big a task it will be getting back to work after the confinement," which the government plans to start lifting on May 11, Penicaud said.

"The longer this crisis lasts, the harder it's going to be afterward."

Also on Wednesday, the head of the state investment bank BPIFrance said nearly 40 billion euros in government-backed, low-rate emergency loans had been extended to businesses amid the coronavirus crisis -- an average of 140,000 euros to some 251,000 businesses.

"It's practically certain that we're going to go beyond 100 billion euros," Nicolas Dufourcq told RTL radio.

But business groups have warned that even with the loans and financial relief such as delayed payment of payroll taxes and other charges, thousands of small and midsize companies could be facing bankruptcy this year.

(AFP)
New York cats become first US pets to contract coronavirus

Issued on: 22/04/2020
Health officials recommend cats be kept indoors when possible to keep them free of COVID-19 Yuri KADOBNOV AFP/File

New York (AFP)

Two cats in New York have become the first pets in the United States to test positive for the new coronavirus, officials said Wednesday.

The cats live in separate areas of New York state, America's COVID-19 epicenter, the Department of Agriculture and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a joint statement.

"Both had mild respiratory illness and are expected to make a full recovery," they said.

The owner of one of the cats had earlier tested positive for the virus before their feline pet started showing symptoms, according to the officials.

The other cat lives in a household where no members were confirmed to be ill with COVID-19.

"The virus may have been transmitted to this cat by mildly ill or asymptomatic household members or through contact with an infected person outside its home," said the statement.

Another cat in the same house has not shown signs of having the illness, the press release added.

The departments stressed that while public health officials are still studying COVID-19's impact on animals "there is no evidence that pets play a role in spreading the virus in the United States."

Health officials recommend that cats and dogs socially isolate while they learn more about how the virus infects pets.

The CDC advises that cats be kept indoors when possible to avoid them interacting with other animals or humans.

It says that dogs should be kept on a leash while outside and should avoid busy areas such as dog parks.

The CDC also advises people who might have COVID-19 to avoid physical contact with their pet.

Earlier this month, a tiger at New York's Bronx Zoo was confirmed to have been infected by a caretaker who was asymptomatic at the time.

In late March a pet cat was discovered infected with the novel coronavirus in Belgium, following similar cases in Hong Kong where two dogs tested positive.

They were believed to have contracted the virus from the people they live with.

More than 15,000 people have been killed by COVID-19 in New York state.

© 2020 AFP

Ernest Mandel

Workers Under Neo-capitalism

(NEO LIBERALISM BY ANY OTHER NAME)


A paper originally delivered at the Socialist Scholars Conference 1968.
Published in International Socialist Review, November-December 1968.
Downloaded with thanks from the Mandel Archive at www.angelfire.com/pr/red/mandel/

Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.

