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Author: Vijay Prashad

  • How the Taliban Chased the West Out of Afghanistan

    Days after the Taliban drove into Kabul on August 15, its representatives started making inquiries about the “location of assets” of the central bank of the nation, Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB), which are known to total about $9 billion. Meanwhile, the central bank in neighboring Uzbekistan, which has an almost equivalent population of approximately 34 million people compared to Afghanistan’s population of more than 39 million, has international reserves worth $35 billion. Afghanistan is a poor country, by comparison, and its resources have been devastated by war and occupation. More

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  • The Return of the Taliban 20 Years Later

    Photograph Source: bluuurgh – Public Domain

    On August 15, the Taliban arrived in Kabul. The Taliban’s leadership entered the presidential palace, which Afghan President Ashraf Ghani had vacated when he fled into exile abroad hours before. The country’s borders shut down and Kabul’s main international airport lay silent, except for the cries of those Afghans who had worked for the U.S. and NATO; they knew that their lives would now be at serious risk. The Taliban’s leadership, meanwhile, tried to reassure the public of a “peaceful transition” by saying in several statements that they would not seek retribution, but would go after corruption and lawlessness.

    The Taliban’s Entry in Kabul Is a Defeat for the United States

    In recent years, the United States has failed to accomplish any of the objectives of its wars. The U.S. entered Afghanistan with horrendous bombing and a lawless campaign of extraordinary rendition in October 2001 with the objective of ejecting the Taliban from the country; now, 20 years later, the Taliban is back. In 2003, two years after the U.S. unleashed a war in Afghanistan, it opened an illegal war against Iraq, which ultimately resulted in an unconditional withdrawal of the United States in 2011 after the refusal by the Iraqi parliament to allow U.S. troops extralegal protections. As the U.S. withdrew from Iraq, it opened a terrible war against Libya in 2011, which resulted in the creation of chaos in the region.

    Not one of these wars—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya—resulted in the creation of a pro-U.S. government. Each of these wars created needless suffering for the civilian populations. Millions of people had their lives disrupted, while hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives in these senseless wars. What faith in humanity can now be expected from a young person in Jalalabad or in Sirte? Will they now turn inward, fearing that any possibility of change has been seized from them by the barbaric wars inflicted upon them and other residents of their countries?

    There is no question that the United States continues to have the world’s largest military and that by using its base structure and its aerial and naval power, the U.S. can strike any country at any time. But what is the point of bombing a country if that violence attains no political ends? The U.S. used its advanced drones to assassinate the Taliban leaders, but for each leader that it killed, another half a dozen have emerged. Besides, the men in charge of the Taliban now—including the co-founder of the Taliban and head of its political commission, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar—were there from the start; it would never have been possible to decapitate the entire Taliban leadership. More than $2 trillion has been spent by the United States on a war that it knew could not be won.

    Corruption Was the Trojan Horse

    In early statements, Mullah Baradar said that his government will focus its attention on the endemic corruption in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, stories spread across Kabul about ministers of Ashraf Ghani’s government attempting to leave the country in cars filled with dollar bills, which was supposed to be the money that was provided by the U.S. to Afghanistan for aid and infrastructure. The drain of wealth from the aid given to the country has been significant. In a 2016 report by the U.S. government’s Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) relating to the “Lessons Learned from the U.S. Experience with Corruption in Afghanistan,” the investigators write, “Corruption significantly undermined the U.S. mission in Afghanistan by damaging the legitimacy of the Afghan government, strengthening popular support for the insurgency, and channeling material resources to insurgent groups.” SIGAR created a “gallery of greed,” which listed U.S. contractors who siphoned aid money and pocketed it through fraud. More than $2 trillion has been spent on the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, but it went neither to provide relief nor to build the country’s infrastructure. The money fattened the rich in the United States, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

    Corruption at the very top of the government depleted morale below. The U.S. pinned its hopes on the training of 300,000 soldiers of the Afghan National Army (ANA), spending $88 billion on this pursuit. In 2019, a purge of “ghost soldiers” in the rolls—soldiers who did not exist—led to the loss of 42,000 troops; it is likely that the number might have been higher. Morale in the ANA has plunged over the past few years, with defections from the army to other forces escalating. Defense of the provincial capitals was also weak, with Kabul falling to the Taliban almost without a fight.

    To this end, the recently appointed defense minister to the Ghani government, General Bismillah Mohammadi, commented on Twitter about the governments that have been in power in Afghanistan since late 2001, “They tied our hands behind our backs and sold the homeland. Damn the rich man [Ghani] and his people.” This captures the popular mood in Afghanistan right now.

    Afghanistan and Its Neighbors

    Hours after taking power, a spokesperson for the Taliban’s political office, Dr. M. Naeem, said that all embassies will be protected, while another spokesperson for the Taliban, Zabihullah Mujahid, said that all former government officials did not need to fear for their lives. These are reassuring messages for now.

    It has also been reassuring that the Taliban has said that it is not averse to a government of national unity, although there should be no doubt that such a government would be a rubber stamp for the Taliban’s own political agenda. So far, the Taliban has not articulated a plan for Afghanistan, which is something that the country has needed for at least a generation.

    On July 28, Taliban leader Mullah Baradar met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Tianjin, China. The outlines of the discussion have not been fully revealed, but what is known is that the Chinese extracted a promise from the Taliban not to allow attacks on China from Afghanistan and not to allow attacks on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) infrastructure in Central Asia. In return, China would continue its BRI investments in the region, including in Pakistan, which is a key Taliban supporter.

    Whether or not the Taliban will be able to control extremist groups is not clear, but what is abundantly clear—in the absence of any credible Afghan opposition to the Taliban—is that the regional powers will have to exert their influence on Kabul to ameliorate the harsh program of the Taliban and its history of support for extremist groups. For instance, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (set up in 2001) revived in 2017 its Afghanistan Contact Group, which held a meeting in Dushanbe in July 2021, and called for a national unity government.

    At that meeting, India’s External Affairs Minister Dr. S. Jaishankar laidout a three-point plan, which achieved near consensus among the fractious neighbors:

    “1. An independent, neutral, unified, peaceful, democratic and prosperous nation.

    “2. Ceasing violence and terrorist attacks against civilians and state representatives, settle conflict through political dialogue, and respect interests of all ethnic groups, and

    “3. Ensure that neighbors are not threatened by terrorism, separatism and extremism.”

    That’s the most that can be expected at this moment. The plan promises peace, which is a great advance from what the people of Afghanistan have experienced over the past decades. But what kind of peace? This “peace” does not include the rights of women and children to a world of possibilities. During 20 years of the U.S. occupation, that “peace” was not in evidence either. This peace has no real political power behind it, but there are social movements beneath the surface that might emerge to put such a definition of “peace” on the table. Hope lies there.

    This article was produced by Globetrotter.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • A Viable—and Perhaps the Only—Path to Lasting Peace in Afghanistan

    Having withdrawn its ground forces, the United States sent in its B-52s to bomb targets in the city of Sheberghan (capital of the province of Jawzjan); reports suggest that at least 200 people were killed in the bombings. It shows the weakness of the government in Kabul that its Ministry of Defense’s spokesperson Fawad Aman cheered on the bombing. More

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    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Show the Children the Green Fields and Let the Sunshine into Their Minds

    Exactly two years ago, I walked with my colleagues from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research through the Camp Marielle Vive (‘Marielle Lives’) outside of Valinhos in the state of São Paulo, Brazil with a great sense of déjà vu. The camp resembles so many other communities of the desperately poor on our planet. The United Nations calculates that one in eight people on our planet – one billion human beings – live in such precariousness. The homes are made of a jumble of materials: blue tarpaulin sheets and bits of wood, corrugated iron sheets and old bricks. A thousand families live in Camp Marielle Vive, named after the Brazilian socialist Marielle Franco, who was assassinated in March 2018.

    Camp Marielle Vive is not an ordinary ‘slum’, a word with so many negative connotations. The mood in many slums is desolate, criminal gangs and religious organisations providing them with fragile social glue. But Camp Marielle Vive exudes a different aura. Flags of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) are everywhere. The residents give off a quiet and friendly dignity, many of them wearing t-shirts or caps from their organisation. They have an air of preparation: prepared to defend their camp from eviction by the local authorities and prepared to build a genuine community for themselves.

    Community kitchen at Camp Marielle Vive, 2019

    At the centre of the camp is a community kitchen where some of the residents eat their three meals. The food is simple but nutritious. Nearby is a small clinic that is visited by a doctor once a week. Outside the homes are flower beds and vegetable gardens. The municipal authorities of the adjoining town stopped allowing the school bus to pick up children from the camp and transport them to the town’s school. As parents struggled to get their children to school every day, Camp Marielle Vive built an on-site classroom for after-school activities, which has continued during the pandemic.

    Tassi Barreto of the MST told me in early August 2021 that the camp has had no deaths to COVID-19 because they have ‘taken firm action to avoid the spread of infection’. The local municipality denied the camp water, which is – as Barreto says – ‘a human rights crime’. The residents continued developing their collective work, strengthening the community kitchen and the community health centre, and advancing agroecological production in the vegetable garden, which is built in the shape of a mandala. The garden has been so productive that the camp has been able to sell baskets of produce in the nearby cities of Valinhos and Campinas.

    The classroom sits in a prominent part of Camp Marielle Vive. But, Barreto told me, ‘the children and young people of school age had great difficulty because there were no face-to-face classes [at the municipal school] and there were virtual activities in which they could not participate’. The camp’s leadership had to innovate: worksheets had to be printed and distributed to the students each fortnight and – since the public school teachers could not review them – the camp turned to educators from the UNICAMP, a nearby public university, to supervise their work. Education for the children has been a serious challenge.

    From Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research comes a dossier, CoronaShock and Education in Brazil: One and a Half Years Later (August 2021), that goes into depth about the crisis of public education as a result of the pandemic. Our dossier cites a UNICEF study that shows that, by the end of 2020 in Brazil, roughly 1.5 million children and adolescents had abandoned their studies and 3.7 million were formally enrolled but were unable to access remote classes.

    The United Nations estimates that 90% of students across the world – 1.57 billion children – were unable to attend in-person schooling during the length of the pandemic, many of them told to go online. However, a recent UNESCO study shows that half of the world’s population does not have an internet connection. That’s 3.6 billion people with no internet access. According to the study, ‘At least 463 million or nearly one-third of students globally cannot access remote learning, mainly due to a lack of online learning policies or lack of equipment needed to connect from home’. Half the global population has no internet, and many of those who are able to access the internet cannot afford the technologies and tools required to participate in distance learning. The digital divide is even more sharp along gender lines: in the less developed countries, only 15% of women used the internet in 2019, compared to 86% of women in the so-called developed world.

    The turn to digital education has emboldened mega-corporations to enclose the commons of public education, making it harder and harder for the masses of children to have access to any education at all. Big business sees the opportunity clearly. As Microsoft explained, ‘The fallout from COVID-19, continuing advances in digital technology, and intensifying pent-up demand for student-centred learning have combined to present an unprecedented opportunity to transform education across whole systems’. As Bia Carvalho of Brazil’s youth movement (Levante Popular da Juventude) told us for our dossier, ‘For these businessmen, distance education is more profitable because it allows them to cut a part of their expenses and it gives them access to a much larger number of students. From the point of view of [looking at] education as a commodity, where they sell classes, distance education makes a lot more sense’. Public funds have already been used to underwrite the massive expansion of private digital education systems.

    Our dossier closes by highlighting three key issues: the need to increase investment in public educational infrastructure (while ensuring no stealth privatisation of education); the need to value, train, and support the professional development of teachers; and the need to struggle for a new educational project. The latter is of great importance. It asks questions about the purpose of education, which sets the stage upon which young people learn to ask questions about their society, about their values, about the discrepancy between their values and their social institutions, and about what one can do about that discrepancy. There is a direct line from the student protests that convulsed Chile in 2011, in South Africa in 2015, and India in 2015-16 to the sentiment in our dossier. This new educational project needs to be elaborated. It is a necessity.

    After-school classroom in Camp Marielle Franco, 2021 (photograph by the Communication Sector, MST–Sao Paulo)

    When we walked through the Camp Marielle Vive in 2019, two young women, Ketley Júlia and Fernanda Fernandes, joined us. They told us about their schooling, including the English classes they were taking at the camp’s classroom. In the past two years, Ketley joined other women in the camp as a key leader in her community. She coordinates the mandala garden, helps at the storeroom, and organises the donations of clothes and blankets, all of this despite fighting off challenges to her own health.

    ‘In the midst of the barbarism’, Barreto told me, ‘hope always has a way of appearing’. Ketley is now pregnant, ‘a joy that encourages us in our struggle’, Barreto said. Fernanda now lives in Camp Irmã Alberta near São Paulo, where she continues in the MST as she raises two children. Fernanda’s children and Ketley’s child provide hope, but they also need hope to be fashioned through a world with a humane and hopeful educational project.

    In 1942, the English poet, socialist, and pacifist Stephen Spender wrote ‘An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum’. The children in the slum school, Spender wrote, have a future ‘painted with a fog’, their maps ‘slums as big as doom’. We must break the windows of that slum, Spender wrote,

    And show the children to green fields, and make their world
    Run azure on gold sands, and let their tongues
    Run naked into books the white and green leaves open
    History is theirs whose language is the sun.

    The post Show the Children the Green Fields and Let the Sunshine into Their Minds first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • As the U.S. Withdraws From Afghanistan, China Forges Ties With the Taliban

    China’s meetings with the Taliban are practical. China and Afghanistan share a very short—76-kilometer—border, which is relatively unpassable. But the real transit point between the two countries is Tajikistan, which has long feared the return of the Taliban to Kabul and the emergence of a free hand to extremism in Central Asia once more. From 1992 to 1997, a terrible civil war took place in Tajikistan between the government and the now-banned Islamic Renaissance Party; tensions over the growth of Taliban-inspired Islamism remain intact in the country. More

    The post As the U.S. Withdraws From Afghanistan, China Forges Ties With the Taliban appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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  • China Eradicates Absolute Poverty While Billionaires Go for a Joyride to Space

    Women who migrated to the Wangjia community participate in local activities at the community centre in Tongren City, Guizhou Province, April 2021.

    Confounding news comes from the flagship World Economic Outlook report of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The report highlights many of the pressing issues facing our planet: disruptions in the global supply chain, rising shipping costs, shortages of intermediate goods, rising commodity prices, and inflationary pressures in many economies. Global growth rates are expected to touch 6% in 2021 and 4.9% in 2022, driven by higher global government debt. According to the report, this debt ‘reached an unprecedented level of close to 100% of the global GDP in 2020 and is projected to remain around that level in 2021 and 2022’. Developing countries’ external debt will remain high, with little expectation of relief.

    Each year, IMF Chief Economist Gita Gopinath highlights the main themes of the report in her blog. This year, her blog has a clear headline: ‘Drawing Further Apart: Widening Gaps in the Global Recovery’. The rift runs along North-South lines, with the poorer nations unable to find an easy path out of the pandemic-induced global slowdown. A range of reasons cause this rift, such as the penalty of relying upon labour-intensive production, the overall poverty of the populations, and the long-standing problems of debt. But Gopinath focuses on one aspect: vaccine apartheid. ‘Close to 40 percent of the population in advanced economies has been fully vaccinated, compared with 11 percent in emerging market economies, and a tiny fraction in low-income developing countries’, she writes. The lack of vaccines, she argues, is the principal cause of the ‘widening gaps in the global recovery’.

    Peasant workers till the land in an organic bamboo fungus company, which was established to help lift Longmenao, a village that is officially registered as poor, out of poverty in Wanshan District, Guizhou Province, April 2021. Credit: Xiang Wang

    Peasant workers till the land in an organic bamboo fungus company, which was established to help lift Longmenao, a village that is officially registered as poor, out of poverty in Wanshan District, Guizhou Province, April 2021.

    These widening gaps have an immediate social impact. The UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation’s 2021 report, The State of Food Insecurity and Nutrition in the World, notes that ‘nearly one in three people in the world (2.37 billion) did not have access to adequate food in 2020 – an increase of almost 320 million people in just one year’. Hunger is intolerable. Food riots are now in evidence, most dramatically in South Africa. ‘They are just killing us with hunger here’, said one Durban resident who was motivated to join the unrest. These protests, as well as the new data released by the IMF and UN, have put hunger back on the global agenda.

    In late July, the United Nations’ Economic and Social Council held a high-level political forum on sustainable development. The forum’s ministerial declaration recognised that ‘the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare and exacerbated our world’s vulnerabilities and inequalities within and among countries, accentuated systemic weaknesses, challenges, and risks and threatens to halt or damage progress made in realising the Sustainable Development Goals’. Seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted by the UN member states in 2015. These goals include poverty alleviation, an end to hunger, good health, and gender equality. Before the pandemic, it was already clear that the world would not meet these goals by 2030 as projected, certainly not even the most basic goal of eradicating hunger.

    During this bleak period, in late February 2021, China’s president Xi Jinping announced that – counter to this general global downturn – China had eradicated extreme poverty. What does this announcement mean? As our team at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research reported last month, it means that 850 million people had climbed out of absolute poverty (the culmination of a seven-decade-long process that began with the Chinese Revolution of 1949), that their per capita income had increased to US$10,000 (a ten-fold increase in the last twenty years), and that life expectancy had increased to 77.3 years on average (compared to 35 years in 1949). Having met the poverty reduction SDGs ten years in advance, China contributed to more than 70% of the world’s total poverty reduction. In March 2021, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres celebrated this achievement as a ‘reason for hope and inspiration to the entire community of nations’.

    First Secretary Liu Yuanxue speaks with a local villager during routine home visits in the village of Danyang, Wanshan District, Guizhou Province, April 2021.

    Our July study, Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China, inaugurated a new series called Studies on Socialist Construction, through which we aim to study experiments in the construction of socialist practices from Cuba to Kerala, Bolivia to China. Serve the People is based on ground-level studies of poverty eradication schemes in different parts of China and on interviews with experts who participated in this long-term project. For instance, Wang Sangui, dean of the National Poverty Alleviation Research Institute of Renmin University, told us how the concept of multidimensional poverty is central to the Chinese approach. The concept became a policy through the Communist Party of China’s programme of ‘three guarantees’ (safe housing, healthcare, and education) and ‘two assurances’ (being fed and being clothed). But even here, the essence of this policy is in the details. As Wang put it in terms of drinking water:

    How do you classify drinking water as safe? First, the basic requirement is that there must be no shortages in the water supply. Second, the source of water must not be too far, no more than twenty minutes round-trip for water retrieval. Last, the water quality must be safe, without any harmful substances. We require test reports that confirm the water quality is safe. Only then can we say that the standard is met.

    Once a policy is crafted, the real work of implementation begins. The Communist Party (CPC) sent out 800,000 cadre to help local authorities survey households to understand the depth of poverty in the countryside. Then, the CPC delegated 3 million cadre out of the Party’s 95.1 million members to be part of 255,000 teams that spent years living in poor villages working towards the eradication of poverty and the social conditions it created. One team was assigned to a village, one cadre to each family.

    The studies of poverty and the experience of the cadre resulted in five core methods for eradicating poverty: developing industry; relocating people; incentivising ecological compensation; guaranteeing free, quality, and compulsory education; and providing social assistance. The most powerful lever of these five methods was industrial development, which created capital-intensive agricultural production (including crop processing and animal breeding); restored farmlands; and grew forests as part of the ecological compensation schemes, reviving areas that had become prey to resource over-exploitation. In addition, an emphasis was placed on educating minority populations and women. As a result, by 2020, China ranked first in the world in the enrolment of women in tertiary education, according to the World Economic Forum.

    Less than 10% of the people who lifted themselves out of poverty did so because of relocation, which was often the most dramatic instance of the programme. One relocated resident, Mou’se, told us about Atule’er, a village on the edge of a mountain, where he lived before relocating. ‘It took me half a day to climb down the cliff to buy a packet of salt’, he recalled. He would go down the cliff on a rattan ‘sky ladder’, which dangled perilously from the edge of the cliff. His relocation – along with the eighty-three other families who lived there – has allowed him to access better facilities and live a less precarious life.

    The eradication of extreme poverty is significant, but it does not solve all problems. Social inequality in China remains a serious problem. These are not China’s problems alone but pressing problems facing humanity in our time. As we move to capital-intensive agriculture that requires fewer farmers, what kinds of habitations will we produce that are neither in rural nor urban areas? What kinds of employment can be generated for people who are no longer needed in the fields? Can we begin to think about a shorter work week, allowing more time to be civic and social?