When we look at the history of the modern proletariat, whose direct ancestors were the unattached and uprooted wage earners in the medieval towns and the vagabonds of the 16th century – so strikingly described by that great novel from my country Till Eulenspiegel – we notice the same combination of structural stability and conjunctural change. The proletarian condition is, in a nutshell, the lack of access to means of production or means of subsistence which, in a society of generalised commodity production, forces the proletarian to sell his labor-power. In exchange for this labor-power he receives a wage which then enables him to acquire the means of consumption necessary for satisfying his own needs and those of his family.
This is the structural definition of the wage earner, the proletarian. From it necessarily flows a certain relationship to his work, to the products of his work, and to his overall situation in society, which can be summarised by the catchword “alienation.” But there does not follow from this structural definition any necessary conclusions as to the level of his consumption, the price he receives for his labor-power, the extent of his needs or the degree to which he can satisfy them. The only basic interrelationship between structural stability of status and conjunctural fluctuations of income and consumption is a very simple one: Does the wage, whether high or low, whether in miserable Calcutta slums or in the much publicised comfortable suburbs of the American megalopolis, enable the proletarian to free himself from the social and economic obligation to sell his labor-power? Does it enable him to go into business on his own account?
Occupational statistics testify that this is no more open to him today than a hundred years ago. Nay, they confirm that the part of the active population in today’s United States which is forced to sell its labor-power is much higher than it was in Britain when Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital, not to speak of the United States on the eve of the American Civil War.
Nobody will deny that the picture of the working class under neo-capitalism would be highly oversimplified if it were limited to featuring only this basic structural stability of the proletarian condition. In general, though, Marxists who continue to stress the basic revolutionary role of today’s proletariat in Western imperialist society avoid that pitfall. It is rather their critics who are in error, who commit the opposite error in fact of concentrating exclusively on conjunctural changes in the situation of the working class, thereby forgetting those fundamental structural elements which have not changed.
I do not care very much for the term “neo-capitalism” which is ambiguous, to say the least. When one speaks about the “neo-reformism” of the Communist parties in the West, one means, of course, that they are basically reformist; but when the term “neo-socialists” was used in the thirties and early forties to define such dubious figures as Marcel Deat or Henri de Man, one meant rather that they had stopped being socialists. Some European politicians and sociologists speak about “neo-capitalism” in the sense that society has shed some of the basic characteristics of capitalism. I deny this most categorically, and therefore attach to the term “neo-capitalism” the opposite connotation: a society which has all the basic elements of classical capitalism.
Nevertheless I am quite convinced that starting either with the great depression of 1929-32 or with the second world war, capitalism entered into a third stage in its development, which is as different from monopoly capitalism or imperialism described by Lenin, Hilferding and others as monopoly capitalism was different from classical 19th century laissez-faire capitalism. We have to give this child a name; all other names proposed seem even less acceptable than “neo-capitalism.” “State monopoly capitalism,” the term used in the Soviet Union and the “official” Communist parties, is very misleading because it implies a degree of independence of the state which, to my mind, does not at all correspond to present-day reality. On the contrary, I would say that today the state is a much more direct instrument for guaranteeing monopoly surplus profits to the strongest private monopolies than it ever was in the past. The German term Spätkapitalismus seems interesting, but simply indicates a time sequence and is difficult to translate into several languages. So until somebody comes up with a better name – and this is a challenge to you, friends! – we will stick for the time being to “neo-capitalism.”
We shall define neo-capitalism as this latest stage in the development of monopoly capitalism in which a combination of factors – accelerated technological innovation, permanent war economy, expanding colonial revolution – have transferred the main source of monopoly surplus profits from the colonial countries to the imperialist countries themselves and made the giant corporations both more independent and more vulnerable.
More independent, because the enormous accumulation of monopoly surplus profits enables these corporations, through the mechanisms of price investment and self-financing, and with the help of a constant build-up of sales costs, distribution costs and research and development expenses, to free themselves from that strict control by banks and finance capital which characterised the trusts and monopolies of Hilferding’s and Lenin’s epoch. More vulnerable, because of shortening of the life cycle of fixed capital, the growing phenomenon of surplus capacity, the relative decline of customers in non-capitalist milieus and, last but not least, the growing challenge of the non-capitalist forces in the world (the so-called socialist countries, the colonial revolution and, potentially at least, the working class in the metropolis) has implanted even in minor fluctuations and crises the seeds of dangerous explosions and total collapse.
For these reasons, neo-capitalism is compelled to embark upon all those well-known techniques of economic programming, of deficit financing and pump-priming, of incomes policies and wage freezing, of state subsidising of big business and state guaranteeing of monopoly surplus profit, which have become permanent features of most Western economies over the last 20 years. What has emerged is a society which appears both as more prosperous and more explosive than the situation of imperialist countries 30 years ago.
It is a society in which the basic contradictions of capitalism have not been overcome, in which some of them reach unheard-of dimensions, in which powerful long-term forces are at work to blow up the system. I will mention here in passing only some of these forces: The growing crisis of the international monetary system; the trend towards a generalised economic recession in the whole capitalist world; the trend to restrict or suppress the basic democratic freedoms of the working class, in the first place, free play of wage bargaining; the trend toward deep and growing dissatisfaction of producers and consumers with a system which forces them to lose more and more time producing and consuming more and more commodities which give less and less satisfaction and stifle more and more basic human needs, emotions and aspirations; the contradictions between the accumulation of wasteful “wealth” in the West and the hunger and misery of the colonial peoples; the contradictions between the immense creative and productive potentialities of science and automation and the destructive horror of nuclear war in the shadow of which we are forced to live permanently – these epitomise the basic contradictions of today’s capitalism.


Students, Workers and the Specter of Surplus Value

Delhi.
It’s six in the morning in Delhi, India. The smog sits above the sprawling city as I and some friends take the long auto-rickshaw ride to the industrial belt on the outskirts of the nation’s capital. We left early to help distribute workers’ newspapers to the thousands of workers walking to their morning shifts. As we approach the industrial belt—shielded from the eyes of the city’s increasing and increasingly isolated middle class—the smog gets thicker. Already the most polluted city in the world, the air in the industrial belt is suffocating. It’s no wonder why. Just past where we stand to distribute the papers, an interminable line of factories stretches out into the distance, guarded by bouncers. Many of these factories are where raw materials are fused with human labor to produce products for U.S. multinational capital. Indeed, this setting is where Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Make in India” initiative is being realized, as the country surpasses China and the U.S. as the number one global destination for foreign direct investment.
The constant stream of workers walking to these factories for hours at a time seems more reminiscent of early 19th century London than it does 2015 in a leading “developing” economy, one in which the Prime Minister tells the country’s dispossessed, “achhe din aane waale hain” (the good days are about to come). As I was distributing papers along with three other students and the publishers of the newspaper, I realized on a visceral level that this was the setting in which the core exploitation to fuel global capitalism was happening. I also began to reflect on my position as a student in relation to these workers. Far from the peaceful green environment of the campus space where I was studying, the industrial belt literally felt like a whole other world. Upon returning to the U.S., I wondered if these two worlds may have a parallel even in the imperial center of the globe.
Switch contexts to Grinnell, Iowa, home of Grinnell College and, despite the College’s efforts to downplay the fact to prospective students, roughly 9,000 rural Iowans. As I was in town distributing leaflets and a workers’ newsletter on a crisp fall evening, I met a man smoking a cigarette outside of a dilapidated house behind a grocery store. After striking up a conversation with him, I quickly found out that he worked at one of two plastics factories in Grinnell. Shortly after meeting me, the worker said in a suspicious and even accusatory tone, “Are you studying here or something?” As a senior, I was already well aware of the stark “town-gown” divide between Grinnell and Grinnell College, but it is always a clear reminder of this physical and social partition to hear it implied so strongly after just meeting a “townie.”
Before getting ready for his 12-hour graveyard shift on a Friday night at the factory, the worker continued, “You wanna know what it’s like out here? It sucks out here.” The causes of his cynicism are readily visible throughout the town. When entering Grinnell’s Davis Elementary School, the first thing you see is a poster bearing the message, “Homeless? It can happen to anyone.” The statistics explain why this sign is necessary: over 40% of students at Davis qualify for free or reduced lunch. Contrast this with the economic prosperity of the College, whose $1.8 billion endowment, one of the top 10 per pupil endowments in the country, posted a 20.4% return in 2014.
Indeed, the difference in material well-being between the College and town is striking in its magnitude, as is the College’s indifference towards doing anything about it. Much could be written on this topic alone, but here I want to focus in on one particular dimension of the “town-gown” contradiction, one I pondered both while standing in the industrial belt of Delhi and during my conversation with the man getting ready for his shift at the plastics factory in Grinnell: the relation of the student to the worker.
This factory worker’s visible distaste for the fact that I was studying at the College led me to take a fresh look at some questions I had begun to consider back in Delhi: Are students workers? Is the social difference between students and workers found in the kind labor they do, cultural background, or is it a question of value production for capital? Why does there appear to be a disconnect between student and worker movements in both the U.S. and abroad?
These questions also stem from other concrete realities on the ground, realities that are desperately in need of theorizing: why was Batay Ouvriye, an autonomous workers’ organization in Haiti, compelled to put students in a separate organization after the students had tried organizing alongside workers? Why do so many leftist students in Delhi, India’s progressive Jawaharlal Nehru University seem disinterested in finding a way to actively support rampant labor unrest in the National Capital Region’s own industrial belt? Why have student-led campaigns for fossil fuel divestment in the U.S. been unable to gain traction outside of a handful of small institutions?