    A local food vendor and user of the Yishizhifu short video platform showcases her cooking in the village of Danyang, Wanshan District, Guizhou Province, April 2021.

    Eradicating poverty is not a Chinese project. It is humanity’s goal. That is why movements and governments committed to this goal look carefully at the achievement of the Chinese people. Many of the projects in motion, however, take a dramatically different approach, seeking to address poverty by transferring income (as several South African research institutes advocate). But cash transfer schemes are not enough. Multidimensional poverty requires more than this. For example, Brazil’s Bolsa Familia programme, implemented by former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, made an enormous dent in hunger in that country, but it was not designed to eradicate poverty.

    Meanwhile, in the Indian state of Kerala, absolute poverty fell from 59.79% of the population in 1973-74 to 7.05% in 2011-2012 under the governance of the Left Democratic Front. The mechanisms that led to this dramatic decline were agrarian reform, establishing public health and education, creating a public distribution system for food, decentralising political authority to local self-governments, providing social security and welfare, and promoting public action (such as through the Kudumbashree cooperative projects). Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said recently that his government is committed to eradicating extreme poverty in the state. The next study in our series on socialist construction will concentrate on Kerala’s cooperative movement, focusing on its role in the eradication of poverty, hunger, and patriarchy.

    From the countryside to Tongren City, Guizhou Province, April 2021.

    In March, the UN Environment Programme released its Food Waste Index Report, which showed that an estimated 931 million tonnes of food went into waste bins across the world. The weight of this food roughly equals that of 23 million fully loaded 40-tonne trucks. If we let these trucks stand bumper-to-bumper at the earth’s circumference, they would make a ring long enough to circle the earth seven times, or to go deep into space, where billionaires Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson decided to go. The $5.5 billion Bezos spent on a four-minute trip into space could have fed 37.5 million people or fully funded the COVAX programme that would vaccinate two billion people.

    The ambitions of Bezos and Branson are not life. Life is the abolition of the harshness of necessity.

    The post China Eradicates Absolute Poverty While Billionaires Go for a Joyride to Space first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Washington Beats the Drum of Regime Change, but Cuba Responds to Its Own Revolutionary Rhythm

    Préfète Duffaut (Haiti), Le Générale Canson, 1950.

    In 1963, the Trinidadian writer CLR James released a second edition of his classic 1938 study of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. For the new edition, James wrote an appendix with the suggestive title ‘From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro’. In the opening page of the appendix, he located the twin Revolutions of Haiti (1804) and Cuba (1959) in the context of the West Indian islands: ‘The people who made them, the problems and the attempts to solve them, are peculiarly West Indian, the product of a peculiar origin and a peculiar history’. Thrice James uses the word ‘peculiar’, which emerges from the Latin peculiaris for ‘private property’ (pecu is the Latin word for ‘cattle’, the essence of ancient property).

    Property is at the heart of the origin and history of the modern West Indies. By the end of the 17th century, the European conquistadors and colonialists had massacred the inhabitants of the West Indies. On St. Kitts in 1626, English and French colonialists massacred between two and four thousand Caribs – including Chief Tegremond – in the Kalinago genocide, which Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre wrote about in 1654. Having annihilated the island’s native people, the Europeans brought in African men and women who had been captured and enslaved. What unites the West Indian islands is not language and culture, but the wretchedness of slavery, rooted in an oppressive plantation economy. Both Haiti and Cuba are products of this ‘peculiarity’, the one being bold enough to break the shackles in 1804 and the other able to follow a century and a half later.

    Osmond Watson (Jamaica), City Life, 1968.

    Today, crisis is the hour in the Caribbean.

    On 7 July, just outside of Haiti’s capital of Port-au-Prince, gunmen broke into the home of President Jovenel Moïse, assassinated him in cold blood, and then fled. The country – already wracked by social upheaval sparked by the late president’s policies – has now plunged even deeper into crisis. Already, Moïse had forcefully extended his presidential mandate beyond his term as the country struggled with the burdens of being dependent on international agencies, trapped by a century-long economic crisis, and struck hard by the pandemic. Protests had become commonplace across Haiti as the prices of everything skyrocketed and as no effective government came to the aid of a population in despair. But Moïse was not killed because of this proximate crisis. More mysterious forces are at work: US-based Haitian religious leaders, narco-traffickers, and Colombian mercenaries. This is a saga that is best written as a fictional thriller.

    Four days after Moïse’s assassination, Cuba experienced a set of protests from people expressing their frustration with shortages of goods and a recent spike of COVID-19 infections. Within hours of receiving the news that the protests had emerged, Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel went to the streets of San Antonio de los Baños, south of Havana, to march with the protestors. Díaz-Canel and his government reminded the eleven million Cubans that the country has suffered greatly from the six-decade-long illegal US blockade, that it is in the grip of Trump’s 243 additional ‘coercive measures’, and that it will fight off the twin problems of COVID-19 and a debt crisis with its characteristic resolve.

    Nonetheless, a malicious social media campaign attempted to use these protests as a sign that the government of Díaz-Canel and the Cuban Revolution should be overthrown. It was clarified a few days later that this campaign was run from Miami, Florida, in the United States. From Washington, DC, the drums of regime change sounded loudly. But they have not found find much of an echo in Cuba. Cuba has its own revolutionary rhythms.

    Eduardo Abela (Cuba), Los Guajiros (1938).

    In 1804, the Haitian Revolution – a rebellion of the plantation proletariat who struck against the agricultural factories that produced sugar and profit – sent up a flare of freedom across the colonised world. A century and a half later, the Cubans fired their own flare.

    The response to each of these revolutions from the fossilised magnates of Paris and Washington was the same: suffocate the stirrings of freedom by indemnities and blockades. In 1825, the French demanded through force that the Haitians pay 150 million francs for the loss of property (namely human beings). Alone in the Caribbean, the Haitians felt that they had no choice but to pay up, which they did to France (until 1893) and then to the United States (until 1947). The total bill over the 122 years amounts to $21 billion. When Haiti’s President Jean-Bertrand Aristide tried to recover those billions from France in 2003, he was removed from office by a coup d’état.

    After the United States occupied Cuba in 1898, it ran the island like a gangster’s playground. Any attempt by the Cubans to exercise their sovereignty was squashed with terrible force, including invasions by US forces in 1906-1909, 1912, 1917-1922, and 1933. The United States backed General Fulgencio Batista (1940-1944 and 1952-1959) despite all the evidence of his brutality. After all, Batista protected US interests, and US firms owned two-thirds of the country’s sugar industry and almost its entire service sector.

    The Cuban Revolution of 1959 stands against this wretched history – a history of slavery and imperial domination. How did the US react? By imposing an economic blockade on the country from 19 October 1960 that lasts to this day, which has targeted everything from access to medical supplies, food, and financing to barring Cuban imports and coercing third-party countries to do the same. It is a vindictive attack against a people who – like the Haitians – are trying to exercise their sovereignty. Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez reported that between April 2019 and December 2020, the government lost $9.1 billion due to the blockade ($436 million per month). ‘At current prices’, he said, ‘the accumulated damages in six decades amount to over $147.8 billion, and against the price of gold, it amounts to over $1.3 trillion’.

    None of this information would be available without the presence of media outlets such as Peoples Dispatch, which celebrates its three-year anniversary this week. We send our warmest greetings to the team and hope that you will bookmark their page to visit it several times a day for world news rooted in people’s struggles.

    Bernadette Persaud (Guyana), Gentlemen Under the Sky (Gulf War), 1991.

    On 17 July, tens of thousands of Cubans took to the streets to defend their Revolution and demand an end to the US blockade. President Díaz-Canel said that the Cuba of ‘love, peace, unity, [and] solidarity’ had asserted itself. In solidarity with this unwavering affirmation, we have launched a call for participation in the exhibition Let Cuba Live. The submission deadline is 24 July for the online exhibition launch on 26 July – the anniversary of the revolutionary movement that brought Cuba to Revolution in 1959 – but we encourage ongoing submissions. We are inviting international artists and militants to participate in this flash exhibition as we continue to amplify the campaign #LetCubaLive to end the blockade.

    A few weeks before the most recent attack on Cuba and the assassination in Haiti, the United States armed forces conducted a major military exercise in Guyana called Tradewinds 2021 and another exercise in Panama called Panamax 2021. Under the authority of the United States, a set of European militaries (France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom) – each with colonies in the region – joined Brazil and Canada to conduct Tradewinds with seven Caribbean countries (The Bahamas, Belize, Bermuda, Dominican Republic, Guyana, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago). In a show of force, the US demanded that Iran cancel the movement of its ships to Venezuela in June ahead of the US-sponsored military exercise.

    The United States is eager to turn the Caribbean into its sea, subordinating the sovereignty of the islands. It was curious that Guyana’s Prime Minister Mark Phillips said that these US-led war games strengthen the ‘Caribbean regional security system’. What they do, as our recent dossier on US and French military bases in Africa shows, is to subordinate the Caribbean states to US interests. The US is using its increased military presence in Colombia and Guyana to increase pressure on Venezuela.

    Elsa Gramcko (Venezuela), El ojo de la cerradura (‘The Keyhole’), 1964.

    Sovereign regionalism is not alien to the Caribbean, which has made four attempts to build a platform: the West Indian Federation (1958-1962), Caribbean Free Trade Association (1965-1973), Caribbean Community (1973-1989), and CARICOM (1989 to the present). What began as an anti-imperialist union has now devolved into a trade association that attempts to better integrate the region into world trade. The politics of the Caribbean are increasingly being drawn into orbit of the US. In 2010, the US created the Caribbean Basic Security Initiative, whose agenda is shaped by Washington.

    In 2011, our old friend Shridath Ramphal, Guyana’s foreign minister from 1972 to 1975, repeated the words of the great Grenadian radical T. A. Marryshow: ‘The West Indies must be West Indian’. In his article ‘Is the West Indies West Indian?’, he insisted that the conscious spelling of ‘The West Indies’ with a capitalised ‘T’ aims to signify the unity of the region. Without unity, the old imperialist pressures will prevail as they often do.

    In 1975, the Cuban poet Nancy Morejón published a landmark poem called “Mujer Negra” (“Black Woman”). The poem opens with the terrible trade of human beings by the European colonialists, touches on the war of independence, and then settles on the remarkable Cuban Revolution of 1959:

    I came down from the Sierra

    to put an end to capital and usurer,
    to generals and to the bourgeoisie.
    Now I exist: only today do we own, do we create.
    Nothing is alien to us.
    The land is ours.
    Ours are the sea and sky,
    the magic and vision.
    My fellow people, here I see you dance
    around the tree we are planting for communism.
    Its prodigal wood already resounds.

    The land is ours. Sovereignty is ours too. Our destiny is not to live as the subordinate beings of others. That is the message of Morejón and of the Cuban people who are building their sovereign lives, and it is the message of the Haitian people who want to advance their great Revolution of 1804.

    The post Washington Beats the Drum of Regime Change, but Cuba Responds to Its Own Revolutionary Rhythm first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • A Senseless Cathedral of Doom

    In early June 2021, the United States military led a major military exercise on the African continent: the African Lion 21.  Major General Andrew Rohling of the US Army’s Southern European Task Force said it was the ‘largest US military exercise ever conducted on this continent’. The African Lion military exercise, which was first held with the Kingdom of Morocco in 2002, is – in the words of US Africa Command – an annual ‘joint, all-domain, multi-national exercise … to counter malign activity in North Africa and Southern Europe, and increase interoperability between US, African, and international partners to defend the theatre from adversary military aggression’. African Lion 21, which included the armed forces of 21 countries including Brazil, Canada, Egypt, Italy, Libya, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, took place in Morocco and in the occupied territory of Western Sahara as well as in Senegal and Tunisia. The overall military exercise – with over 7,000 soldiers – was conducted under the leadership of the US Africa Command with the assistance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO).

    The exercise was conducted under the command of Major General Rohling and General Belkhir El Farouk, the Royal Moroccan Armed Forces Southern Zone commander. It is important to note that General El Farouk’s jurisdiction covers the Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara. On 10 December 2020, US President Donald Trump offered Morocco recognition of its illegal occupation of Western Sahara in exchange for Morocco normalising its relations with Israel. Trump’s statement on Western Sahara goes against a range of UN General Assembly resolutions, including 1514 (XV) from 1960, which affirms that all people from former colonies have the right to self-determination, and 34/37 from 1979, which explicitly calls for an end to Morocco’s occupation of the territory. When Major General Rohling was asked about African Lion 21’s presence in Western Sahara, he demurred, saying that the choices of the location were made before Trump’s December 2020 declaration.

    Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

    Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

    This month, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, along with the Socialist Movement of Ghana’s Research Group, released dossier no. 42 (July 2021), Defending Our Sovereignty: US Military Bases in Africa and the Future of African Unity. The dossier catalogues the growth of the Western military presence on the African continent, with special focus on the United States and France. The US, by itself, has 29 known military facilities in 15 countries, while France has bases in 10 countries. There is no doubt that the United States and France have by far the largest military footprint on the African continent, and that no country in the world has a greater global military footprint than the United States. According to the US National Defense Business Operations Plan (2018-2022), the US military manages a ‘global portfolio that consists of more than 568,000 assets (buildings and structures), located at nearly 4,800 sites worldwide’.

    In the case of the US military, the sheer scale of the military’s presence and activities indicates a qualitatively different character. This character includes the capacity of the US to defend its interests on the continent, operating as the gendarme not for the world community, but for the beneficiaries of capitalism. Furthermore, it attempts to prevent any serious competition to its control of resources and markets through a ‘new cold war,’ through which the US exerts pressure to contain China on the continent as part of its broader geopolitical aggression.

    Both the US and France are members of NATO, whose own mandate has moved from the defence of Europe to aggression overseas. Two main objectives stand at the heart of NATO’s activity in Africa: to prevent migration into Europe and to obstruct Russian activities in northern Africa. In its recent strategic document, NATO 2030, the alliance notes, ‘NATO’s “South” refers to a broad geographic area including North Africa and large parts of the Middle East, extending to sub-Saharan Africa and Afghanistan’. This is not a new vision, since NATO has previously operated in Sudan (2005-2007), in the Gulf of Aden and off the Horn of Africa (2008-2016), and in Libya (2011). NATO took the lead in the destruction of Libya, which continues to be wracked by a political-military crisis and social collapse. NATO’s new missions include operations in the Mediterranean Sea such as Operation Active Endeavour (2001-2016) and Sea Guardian (ongoing); operations to support the African Union such as training the African Standby Force; and counterterrorism efforts in northern Africa.

    Agadez, Niger

    Agadez, Niger

    Reading the documents by US Africa Command, the French military, and NATO, one could misleadingly believe that the Western military operates in Africa to prevent the growth of terrorism (largely the al-Qaeda variants). NATO’s operation in Libya in 2011 crushed the state, emboldening the extreme Islamist currents in the region to act with impunity. Some of these groups – such as al-Qaeda in the Maghreb – end up being smugglers of cigarettes, cocaine, humans, and weapons. It was the destroyed Libyan state which opened the door to both the rise of insurgency and criminal activity across the Sahara Desert and the increase in migration towards Europe.

    It was in this context that, in 2014, France suborned five African countries (Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger) to form the G5 Sahel initiative. The Sahel is the belt that runs across Africa below the Sahara Desert. At the same time, the US has built a network of bases, including an enormous drone base in Agadez (Niger), and uses its drones to provide aerial support for US forces, France’s military, and the militaries of the G5 states. Europe has moved its southern border from the northern edge of the Mediterranean Sea to the southern rim of the Sahara Desert.

    From interventions in Somalia in 1992 to present-day activities, the track records of US and French military interventions in African countries are clear: US and French troops exacerbate conflicts and use the internal weakness of African states to assert US and European aims. A recent study by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) shows that there are 23 active armed conflicts on the African continent (Angola, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Guinea, Kenya, Libya, Madagascar, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Uganda, and Western Sahara). With a 41% net increase in fatalities from 2019-2020, SIPRI writes, sub-Saharan Africa ‘was the region with the most conflict-related fatalities in 2020’. It is well-worth recalling that US and French arms manufacturers, whose combined arms exports accounted for over 43% of the global total between 2015 and 2019, provide the lion’s share of weapons for these conflicts.

    Camp Simba, Kenya

    The principal causes of conflict on the continent, SIPRI summarises, are: ‘state weakness, corruption, ineffective delivery of basic services, competition over natural resources, inequality, and a sense of marginalisation’. The main reason that US Africa Command and NATO provide for their intervention in Africa – terrorism and geopolitical conflict – are not on the list.

    To address these issues, it is important for African states to assert their sovereignty and chart out a credible project for the well-being of the people in these regions. That is why the African Union’s Peace and Security Council passed a resolution in 2016 expressing concern at the expanding foreign military bases on the continent. It is the weakness of the member states and their organisational disunity that have prevented that resolution from being enacted further and it is what enables the West to extend its neo-colonial pressures to intensify the causes of conflict. The austerity programmes of the International Monetary Fund produce the ‘ineffective delivery of basic services’, and Western multinational firms produce ‘corruption’ and ‘competition over natural resources’. The main authors of the problems on the continent are neither China nor Russia, whose presence is used as a justification for expanding the Western military presence.

    The Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research dossier is enriched by satellite photos gathered by data artist Josh Begley. For the dossier, the art team at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research physically projected images and coordinates of these hidden-away sites onto a map of Africa, visually reconstructing the apparatus of militarisation today. Meanwhile, the pins and threads connecting these places remind us of the ‘war rooms’ of colonial domination. Together, the set of images is a visual testament to the continued ‘fragmentation and subordination of the continent’s peoples and governments’, as this dossier writes.

    Kofi Awoonor, 1935-2013

    Kofi Awoonor, 1935-2013

    In 2013, when extremists from al-Shabaab attacked the Westgate Shopping Mall in Nairobi (Kenya), they shot and killed Kofi Awoonor, a Ghanaian poet, ambassador to Cuba, Brazil, and the UN, and chair of a UN committee against apartheid. Awoonor would often talk of the ‘distresses’ of his country – the same country that President Kwame Nkrumah led out of colonialism and into a new possible future. Military coups and IMF austerity deadened the hopes of generations of Ghanaians in their struggle for liberation, but Awoonor held fast. One of my favourite poems by Awoonor is ‘The Cathedral’, which carries forward that sense of the ‘distresses’ that are visited upon our world and that continue to be fought against today:

    On this dirty patch
    a tree once stood
    shedding incense on the infant corn:
    its boughs stretched across a heaven
    brightened by the last fires of a tribe.
    They sent surveyors and builders
    who cut the tree?
    planting in its place
    A huge senseless cathedral of doom.

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  • Women Everywhere in the World Are Squeezed into a Tight Corner

    Sandra Eleta (Panama), La servidumbre, 1978-79.

    Sandra Eleta (Panama), La servidumbre, 1978-79.

    Between 30 June and 2 July 2021, the United Nations and other multilateral organisations held the Generation Equality Forum in Paris (France). The forum was held to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action set out at the Fourth World Conference on Women (1995). Re-reading the Beijing Platform shows that rather than advance the cause of justice and equality, many countries have slipped backwards. Critical areas of concern to be addressed included the following:

    • The burden of poverty on women.
    • Inequalities and inadequacies in access to education, training, healthcare, employment, and decision-making.
    • Violence against women, including the grave dangers for women in armed conflict.
    • Lack of respect for women as well as inadequate promotion and protection of women’s human rights.
    • Persistent discrimination against and violations of the rights of the girl child.
    • Insufficient mechanisms at all levels to promote the advancement of women.

    As part of the forum held in Paris last week, a group of agencies – including the World Health Organisation (WHO) – released a set of twelve papers that considered developments in the past twenty-five years, with an emphasis on the social impact of the pandemic. The lead paper notes that it ‘is disheartening that still not one country can claim to have achieved gender equality’. Furthermore, ‘the COVID-19 pandemic has been a serious setback for gender equality and women’s health’. Some key requirements for a way forward emerge out of these twelve papers:

    1. ‘The first requirement is that paid employment and unpaid care work are valued equally, recognising the fact that many women are not employed or work in informal sectors and that women bear a disproportionate burden of unpaid care work’.
    2. Universal coverage for healthcare is necessary, with comprehensive sexual and reproductive healthcare included in the coverage.
    3. Universal social protections should include provisions for childcare, paid parental, sick, and family care leave, and a pension for the elderly.
    4. Women’s movements must be supported, and women must participate fully in the construction of policies in all sectors of society. Reflecting on the role of women in politics and government, the head of UN Women, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, told the forum, ‘Women make up one quarter of those who are managers, they are one quarter of parliamentarians around the world, they are one quarter of those who negotiate climate change, they are less than one quarter of those who negotiate peace agreements. All these decisions have a fundamental impact on their capacity to have a life that is meaningful’.
    Olga Rozanova (Russia), In the Street, 1915.