To answer these kinds of questions, we must move beyond a populist portrayal of capitalism, a portrayal that, to use contemporary examples from the Occupy Movement and the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, identifies “the 1%” or “the billionaire class” and collapses the rest of society into one class comprised of everyone who is not a capitalist. It is not enough to simply say that we are all dominated by capitalism and, therefore, should unite to rein it in or stop it. Rather, if we actually want to end capitalism, our theory must be in service of uncovering the mechanisms through which capital reproduces itself and the class or classes capable of halting this reproduction. To this end, I will offer an analysis of surplus value—the driving force behind capitalism’s reproduction—and explain why this analysis matters to students and student participation in class struggle. I will then apply this analysis to concrete struggles like the ones mentioned above and suggest some tentative answers to my biggest political question: What is the role of the student militant in relation to the working class?
Surplus Value: The Engine of the Capitalist Machine
The production of surplus value is the defining feature of capitalism as a mode of production that distinguishes it from historical modes of production, namely feudalism. Under feudalism, the appropriation of surplus is empirically visible: the lord is entitled to a certain portion of the product of the peasant’s labor on the land at harvest time. In other words, exploitation of labor is executed outside the production process as an ex post facto claim on the surplus product of the peasant’s agricultural labor. In contrast, under capitalism, the appropriation of surplus occurs inside the production process. Instead of having a portion of her surplus product retroactively appropriated by the owning class, the worker is exploited during the production process itself.
For example, if a worker is paid $100 for eight hours of work, but produces goods worth $100 in just two hours, then the rest of that time—six hours—she is not paid for her work. During those remaining six hours, the worker produces $300 of goods. That amount is surplus value. By way of his ownership of the means of production, the capitalist appropriates the surplus value by also claiming ownership over the newly produced commodities. This surplus value, embodied in these physical commodities, is realized as profit when they are sold, and a portion is reinvested as capital to allow the industry to expand. This extraction of surplus value is not merely a quantitative measure—the $300—but, rather, is made possible by a qualitative social relation of domination between capital and labor.
Because the extraction of surplus value occurs within the time-disciplined production process under capitalism, the point of production itself becomes politicized. For example, in February of this year in the same industrial belt where I was passing out newspapers, a garment worker at a Richa Global factory was prevented from entering the factory—an action which indicated the termination of his contract—just for arriving ten minutes late to his work shift. After he refused to leave without due compensation, he was beaten to hospitalization by factory bouncers. When ten minutes of tardiness is equal to ten minutes of lost surplus value extraction, the stakes are potentially fatal.
This beating was followed by worker agitation in the industrial belt. While this agitation, which is one of many in (removed the word “the”) Delhi’s industrial belts, was clearly a direct response to an attack on an individual worker, its roots lie in the daily struggle of all the factory workers against the hyper-exploitation of surplus value and the inhumanity that this entails. Pitiful wagescontract labor, and deadly working conditions are the norm in the industrial area. These practices and conditions are driven not by capitalists’ “greed” or a hatred of the poor, though individual capitalists may be greedy or hate the poor. Rather, they are in service of keeping the motor of capital production—surplus value—well oiled with labor-power amenable to as much exploitation as possible. Surplus value is the engine of the capitalist machine.
Productive and Unproductive Labor
A failure to grasp the process of surplus value production leads a majority of theorists on the left to only tell part of the story about how capitalism reproduces itself and little about how to politically intervene in this reproduction process. Even for the formidable theorists of the independent socialist magazine, Monthly Review, the conception of the working class is rendered mechanical and vague due to a failure to appropriate the concept of surplus value. For example, in his influential 1974 book, Labor and Monopoly Capital, Harry Braverman points to six “occupational categories” that comprise “the unmistakably working-class population.” He bases these categories not on the distinction between “productive” and “unproductive” labor that was pivotal in Marx’s definition of the working class, but rather on the socioeconomic status of laborers. As such, anyone in the “new middle class” can slide down the class spectrum into the working class as their labor is “degraded.”