    Olga Rozanova (Russia), In the Street, 1915.

    Last year, in a major report, UN Women concluded that the gains made over the past quarter century have been eroded. The main drivers of this reversal are a combination of the climate emergency, cruel austerity policies, conflict, violence, the ‘rise of exclusionary politics, characterised by misogyny and xenophobia’, the entire care economy being held up by women, and other factors. These reasons are now compounded by the pandemic, which – as our study CoronaShock and Patriarchy showed – has hit women very hard.

    Of the many important points, here are some to consider:

    1. 510 million women around the world – about 40% of all working women – are employed in the sectors hit hardest by the pandemic, such as entertainment, food service, hospitality, manufacturing, and tourism.
    2. Women are disproportionately found in the informal sector (60%), where they do not receive social and economic protections.
    3. Women have been more likely than men to lose their jobs during the pandemic.
    4. During the pandemic, at least 64 million women lost their jobs, with an income decline of at least $800 billion. This does not include women in the informal sector, which is the main arena for working women in southern Asia and in Africa.
    5. Studies from around the world show that women had to cut back on their hours of employment due to increased care obligations during the pandemic and that these cuts impact long-term pay and pensions. This also impacts the ability of women to return to work and often results in a greater increase in care work in the long term. Furthermore, as the International Labour Organisation points out, ‘women are not only hit by the loss of jobs but also by expenditure cuts that contract public service provision, in particular care services’.
    6. A survey by UNAIDS found that 47% of LGBTQIA+ respondents faced economic difficulty, with ‘a quarter unable to meet their basic needs, skipping meals, or reducing meal sizes’.

    Aurora Reyes Flores (Mexico), Escena revolucionaria, 1935.

    Hidden in the shadows of these reports are the realities of women who live in rural areas. In India, for instance, rural women make up 81.29% of the female workforce, but only 12.9% of women hold land. Most of these women are landless agricultural workers or informal sector workers. During the most recent wave of the pandemic to strike India, 5.7 million rural women’s jobs vanished in April 2021; this job loss accounts for nearly 80% of all job losses that month. Recoveries in May were anaemic. The Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research dossier on the farmers’ revolt is important reading for the context of the crisis in rural India. Nikore Associates, based in Delhi, offered four reasons for the crisis experienced by rural women:

    1. In rural India, before the pandemic, women spent 5.017 hours per day on unpaid care work; in comparison, men spent 1.67 hours per day. During the pandemic, as family members fell ill, the compulsion of care work fell on the shoulders of women.
    2. Due to the lockdowns and other pressures, women – who supplemented their incomes by trading goods and agricultural produce, including selling fish – found it difficult to go to the markets.
    3. Women had been important beneficiaries of the government’s rural work scheme (MNREGA), which saw an almost 35% reduction in the government’s 2020-21 budget. In April-May 2021, jobs provided through this scheme fell by 21%.
    4. Women who worked in the handicraft and small industries sector – including through piece-rate and home-based production – saw the sector stutter during the second wave and fail to make any recovery in the months since then.

    Colette Omogbai (Nigeria), Agony, 1963.

    At the Paris meeting, UN Women’s Mlambo-Ngcuka said, ‘Women everywhere in the world are squeezed into a small corner’. But they are, of course, fighting back. Across the world, trade unions and agricultural unions, women’s organisations and human rights groups, as well as political parties of the Left are pushing back, stepping out of the corner, and seeking to put the agenda of working women on the table. The demands being made are basic. Eighteen of them are at the end of CoronaShock and Patriarchy study. Here is a summary, condensed into eight demands:

    1. Nominate leaders of working-class women’s organisations to influential bodies that shape policy.
    2. Recognise and count informal women workers in national accounts.
    3. Ensure that informal workers have basic workplace protections.
    4. Provide immediate cash relief and food relief to women workers.
    5. Provide immediate healthcare coverage to all workers.
    6. Place a moratorium on rent and utilities payments.
    7. Enhance social protection systems, including child and elder care programmes.
    8. Provide credit to women’s cooperatives.

    In 1995, the delegates elected Chen Muhua (1921-2011) as the president of the UN World Conference on Women. In 1938, Chen went to Yan’an to join the communist revolution, studying at Kàngda and helping to build the economic resilience of the base areas. After 1949, Chen worked in the Communist Party (rising to be an alternate Politburo member), in the Chinese state (becoming the governor of the People’s Bank of China), and in the women’s movement (leading the All-China Women’s Federation). At the Beijing Conference, Chen made a strong plea for the emancipation of women. ‘It is evident that women are crying out for an improvement in their status. The times demand it. Humanity aspires to it’.

    The post Women Everywhere in the World Are Squeezed into a Tight Corner first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Cuba’s Vaccine Shield and the Five Monopolies that Structure the World

    Raúl Martínez (Cuba), Yo he visto (‘I Have Seen’), n.d.

    Raúl Martínez (Cuba), Yo he visto (‘I Have Seen’), n.d.

    In 1869, at the age of fifteen, José Martí and his young friends published a magazine in Cuba called La Patria Libre (‘The Free Homeland’), which adopted a strong position against Spanish imperialism. The first and only issue of the magazine carried Martí’s poem, ‘Abdala’. The poem is about a young man, Abdala, who goes off to fight against all odds to free his native land, which Martí calls Nubia. ‘Neither laurels nor crowns are needed for those who breathe courage’, Martí wrote. ‘Let us run to the fight … to war, valiant ones’. And in the rousing address by Abdala, comes these lyrical words:

    Let the warlike valour of our souls
    Serve you, my homeland, as a shield.

    Martí was arrested and sentenced to six years of hard labour. Eventually, the Spanish imperial government sent the young Cuban into exile in 1871. He spent this time – much of it in New York – writing patriotic poems, producing political essays and commentary, and organising the resistance to Spanish imperialism. He returned home in 1895, only to be killed shortly afterwards in a skirmish, his legacy cemented in the war against the Spanish in 1898 and in the Cuban Revolution that began in 1959.

    The lines from Martí about the ‘warlike valour’ serving as the country’s ‘shield’ form the basis for the name of the new Cuban vaccine, Abdala. This vaccine, the fifth to be produced in Cuba, was developed by the Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB) in Havana. In announcing the results of their trials, BioCubaFarma, the country’s leading biotechnology and pharmaceutical institution, noted that it had an efficacy rate of 92.28%, almost as high as the efficacy rate of the vaccines by Pfizer (95%) and Moderna (94.1%). The vaccine is administered in three doses, each given with a two-week gap. The Cuban authorities plan to vaccinate three quarters of the population by September. Already, more than 2.23 million vaccines have been administered to the 11 million Cubans on the island, 1.346 million people have been vaccinated with at least one dose, 770,390 with the second dose, and 148,738 with the third dose.

    Juan Roberto Diago Durruthy (Cuba), Tu lugar (‘Your Place’), 2006.

    Juan Roberto Diago Durruthy (Cuba), Tu lugar (‘Your Place’), 2006.

    Cuba has already planned to export its vaccines to countries around the world and has now produced five different vaccine candidates, including Soberana 02 and the needle-free intranasal vaccine, Mambisa. The latter, which holds great promise for vaccine administration in low-resource countries, is named after guerrilla soldiers who fought in the Ten Year War (1868-1878) for independence from Spain.

    Each of these vaccines has been developed under conditions of duress imposed by the illegal US blockade. Since 1992, the UN General Assembly has voted annually against the US blockade, except for 2020, when, due to the pandemic, there was no vote. On 23 June 2021, 184 member states of the United Nations again voted to end this blockade. In the context of the coronavirus pandemic, Cuba’s foreign minister, Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, said, ‘Like the virus, the blockade asphyxiates and kills. It must stop’. One of the casualties of the blockade has been Cuba’s inability to buy ventilators to treat critically ill patients, since the two Swiss companies (IMT Medical AG and Acutronic) who made them were purchased by a US company (Vyaire Medical, Inc.) in April 2020. Cuba has now developed its own ventilator in response.

    At the same time, Cuba suffers from a shortage of syringes. Syringe manufacturers are entangled in one way or another with the US pharmaceutical industry. Terumo (Japan) and Nipro (Japan) have operations in the United States, while B. Braun Melsungen AG (Germany) is in a partnership with Concordance Healthcare Solutions (US). An Indian syringe firm, Hindustan Syringes & Medical Devices Ltd., is linked to Envigo (US), which brings US government scrutiny to the Indian firm. In an act of concrete solidarity, a campaign is underway to raise funds towards the purchase of syringes for Cuba.

    Belkis Ayón (Cuba), La consagración III (‘The Consecration III’), 1991.

    Belkis Ayón (Cuba), La consagración III (‘The Consecration III’), 1991.

    The Our World in Data project calculates that, as of 29 June, just over 3 billion doses have been administered worldwide, which amount to less than 1 billion people out of the 7.7 billion in the world who have been vaccinated. Just over 23% of the world population has had their first vaccine shot. But the data shows that vaccination drives have been predictably uneven. In low-income countries, only 0.9% of the population has received at least one dose of the vaccine. In April 2021, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Gheybreysus said, ‘There remains a shocking imbalance in the global distribution of vaccines. On average in high-income countries, almost one in four people has received a vaccine. In low-income countries, it’s one in more than 500. Let me repeat that: one in four versus one in 500’. By May 2021, Ghebreyesus said that the world was in a situation of ‘vaccine apartheid’.

    In February 2021, in one of our newsletters, Tricontinental: Institute of Social Research noted that we lived in a time of ‘three apartheids’. These apartheids include that of food, money, and medicine. At the heart of the medical apartheid is vaccine nationalism, vaccine hoarding, and, as Ghebreyesus put it, vaccine apartheid. Matters are quite grave. The COVAX vaccine alliance has seen vaccines move out of its reach both because of bilateral deals being made between the richer countries and the vaccine makers and because of the lack of financial support from the richer states to the poorer ones. The trends show that many countries will not see significant enough numbers of their population vaccinated before 2023, ‘if it happens at all’, says the Economist Intelligence Unit.

    Raúl Corrales Fornos (Cuba), La caballería (‘The Cavalry’), 1960.

    Raúl Corrales Fornos (Cuba), La caballería (‘The Cavalry’), 1960.

    What is the cause of these three apartheids? The control that a handful of companies exercise over the global economy, driven by five types of monopolies, as our friend, the late Samir Amin, laid out:

    1. The monopoly over science and technology
    2. The monopoly over financial systems
    3. The monopoly over access to resources
    4. The monopoly over weaponry
    5. The monopoly over communications

    We are looking closely at this list and the relationship between each of these elements, analysing it to see if anything has been left out. Amin argued that it is not the lack of industrialisation alone that impacts the subordination of countries; what has kept the world in a situation of great inequality, he suggested, were these five monopolies. After all, many countries in the world have developed industries over the past fifty years but remain unable to advance the social agenda of their populations.

    Central to the discussion about vaccine apartheid are at least two of these monopolies: the monopoly over finance and the monopoly over science and technology. A lack of finances in hand draws many of the world’s states to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), to various public investors (the Paris Club), or to commercial capital (the London Club). These financiers take their lead from the IMF, which has demanded that countries cut back on several crucial areas of human life – education and health care, for instance. Cutting funds for education drains countries’ potential to develop sufficient numbers of scientists as well as the scientific temper necessary to create essential technologies such as vaccine candidates. Cutting funds for health care systems and adopting intellectual property rules that block the transfer of technology leaves countries disarmed from being able to appropriately deal with the pandemic.

    A lack of funds has driven many states to surrender the possibility that they could advance the well-being of their populations (as of April 2020, sixty-four countries spend more to service their debt than on healthcare). It is not enough to demand the transfer of technology to states in the midst of a pandemic so that they can make the vaccine. Technology is yesterday’s science; science is tomorrow’s technology.

    To use the social wealth of a population, to teach science, and to establish a basic norm of scientific literacy are essential lessons of the pandemic. These are lessons well-learnt by the Cubans. This is why Cuba has, against all odds, developed five different vaccines. Abdala and Cuba’s four other vaccines stand as a shield against COVID-19. These vaccines emerge out of the social productivity of socialist Cuba, which has not surrendered to the ugliness of the five monopolies.

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  • Civil War in Afghanistan Will Threaten Afghanistan, China and Pakistan

    The United States, which has prosecuted a war against Afghanistan since October 2001, has promised to withdraw its combat troops by September 11, 2021. This war has failed to attain any of the gains that were promised after 20 years of fighting: neither has it resulted in the actual fragmentation of terrorist groups nor has it led to the destruction of the Taliban. The great suffering and great waste of social wealth caused due to the war will finally end with the Taliban’s return to power, and with terrorist groups, which are entrenched in parts of Central Asia, seizing this prospect to make a full return to Afghanistan. More

    The post Civil War in Afghanistan Will Threaten Afghanistan, China and Pakistan appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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  • If I Fall in the Struggle, Take My Place

    Tiger Tateishi (Japan), Samurai, the Watcher (Koya no Yojinbo), 1965.

    Tiger Tateishi (Japan), Samurai, the Watcher (Koya no Yojinbo), 1965.

    Ugliness defines the mood of state violence from Cali (Colombia) to Durban (South Africa), each context different and the depth of the violence particular to the location. Images of security forces cracking down on people trying to express their political rights have become commonplace. It is impossible to keep track of the events, which move swiftly from public manifestations to courtroom scenes, from the dissipation of tear gas to the invisible frustration of the prison cell. Yet, underlying these events and amidst the range of feelings that shape them lies a sense of refusal, the Great Refusal, the refusal to accept the terms dictated from those in power and the refusal to express this dissent in polite terms.


    Orchestra director Susana Boreal (Medellín, Colombia), El pueblo unido jamás será vencido, 5 May 2021.

    Colombia’s government decided to push through a peculiarly named Sustainable Solidarity Law (Ley de Solidaridad Sostenible) that transferred the financial cost of the pandemic onto the population, which reacted – as expected – with anger. Faced with a national strike on 28-29 April, the Colombian state responded, as it often does, with wildly harsh violence, including by mobilising the dangerously named Mobile Anti-Disturbance Squadron (ESMAD). Those on the streets came with rage and with music, the range of responses united by antipathy to the government of President Iván Duque.

    The unflinching Colombian oligarchy, which has dispensed violence to maintain its power, must have trembled when it saw protestors in Cali take down the statue of Sebastián de Belalcázar, a conquistador. This act suggested that the protestors would not be satisfied only with the reversal of the proposed law, but that they wanted to overturn the rigid hierarchies that govern their society. Duque does not see the protestors as citizens; to him, they are ‘vandals’. No wonder that Duque let loose the ugliest of violence, with the cities of Bogotá, Cali, and Medellin facing the brunt of the attack. Despite calls from the mayors of Bogotá (Claudia López) and Medellin (Daniel Quintero), this state violence nonetheless went ahead, the battlefield in the streets coming to resemble Iraq, in the words of a Colombian friend who had covered the wars in West Asia.

    David Koloane (South Africa), Bull in the City, 2016.

    David Koloane (South Africa), Bull in the City, 2016.

    Like Iraq. Or like Israel, recently named an apartheid state by Human Rights Watch (HRW). Apartheid is an Afrikaans word meaning ‘apartness’, to keep the whites apart from others or, in the case of Israel, to keep the Jewish citizens apart from the Palestinian subjects. The HRW report follows numerous others by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission on West Asia (ESCWA), which used the word ‘apartheid’ to describe Israel’s racist policies towards the Palestinian people. HRW, which has taken its time to come to these elementary conclusions, says that Israel harshly deprives Palestinians of the right to affirm life; ‘these deprivations are so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution’.

    The linkage between the terms ‘apartheid’ and ‘crimes against humanity’ refers to a United Nations General Assembly resolution from December 1966 that condemned ‘the policies of apartheid of the Government of South Africa as a crime against humanity’. In 1984, the UN Security Council described apartheid as ‘a system characterised as a crime against humanity’. The term ‘crime against humanity’ has subsequently been enshrined in Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998). It is no coincidence that on 3 March 2021, the lead prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC), Fatou Bensouda, said that the ICC would open an investigation into crimes committed in Israel since 2014. Israel has refused to cooperate with the ICC.

    Israeli courts decided to move ahead with the eviction of six families from the Palestinian neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem, an area with three thousand residents – despite the fact that the Israeli courts have no jurisdiction in the occupied territories. In 1967, Israel seized East Jerusalem, which forms part of the occupied Palestinian territories. UN resolution 242 (1967) states that the occupying power, namely Israel, must respect the sovereignty, political independence and ‘territorial inviolability’ of every State in the area. In 1972, Israeli settlers moved the Israeli courts to evict the thousands of Palestinians who lived in the area, a process that has been resisted by the Palestinians in the fifty years since. The brazen violence of the Israeli Border Police, or Magav, was further escalated with the entry of heavily armed Israeli soldiers into Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque on 7 May, mimicking the violence of the Colombian ESMAD.

    Terrible repression comes alongside the continued attempt to delegitimise any political project of the Palestinian people. If the Palestinian people stand up, Israel calls them terrorists. This mirrors the way the South African apartheid government and their Western allies described the African National Congress during the heyday of the anti-apartheid struggle. In 1994, the African National Congress alliance took power over the South African state, beginning a long-term process to dismantle the entrenched structures of inequality and apartheid; it will take generations of resistance to undo what has been so powerfully set in place over the past decades.

    Dang Xuan Hoa (Vietnam), The Red Family, 2008

    Dang Xuan Hoa (Vietnam), The Red Family, 2008

    In August 2020, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research published a dossier entitled ‘The Politic of Blood’: Political Repression in South Africa. Early into the text, we quote from Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1961), which several times uses the word ‘incapacity’ to refer to the ruling classes of the new states that emerge out of colonialism. When the people form their own organisations and develop their demands for participatory forms of democracy, the ruling class, Fanon writes, has an incapacity to understand this popular action as rational; it sees this popular action as a threat to its rule. Such an attitude governs the Colombian oligarchy and the Israeli apartheid class. It also defines the ruling class in South Africa, whose political instruments cannot find the room to allow for the growth of the independent political organisation of the working class in that country.

    On 4 May 2021, the authorities arrested Mqapheli George Bonono, the deputy president of Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM), the shack dwellers’ movement in South Africa. The authorities charged Bonono with ‘conspiring to commit murder’. Led by shack dwellers, AbM – which organises land occupation and housing struggles with a membership of 82,000 people – has faced repression since its foundation in 2005.

    In 2018, we interviewed AbM leader S’bu Zikode for a dossier, in which he said:

    Politics has become a way to get rich and people are willing to kill or to do anything to become rich and to stay rich. We move from funeral to funeral. We bury our comrades with the dignity that they were denied in life. Many of our comrades cannot sleep in their own homes or cannot leave their home after dark in the so-called democratic post-apartheid South Africa. Repression comes in waves.

    Bonono is only the latest of the AbM members to face political repression. Brave activists from one end of the planet to the other face intimidation and murder for building organisations against the present. This repression resulted in the recent police killing of the artist Nicolas Guerrero in Cali (Colombia) and the political murder of Kakali Khetrapal of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) from Nabagram, East Burdwan (West Bengal, India). Guerrero was killed on the streets during the first hours of this protest wave, while Ketrapal was murdered by members of the party that won the West Bengal legislative election. This is political cleansing or politicide, the murder of activists whose deaths deflate the confidence of the masses to take on the great granite block of power. Sharpening their swords in the shadows, the killers take their orders from cell phones that can dial the homes of the powerful.

    Fernando Bryce (Peru), Untitled (Cadaveres Atomicos), 2018

    Fernando Bryce (Peru), Untitled (Cadaveres Atomicos), 2018

    Ugly, this use of power, this killing with impunity. On 6 May, squadrons of the state entered the favela of Jacarezinho in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and opened fire, killing at least twenty-five people who appeared to surrender before the guns blazed. The United Nations has called for an investigation, but this will not go far. Brazil’s 1988 Constitution abolished the death penalty, yet the evidence suggests that the police believe that if you live in the favelas, then the death sentence – without judicial review – is permitted.

    What kind of times are these when political repression operates without sufficient outrage? Muin Bseiso sang songs to rouse his fellow Palestinians in Gaza, suffocated by apartheid Israel. In his epic poem, Al-Ma’raka (‘The Battle’), Muin Bseiso found this solace:

    If I fall in the struggle, comrade, take my place.
    Gaze at my lips as they stop the wind’s madness.
    I have not died. I still call you from beyond my wounds.
    Bang your drum so that the people might hear your call to battle.

    The post If I Fall in the Struggle, Take My Place first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • I’m Still Here, Though My Country’s Gone West

    Berlin, Fackelzug zur Gründung der DDR

    A mass rally with the Free German Youth that marked the founding of the German Democratic Republic in the Soviet Occupation Zone, October 1949.

    A full generation has elapsed since the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) collapsed in late 1991. Two years earlier, in 1989, the communist states of Eastern Europe dissolved, with the first salvo fired when Hungary opened its border. On 3 March 1989, Hungary’s last communist prime minister Miklós Németh asked the USSR’s last President Mikhail Gorbachev whether the border to Western Europe could be opened. ‘We have a strict regime on our borders’, Gorbachev told Németh, ‘but we are also becoming more open’. Three months later, on 15 June, Gorbachev told the press in Bonn (West Germany) that the Berlin Wall ‘could disappear when the preconditions, which brought it about, cease to exist’. He did not list the preconditions, but he said, ‘Nothing is permanent under the Moon’. On 9 November 1989, the Berlin Wall was knocked down. By October 1990, the German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik or DDR) was absorbed into a unified Germany dominated by West Germany.

    As part of the unification, the structures of the DDR had to be demolished. Headed by the Social Democratic politician Detlev Rohwedder, the new rulers created the Treuhandanstalt (‘Trust Agency’) to privatise 8,500 public enterprises that employed over 4 million workers. ‘Privatise quickly, restructure resolutely, and shut down carefully’, Rohwedder said. But before he could do this, Rohwedder was assassinated in April 1991. He was succeeded by the economist Birgit Breuel who told the Washington Post, ‘We can try to explain ourselves to people, but they will never love us. Because whatever we do, it’s hard for people. With every one of the 8,500 enterprises, we either privatise or restructure or close them down. In every case, people lose jobs’. Hundreds of firms that had been public property (Volkseigentum) fell into private hands and millions of people lost their jobs; during this time, 70% of women lost their jobs. The stunning scale of the corruption and cronyism only came out decades later in a German parliamentary inquiry in 2009.

    LPG Mansfeld, Solidaritätsbekundung mit Vietnam

    Cooperative farmers handing over a flag of solidarity with the motto ‘Solidarity Hastens Victory’ written on it to the Ambassador of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, 1972.

    Not only did the public property of the DDR slip into the pockets of private capital, but the entire history of the project vanished in a haze of anti-communist rhetoric. The only word that remained to define the forty years of DDR history was stasi, the colloquial name for the Ministry for State Security. Nothing else mattered. Neither the de-Nazification of that part of Germany – which was not conducted in the West – nor the impressive gains in terms of housing, health, education, and social life occupy space in the public imagination. There is little mention of the DDR’s contribution to the anti-colonial struggle or to the socialist construction experiments from Vietnam to Tanzania. All this vanished, the earthquake of the reunification swallowing up the achievements of the DDR and leaving behind the ash heap of social despair and amnesia. Little wonder that poll after poll – whether in the 1990s or the 2000s – show that large numbers of people living in the former East Germany look back longingly for the DDR past. This Ostalgie (‘nostalgia’) for the East remains intact, reinforced by the greater unemployment and lower incomes in the eastern over the western part of Germany.

    In 1998, the German parliament set up the Federal Foundation for the Study of Communist Dictatorship in East Germany, which set the terms for the national appraisal of communist history. The organisation’s mandate was to fund research on the DDR that would portray it as a criminal enterprise rather than a historical project. Fury governed the historical undertaking. The attempt to delegitimise Marxism and Communism in Germany mirrored attempts in other countries in Europe and North America that hastened to snuff out the reappearance of these left ideologies. The ferocity of efforts to rewrite history suggested that they feared its return.

    This month, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research partnered with the Internationale Forschungsstelle DDR (IF DDR) to produce the first of a new series, Studies on the DDR. The first study, Risen from the Ruins: The Economic History of Socialism in the German Democratic Republic, goes beneath the anti-communist sludge to unearth, in a reasonable way, the historical development of the forty-year project in the DDR. Based in Berlin, the authors of the text sifted through the archives and memories, interviewing those who helped construct socialism in Germany at different levels of society.

    Peter Hacks, a poet of the DDR, said in retrospect, ‘The worst socialism is better than the best capitalism. Socialism, that society that was toppled because it was virtuous (a fault on the world market). That society whose economy respects values other than the accumulation of capital: the rights of its citizens to life, happiness, and health; art and science; utility and the reduction of waste’. For when socialism is involved, Hacks said, it is not economic growth, but ‘the growth of its people that is the actual goal of the economy’. Risen from the Ruins lays out the story of the DDR and its people from the ashes of Germany after the defeat of fascism to the economic pillage of the DDR after 1989.

    Leipzig, Straßenschild Lumumbastraße

    A monument to Patrice Lumumba built by Leipzig’s Free German Youth; the street was later renamed ‘Lumumba Street’ in a ceremony with Congolese students, 1961.

    One of the least known parts of the DDR’s history is its internationalism, wonderfully explored in this study. Three brief extracts make the point:

    1. Solidarity Work. Between 1964 and 1988, sixty friendship brigades of the Free German Youth (the DDR youth mass organisation) were deployed to twenty-seven countries in order to share their knowledge, help with construction, and create training opportunities and conditions for economic self-sufficiency. A number of these projects still exist today, though some have taken on different names, such as the Carlos Marx Hospital in Managua, Nicaragua; the German-Vietnamese Friendship Hospital in Hanoi, Vietnam; and the Karl Marx Cement Factory in Cienfuegos, Cuba, to name but a few.
    2. Learning and Exchange Opportunities. Overall, more than 50,000 foreign students successfully completed their education at the universities and colleges of the DDR. The studies were financed by the DDR’s state budget. As a rule, there were no tuition fees, a large number of foreign students received scholarships, and accommodation was provided for them in student halls of residence. In addition to the students, many contract workers came to the DDR from allied states such as Mozambique, Vietnam, and Angola as well as from Poland and Hungary seeking job training and work in production. Right until the end, foreign workers remained a priority, with contract workers growing from 24,000 to 94,000 (1981-1989). In 1989, all foreigners in the DDR received full municipal voting rights and began to nominate candidates themselves.
    3. Political Support. While the West was slandering Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) as terrorists and ‘racists’ and conducting business with the apartheid regime in South Africa – even providing arms shipments – the DDR supported the ANC, provided the freedom fighters with military training, printed their publications, and cared for its wounded. After black students in the township of Soweto launched an uprising against the apartheid regime on 16 June 1976, the DDR began to commemorate international Soweto Day as a sign of solidarity with the South African people and their struggle. Solidarity was even extended to those in the belly of the beast: when Angela Davis was tried as a terrorist in the United States, a DDR correspondent presented her with flowers for Women’s Day and students led the One Million Roses for Angela Davis campaign, during which they delivered truckloads of cards with hand-painted roses to her in prison.

    The memory of this solidarity no longer remains either in Germany or in South Africa. Without the material support provided by the DDR, the USSR, and Cuba, it is unlikely that national liberation in South Africa would have come when it did. Cuban military support for the national liberation fighters at the 1987 Battle of Cuito Cuanavale was crucial for this defeat of the South African apartheid army, leading eventually to the collapse of the apartheid project in 1994.

    Berlin, 10. Weltfestspiel, Demonstration, Ehrentribüne

    The Free German Youth, a member of the World Federation of Democratic Youth, hosted the Tenth World Festival of Youth and Students in Berlin, 1973.

    Organisations such as the Federal Foundation for the Study of Communist Dictatorship in East Germany (Berlin) and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (Washington, United States) exist not only to denigrate the communist past and to malign communism, but also to make sure that communist projects in the present carry the penalty of their caricatures. To advance a left project in our time – which is imperative – is made much more difficult if it must carry the albatross of anti-communist fabrications on its back. That is the reason why this project, led by IF DDR, is so important. It is not merely an argument about the DDR; it is also, at its core, a broader argument about the possibilities opened by experiments to create a socialist society and the material improvements they create, and have created, in the lives of the people.

    Socialism does not emerge fully fledged nor perfectly formed. A socialist project inherits all the limitations of the past. It takes effort and patience to transform a country, with its rigidities and class hierarchies, into a socialist society. The DDR lasted for a mere forty years, half the life expectancy of the average German citizen. In its aftermath, the adversaries of socialism exaggerated all its problems to eclipse its achievements.

    Volker Braun, an East German poet, wrote an elegy to his forgotten country in October 1989 called Das Eigentum or Property.

    I’m still here: my country has gone West.
    PEACE FOR THE PALACES AND WAR ON THE SHACKS.
    I myself have given my country the boot.

    What little virtue it possessed burns in the fire.
    Winter is followed by a summer of desire.

    I might as well get lost, who cares what’s next
    And no one will ever again decipher my texts.

    What I never possessed, from me was taken.
    I will eternally long for what I didn’t partake in.

    Hope appeared on the path like a trap
    You grope and grab at the property I had.

    When will I say mine again and mean we and ours.

    Our quest here is not to reverse direction and exaggerate all the achievements while hiding the problems. The past is a resource to understand the complexities of social development so that lessons can be learnt about what went wrong and what went right. The IF DDR project, in collaboration with Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, is invested in this kind of archaeology to dig amongst the bones to discover how to improve the way we humans stretch our spines and stand upright with dignity.

    The post I’m Still Here, Though My Country’s Gone West first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Waiting for Catastrophes While Living Under the Specter of Pandemic and War

    Vijay Prashad

    When “How are you doing?” is also a question of politics and the world.

    The post Waiting for Catastrophes While Living Under the Specter of Pandemic and War appeared first on The Nation.

    This post was originally published on Article – The Nation.

  • The COVID-19 Catastrophe in India Keeps Growing

    Photograph Source: Gwydion M. Williams – CC BY 2.0

    For Ashish Yechury (1986-2021), journalist.

    It is difficult to overstate the grip of COVID-19 on India. WhatsApp bristles with messages about this or that friend and family member with the virus, while there are angry posts about how the central government has utterly failed its citizenry. This hospital is running out of beds and that hospital has no more oxygen, while there is evasion from Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Cabinet.

    Thirteen months after the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that the world was in the midst of a pandemic, the Indian government looks into the headlights like a transfixed animal, unable to move. While other countries are well advanced on their vaccination programs, the Indian government sits back and watches a second wave or a third wave land heavily on the Indian people.

    On April 21, 2021, the country registered 315,000 cases in a 24-hour period. This is an extraordinarily high number. Bear in mind that in China, where the virus was first detected in late 2019, the total number of detected cases stands at less than 100,000. This spike has raised eyebrows: is this a new variant, or is this a result of failure to manage social interactions (including the 3 million pilgrims who gathered at this year’s Kumbh Mela) and to vaccinate enough people.

    At the core is the total failure of the Indian government, led by PM Modi, to take this pandemic seriously.

    Disregard

    A glance around the world shows those governments that disregarded the WHO warnings suffered the worst ravages of COVID-19. From January 2020, the WHO had asked governments to insist on basic hygiene rules—washing hands, physical distance, mask wearing—and then later had suggested testing for COVID-19, contact tracing and social isolation. The first set of recommendations do not require immense resources. Vietnam’s government, for instance, took those recommendations very seriously and slowed the spread of the disease immediately.

    India’s government moved slowly despite evidence of the dangerousness of the disease. By March 10, 2020, before the WHO declared a pandemic, the Indian government reported about 50 COVID-19 cases in India, with infections doubled in 14 days. The first major act from India’s prime minister was a 14-hour Janata Curfew, which was dramatic but not in line with the WHO recommendations. This ruthless lockdown, with four hours’ notice, sent hundreds of thousands of workers on the road to their homes, penniless, some dying by the wayside, many carrying the virus to their towns and villages. Prime Minister Modi executed this lockdown without checking with his own departments, whose advice might have warned him against such a precipitous and unnecessary act.

    Prime Minister Modi took the entire pandemic lightly. He urged people to light candles and bang pots, to make noise to scare away the virus. The lockdown kept being extended, but there was nothing systematic, no national policy that one can find anywhere on the government’s websites. In May and June of 2020, the lockdown kept getting extended, although this was meaningless to the millions of working-class Indians who had to go to work to survive on their daily wages. A year into the pandemic, there are now 16 million people in India with detected infections, with 185,000 people confirmed dead from the pandemic. One has to write words like “detected” and “confirmed” because mortality data from India during this pandemic has been totally unreliable.

    Consequences of Privatization

    The consequences of turning over health care to the private sector and underfunding public health have been diabolical. For years now, advocates of public health care, such as the Jan Swasthya Abhiyan, have called for more government spending on public health and less reliance upon profit-driven health care. These calls fell on deaf ears.

    India’s governments have spent very low amounts on health—3.5 percent of GDP in 2018, a figure that has remained the same for decades. India’s current health expenditure per capita, by purchasing power parity, was 275.13 in 2018, around the figures of Kiribati, Myanmar and Sierra Leone. This is a very low number for a country with the kind of industrial capacity and wealth of India.

    In late 2020, the Indian government admitted that it has 0.8 medical doctors for every 1,000 Indians, and it has 1.7 nurses for every 1,000 Indians. No country of India’s size and wealth has such a low medical staff. It gets worse. India has only 5.3 beds for every 10,000 people, while China—for example—has 43.1 beds for the same number. India has only 2.3 critical care beds for 100,000 people (compared to 3.6 in China) and it has only 48,000 ventilators (China had 70,000 ventilators in Wuhan alone).

    The weakness of medical infrastructure is wholly due to privatization, where private sector hospitals run their system on the principle of maximum capacity and have no ability to handle peak loads. The theory of optimization does not permit the system to tackle surges, since in normal times it would mean that the hospitals would have surplus capacity. No private sector is going to voluntarily develop any surplus beds or surplus ventilators. It is this that inevitably causes the crisis in a pandemic.

    Low health spending means low expenditure on medical infrastructure and low wages for medical workers. This is a poor way to run a modern society.

    Vaccines and Oxygen

    Shortages are a normal problem in any society. But the shortages of basic medical goods in India during the pandemic have been scandalous.

    India has long been known as the “pharmacy of the world,” since India’s pharmaceutical industry sector has been skillful at reverse-engineering a range of generic drugs. It is the third-largest pharmaceutical industry manufacturer. India accounts for 60 percent of global vaccine production, including 90 percent of the WHO use of measles vaccine, and India has become the largest producer of pills for the U.S. market. But none of this helped during the crisis.

    Vaccines for COVID-19 are not available for Indians at the pace necessary. Vaccinations for Indians will not be complete before November 2022. The government’s new policy will allow vaccine makers to hike up prices, but not produce fast enough to cover needs (India’s public sector vaccine factories are sitting idle). No large-scale rapid procurement is on the cards. Nor is there enough medical oxygen, and promises to build capacity have been unfulfilled by the ruling party. India’s government has been exporting oxygen, even when it became clear that domestic reserves were depleted (it has also exported precious Remdesivir injections).

    On March 25, 2020, Modi said that he would win this Mahabharat—this epic battle—against COVID-19 in 18 days. Now, more than 56 weeks after that promise, India looks more like the blood-soaked fields of Kurukshetra, where thousands lay dead, with the war not even at halftime.

    This article was produced by Globetrotter.

    The post The COVID-19 Catastrophe in India Keeps Growing appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • The COVID-19 Catastrophe in India Keeps Growing

    Photograph Source: Gwydion M. Williams – CC BY 2.0

    For Ashish Yechury (1986-2021), journalist.

    It is difficult to overstate the grip of COVID-19 on India. WhatsApp bristles with messages about this or that friend and family member with the virus, while there are angry posts about how the central government has utterly failed its citizenry. This hospital is running out of beds and that hospital has no more oxygen, while there is evasion from Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Cabinet.

    Thirteen months after the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that the world was in the midst of a pandemic, the Indian government looks into the headlights like a transfixed animal, unable to move. While other countries are well advanced on their vaccination programs, the Indian government sits back and watches a second wave or a third wave land heavily on the Indian people.

    On April 21, 2021, the country registered 315,000 cases in a 24-hour period. This is an extraordinarily high number. Bear in mind that in China, where the virus was first detected in late 2019, the total number of detected cases stands at less than 100,000. This spike has raised eyebrows: is this a new variant, or is this a result of failure to manage social interactions (including the 3 million pilgrims who gathered at this year’s Kumbh Mela) and to vaccinate enough people.

    At the core is the total failure of the Indian government, led by PM Modi, to take this pandemic seriously.

    Disregard

    A glance around the world shows those governments that disregarded the WHO warnings suffered the worst ravages of COVID-19. From January 2020, the WHO had asked governments to insist on basic hygiene rules—washing hands, physical distance, mask wearing—and then later had suggested testing for COVID-19, contact tracing and social isolation. The first set of recommendations do not require immense resources. Vietnam’s government, for instance, took those recommendations very seriously and slowed the spread of the disease immediately.

    India’s government moved slowly despite evidence of the dangerousness of the disease. By March 10, 2020, before the WHO declared a pandemic, the Indian government reported about 50 COVID-19 cases in India, with infections doubled in 14 days. The first major act from India’s prime minister was a 14-hour Janata Curfew, which was dramatic but not in line with the WHO recommendations. This ruthless lockdown, with four hours’ notice, sent hundreds of thousands of workers on the road to their homes, penniless, some dying by the wayside, many carrying the virus to their towns and villages. Prime Minister Modi executed this lockdown without checking with his own departments, whose advice might have warned him against such a precipitous and unnecessary act.

    Prime Minister Modi took the entire pandemic lightly. He urged people to light candles and bang pots, to make noise to scare away the virus. The lockdown kept being extended, but there was nothing systematic, no national policy that one can find anywhere on the government’s websites. In May and June of 2020, the lockdown kept getting extended, although this was meaningless to the millions of working-class Indians who had to go to work to survive on their daily wages. A year into the pandemic, there are now 16 million people in India with detected infections, with 185,000 people confirmed dead from the pandemic. One has to write words like “detected” and “confirmed” because mortality data from India during this pandemic has been totally unreliable.

    Consequences of Privatization

    The consequences of turning over health care to the private sector and underfunding public health have been diabolical. For years now, advocates of public health care, such as the Jan Swasthya Abhiyan, have called for more government spending on public health and less reliance upon profit-driven health care. These calls fell on deaf ears.

    India’s governments have spent very low amounts on health—3.5 percent of GDP in 2018, a figure that has remained the same for decades. India’s current health expenditure per capita, by purchasing power parity, was 275.13 in 2018, around the figures of Kiribati, Myanmar and Sierra Leone. This is a very low number for a country with the kind of industrial capacity and wealth of India.

    In late 2020, the Indian government admitted that it has 0.8 medical doctors for every 1,000 Indians, and it has 1.7 nurses for every 1,000 Indians. No country of India’s size and wealth has such a low medical staff. It gets worse. India has only 5.3 beds for every 10,000 people, while China—for example—has 43.1 beds for the same number. India has only 2.3 critical care beds for 100,000 people (compared to 3.6 in China) and it has only 48,000 ventilators (China had 70,000 ventilators in Wuhan alone).

    The weakness of medical infrastructure is wholly due to privatization, where private sector hospitals run their system on the principle of maximum capacity and have no ability to handle peak loads. The theory of optimization does not permit the system to tackle surges, since in normal times it would mean that the hospitals would have surplus capacity. No private sector is going to voluntarily develop any surplus beds or surplus ventilators. It is this that inevitably causes the crisis in a pandemic.

    Low health spending means low expenditure on medical infrastructure and low wages for medical workers. This is a poor way to run a modern society.

    Vaccines and Oxygen

    Shortages are a normal problem in any society. But the shortages of basic medical goods in India during the pandemic have been scandalous.

    India has long been known as the “pharmacy of the world,” since India’s pharmaceutical industry sector has been skillful at reverse-engineering a range of generic drugs. It is the third-largest pharmaceutical industry manufacturer. India accounts for 60 percent of global vaccine production, including 90 percent of the WHO use of measles vaccine, and India has become the largest producer of pills for the U.S. market. But none of this helped during the crisis.

    Vaccines for COVID-19 are not available for Indians at the pace necessary. Vaccinations for Indians will not be complete before November 2022. The government’s new policy will allow vaccine makers to hike up prices, but not produce fast enough to cover needs (India’s public sector vaccine factories are sitting idle). No large-scale rapid procurement is on the cards. Nor is there enough medical oxygen, and promises to build capacity have been unfulfilled by the ruling party. India’s government has been exporting oxygen, even when it became clear that domestic reserves were depleted (it has also exported precious Remdesivir injections).