While Braverman’s work is engaged in the important task of theorizing the declining material conditions of the “new middle class” that accompanied capital’s offensive in the early 1970s, he fails to frame his analysis in terms of the central question we must ask when crafting revolutionary theory: How is capitalism reproduced and how can this reproduction be stopped? By defining the working class principally in terms of socioeconomic status, Braverman strips class analysis of its qualitative social dimension, the dimension we must attend to if we wish to struggle not simply for the redistribution of already exploited surplus value, but, rather, for the overturning of the capitalist mode of production itself. In other words, description of a sliding spectrum of socioeconomic conditions does not make a class analysis. This approach also misleads us politically: due to the “degradation of labor,” we are given the impression that there is an ever-growing working class and, thus, all the more reason to expect immanent uprisings against capital culminating in revolution. But, looking back, this degradation, which has objectively continued, has not fostered uprisings of any sort. Rather, working class strength is at an historical low with its putative indicator of resurgence in the U.S., the Fight for 15 movement, controlled by collaborationist unions and NGOs that use workers as pawns.
What explains this paradox of an ostensibly numerically increasing working class paired with an objectively weaker workers’ movement? Clearly, the answer lies not in a quantitative measure of the mere number of workers in a given social formation, nor does the “collective action problem” faced by workers explain the specific historical and social crux of this paradox. Rather, we must turn to Marx’s distinction between “productive” and “unproductive” labor in the Grundrisse to help us explain this seemingly unexplainable concrete reality. Well before the rise of the “new middle class,” or, more precisely what Nicos Poulantzas calls the “new petite bourgeois,” Marx made a distinction between those laborers who produce surplus value and those who do not. This is not a moral distinction, nor one that is not simply about the “occupational category” of the laborer at hand. Rather, it pertains to which laborers produce new value for capital and are, therefore, in direct antagonism to it. In his own words:
Is it not crazy, asks e.g. (or at least something similar) Mr Senior, that the piano maker is a productive worker, but not the piano player, although obviously the piano would be absurd without the piano player? But this is exactly the case. The piano maker reproduces capital; the pianist only exchanges his labour for revenue.
As Marx goes on to explain, it does not matter “how useful” the labor of the pianist might be (as a musician myself, I would consider it to be wonderfully useful, even essential, for society); if it is not labor that “directly augments capital,” it is not productive labor. Indeed, even in an age of monopoly-finance capital in which value appears to be detached from any input of labor-power and short-term profit can be made from the sale of just about anything, surplus value still must be embodied in physical commodities. The crisis-prone nature of the economy under the dominance of finance capital—itself a response to the stagnation in the material economy—is evidence of the absence of new value production behind this toxic form of accumulation. As Dani Wadada Nabudere, reflecting on the meltdown of 2007-08, succinctly writes in The Crash of International Finance-Capital and its Implications for the Third World:
The [financial] ‘wealth’ has, without the production of real material goods, turned itself  into a form of ‘toxic wealth’ which can only pollute what remains of the ‘real’ economy, unless the real producers of these material goods find a new means by which they can bury this toxic economy on a new material basis.
From this distinction between productive and unproductive labor, and the related distinction between industrial and finance capital, we come to a definition of the working class as those laborers who are involved in the process of physical commodity production; in other words, those laborers who produce surplus value for capital. This distinction, rather than a theoretical abstraction, is often quite clear to those on the streets. For example, the same plastics worker who was wary of the fact that I was a student, upon hearing that I was interested in speaking with workers, immediately asked me, “What kind of workers do you want to talk to—factory workers?” His comment demonstrates that making distinctions between different kinds of labor is not an arcane, academic activity, but rather an intuitive practice to pursue under a contemporary capitalism in which different kinds of labor fulfill different roles in its reproduction.
From this definition of the working class, it becomes clear why workers’ capacity is so weak in the U.S.: while there are an increasing number of highly dominated, low-wage laborers in the workforce, the phenomenon described by Braverman’s “degradation of labor” thesis, because they are involved in the circulation rather than production of capital, they are incapable, on their own, of challenging the fundamental reproductive contradiction of capitalism: surplus value production. For instance, I recently spoke with a retail worker who said of himself and his employees, “We’re at the last stage of a product reaching the consumer, so we can’t do much to impact the economy.” Indeed, he realized intuitively that, while he had to sell his services to survive, he still did not have the ability to actually impact capitalist commodity production, let alone provide a material alternative to it. Indeed, until garment workers in countries like Haiti and Bangladesh, who are involved in producing the commodities sold in retail stores, are able to challenge capital at the point of production, unproductive workers’ struggles will only be able to weaken capital but not completely overcome it.