    On March 25, 2020, Modi said that he would win this Mahabharat—this epic battle—against COVID-19 in 18 days. Now, more than 56 weeks after that promise, India looks more like the blood-soaked fields of Kurukshetra, where thousands lay dead, with the war not even at halftime.

    This article was produced by Globetrotter.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • I Entered My Country’s House of Justice and Found a Snake Charmer’s Temple

    Colectivo Culturas Vivas, Senderos latinos / Latino paths, Honduras, 2019

    Colectivo Culturas Vivas, Senderos latinos / Latino paths, Honduras, 2019

    On a Sunday night on 21 March 2021, gunmen stopped Juan Carlos Cerros Escalante (age 41) as he walked from this mother’s home to his own in the village of Nueva Granada near San Antonio de Cortés (Honduras). The gunmen opened fire in front of a catholic church, killing this leader of United Communities in front of his children. Forty bullets were found at the scene.

    Jorge Vásquez of the National Platform of Indigenous Peoples said that Juan Carlos Cerros had been threatened for his leadership of the Lenca peoples and their fight to protect their land. Carlos Cerros was killed, Vásquez said, ‘because of the work we do’. None of his killers have been arrested.

    Two and a half weeks later, on 6 April, Roberto David Castillo Mejía entered the Supreme Court in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras. Castillo, the former president of Desarrollos Energéticos Sociedad Anónima (DESA), the company behind the Agua Zarca dam project on the Gualcarque River, came to face charges that he was the mastermind in the 2016 assassination of Berta Cáceres, the leader of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organisation of Honduras (COPINH). The next day, on a plea from the defence, the Court agreed to suspend the trial for the fourth time.

    Before the suspension, the legal team representing Berta and her family presented new evidence that established a wider conspiracy that involved the Atala Zablah family. The lawyers filed paperwork that showed confirmation of a payment of $1,254,000 from DESA to Potencia y Energia de Mesoamerica S.A. (PEMSA). This money went from DESA’s chief financial officer, Daniel Atala Midence, to David Castillo, who then funnelled it to the military officer Douglas Bustillo, who coordinated the assassination of Berta.

    In 2013, DESA had initiated the construction of a hydroelectric dam without consulting the Lenca community, who consider the river to be a sacred and common resource. Berta Cáceres opposed the Agua Zarca dam and defended the land of the Lenca people. As Vásquez said of the murder of Carlos Cerros, Berta too was killed for the work she did. She was killed, her family says, by a conspiracy that involved the Atala Zablah family, the main financial backers of the dam project. The Atala Zablah family’s company, Inversiones Las Jacaranda, raised their money – despite pleas from Berta – from FMO (a Dutch development bank), FinnFund (a Finnish development investor), and the Central American Bank of Economic Integration (a multilateral development institution).

    Bertha and Laura Zúniga Cáceres at a mural made by el Colectivo Culturas Vivas, Tegucigalpa, Honduras, 2021.

    Bertha and Laura Zúniga Cáceres at a mural made by el Colectivo Culturas Vivas, Tegucigalpa, Honduras, 2021.

    ‘We are in a lot of uncertainty’, Bertha Zúniga Cáceres, the daughter of Berta Cáceres, told me; ‘the justice system in Honduras has never cared about this’. The ‘this’ in her statement relates to the role of DESA and its executives. The authorities have been shielding the Atala Zablah family and the ruling party, which had itself tried to collude in the cover-up.

    In 2009, the US government actively participated in and egged on the oligarchy to undertake a coup d’état against the left-leaning government of Manuel Zelaya. Since then, Honduras has been governed by the far-right National Party, whose current leader and Honduran president is Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH). After Berta Cáceres was assassinated, President Hernández’s minister of security Julián Pacheco Tinoco wrote to Pedro Atala Zablah, one of the leaders of the Atala Zablah family and a board member of DESA. He wanted to assure Atala Zablah and his family that the government would not pursue the case with any seriousness; the case, he said, would be seen as a ‘crime of passion’. Zúniga Cáceres tells me that ‘neither did the army act alone nor did the company act alone either’. There is, she says, ‘coordination between the economic and military power centres, which is the essence of the dictatorship under which we live in Honduras’.

    This week, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research published a dossier on the 2009 coup and on the regime of JOH. It looks at how these processes have created a climate of impunity for class violence by the elites – such as the Atala Zablahs – against leaders such as Berta Cáceres and Carlos Cerros, brave people who defend the dignity and land of all people in Honduras. We researched and wrote the dossier with COPINH and Peoples Dispatch (special thanks to Zoe Alexandra). The dossier, Pity the Nation: Honduras Is Being Eaten From within and without,  comes in three parts:

    1. Part 1 details the fact of the 2009 coup, authorised by the United States government of President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
    2. Part 2 unmasks the structure of extreme right terror sown by the coup regime, which has its tentacles deep in the world of narco-trafficking.
    3. Part 3 provides three examples of the broad attack on the Honduran Left: the assassination of Berta, the attack on the trade unions, and the forced disappearance of Garifuna leaders in July 2020.

    The third section ends with a quote from Miriam Miranda, a leader of the Black Fraternal Organisation of Honduras (OFRANEH): ‘We are tired of the lies from the government of Honduras. [Government reports] have no substance. They don’t say anything. They make a joke of us, the Garifuna people. We do not want lies. We want the truth. We want life to be worth more in our country. We have to build new paths. We will continue fighting so that this becomes a reality’.

    In Yoro, Honduras, the people speak of the lluvia de peces, or the rain of fish, which they commemorate with a festival during the rainy season. Miracles such as this, it is hoped, will rescue people from the tribulations of hunger. Roberto Sosa (1930-2011), one of the great poets of Honduras, was born in Yoro, but he moved away from the miraculous toward the politics of the people and the Left. In 1968, he published his finest collection of poems, Los pobres (The Poor), which won the Adonáis Prize. The headline for this newsletter comes from one of the poems from this collection, La Casa de la Justicia. Here’s an extract:

    I entered
    the House of Justice
    of my country
    and found it to be
    a temple
    of snake charmers.

    ….

    Grim judges
    speak of purity
    with words
    that have acquired
    the brightness
    of a knife. The victims – in constrained space –
    measure terror in a single blow.

    Roberto Sosa’s line, ‘I entered the House of Justice of my country and found it to be a temple of snake charmers’, has been quoted often in the immediate aftermath of the 2009 coup and in the years that have followed. After the coup, Sosa said that Honduras had been turned ‘into a jail country’ (en un país cárcel). ‘Today, the entire country is militarised’, Sosa said, but he took refuge in the ‘massive and organised resistance that has not stopped demonstrating against the coup government, a resistance that does not retreat’.

    There is no retreat even today. None for the people of Honduras.

    The post I Entered My Country’s House of Justice and Found a Snake Charmer’s Temple first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Zambia Is the Tip of the Tail of the Global Dog

    From left to right: Vijay Prashad, Fred M’membe, Diego Sequera, and Erika Farías in Caracas, 2019. Photograph taken by Yeimi Salinas.

    On 12 August 2021, the people of Zambia will vote to elect a new president, who will be the seventh person elected to the office since Zambia won its independence from the United Kingdom in 1964 if the incumbent loses. The incumbent, President Edgar Lungu, is facing a strong challenge from Fred M’membe, the presidential candidate of the Socialist Party Zambia.

    M’membe knows the importance of a challenge. As the editor of The Post since its creation in 1991, M’membe has long faced malicious harassment and political persecution. The voice of M’membe’s The Post sizzled with truth-telling; silenced in 2016, it was reborn as The Mast.

    In 2009, an editorial in The Post described how, despite decades of independence, Zambia remained in the claws of an unjust world system. ‘Economically speaking, Zambia is the tip of the tail of the global dog,’ wrote The Post. ‘When the dog is happy, we find ourselves merrily flicking from side to side; when the dog is miserable, we find ourselves coiled up in a dark and smelly place’. No wonder that every government from Frederick Chiluba (1991-2002) to sitting President Edgar Lungu has tried to muzzle the paper and its editor, who cast a spotlight on the awful surrender of the Zambian political elite to multinational corporations and foreign bondholders. Now the editor of The Post is a presidential candidate.

    Mapopa Manda (Zambia), Visionary, 2019.

    Mapopa Manda (Zambia), Visionary, 2019.

    Fred M’membe is a humble man who demurs about his presidential run through a warm smile. ‘Ours is a collective leadership’, he tells me of the Socialist Party, which was launched in March 2018. The manifesto of the Party pledges to reverse Zambia’s slide into privatisation and de-industrialisation, social processes that have damaged social life in the country and created a sense of despondency amongst the masses. A reading of that manifesto in these COVID-19 times is chilling: ‘Due to the poor state of water and sanitation, urban areas are prone to water-borne diseases that break out almost every year’, with water scarce and half the population without connection to sanitation systems.

    The neoliberal policies pushed since the end of the government of Zambia’s first president, Kenneth Kaunda (1964-1991), have been catastrophic for Zambians. These policies, M’membe told me, ‘are creating an enormous time bomb in our country. We shouldn’t resign ourselves to hunger, unemployment, squalor, disease, ignorance, hopelessness, and despair. Struggling for a better Zambia means, in part, to build a better Zambia’.

    Lutanda Mwamba (Zambia), Chuma Grocery, 1993.

    Lutanda Mwamba (Zambia), Chuma Grocery, 1993.

    Zambia is a rich country with a poor population. Zambia’s poverty rate is estimated between 40% and 60% (the country only has statistics up to 2015). A World Bank household survey conducted in early June 2020 found that half of the families who relied on agriculture saw a substantial loss of income and 82% of families that earned income from non-farm businesses saw their livelihoods shrink. The World Bank found that remittance flows into Zambia also precipitously declined.

    Because of the drop in income, households reduced their consumption of goods, especially food. In 2019, before the pandemic, the Global Hunger Index found the hunger situation in Zambia to be ‘alarming’. But there is no reliable data on the growth of hunger caused by the pandemic, which prevented the Index from properly assessing the situation. Instead, it assessed the situation as ‘serious’. ‘Zambia’, M’membe told me, ‘stands at the brink of a major catastrophe’.

    In November 2020, Zambia defaulted on a $42.5 million payment towards a Eurobond. President Lungu’s government has been talking to the IMF ever since, hoping to get a bailout without stringent austerity measures. Such austerity measures – including cuts in public services that the country can ill afford during the pandemic – would jeopardise Lungu’s chances in the August 2021 elections. In early March, the IMF’s staff visit concluded that ‘significant progress’ has been made toward an ‘appropriate policy package’, but no details or timetable have been released.

    Mulenga Chafilwa (Zambia), Drip Drip Drip, 2014.

    Mulenga Chafilwa (Zambia), Drip Drip Drip, 2014.

    A month before the IMF team met with Zambian officials, the country’s minister of mines Richard Musukwa announced that the country’s copper production had reached 882,061 tonnes. This was an increase by 10.8% from 2019 figures, a ‘historical high’ according to Musukwa. Given the move to electric cars and to more high-tech appliances, copper wiring is certain to be in high demand, which is why Zambia hopes to produce more than 1 million tonnes a year in the next few years. Copper prices are inching upwards ($4 per pound) toward the highs of 2011 ($4.54 per pound). There is plenty of money to be made from copper, particularly for the Zambian people.

    Four companies dominate Zambian copper: Barrick Lumwana of Canada’s Barrick Gold, FQM Kansanshi of Canada’s First Quantum, Mopani of Switzerland’s Glencore, and Konkola Copper Mines of the UK’s Vedanta. These are major mining companies that leech Zambia of its resources through creative means such as transfer mispricing and bribery. In 2019, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research spoke to Gyekye Tanoh, head of the Political Economy Unit at the Third World Network-Africa based in Accra (Ghana), about the situation of ‘resource sovereignty’. His comments on Zambia merit re-reading:

    Because Zambia is now utterly reliant on copper exports, the international copper price movements have a preponderant and distorting effect on the exchange rate of the Kwacha [Zambia’s currency]. This distortion and the limited revenue from copper exports impacts the competitiveness and viability of other, non-copper exports as a result of the fluctuations of the Kwacha. The fluctuations also impact the social sector. A study done in 2018 showed that changes in the exchange rates oscillated between -11.1% to +13.4% in the period between 1997 and 2008. The loss of funds from donors to the Ministry of Health in Zambia amounted to US $13.4 million or $1.1 million per year. Because of the collapse of the Kwacha between 2015 and 2016, per capita health expenditure in Zambia fell from $44 (2015) to $23 (2016).

    M’membe told me that poverty levels in the Copperbelt Province, the heart of Zambia’s wealth, are very high. It is striking that 60% of the children in this copper-rich area cannot read. ‘Foreign multinational corporations have been the major beneficiaries’, he explained. A cozy relationship with the Zambian elites enables these firms to pay low taxes and take their profits out of the country, as well as to use techniques such as outsourcing and subcontracting to skirt Zambia’s labour laws. This industry, M’membe said, ‘still operates along colonial lines’. Indeed, in Phyllis Deane’s Colonial Social Accounting (1953), she shows that in Northern Rhodesia – Zambia’s name during colonial rule – two-thirds of the profits were taken out of the territory to pay foreign shareholders, while two-thirds of the remainder went to the European workers and the minuscule leftovers went to the vast majority, the African miners.

    ‘Reliance on non-renewable resources like minerals for growth is, by definition, unsustainable’, M’membe reflected. Any government in Zambia will have to rely on copper – only a third of it mined to date – until the country’s economy and society are properly diversified. The Socialist Party has proposed a range of policies to harness the copper resources, from cutting better deals with the current owners to full-scale nationalisation (a policy that is currently being imposed on Zambia, as First Quantum and Glencore have cut back on their investments, forcing the government to step in). M’membe laid out seven points for a just mining policy for the immediate period:

    1. The socialist government will declare minerals as strategic metals and provide a protective legal environment for their extraction. The export of concentrates will be outlawed, and the marketing of minerals will be coordinated by the state.
    2. Zambian labour will have their power strengthened by laws and by political will.
    3. Mining firms will have to source at least 30% of their industrial inputs from Zambia, which would encourage manufacturing.
    4. Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines Limited-Investment Holdings (ZCCM-IH), a state-owned corporation, will take a controlling interest in all new mines.
    5. Resource rent or variable income tax will be introduced to secure additional mineral rents.
    6. All proceeds from mineral sales will first be credited in Bank of Zambia accounts – an essential aspect of currency and balance of payments management and stability.
    7. Mines will have to adhere to state-of-the-art environmental technologies, practices, and standards.

    Beyond this, the socialist government will encourage the creation of miners’ cooperatives, particularly for manganese, which is cheaper to mine.

    Mwamba Mulangala (Zambia), Political Strategies, 2009.

    Mwamba Mulangala (Zambia), Political Strategies, 2009.

    There is seriousness of purpose in the Socialist Party’s agenda for Zambia. M’membe travels the length and breadth of his country speaking about this agenda. ‘We should win because of what we believe in’, he tells me. He believes that every child in Zambia should be able to read and should be able to go to sleep without hunger pangs. This is a belief that should be shared by every human being.

    This article was posted on Thursday, April 8th, 2021 at 8:12pm and is filed under Austerity, Mining, Socialism, Zambia.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Zambia Is the Tip of the Tail of the Global Dog

    From left to right: Vijay Prashad, Fred M’membe, Diego Sequera, and Erika Farías in Caracas, 2019. Photograph taken by Yeimi Salinas.

    On 12 August 2021, the people of Zambia will vote to elect a new president, who will be the seventh person elected to the office since Zambia won its independence from the United Kingdom in 1964 if the incumbent loses. The incumbent, President Edgar Lungu, is facing a strong challenge from Fred M’membe, the presidential candidate of the Socialist Party Zambia.

    M’membe knows the importance of a challenge. As the editor of The Post since its creation in 1991, M’membe has long faced malicious harassment and political persecution. The voice of M’membe’s The Post sizzled with truth-telling; silenced in 2016, it was reborn as The Mast.

    In 2009, an editorial in The Post described how, despite decades of independence, Zambia remained in the claws of an unjust world system. ‘Economically speaking, Zambia is the tip of the tail of the global dog,’ wrote The Post. ‘When the dog is happy, we find ourselves merrily flicking from side to side; when the dog is miserable, we find ourselves coiled up in a dark and smelly place’. No wonder that every government from Frederick Chiluba (1991-2002) to sitting President Edgar Lungu has tried to muzzle the paper and its editor, who cast a spotlight on the awful surrender of the Zambian political elite to multinational corporations and foreign bondholders. Now the editor of The Post is a presidential candidate.

    Mapopa Manda (Zambia), Visionary, 2019.

    Mapopa Manda (Zambia), Visionary, 2019.

    Fred M’membe is a humble man who demurs about his presidential run through a warm smile. ‘Ours is a collective leadership’, he tells me of the Socialist Party, which was launched in March 2018. The manifesto of the Party pledges to reverse Zambia’s slide into privatisation and de-industrialisation, social processes that have damaged social life in the country and created a sense of despondency amongst the masses. A reading of that manifesto in these COVID-19 times is chilling: ‘Due to the poor state of water and sanitation, urban areas are prone to water-borne diseases that break out almost every year’, with water scarce and half the population without connection to sanitation systems.

    The neoliberal policies pushed since the end of the government of Zambia’s first president, Kenneth Kaunda (1964-1991), have been catastrophic for Zambians. These policies, M’membe told me, ‘are creating an enormous time bomb in our country. We shouldn’t resign ourselves to hunger, unemployment, squalor, disease, ignorance, hopelessness, and despair. Struggling for a better Zambia means, in part, to build a better Zambia’.

    Lutanda Mwamba (Zambia), Chuma Grocery, 1993.

    Lutanda Mwamba (Zambia), Chuma Grocery, 1993.

    Zambia is a rich country with a poor population. Zambia’s poverty rate is estimated between 40% and 60% (the country only has statistics up to 2015). A World Bank household survey conducted in early June 2020 found that half of the families who relied on agriculture saw a substantial loss of income and 82% of families that earned income from non-farm businesses saw their livelihoods shrink. The World Bank found that remittance flows into Zambia also precipitously declined.

    Because of the drop in income, households reduced their consumption of goods, especially food. In 2019, before the pandemic, the Global Hunger Index found the hunger situation in Zambia to be ‘alarming’. But there is no reliable data on the growth of hunger caused by the pandemic, which prevented the Index from properly assessing the situation. Instead, it assessed the situation as ‘serious’. ‘Zambia’, M’membe told me, ‘stands at the brink of a major catastrophe’.

    In November 2020, Zambia defaulted on a $42.5 million payment towards a Eurobond. President Lungu’s government has been talking to the IMF ever since, hoping to get a bailout without stringent austerity measures. Such austerity measures – including cuts in public services that the country can ill afford during the pandemic – would jeopardise Lungu’s chances in the August 2021 elections. In early March, the IMF’s staff visit concluded that ‘significant progress’ has been made toward an ‘appropriate policy package’, but no details or timetable have been released.

    Mulenga Chafilwa (Zambia), Drip Drip Drip, 2014.

    Mulenga Chafilwa (Zambia), Drip Drip Drip, 2014.

    A month before the IMF team met with Zambian officials, the country’s minister of mines Richard Musukwa announced that the country’s copper production had reached 882,061 tonnes. This was an increase by 10.8% from 2019 figures, a ‘historical high’ according to Musukwa. Given the move to electric cars and to more high-tech appliances, copper wiring is certain to be in high demand, which is why Zambia hopes to produce more than 1 million tonnes a year in the next few years. Copper prices are inching upwards ($4 per pound) toward the highs of 2011 ($4.54 per pound). There is plenty of money to be made from copper, particularly for the Zambian people.

    Four companies dominate Zambian copper: Barrick Lumwana of Canada’s Barrick Gold, FQM Kansanshi of Canada’s First Quantum, Mopani of Switzerland’s Glencore, and Konkola Copper Mines of the UK’s Vedanta. These are major mining companies that leech Zambia of its resources through creative means such as transfer mispricing and bribery. In 2019, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research spoke to Gyekye Tanoh, head of the Political Economy Unit at the Third World Network-Africa based in Accra (Ghana), about the situation of ‘resource sovereignty’. His comments on Zambia merit re-reading:

    Because Zambia is now utterly reliant on copper exports, the international copper price movements have a preponderant and distorting effect on the exchange rate of the Kwacha [Zambia’s currency]. This distortion and the limited revenue from copper exports impacts the competitiveness and viability of other, non-copper exports as a result of the fluctuations of the Kwacha. The fluctuations also impact the social sector. A study done in 2018 showed that changes in the exchange rates oscillated between -11.1% to +13.4% in the period between 1997 and 2008. The loss of funds from donors to the Ministry of Health in Zambia amounted to US $13.4 million or $1.1 million per year. Because of the collapse of the Kwacha between 2015 and 2016, per capita health expenditure in Zambia fell from $44 (2015) to $23 (2016).