Even though the role of production has remained relatively stable as a percentage of GDP in the U.S., productive work, to the tune of five million manufacturing jobs, has increasingly shifted away from the U.S between 1980 and 2004. By outsourcing production to the global periphery, capital has been able to more tightly control it by repeatedly relocating it to regions with lower wages and more repressive conditions. Indeed, only by distinguishing productive labor from labor in general can we explain how imperialism is materially reproduced in the 21st century.
Let me be clear: none of this argument is meant to discourage the organization and struggle of unproductive laborers; quite the contrary. In general, the material conditions of these fundamental laborers are nearly indistinguishable from those of productive laborers and their domination by capital is comparably severe. Furthermore, in today’s globalized capitalism, unproductive laborers often occupy strategic positions in supply chains. All this argument suggests is that, without the class strength of productive workers, any movement against capital will hit a wall due to its inability to engage the only class—the working class—with the capacity to not only weaken capital, but also to provide an alternative to it by cutting surplus value production at its root: material production.  
Do Students Produce Surplus Value?
With this theoretical framework on surplus value in place—one that is heretical for a left that has largely abandoned working class struggle in a shift to targeting capitalism’s effects—we arrive at the question of students. It is clear that the aforementioned garment worker in India, nearly beaten to death for his ten-minute tardiness, produces surplus value and that, by withholding his labor-power, the factory owner’s ability to reproduce himself as a capitalist would be negatively impacted. But what about students? For instance, can’t the student-administration contradiction in the university space be understood as representing the same antagonism that was present between the worker and capitalist in Delhi’s industrial belt? Moreover, by withholding her labor, might the student impact capital in the same way as this garment worker?
I contend that the student—unless engaged in surplus value producing work outside of his capacity as a student—does not produce surplus value and is, thus, not a member of the working class. This holds true even of students from working class backgrounds. To understand why, we must ask, “Why do students go to college?” While you’ll get many answers to this question, most are along the lines of getting “a better job,” code for a job within the new petite bourgeoisie. In other words, the goal is precisely not to end up in the working class.
Indeed, I was recently speaking with a senior at another college who mentioned that almost everyone she knew was striving for employment in finance in one way or another. In fact, finance companies are now even hiring students in the humanities and soft social sciences due to their tendency to be “self-starters.” If not finance, NGO employment has become a desirable option for those graduates who follow the ideal “getting paid to do good,” but end up undermining working class struggle in the process. One graduate recently told me that he aspired to “meaningful” employment in the NGO sector following college, but now, after five years working in it, feels alienated and thinks his salary would be better utilized if given to the state to fund social programs. Even though the economy drives some students back into the working class after college, their aspirations while studying not to become workers have political consequences concerning the relationship of students to workers’ struggles.
Here the concept of the petite bourgeoisie—the non-autonomous class that neither produces nor extracts surplus value—is particularly relevant. In French, “petite” not only connotes “small,” but also something small that will become big. Indeed, while not itself the bourgeoisie, the petite bourgeoisie has a tendency to aspire to become the “big” bourgeoisie. Students, by virtue of their training in dispositions, desires, and skills that will allow them to rise above the sphere of commodity-producing labor, strive not to place themselves in a position to end capital accumulation at its productive source, but, if not to become capitalists, at least to find a satisfactory middle-ground between the fundamentally antagonistic classes of the bourgeoisie and proletariat.
At this point, several objections may arise. First, what do we make of current reforms in education that seek to produce workers rather than comfortable allies of capital in the petite bourgeoisie? First, we need to ask which kind of workers these colleges and universities are trying to produce. Despite dubious empirical claims that colleges are beginning to train students for productive work, there is clear evidence that productive labor and college generally do not go together. For example, the Economic Policy Institute notes that, in the U.S. “the non-college share in manufacturing was 26.9 percent greater than in all industries.” Similarly, only 20 percent of farmworkers have attended even some college, this itself an inflated figure since it includes both farmworkers and supervisors. In light of the fact that less than forty percent of working-age Americans hold college degrees, it is not surprising that this minority does not flock to productive labor. Indeed, those who overemphasize the role of colleges in producing workers invoke Braverman’s empirically insightful but theoretically unhelpful “degradation of labor” thesis, arguing, for example, that university work is “increasingly cast as piecework” and, by implication, has been degraded to an “occupational category” of the working class.