    M’membe told me that poverty levels in the Copperbelt Province, the heart of Zambia’s wealth, are very high. It is striking that 60% of the children in this copper-rich area cannot read. ‘Foreign multinational corporations have been the major beneficiaries’, he explained. A cozy relationship with the Zambian elites enables these firms to pay low taxes and take their profits out of the country, as well as to use techniques such as outsourcing and subcontracting to skirt Zambia’s labour laws. This industry, M’membe said, ‘still operates along colonial lines’. Indeed, in Phyllis Deane’s Colonial Social Accounting (1953), she shows that in Northern Rhodesia – Zambia’s name during colonial rule – two-thirds of the profits were taken out of the territory to pay foreign shareholders, while two-thirds of the remainder went to the European workers and the minuscule leftovers went to the vast majority, the African miners.

    ‘Reliance on non-renewable resources like minerals for growth is, by definition, unsustainable’, M’membe reflected. Any government in Zambia will have to rely on copper – only a third of it mined to date – until the country’s economy and society are properly diversified. The Socialist Party has proposed a range of policies to harness the copper resources, from cutting better deals with the current owners to full-scale nationalisation (a policy that is currently being imposed on Zambia, as First Quantum and Glencore have cut back on their investments, forcing the government to step in). M’membe laid out seven points for a just mining policy for the immediate period:

    1. The socialist government will declare minerals as strategic metals and provide a protective legal environment for their extraction. The export of concentrates will be outlawed, and the marketing of minerals will be coordinated by the state.
    2. Zambian labour will have their power strengthened by laws and by political will.
    3. Mining firms will have to source at least 30% of their industrial inputs from Zambia, which would encourage manufacturing.
    4. Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines Limited-Investment Holdings (ZCCM-IH), a state-owned corporation, will take a controlling interest in all new mines.
    5. Resource rent or variable income tax will be introduced to secure additional mineral rents.
    6. All proceeds from mineral sales will first be credited in Bank of Zambia accounts – an essential aspect of currency and balance of payments management and stability.
    7. Mines will have to adhere to state-of-the-art environmental technologies, practices, and standards.

    Beyond this, the socialist government will encourage the creation of miners’ cooperatives, particularly for manganese, which is cheaper to mine.

    Mwamba Mulangala (Zambia), Political Strategies, 2009.

    Mwamba Mulangala (Zambia), Political Strategies, 2009.

    There is seriousness of purpose in the Socialist Party’s agenda for Zambia. M’membe travels the length and breadth of his country speaking about this agenda. ‘We should win because of what we believe in’, he tells me. He believes that every child in Zambia should be able to read and should be able to go to sleep without hunger pangs. This is a belief that should be shared by every human being.

    This article was posted on Thursday, April 8th, 2021 at 8:12pm and is filed under Austerity, Mining, Socialism, Zambia.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Zambia Is the Tip of the Tail of the Global Dog

    From left to right: Vijay Prashad, Fred M'membe, Diego Sequera, and Erika Farías. Photographer: Yeimi Salinas.

    From left to right: Vijay Prashad, Fred M’membe, Diego Sequera, and Erika Farías in Caracas, 2019. Photograph taken by Yeimi Salinas.

    On 12 August 2021, the people of Zambia will vote to elect a new president, who will be the seventh person elected to the office since Zambia won its independence from the United Kingdom in 1964 if the incumbent loses. The incumbent, President Edgar Lungu, is facing a strong challenge from Fred M’membe, the presidential candidate of the Socialist Party Zambia.

    M’membe knows the importance of a challenge. As the editor of The Post since its creation in 1991, M’membe has long faced malicious harassment and political persecution. The voice of M’membe’s The Post sizzled with truth-telling; silenced in 2016, it was reborn as The Mast.

    In 2009, an editorial in The Post described how, despite decades of independence, Zambia remained in the claws of an unjust world system. ‘Economically speaking, Zambia is the tip of the tail of the global dog,’ wrote The Post. ‘When the dog is happy, we find ourselves merrily flicking from side to side; when the dog is miserable, we find ourselves coiled up in a dark and smelly place’. No wonder that every government from Frederick Chiluba (1991-2002) to sitting President Edgar Lungu has tried to muzzle the paper and its editor, who cast a spotlight on the awful surrender of the Zambian political elite to multinational corporations and foreign bondholders. Now the editor of The Post is a presidential candidate.

    Mapopa Manda (Zambia), Visionary, 2019.

    Mapopa Manda (Zambia), Visionary, 2019.

    Fred M’membe is a humble man who demurs about his presidential run through a warm smile. ‘Ours is a collective leadership’, he tells me of the Socialist Party, which was launched in March 2018. The manifesto of the Party pledges to reverse Zambia’s slide into privatisation and de-industrialisation, social processes that have damaged social life in the country and created a sense of despondency amongst the masses. A reading of that manifesto in these COVID-19 times is chilling: ‘Due to the poor state of water and sanitation, urban areas are prone to water-borne diseases that break out almost every year’, with water scarce and half the population without connection to sanitation systems.

    The neoliberal policies pushed since the end of the government of Zambia’s first president, Kenneth Kaunda (1964-1991), have been catastrophic for Zambians. These policies, M’membe told me, ‘are creating an enormous time bomb in our country. We shouldn’t resign ourselves to hunger, unemployment, squalor, disease, ignorance, hopelessness, and despair. Struggling for a better Zambia means, in part, to build a better Zambia’.

    Lutanda Mwamba (Zambia), Chuma Grocery, 1993.

    Lutanda Mwamba (Zambia), Chuma Grocery, 1993.

    Zambia is a rich country with a poor population. Zambia’s poverty rate is estimated between 40% and 60% (the country only has statistics up to 2015). A World Bank household survey conducted in early June 2020 found that half of the families who relied on agriculture saw a substantial loss of income and 82% of families that earned income from non-farm businesses saw their livelihoods shrink. The World Bank found that remittance flows into Zambia also precipitously declined.

    Because of the drop in income, households reduced their consumption of goods, especially food. In 2019, before the pandemic, the Global Hunger Index found the hunger situation in Zambia to be ‘alarming’. But there is no reliable data on the growth of hunger caused by the pandemic, which prevented the Index from properly assessing the situation. Instead, it assessed the situation as ‘serious’. ‘Zambia’, M’membe told me, ‘stands at the brink of a major catastrophe’.

    In November 2020, Zambia defaulted on a $42.5 million payment towards a Eurobond. President Lungu’s government has been talking to the IMF ever since, hoping to get a bailout without stringent austerity measures. Such austerity measures – including cuts in public services that the country can ill afford during the pandemic – would jeopardise Lungu’s chances in the August 2021 elections. In early March, the IMF’s staff visit concluded that ‘significant progress’ has been made toward an ‘appropriate policy package’, but no details or timetable have been released.

    Mulenga Chafilwa (Zambia), Drip Drip Drip, 2014.

    Mulenga Chafilwa (Zambia), Drip Drip Drip, 2014.

    A month before the IMF team met with Zambian officials, the country’s minister of mines Richard Musukwa announced that the country’s copper production had reached 882,061 tonnes. This was an increase by 10.8% from 2019 figures, a ‘historical high’ according to Musukwa. Given the move to electric cars and to more high-tech appliances, copper wiring is certain to be in high demand, which is why Zambia hopes to produce more than 1 million tonnes a year in the next few years. Copper prices are inching upwards ($4 per pound) toward the highs of 2011 ($4.54 per pound). There is plenty of money to be made from copper, particularly for the Zambian people.

    Four companies dominate Zambian copper: Barrick Lumwana of Canada’s Barrick Gold, FQM Kansanshi of Canada’s First Quantum, Mopani of Switzerland’s Glencore, and Konkola Copper Mines of the UK’s Vedanta. These are major mining companies that leech Zambia of its resources through creative means such as transfer mispricing and bribery. In 2019, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research spoke to Gyekye Tanoh, head of the Political Economy Unit at the Third World Network-Africa based in Accra (Ghana), about the situation of ‘resource sovereignty’. His comments on Zambia merit re-reading:

    Because Zambia is now utterly reliant on copper exports, the international copper price movements have a preponderant and distorting effect on the exchange rate of the Kwacha [Zambia’s currency]. This distortion and the limited revenue from copper exports impacts the competitiveness and viability of other, non-copper exports as a result of the fluctuations of the Kwacha. The fluctuations also impact the social sector. A study done in 2018 showed that changes in the exchange rates oscillated between -11.1% to +13.4% in the period between 1997 and 2008. The loss of funds from donors to the Ministry of Health in Zambia amounted to US $13.4 million or $1.1 million per year. Because of the collapse of the Kwacha between 2015 and 2016, per capita health expenditure in Zambia fell from $44 (2015) to $23 (2016).

    M’membe told me that poverty levels in the Copperbelt Province, the heart of Zambia’s wealth, are very high. It is striking that 60% of the children in this copper-rich area cannot read. ‘Foreign multinational corporations have been the major beneficiaries’, he explained. A cozy relationship with the Zambian elites enables these firms to pay low taxes and take their profits out of the country, as well as to use techniques such as outsourcing and subcontracting to skirt Zambia’s labour laws. This industry, M’membe said, ‘still operates along colonial lines’. Indeed, in Phyllis Deane’s Colonial Social Accounting (1953), she shows that in Northern Rhodesia – Zambia’s name during colonial rule – two-thirds of the profits were taken out of the territory to pay foreign shareholders, while two-thirds of the remainder went to the European workers and the minuscule leftovers went to the vast majority, the African miners.

    ‘Reliance on non-renewable resources like minerals for growth is, by definition, unsustainable’, M’membe reflected. Any government in Zambia will have to rely on copper – only a third of it mined to date – until the country’s economy and society are properly diversified. The Socialist Party has proposed a range of policies to harness the copper resources, from cutting better deals with the current owners to full-scale nationalisation (a policy that is currently being imposed on Zambia, as First Quantum and Glencore have cut back on their investments, forcing the government to step in). M’membe laid out seven points for a just mining policy for the immediate period:

    1. The socialist government will declare minerals as strategic metals and provide a protective legal environment for their extraction. The export of concentrates will be outlawed, and the marketing of minerals will be coordinated by the state.
    2. Zambian labour will have their power strengthened by laws and by political will.
    3. Mining firms will have to source at least 30% of their industrial inputs from Zambia, which would encourage manufacturing.
    4. Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines Limited-Investment Holdings (ZCCM-IH), a state-owned corporation, will take a controlling interest in all new mines.
    5. Resource rent or variable income tax will be introduced to secure additional mineral rents.
    6. All proceeds from mineral sales will first be credited in Bank of Zambia accounts – an essential aspect of currency and balance of payments management and stability.
    7. Mines will have to adhere to state-of-the-art environmental technologies, practices, and standards.

    Beyond this, the socialist government will encourage the creation of miners’ cooperatives, particularly for manganese, which is cheaper to mine.

    Mwamba Mulangala (Zambia), Political Strategies, 2009.

    Mwamba Mulangala (Zambia), Political Strategies, 2009.

    There is seriousness of purpose in the Socialist Party’s agenda for Zambia. M’membe travels the length and breadth of his country speaking about this agenda. ‘We should win because of what we believe in’, he tells me. He believes that every child in Zambia should be able to read and should be able to go to sleep without hunger pangs. This is a belief that should be shared by every human being.

    The post Zambia Is the Tip of the Tail of the Global Dog first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Vaccine Must Be a Common Good for Humanity

    Vladimir Griuntal’ and G. Iablonovskii (USSR), Chto eto takoe? (‘What is This?’) 1932.

    Vladimir Griuntal’ and G. Iablonovskii (USSR), Chto eto takoe? (‘What is This?’) 1932.

    Nearly three million people have reportedly been killed by the novel coronavirus (SAR-CoV-2) and upwards of 128 million people have been infected by the virus, many with long-lasting health repercussions. Thus far, roughly 1.5% of the world’s population of 7.7 billion have been vaccinated, but 80% of them are from only ten countries. In February, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research warned about the ‘medical apartheid’ that has shaped the vaccine roll-out.

    Since 1950, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has celebrated Global Health Day on 7 April. Each year, the WHO choses a different theme for the day, with last year’s being ‘Support Nurses and Midwives’. This year, the theme is ‘Building a fairer, healthier world’, which goes to the heart of medical apartheid.

    On 1 April, the International Week of Anti-Imperialist Struggle released the ‘International Manifesto for Life,’ which called for ‘free vaccines for all people’. This week’s newsletter is dedicated to our Red Alert no. 10, which – with the guidance of scientists and doctors – looks at the need for a people’s vaccine.

    What is a vaccine?

    Infectious diseases can cause serious illness and death. Those who survive the infection often develop long-lasting protection from that same disease. About 150 years ago, scientists discovered that infections are caused by microscopic ‘germs’ (what we now call pathogens), which can spread from animals to humans and from person to person. Could a small or weakened portion of these pathogens trigger changes in the body that might protect people from severe infections in the future? This is the principle behind vaccines.

    A vaccine, containing microscopic molecules that mimic parts of an infection pathogen, can be injected into the body to activate this pre-emptive protection against the disease. Although one vaccine protects just one individual against just one pathogen, when many vaccines are considered together in organised, large-scale vaccination programmes, they become crucial to community-level interventions.

    Not all infections can be prevented by vaccines. Despite huge financial investments, we still do not yet have (and may never have) dependable vaccines for certain infectious diseases – such as HIV-AIDS and malaria – due to these diseases’ biological complexity. It has been possible for COVID-19 vaccines to be rushed into use because – for the most part– they are based on well-understood biological mechanisms in less complex disease situations. Vaccines are an important measure to contain infectious epidemics. However, genetic changes in the infectious microbe can make vaccines ineffective and necessitate development and deployment of new vaccines.

    Roger Melis (DDR), Kinder in der Kollwitzstraße (‘Children in Kollwitzstraße’), 1974.

    Roger Melis (DDR), Kinder in der Kollwitzstraße (‘Children in Kollwitzstraße’), 1974.

    Why aren’t COVID-19 vaccines being provided to all of the world’s 7.7 billion people?

    Not long after the emergence of the novel coronavirus (SAR-CoV-2), Chinese authorities sequenced the virus and shared that information on a public website. Scientists from public and private institutions rushed to download the information to better understand the virus and to find a way to both treat its effects on the human body and to create a vaccine to immunise people against the disease. At this stage, no patent was issued on any of the information.

    Within months, eight private and public sector firms announced that they had vaccine candidates: Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Novavax, Johnson & Johnson, Sanofi/GSK, Sinovac, Sinopharm and Gamaleya. The Sinovac, Sinopharm, and Gamaleya vaccines are produced by the Chinese and Russian public sectors (by mid-March, China and Russia had provided 800 million doses to 41 countries). The others are produced by private firms that have received vast amounts of public funding. Moderna, for instance, received $2.48 billion from the US government, while Pfizer received $548 million from the European Union and the German government. These firms put the public funding towards making a vaccine and then extracted enormous profits from their sales and further secured these profits through patents. This is one example of pandemic profiteering.

    Information about the numbers of vaccines sold and transported to different parts of the world changes rapidly. Nonetheless, it is now acknowledged that many poorer nations will not have vaccines for their citizens before 2023, while the Global North has secured more vaccines than they require – enough to vaccinate their populations three times over. Canada, for instance, has enough vaccines to vaccinate its citizens five times. The Global North, with less than 14% of the world’s population, has secured more than half the total anticipated vaccines. This is known as vaccine hoarding or vaccine nationalism.

    The governments of India and South Africa approached the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in October 2020 to ask for a temporary waiver of patent obligations under the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). If the WTO had agreed to this waiver, these countries could have produced generic versions of the vaccine to distribute at low cost for a mass vaccination drive. However, the Global North led the opposition to this proposal, arguing that such a waiver – even in the midst of a pandemic – would stifle research and innovation (despite the fact that the vaccines were developed largely with public money). The Global North successfully blocked the application for the waiver in the WTO.

    In April 2020, the World Health Organisation (WHO), with other partners, set up the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access or COVAX. The point of COVAX is to ensure equitable access to the vaccines. The project is led by UNICEF; GAVI, The Vaccine Alliance; the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI); and the WHO. Despite the fact that the majority of the world’s countries signed on to the alliance, vaccines are not being distributed to the Global South in sufficient numbers. A study from December 2020 found that, during 2021, nearly seventy countries in the Global South will only be able to vaccinate one in ten people.

    Rather than supporting the India-South Africa application for the waiver, COVAX backed a proposal for patent pooling called Covid-19 Technology Access Pool (C-Tap). This process would involve two or more patent holders agreeing to license their patents to one another or to any third party. COVAX has not received any contributions to date from pharmaceutical companies.

    In May 2020, the WHO proposed to establish an international COVID-19 vaccine solidarity trial in which the WHO would coordinate trial sites in multiple countries. This would have led emerging vaccine candidates to enter clinical trials rapidly and transparently; they would have been tested in multiple populations and comparisons could have been made for specific strengths and limitations. Both Big Pharma and the countries of the North suffocated this proposal.

    Joaquín Torres García (Uruguay), Energía Atómica (Atomic Energy), 1946.

    Joaquín Torres García (Uruguay), Energía Atómica (Atomic Energy), 1946.

    What would it take to produce basic vaccines for the world’s 7.7 billion people?

    The production of vaccines varies based on the actual technological platform required for creating the particular infection mimicry to be used for the specific vaccine. For COVID-19 vaccines, there are many successful platforms. Two such instances have been the RNA vaccines (in the case of Moderna) and adenovirus vaccines (in the case of AstraZeneca). These technology platforms are robust, meaning that if the know-how (including trade secrets for the vaccine production) and skilled personnel are available and manufacturing lines are scaled-up and efficient, the vaccine could be produced for the people. The word ‘if’ is in italics because these are the most important impediments that stem from the capitalist logic of intellectual property rights and the long-term drive to undermine a public sector that centres the social good.

    One intermediate approach to vaccine production attempts the large-scale manufacture of mimic proteins in fermentation tanks (the Novavax vaccine, for example, is manufactured in this way). For this platform, the absorption capacity and personnel with skills are more widespread. The quality control and assurance issues are more varied batch-to-batch in these platforms, which is a hurdle for widespread decentralised production.

    There is a much simpler way to produce the vaccines: to grow the infectious agent, inactivate it (namely, to make it non-dangerous), and inject that into the body (such as Covaxin, the vaccine developed by Bharat in India). But there are problems here since it is not always easy to inactivate the harmful pathogen whilst still keeping it whole to develop the antibodies.

    Alfred Eisenstaedt (USA), Student Nurses at Roosevelt Hospital (1938).

    Alfred Eisenstaedt (USA), Student Nurses at Roosevelt Hospital (1938).

    What would it take to administer vaccines for the 7.7 billion?

    To widely administer the COVID-19 vaccines across the globe, we need to consider three elements:

    1. Public Health Systems. Effective vaccination programmes require robust public health systems. But these have been eroded by long-term austerity policies in many countries across the world. Therefore, there are insufficient numbers of skilled and practiced personnel to administer the vaccine; since these are sensitive vaccines, preparation and administration of the vaccine must be done by trained public health workers (both to ensure the vaccine is delivered optimally and to prevent side effects).
    2. Transportation and Cold Chains. Since regional and national vaccine production lines are not available, the vaccines need to be transported over long distances. Some COVID-19 vaccines that require an ultra-cold chain are simply impractical in much of the Global South.
    3. Medical Monitoring Systems. Finally, there need to be well-developed systems to monitor the impact of the vaccine. This requires long-term follow-up and both personnel and technologies that are often lacking in poorer nations, which have long been disadvantaged by the global economic order.
    Otman Ghalmi (Democratic Way/Morocco), Dr. Nawal El-Saadawi (1931-2021), 2021.

    Otman Ghalmi (Democratic Way/Morocco), Dr. Nawal El-Saadawi (1931-2021), 2021.

    It is worthwhile to read and circulate the Alma-Ata Declaration (1978) on primary health care and the People’s Charter for Health (2000), both strong statements for a robust, humane approach to health care. The latter asks for a rejection of ‘patents on life’, which includes patents on vaccines. There is no alternative to a people’s vaccine, no alternative to life over profit.

    The post The Vaccine Must Be a Common Good for Humanity first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Vaccine Must Be a Common Good for Humanity

    Vladimir Griuntal’ and G. Iablonovskii (USSR), Chto eto takoe? (‘What is This?’) 1932.

    Nearly three million people have reportedly been killed by the novel coronavirus (SAR-CoV-2) and upwards of 128 million people have been infected by the virus, many with long-lasting health repercussions. Thus far, roughly 1.5% of the world’s population of 7.7 billion have been vaccinated, but 80% of them are from only ten countries. In February, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research warned about the ‘medical apartheid’ that has shaped the vaccine roll-out.

    Since 1950, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has celebrated Global Health Day on 7 April. Each year, the WHO choses a different theme for the day, with last year’s being ‘Support Nurses and Midwives’. This year, the theme is ‘Building a fairer, healthier world’, which goes to the heart of medical apartheid.

    On 1 April, the International Week of Anti-Imperialist Struggle released the ‘International Manifesto for Life,’ which called for ‘free vaccines for all people’. This week’s newsletter is dedicated to our Red Alert no. 10, which – with the guidance of scientists and doctors – looks at the need for a people’s vaccine.

    What is a vaccine?

    Infectious diseases can cause serious illness and death. Those who survive the infection often develop long-lasting protection from that same disease. About 150 years ago, scientists discovered that infections are caused by microscopic ‘germs’ (what we now call pathogens), which can spread from animals to humans and from person to person. Could a small or weakened portion of these pathogens trigger changes in the body that might protect people from severe infections in the future? This is the principle behind vaccines.

    A vaccine, containing microscopic molecules that mimic parts of an infection pathogen, can be injected into the body to activate this pre-emptive protection against the disease. Although one vaccine protects just one individual against just one pathogen, when many vaccines are considered together in organised, large-scale vaccination programmes, they become crucial to community-level interventions.

    Not all infections can be prevented by vaccines. Despite huge financial investments, we still do not yet have (and may never have) dependable vaccines for certain infectious diseases – such as HIV-AIDS and malaria – due to these diseases’ biological complexity. It has been possible for COVID-19 vaccines to be rushed into use because – for the most part– they are based on well-understood biological mechanisms in less complex disease situations. Vaccines are an important measure to contain infectious epidemics. However, genetic changes in the infectious microbe can make vaccines ineffective and necessitate development and deployment of new vaccines.

    Roger Melis (DDR), Kinder in der Kollwitzstraße (‘Children in Kollwitzstraße’), 1974.

    Roger Melis (DDR), Kinder in der Kollwitzstraße (‘Children in Kollwitzstraße’), 1974.

    Why aren’t COVID-19 vaccines being provided to all of the world’s 7.7 billion people?

    Not long after the emergence of the novel coronavirus (SAR-CoV-2), Chinese authorities sequenced the virus and shared that information on a public website. Scientists from public and private institutions rushed to download the information to better understand the virus and to find a way to both treat its effects on the human body and to create a vaccine to immunise people against the disease. At this stage, no patent was issued on any of the information.

    Within months, eight private and public sector firms announced that they had vaccine candidates: Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Novavax, Johnson & Johnson, Sanofi/GSK, Sinovac, Sinopharm and Gamaleya. The Sinovac, Sinopharm, and Gamaleya vaccines are produced by the Chinese and Russian public sectors (by mid-March, China and Russia had provided 800 million doses to 41 countries). The others are produced by private firms that have received vast amounts of public funding. Moderna, for instance, received $2.48 billion from the US government, while Pfizer received $548 million from the European Union and the German government. These firms put the public funding towards making a vaccine and then extracted enormous profits from their sales and further secured these profits through patents. This is one example of pandemic profiteering.

    Information about the numbers of vaccines sold and transported to different parts of the world changes rapidly. Nonetheless, it is now acknowledged that many poorer nations will not have vaccines for their citizens before 2023, while the Global North has secured more vaccines than they require – enough to vaccinate their populations three times over. Canada, for instance, has enough vaccines to vaccinate its citizens five times. The Global North, with less than 14% of the world’s population, has secured more than half the total anticipated vaccines. This is known as vaccine hoarding or vaccine nationalism.

    The governments of India and South Africa approached the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in October 2020 to ask for a temporary waiver of patent obligations under the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). If the WTO had agreed to this waiver, these countries could have produced generic versions of the vaccine to distribute at low cost for a mass vaccination drive. However, the Global North led the opposition to this proposal, arguing that such a waiver – even in the midst of a pandemic – would stifle research and innovation (despite the fact that the vaccines were developed largely with public money). The Global North successfully blocked the application for the waiver in the WTO.

    In April 2020, the World Health Organisation (WHO), with other partners, set up the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access or COVAX. The point of COVAX is to ensure equitable access to the vaccines. The project is led by UNICEF; GAVI, The Vaccine Alliance; the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI); and the WHO. Despite the fact that the majority of the world’s countries signed on to the alliance, vaccines are not being distributed to the Global South in sufficient numbers. A study from December 2020 found that, during 2021, nearly seventy countries in the Global South will only be able to vaccinate one in ten people.

    Rather than supporting the India-South Africa application for the waiver, COVAX backed a proposal for patent pooling called Covid-19 Technology Access Pool (C-Tap). This process would involve two or more patent holders agreeing to license their patents to one another or to any third party. COVAX has not received any contributions to date from pharmaceutical companies.

    In May 2020, the WHO proposed to establish an international COVID-19 vaccine solidarity trial in which the WHO would coordinate trial sites in multiple countries. This would have led emerging vaccine candidates to enter clinical trials rapidly and transparently; they would have been tested in multiple populations and comparisons could have been made for specific strengths and limitations. Both Big Pharma and the countries of the North suffocated this proposal.

    Joaquín Torres García (Uruguay), Energía Atómica (Atomic Energy), 1946.

    Joaquín Torres García (Uruguay), Energía Atómica (Atomic Energy), 1946.

    What would it take to produce basic vaccines for the world’s 7.7 billion people?

    The production of vaccines varies based on the actual technological platform required for creating the particular infection mimicry to be used for the specific vaccine. For COVID-19 vaccines, there are many successful platforms. Two such instances have been the RNA vaccines (in the case of Moderna) and adenovirus vaccines (in the case of AstraZeneca). These technology platforms are robust, meaning that if the know-how (including trade secrets for the vaccine production) and skilled personnel are available and manufacturing lines are scaled-up and efficient, the vaccine could be produced for the people. The word ‘if’ is in italics because these are the most important impediments that stem from the capitalist logic of intellectual property rights and the long-term drive to undermine a public sector that centres the social good.

    One intermediate approach to vaccine production attempts the large-scale manufacture of mimic proteins in fermentation tanks (the Novavax vaccine, for example, is manufactured in this way). For this platform, the absorption capacity and personnel with skills are more widespread. The quality control and assurance issues are more varied batch-to-batch in these platforms, which is a hurdle for widespread decentralised production.

    There is a much simpler way to produce the vaccines: to grow the infectious agent, inactivate it (namely, to make it non-dangerous), and inject that into the body (such as Covaxin, the vaccine developed by Bharat in India). But there are problems here since it is not always easy to inactivate the harmful pathogen whilst still keeping it whole to develop the antibodies.

    Alfred Eisenstaedt (USA), Student Nurses at Roosevelt Hospital (1938).

    Alfred Eisenstaedt (USA), Student Nurses at Roosevelt Hospital (1938).

    What would it take to administer vaccines for the 7.7 billion?

    To widely administer the COVID-19 vaccines across the globe, we need to consider three elements:

    1. Public Health Systems. Effective vaccination programmes require robust public health systems. But these have been eroded by long-term austerity policies in many countries across the world. Therefore, there are insufficient numbers of skilled and practiced personnel to administer the vaccine; since these are sensitive vaccines, preparation and administration of the vaccine must be done by trained public health workers (both to ensure the vaccine is delivered optimally and to prevent side effects).
    2. Transportation and Cold Chains. Since regional and national vaccine production lines are not available, the vaccines need to be transported over long distances. Some COVID-19 vaccines that require an ultra-cold chain are simply impractical in much of the Global South.
    3. Medical Monitoring Systems. Finally, there need to be well-developed systems to monitor the impact of the vaccine. This requires long-term follow-up and both personnel and technologies that are often lacking in poorer nations, which have long been disadvantaged by the global economic order.
    Otman Ghalmi (Democratic Way/Morocco), Dr. Nawal El-Saadawi (1931-2021), 2021.

    Otman Ghalmi (Democratic Way/Morocco), Dr. Nawal El-Saadawi (1931-2021), 2021.

    It is worthwhile to read and circulate the Alma-Ata Declaration (1978) on primary health care and the People’s Charter for Health (2000), both strong statements for a robust, humane approach to health care. The latter asks for a rejection of ‘patents on life’, which includes patents on vaccines. There is no alternative to a people’s vaccine, no alternative to life over profit.

    This article was posted on Friday, April 2nd, 2021 at 7:49am and is filed under Canada, COVID-19, Vaccines, World Health Organization (WHO).

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Biden, alongside Morrison, Modi and Suga, continues conflict with China

    Biden, alongside Morrison, Modi and Suga, continues conflict with China The U.S. is determined to maintain its dominance over the world and is unlikely to forfeit that without a fight, writes Vijay Prashad.  read now…

    This post was originally published on Independent Australia.

  • There Are So Many Lessons to Learn from Kerala

    Anujath Sindhu Vinaylal (India), Gender and Child Equality, 2017.

    Anujath Sindhu Vinaylal (India), My mother and the mothers in the neighborhood, 2017.

    Indian farmers and agricultural workers have crossed the hundred-day mark of their protest against the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. They will not withdraw until the government repeals laws that deliver the advantages of agriculture to large corporate houses. This, the farmers and agricultural workers say, is an existential struggle. Surrender is equivalent to death: even before these laws were passed, more than 315,000 Indian farmers had committed suicide since 1995 because of the debt burden placed on them.

    Over the next one and a half months, assembly elections will take place in four Indian states (Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal) and in one union territory (Puducherry). There are 225 million people who live in these four states, which would, if measured by itself, make this area the fifth largest country in the world after Indonesia. Prime Minister Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is not a serious contender in any of these states.

    Gopika Babu (India), Community, 2021.

    Gopika Babu (India), Community, 2021.

    In Kerala (population 35 million), the Left Democratic Front has been in the government for the past five years, during which it has confronted a number of serious crises: the aftereffects of Cyclone Ockhi in 2017, the Nipah virus outbreak of 2018, the floods of 2018 and 2019, and then the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, Kerala’s health minister, K.K. Shailaja, has earned the nickname the ‘Coronavirus Slayer’ because of the state’s rapid and comprehensive approach to breaking the chain of infection. All polls indicate that the Left will return to the government, breaking an anti-incumbency trend in the state since 1980.

    Vijay Prashad speaks to Kerala’s Finance Minister Thomas Isaac about the upcoming legislative elections in Kerala, courtesy of Peoples Dispatch.

    To better understand the great gains made by the Left Democratic Front government over the past five years, I spoke to Kerala’s Finance Minister T. M. Thomas Isaac, a Central Committee member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Isaac begins by telling me that the switch back and forth between the Left Front and the Right Front, as he called it, has ‘cost Kerala a lot of social advancement’. If the Left wins again, he says, it will ‘be in power continuously for ten years. That is a sufficiently long period to leave a very substantial imprint upon Kerala’s development process’.

    The general orientation of the Left’s approach toward Kerala’s development, Isaac said, has been ‘a kind of hop, step, and jump’:

    The hop, the first stage, is redistributive politics. Kerala has been very noted for that. Our trade union movement has succeeded in having significant redistribution of income. Kerala has the highest wage rates in the country. Our peasant movement has been able to redistribute landed assets through a very successful land reform programme. Powerful social movements which pre-date even the Left movement in Kerala, [and] whose tradition the Left has carried forward, have pressurised successive governments which have been in power in Kerala to provide education, healthcare, [and for the] basic needs of everyone. Therefore, in Kerala, an ordinary person enjoys a quality of life which is much superior to the rest of India.

    But there is a problem with this process. Because we have to spend so much on the social sector, there won’t be sufficient money [or] resources for building infrastructure. So [after] a programme of social development spread over more than half a century, there’s a serious infrastructure deficit in Kerala.

    Our present government has been very remarkable in meeting the crises, ensuring that there is no social breakdown, ensuring that nobody in Kerala would go hungry, and [that] everybody will get treatment during COVID times and so on. But we did something more remarkable.

    Junaina Muhammed (India), Green Kerala, 2021.

    Junaina Muhammed (India), Green Kerala, 2021.

    What the government did was to build the state’s infrastructure and begin to pivot to another economic foundation. The amount needed to upgrade the infrastructure is staggering, about Rs. 60,000 crores (or $11 billion). How does a Left government raise the funds to finance this kind of infrastructural development? Kerala, as a state within India, cannot borrow beyond a certain limit, so the Left government set up instruments such as the Kerala Infrastructure Investment Fund Board (KIIFB). Through the Board, the government was able to spend Rs. 10,000 crores (US$1.85 billion) and ‘has produced a remarkable change in the infrastructure’. After the hop (redistribution) and infrastructural development (step), comes the jump:

    The jump is the programme that we have placed before the people. Now that infrastructure is there, [such as] transmission lines, assured electricity, industrial parks for investors to come and invest, we will have K-FON [Kerala-Fibre Optic Network], a super-highway of internet owned by the state, which is available to any service provider. [It ensures] equal treatment to everybody; nobody will have an [undue] advantage. And we are going to provide internet to everybody. It is the right of every individual. All the poor are going to get broadband connectivity for free.

    All of this has provided a background for us to take the next big jump. That is, we now want to change the economic base of our economy. Our economic base is commercial crops, which are in serious crisis because of opening up [to ‘free trade’], or labour-intensive traditional industries, or very polluting chemical industries and so on. Therefore, we realise now, industries which are of our core competence would be knowledge industries, service industries, skill-based industries, and so on. Now how do you make this paradigm shift from your traditional economic base to the new [one]?

    Kadambari Vaiga (India), High-tech School, 2020.

    Kadambari Vaiga (India), High-tech School, 2020.

    What will the new economic opportunities be for Kerala? First, because of the shift to the digital platform economy, Kerala will now develop its IT industry with the immense advantages of the state’s high literacy rates as well as 100% state-funded internet connectivity that will soon be available to the entire population. This, Isaac said, ‘is going to have a tremendous impact upon women’s employment’. Second, Kerala’s Left government will restructure higher education to promote innovation and deepen Kerala’s history of cooperative production (the example here is the Uralungal Labour Contract Cooperative Society, which recently rebuilt an old bridge in five months, seven months ahead of schedule).

    Kerala aims to go beyond the paradigms of the Gujarat Model (high rates of growth for capitalist firms, but little social security and welfare for the people), the Uttar Pradesh Model (neither high growth nor social welfare), and the model that would provide high welfare but little industrial growth. The new Kerala project would go for high but managed growth and high welfare. ‘We want to create in Kerala [the basis for] individual dignity of life, security, and welfare’, Isaac says, which requires both industry and welfare. ‘We are not a socialist country’, he reminds me; ‘we are part of Indian capitalism. But in this part, within the limitations, we shall design a society which will inspire all progressive-thinking people in India. Yes, it is possible to build something different. That’s the idea of Kerala’.

    A key element in the Kerala Model is the powerful social movements that grip the state. Amongst them is a mass front of the hundred-year-old communist movement and the All-India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA), which formed forty years ago in 1981 and which has a membership in excess of ten million women. One of the founders of AIDWA was Kanak Mukherjee (1921-2005). Kanakdi, as she was called, joined the freedom movement at the age of ten and never stopped fighting to emancipate our world from the chains of colonialism and capitalism. In 1938, at the age of seventeen, Kanakdi joined the Communist Party of India, using her immense talents to organise students and industrial workers. In 1942, as part of the anti-fascist struggle, Kanakdi helped found the Mahila Atma Raksha Samiti (‘Women’s Self Defence Committee’), which played a key role in helping those devastated by the Bengal Famine of 1943 – a famine created by imperialist policy that resulted in as many as three million deaths. These experiences deepened Kanakdi’s commitment to the communist struggle, to which she devoted the rest of her life.

    To honour this pioneer communist, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research dedicated our second feminisms study (Women of Struggle, Women in Struggle) to her life and work. Professor Elisabeth Armstrong, who was a key contributor to this study, recently published a book on AIDWA, which is now out as a paperback from LeftWord Books.

    Today, organisations such as AIDWA continue to lift the confidence and power of working-class and peasant women, whose role has been considerable in Kerala and in the farmer’s revolt, as well as in struggles across the world. They speak out not only about their suffering but also about their aspirations, their great dreams of a socialist society – dreams that need to be built alongside other instruments such as the Left Democratic Front government in Kerala.

    The post There Are So Many Lessons to Learn from Kerala first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Are We Not All in Search of Tomorrow

    Oswaldo Terreros (Ecuador), Mural para la Universidad Superior de las Artes (‘Mural for the University of the Arts’), 2012.

    Oswaldo Terreros (Ecuador), Mural para la Universidad Superior de las Artes (‘Mural for the University of the Arts’), 2012.

    In 2019, 613 million Indians voted to appoint their representatives to the Indian parliament (Lok Sabha). During the election campaign, the political parties spent Rs. 60,000 crores (around US $8 billion), 45% of which was spent by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the governing party; the BJP won 37% of the vote, which translated into 303 of the 545 seats in the Lok Sabha. A year later, a massive $14 billion was spent on the US presidential and congressional elections, with the winning Democrat Party dominating the spending. These are massive amounts of money, whose grip on the democratic process is quite clear by now. Is it possible to talk about ‘democracy’ without being candid about the erosion of the democratic spirit by this avalanche of money?

    Money floods the system, eats into the loyalties of politicians, corrupts the institutions of civil society, and shapes the narratives of the media. It matters that the dominant classes in our world own the main communications outlets and that these outlets shape the way people decipher the world around us. Although the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms that ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression’ (Article 19), the plain fact is that the concentration of the media in the hands of a few corporate entities circumscribes the freedom to ‘impart information and ideas through any media’. For this reason, Reporters Without Borders has an ongoing Media Ownership Monitor that traces the consolidation of the media held by corporate power, which in turn drives a political agenda within existing systems of government.

    Paul Guiragossian (Lebanon), La Lutte de l’Existence (‘The Struggle of Existence’), 1988

    Paul Guiragossian (Lebanon), La Lutte de l’Existence (‘The Struggle of Existence’), 1988

    Aijaz Ahmad, Senior Fellow at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, argues that extreme right political projects find it possible to drive their agenda through democratic institutions, since the political structures in these countries – from the United States to India – have seen a considerable erosion of their democratic content. As Ahmad explains, the extreme right in countries such as the United States and India does not challenge the constitutional, liberal democratic form, but garrottes formal institutions by transforming society ‘in all domains of culture, religion, and civilisation’.

    In Latin America, the extreme right has used every weapon to delegitimise its adversaries, including using perfectly good laws against corruption in a malicious way to target leaders of the left. This is a strategy called ‘lawfare’, where the law is used – often without evidence – to oust democratically-elected leaders of the left or to prevent them from running for office. Lawfare was used to remove Honduran president José Manuel Zelaya in 2009, Paraguayan president Fernando Lugo in 2012, and Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff in 2016; these leaders were all victims of judicial coup d’états. Brazil’s former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was denied the right to run for the presidency in 2018 by a lawsuit of no merit whatsoever amidst predictions in all polls that he would win. Argentina’s former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner faced a series of cases beginning in 2016, all of which prevented her from running again in 2019 (she is now the vice president, a testament to her popularity in the country).

    Emiliano di Cavalcanti (Brazil), Sonhos do carnaval (‘Dreams of Carnaval’), 1955.

    Emiliano di Cavalcanti (Brazil), Sonhos do carnaval (‘Dreams of Carnaval’), 1955.

    In Ecuador, the oligarchy used the techniques of the guerra jurídica (‘legal war’) to delegitimise the entire left, especially former president Rafael Correa (2007-2017). Correa was accused of bribery – with the bizarre notion of ‘psychic influence’ (influjo psíquico) at the root of the case. He was handed down an eight-year sentence which prevented him from running for office in Ecuador.

    Why was Correa anathema to both Ecuador’s dominant class and to the United States? The Citizens’ Revolution that Correa led passed a progressive constitution in 2008, which put the principle of ‘good living’ (buen vivir in Spanish and sumak kawsay in Quechua) at its heart. Government investment to strengthen social and economic rights came alongside a crackdown on corporate (including multinational) corruption. Oil revenue was not parked in foreign banks, but used to invest in education, health care, roads, and other basic infrastructure. From Ecuador’s population of 17 million, nearly 2 million people were lifted out of poverty in the Correa years.