This brings us to a second objection: what about students who are also research scholars and, thus, who produce scholarly “products” for the university? Aren’t they workers, too? Again, this question comes back to the issue of productive versus unproductive laborer. While research scholars may produce surpluses, not all surplus production is surplus value production. For example, peasants under feudalism produce surplus, but this surplus does not take the form of surplus value. Similarly, ecosystems under certain conditions produce a surplus of deer, but this is a biological surplus, not a surplus of value. This is, again, not to say that research scholars do not do useful work. For example, I think that the research I completed this past summer, which was funded by my college, was “useful,” but I recognize that, just because my labor is useful, it does not automatically mean that it is surplus value-producing labor that would, then, make me a part of the working class.
Third, there is the argument that, because many universities are for-profit either overtly or covertly, they are extracting surplus value from students. Raising tuition costs, debt peonage, exorbitant textbook costs, and so on are, of course, all evidence of the advances of capitalist class struggle under monopoly-finance capital. However, to say that these phenomena are equivalent to the extraction of surplus value from the worker is wishful thinking at best and intellectual vanguardism at worst. For example, just because faculty at a university enable students to get a “better job” in the future—adding value to future labor-power just like workers’ labor-power adds value to commodities, as the argument goes—it does not follow that students have this added value “exploited” by administrators who charge them exorbitant tuition fees in the present. Using this logic, anything can “add value” to the products that this potential worker might produce at some undefined point in the future: her friends, entertainment, therapy, and so on. And since the majority of graduates will not actually produce surplus value in their future jobs, the argument is largely immaterial.
This brings me to a final and crucial point: Without productive labor, colleges and universities would have no means of materially reproducing themselves. An analysis of the fossil fuel divestment campaign in U.S. colleges and universities demonstrates this truth. Let’s look at Harvard, the world’s wealthiest university. It seems reasonable that the University would be able to sacrifice a portion of returns on its whopping $36.4 billion endowment after 72% of students voted in favor of divesting from fossil fuels. However, Harvard President Drew Faust, speaking on behalf of the University’s Corporation Committee on Shareholder Responsibility, responded that such a divestment would not be “warranted or wise.” She continued, revealing an economic savvy rarely found on the left:
Given our pervasive dependence on these [fossil fuel] companies for the energy to heat and light our buildings, to fuel our transportation, and to run our computers and appliances, it is hard for me to reconcile that reliance with a refusal to countenance any relationship with these companies through our investments.
Indeed, unlike the many leftists who equate “knowledge production” with material production, Faust is clear that the latter provides the very material conditions for the former’s reproduction. The student-led fossil fuel divestment campaign has proved so difficult to actualize on a scale that would significantly impact oil, gas, and coal companies precisely because of the stubborn nature of productive labor, in this case that employed to drill for fossil fuels. And students—due to their petite bourgeoisie class status—are unable to do anything about this on their own. Even students at Harvard, the highest player in higher education, cannot escape this reality.
Students in Chile encountered their limitations in a similar manner during the massive student mobilizations of 2011-13. On their Struggling to Win speaking tour in the U.S., a group of Chilean students noted that, despite the mobilizations of over one hundred thousand students, they did not have the leverage to achieve their demands for increased democratization and affordability of education. Only when they began to engage workers—particularly dockworkers—in this struggle were they able to win their demand prohibiting state support of for-profit educational institutions. This example illustrates that, even if we want to, students do not have the ability to make major inroads against capital on our own.
The Role of the Student Militant
In light of the social limitations of students due to our class position, how can we best fit into the struggle for socialism/communism? To start, we must realize that, on our own, we cannot provide an alternative to capitalism. Certainly students can concoct theoretical alternatives to capitalism in our papers and class discussions, but, when it comes to pushing the fundamental contradiction of capitalism—capital versus labor—in an effort to overcome it through its own inherent antagonism, we must turn to the working class. Only the working class, due to its central position in the fundamental contradiction of capitalism, is capable of providing an alternative to capitalism—a proletarian alternative.
Once we acknowledge this objective reality, how can we complement workers’ struggle? For one, we must find a way to engage with workers’ movements without opportunistically converting them into a means for our own interests, as is the risk in contexts like the student movement in Chile. As I mentioned earlier, we can observe instances in which students simply do not have an interest in workers’ struggle, which is one extreme, as well as instances in which their involvement has the effect of eroding its autonomous character. While student militants can and should work to build workers’ organizations and movements, when the rubber hits the road, workers themselves must take control of and drive these struggles. Once a struggle is in workers’ hands, we can follow their leadership when developing ways to strategically assist the struggle. This assistance could potentially manifest as demonstrations outside of a workplace in response to attacks by the bosses on workers, aid in legal battles if these are necessary to sustain class struggle, written articles on the details of working conditions or the state of particular struggles, or whatever the need of the concrete reality at hand may be.
I should be clear that this position of working class autonomy and students’ role in relation to it is not equivalent to a conception of “allyship.” Students must figure out how to straddle the line—always reacting to changing concrete conditions—between lack of involvement and over-involvement in workers’ struggles not out of deference to “worker experience” but for purely material, strategic reasons. As one railroad worker, who has previously been involved in labor militancy at a tire factory, recently told me while we were discussing the topic of workers and students, “Workers may espouse bad politics and still have a materialist innate notion of solidarity against the employers.” Indeed, workers have the unique capacity to struggle as a class even if their politics are ideologically unsound or even reactionary. While reactionary politics—such as those relating to race, gender, disability, nationality, and sexuality—must be struggled against no matter who espouses them, workers are able to engage in this struggle materialistically in practical relation to an existing class struggle. This stands in contrast with students, who are taught to hash out debates in the idealist space of the academy in which there is no material interest at stake.
Through an understanding of surplus value and productive and unproductive labor, we as students can better use our social position to aid the struggle against capitalism led by the working class. Instead of merely lamenting occasions like the beating of a worker at the Richa Global factory in India as a labor and human rights violation, we need to ask why beatings like this occur and what we can do as students to address their causes while simultaneously avoiding the pitfalls of under- and over-involvement in workers’ struggles. In short, we can slowly but surely demonstrate to workers that we are not, as the plastics factory worker told me, just “studying here or something,” but also committed to the advancement of working class struggle.
Furthermore, while we need militants in all social spheres, including within the university, there is the option for students to not only become proletarian militants within higher education, but to materially rupture with the petite bourgeoisie and become part of the working class itself. While all student militants, even if not part of the proletariat proper, must constantly strive to become proletarian revolutionaries by stripping themselves of petite bourgeois ideology, actively becoming part of the fundamental contradiction between the capitalist class and the working class—becoming proletarian through becoming part of the proletariat—can be a particularly advantageous way to push this contradiction forward.
When I was standing distributing leaflets in the industrial belt of Delhi, I was breathing in the stifling smog along with the thousands of workers streaming by on their way to the factory. This smog is symptomatic of the already proceeding environmental catastrophe whose weight sits heavily on the shoulders of students and workers alike. Likewise, the very same class war that has been waged with increasing force against these workers since the rise of monopoly-finance capital has simultaneously impacted me as a student in the form of exponentially increasing tuition costs and the inevitability of student debt. Indeed, in many ways, the two worlds of the worker and the student come closer together today than in any previous time in history. While this proximity forms the material basis for solidarity between different segments of the masses, such as students and workers, there still remains the unavoidable political question of which class is capable of not just weakening but actually overturning and providing an alternative to capitalism. Only through the aforementioned strategic shifts for student militants can we work to fight not only in our interests as students dominated by capitalism, but also in the interests of the working class, the only class with the capacity to liberate all of humanity and the planet from capitalism!
This article originally appeared on INIP.