    Correa’s government was an aberration to the multinational firms – such as the US-based oil company Chevron – and to the Ecuadorian oligarchy. Chevron’s dangerous case for compensation against Ecuador, brought forward before Correa took office, was nonetheless fiercely resisted by Correa’s government. The Dirty Hand (Mano Negra) campaign put enormous international pressure against Chevron, which worked closely with the US embassy in Quito and the US government to undermine Correa and his campaign against the oil giant.


    Legendary musician Roger Waters talks to me about Chevron’s mischief in Ecuador

    Not only did they want Correa out, but they wanted all the leftists – called Correistas by shorthand – out as well. Lenín Moreno, who was once close to Correa, ascended to the presidency in 2017, switched sides, became the main instrument for fragmenting the Ecuadorian left, and delivered Ecuador back to its elites and to the United States. Moreno’s government gutted the public sector by defunding education and health care, withdrawing labour and housing rights, attempting to sell off Ecuador’s refinery, and deregulating parts of the financial system. Collapsed oil prices that led to cuts in oil subsidies, a hefty loan from the International Monetary Fund at the cost of austerity measures, and mismanagement of the pandemic battered Moreno’s legitimacy. A consequence of these policies has been Ecuador’s appalling response to the pandemic, which includes accusations of the deliberate undercounting of as many as 20,000 COVID-19 deaths.

    Firoz Mahmud (Bangladesh), Ouponibeshik/Porouponibeshik (‘Colonial/Postcolonial’), 2017.

    Firoz Mahmud (Bangladesh), Ouponibeshik/Porouponibeshik (‘Colonial/Postcolonial’), 2017.

    To ingratiate himself to the United States, Moreno ejected WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from Ecuador’s London embassy, arrested computer programmer and privacy activist Ola Bini on a concocted case, and launched a frontal attack against the Correistas. The political organisation of the Correistas was broken up, its leaders arrested, and any attempt to regroup for elections denied. Once such as example is the Social Compromise Force or Fuerza Compromiso Social platform, which the Correistas used  to run for local elections in 2019; this platform was then banned in 2020. A February 2018 referendum was barrelled through the country, allowing the government to destroy the democratic structures of the National Electoral Council (CNE), the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court, the Judiciary Council, the attorney general, the comptroller general, and others. Democracy was hollowed out.

    A month before the 7 February 2021 presidential election, it appeared clear that in a fair election the candidate of the left, Andrés Arauz Galarza, would prevail. A range of pollsters suggested that Arauz would win in the first round with over the threshold of 40%. Arauz (age 35) is an attractive candidate with not a whiff of corruption or incompetence around him for his decade of service in the Central Bank and as a minister in the last two turbulent years of Correa’s government. When Correa left office, Arauz went to Mexico to pursue a PhD at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). The oligarchy has used every means to block his victory.

    Gulnara Kasmalieva and Murat Djumaliev (Kyrgyzstan), Shadows, 1999.

    Gulnara Kasmalieva and Murat Djumaliev (Kyrgyzstan), Shadows, 1999.

    On 14 January, the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) provided Ecuador with a loan of $2.8 billion to be used to pay off Ecuador’s debt to China and to ensure that Ecuador pledge to break commercial ties with China. Knowing that Arauz might win, the US and the oligarchy of Ecuador decided to tie the Andean country to an arrangement that could suffocate any progressive government. Formed in 2018, the DFC developed a project called América Crece or ‘Growth in the Americas’, whose entire policy framework aims to edge out Chinese business from the American hemisphere. Quito has since signed up for Washington’s ‘Clean Network’, a US State Department project to force countries to build telecommunications networks without a Chinese telecom provider involved in them. This particularly applies to the high-speed fifth generation (5G) networks. Ecuador joined the Clean Network in November 2020, which opened the door for the DFC loan.

    Correa drew in $5 billion from Chinese banks to enhance Ecuador’s infrastructure (particularly for the construction of hydroelectric dams); Ecuador’s total external debt is $52 billion. Moreno and the United States have painted the Chinese funds as a ‘debt trap’, although there is no evidence that the Chinese banks have been anything but accommodating. Over the last six months of 2020, Chinese banks have been willing to put loan payments on hold until 2022 (this includes a delay on the repayment of the $474 million loan to the Export-Import Bank of China and the $417 million loan to the China Development Bank). Ecuador’s Finance Ministry says that, for now, the plan is for repayment to start in March 2022 and to end by 2029. Moreno took to Twitter to announce these two delays. There were no aggressive measures taken by these two banks nor from any other Chinese financial entity.

    Essentially, the DFC loan attempts to sabotage an Arauz presidency. This US-imposed conflict against China in Latin America is part of a broader assault. On 30 January, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research held a seminar alongside Instituto Simón Bolívar, ALBA Social Movimientos, and the No Cold War platform to reflect on the Latin American battlefield of this hybrid war.


    The speakers included Alicia Castro (Argentina), Eduardo Regaldo Florido (Cuba), João Pedro Stedile (Brazil), Ricardo Menéndez (Venezuela), Monica Bruckmann (Peru/Brazil), Ambassador Li Baorong (China), and Fernando Haddad (Brazil).

    Despite the hollowing out of democracy, elections remain one front in the political contest, and in that contest, the left fights to summon a democratic spirit. Perhaps poetry is the best way to articulate the texture of this conflict. Out of Ecuador’s rich tradition of emancipatory thinking came the writer and communist Jorge Enrique Adoum. Here’s a part of his powerful poem, Fugaz retorno (‘Fleeting Return’):

    And we ran, like two runaways,
    to the hard shore where stars
    came apart. Fishermen told us
    of successive victories in nearby provinces.
    And our feet got wet with a spray of dawn,
    full of roots that were ours and the world’s.

    ‘When is happiness?’, the poet asks. Tomorrow. Are we not all in search of tomorrow?

    The post Are We Not All in Search of Tomorrow first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Are We Not All in Search of Tomorrow

    Firoz Mahmud (Bangladesh), Ouponibeshik/Porouponibeshik (‘Colonial/Postcolonial’), 2017.

    To ingratiate himself to the United States, Moreno ejected WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from Ecuador’s London embassy, arrested computer programmer and privacy activist Ola Bini on a concocted case, and launched a frontal attack against the Correistas. The political organisation of the Correistas was broken up, its leaders arrested, and any attempt to regroup for elections denied. Once such as example is the Social Compromise Force or Fuerza Compromiso Social platform, which the Correistas used  to run for local elections in 2019; this platform was then banned in 2020. A February 2018 referendum was barrelled through the country, allowing the government to destroy the democratic structures of the National Electoral Council (CNE), the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court, the Judiciary Council, the attorney general, the comptroller general, and others. Democracy was hollowed out.

    A month before the 7 February 2021 presidential election, it appeared clear that in a fair election the candidate of the left, Andrés Arauz Galarza, would prevail. A range of pollsters suggested that Arauz would win in the first round with over the threshold of 40%. Arauz (age 35) is an attractive candidate with not a whiff of corruption or incompetence around him for his decade of service in the Central Bank and as a minister in the last two turbulent years of Correa’s government. When Correa left office, Arauz went to Mexico to pursue a PhD at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). The oligarchy has used every means to block his victory.

    Gulnara Kasmalieva and Murat Djumaliev (Kyrgyzstan), Shadows, 1999.

    On 14 January, the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) provided Ecuador with a loan of $2.8 billion to be used to pay off Ecuador’s debt to China and to ensure that Ecuador pledge to break commercial ties with China. Knowing that Arauz might win, the US and the oligarchy of Ecuador decided to tie the Andean country to an arrangement that could suffocate any progressive government. Formed in 2018, the DFC developed a project called América Crece or ‘Growth in the Americas’, whose entire policy framework aims to edge out Chinese business from the American hemisphere. Quito has since signed up for Washington’s ‘Clean Network’, a US State Department project to force countries to build telecommunications networks without a Chinese telecom provider involved in them. This particularly applies to the high-speed fifth generation (5G) networks. Ecuador joined the Clean Network in November 2020, which opened the door for the DFC loan.

    Correa drew in $5 billion from Chinese banks to enhance Ecuador’s infrastructure (particularly for the construction of hydroelectric dams); Ecuador’s total external debt is $52 billion. Moreno and the United States have painted the Chinese funds as a ‘debt trap’, although there is no evidence that the Chinese banks have been anything but accommodating. Over the last six months of 2020, Chinese banks have been willing to put loan payments on hold until 2022 (this includes a delay on the repayment of the $474 million loan to the Export-Import Bank of China and the $417 million loan to the China Development Bank). Ecuador’s Finance Ministry says that, for now, the plan is for repayment to start in March 2022 and to end by 2029. Moreno took to Twitter to announce these two delays. There were no aggressive measures taken by these two banks nor from any other Chinese financial entity.

    Essentially, the DFC loan attempts to sabotage an Arauz presidency. This US-imposed conflict against China in Latin America is part of a broader assault. On 30 January, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research held a seminar alongside Instituto Simón Bolívar, ALBA Social Movimientos, and the No Cold War platform to reflect on the Latin American battlefield of this hybrid war.



    The speakers included Alicia Castro (Argentina), Eduardo Regaldo Florido (Cuba), João Pedro Stedile (Brazil), Ricardo Menéndez (Venezuela), Monica Bruckmann (Peru/Brazil), Ambassador Li Baorong (China), and Fernando Haddad (Brazil).

    Despite the hollowing out of democracy, elections remain one front in the political contest, and in that contest, the left fights to summon a democratic spirit. Perhaps poetry is the best way to articulate the texture of this conflict. Out of Ecuador’s rich tradition of emancipatory thinking came the writer and communist Jorge Enrique Adoum. Here’s a part of his powerful poem, Fugaz retorno (‘Fleeting Return’):

    And we ran, like two runaways,
    to the hard shore where stars
    came apart. Fishermen told us
    of successive victories in nearby provinces.
    And our feet got wet with a spray of dawn,
    full of roots that were ours and the world’s.

    ‘When is happiness?’, the poet asks. Tomorrow. Are we not all in search of tomorrow?

    This article was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2021 at 4:35pm and is filed under Ecuador, Finance, Human Rights, India, Oil, Gas, Coal, Pipelines.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Country Where Liberty Is a Statue

    On 6 January, the world witnessed an interesting spectacle, an assortment of what appeared to be characters from fantasy television shows taking possession of the US Capitol, where the legislature sits. Despite spending more than $1 trillion on its military, intelligence services, and police, the United States government found itself overrun by a horde of Donald Trump’s supporters. They came without any precise programme and were not able to elicit a serious revolt around the country. What they showed clearly is that there is a serious divide in the United States, which weakens the ability of the US elites to exercise their domination over the world.

    Around the world, people gaped at the bizarre pageant of Trump’s army running riot in the chambers of the body that calls itself the ‘world’s oldest democracy’. With precision, Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson Mnangagwa sent out a tweet that tied the US economic sanctions against his country to the chaos in Washington, DC. The events at the Capitol, he wrote on 7 January, ‘showed that the US has no moral right to punish another nation under the guise of upholding democracy. These sanctions must end’. The government of Venezuela offered its concern about the ‘political polarisation and the spiral of violence’ and explained that the United States now experiences ‘what it has generated in other countries with its policies of aggression’.

    President Mnangagwa’s use of the term ‘moral right’ has echoed across the world: how can a society that faces such a severe challenge to its own political institutions feel that it has the right to ‘promote’ democracy in other countries, using the various instruments of hybrid war?

    The United States – like other capitalist democracies – has struggled with insurmountable challenges to its economy and society, with high rates of wealth inequality crushed by large-scale precarity and income deflation. Between 1990 and 2020, US billionaires saw their wealth increase by 1,130%, while median wealth in the US increased by only 5.37% (this increase was even more marked during the pandemic). Exits from this social and economic crisis are simply not available to the US ruling class, which seems not to care about the great dilemmas of its own population and of the world. An example of this is the meagre income support provided during the pandemic, while the government hastens to protect the value of the wealth of the small minority that holds an obscene share of national wealth and income.

    Rather than seek a solution to the economic and social crisis – which it cannot solve – the US ruling class projects its problem as one of political legitimacy. There is now a false sense that the main problem in the United States is posed by Donald Trump and his rag-tag army; but Trump is merely the symptom of the problem, not its cause. The constituency that he has assembled will remain intact and will continue to flourish as long as the social and economic crisis spirals further out of control. Large swathes of the US elite have rallied around Joe Biden, hoping that he – as a representative of stability – will be able to maintain order and restore the legitimacy of the United States. Their view is that the US is currently facing a crisis of political legitimacy and not a socio-economic crisis for which they have no answers.

    The January dossier from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Twilight: The Erosion of US Control and the Multipolar Future, broaches the question of the decline of US authority. Since the US war on Iraq (2003) and the credit crisis (2010), there has been the anticipation of the decline of the power of the United States and its project. At the same time, the United States continues to exert immense power through its military superiority, its control over large sections of the financial and trade system (the Dollar-Wall Street Complex), and its command over information networks. Since the late 1940s, the United States has declared that anything ‘less than preponderant power would be to opt for defeat’. This political aim has been repeated in each National Security Strategy of the United States government. The socio-economic crisis over the past two decades has weakened US authority, but it has not eroded US power. This is why our dossier is titled Twilight: we are in the midst of a process of the whittling down of US authority, but not of the loss of US power.

    During the last two decades, China has developed its scientific and technological prowess, which has resulted in rapid advances for China’s development. Over the past few years, Chinese scientists have published more peer-reviewed papers than scientists from elsewhere and Chinese scientists and firms have registered more patents than scientists and firms from elsewhere. As a consequence of these intellectual developments, China’s firms have made key technological breakthroughs, such as in solar power, robotics, and telecommunications. A high savings rate by the population has enabled the Chinese state and private Chinese capital to make considerable investments in manufacturing; this has propelled China’s high-tech industries, which have seriously threatened Silicon Valley firms. It is this challenge, we argue in this dossier, that has provoked the US ruling class to instigate a dangerous confrontation against China; Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’ and Trump’s ‘trade war’ have both had a military component, which includes the deployment of tactical nuclear warheads into the waters around Asia.

    The War in Eurasia

    Rather than tackle the great social and economic challenges within the US, its ruling class has taken refuge in anti-Chinese rhetoric. Why is the employment situation so bad in the United States, the people ask? Because of China, say the elites – whether those who support Trump or those who look back nostalgically to Obama. Why did COVID-19 create such havoc in the United States, which continues to have the highest death toll in the world? Because of China, says Trump. Biden, in a softer way, makes similar noises. The general orientation of the US ruling class is to blame China for every problem within the United States, to make China’s rise the excuse for any failure in the United States.

    Trump used the Obama-era Quad (Australia, India, Japan, and the United States) against China, while Biden promises to build a wider ‘coalition of democracies’ (the Quad plus Europe) against China. Regardless of which fragment of the US ruling class governs the country, these leaders will seek to shift all responsibility for their failures onto China. This is a cynical and dangerous strategy because – as we point out in the dossier – the US elites well know that China’s economic development poses a serious challenge to the US, but that China does not have any military or any significant political ambitions to dominate the world. The US ruling class, however, is willing to risk a cataclysmic war to protect its preponderant power.

    TBT: Ricardo Silva Soto

    In 1972, when the socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile came under murderous pressure from the United States, the poet Nicanor Parra wrote:

    United States: the country where
    liberty is a statue.

    A year later, the US government told General Augusto Pinochet to leave the barracks, overthrow Allende’s government, and inaugurate a dictatorship that would last for 17 years. Three years before the coup took place, the CIA’s director of plans wrote, ‘It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup. It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that the [United States government] and [the] American hand be well hidden’. This policy of making sure that the ‘American hand be well hidden’ is part of the hybrid war techniques, which we outline in the dossier.

    Brave women and men fought and died to overthrow the Pinochet dictatorship. Amongst them were people like Ricardo Silva Soto, a young man who liked to play football and enjoyed his studies at the Faculty of Chemical Sciences and Pharmacy at the University of Chile. He joined the Communist Party of Chile’s Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front (FPMR), which operated against the tentacles of the dictatorship. In June 1987, Silva Soto and others were killed in cold blood in Operation Albania. The Chilean Human Rights Commission and Vicaría de la Solidaridad found that no bullets had been fired from inside their safe house at 582 Pedro Donoso Street in Santiago; the bullets were fired at close range at the militants. In Recoleta, there is a people’s pharmacy named for Silva Soto. It was opened in 2015 by the mayor Daniel Jadue, who is now a candidate for the Chilean presidency. The creation of this pharmacy led to the establishment of the Chilean Association of Popular Pharmacies (ACHIFARP) and to the opening in 94 municipalities across Chile of such establishments, which have played a key role in the fight against COVID-19. Ricardo Silva Soto was killed to stop the world from breathing; his name now sits atop a process that helps the world survive.

    The global reaction to the events of 6 January shows that the authority of the United States is greatly dented. Biden will use any method – including hybrid war – to revive this authority. But it is unlikely to succeed. Parra’s poem was written in 1972 with bitter irony; today, due to the worldwide interest in Black Lives Matter and the public appearance of the white supremacist Trump-supporting hordes, Parra’s statement is seen to be a description of reality.

    The US has considerable resources to reassert its authority. The struggles ahead – in the name of people like Ricardo Silva Soto – will be difficult and perilous. But – for the sake of humanity – these struggles are essential.

    This article was posted on Thursday, January 14th, 2021 at 3:45pm and is filed under Capitalism, China, Classism, Zimbabwe.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Future Will Only Contain What We Put into It Now

    Towards the end of November, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres addressed the German Bundestag to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the United Nations (UN). At the heart of the UN is its Charter, the treaty that binds nations together in a global project, which has now been ratified by all 193 member nations of the UN. It is well worth reiterating the four main goals of the UN Charter, since most of these have slipped from public consciousness:

    Guterres pointed out that the avenues to realise the aims of the Charter are being closed off not only by the neofascists, who he euphemistically calls ‘populist approaches’, but also by the worst kind of imperialism, as illustrated by the ‘vaccine nationalism’ driven by countries such as the United States of America. ‘It is clear’, Guterres said, ‘that the way to win the future is through an openness to the world’ and not by a ‘closing of minds’.

    CoronaShock: A Virus and the World. Cover image by Vikas Thakur (India).

    At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we take the UN Charter as the foundation of our work. To advance its goals is an essential step for the construction of humanity, which is a concept of aspiration rather than a concept of fact; we are not yet human beings, but we strive to become human. Imagine if we lived in a world without war and with respect for international law, if we lived in a world that honoured fundamental human rights and tried to promote the widest social progress? This would a be a world where the productive resources would no longer be used for military hardware but would be used to end hunger, to end illiteracy, to end poverty, to end houselessness, to end – in other words – the structural features of indignity.

    In 2019, the world’s nations spent nearly $2 trillion on weaponry, while the world’s richest people hid $36 trillion in illicit tax havens. It would take a fraction of this money to eradicate hunger, with estimates ranging from $7 billion to $265 billion per year. Comparable amounts of money are needed to finance comprehensive public education and universal primary health care. Productive resources have been highjacked by the wealthy, who then use their money power to ensure that Central Banks keep inflation down rather than pursue policies towards full employment. It’s a racket, if you look at it closely.

    Two new World Bank studies show that, because of a lack of resources and imagination during this pandemic, an additional 72 million primary school aged children will slip into ‘learning poverty’, a term that refers to the inability to read and comprehend simple texts by the age of ten. A UNICEF study shows that in sub-Saharan Africa an additional 50 million people have moved into extreme poverty during the pandemic, most of whom are children; 280 million of sub-Saharan Africa’s 550 million children struggle with food insecurity, while learning has completely stopped for millions of children who are ‘unlikely to ever return to the classroom’.

    The gap between the plight of the billions who struggle to survive and the extravagances of the very few is stark. The UBS report on wealth bears an awkward title: Riding the storm. Market turbulence accelerates diverging fortunes. The world’s 2,189 billionaires seemed to have ridden the storm of the pandemic to their great advantage, with their wealth at a record high of $10.2 trillion as of July 2020 (up from $8.0 trillion in April). The most vulgar number was that their wealth increased by a quarter (27.5%) from April to July during the Great Lockdown. This came when billions of people in the capitalist world were newly unemployed, struggling to survive on very modest relief from governments, their lives turned upside down.

    CoronaShock and Patriarchy. Cover image by Daniela Ruggeri (Argentina)

    Our most recent study, CoronaShock and Patriarchy, should be compulsory reading; it provides a sharp assessment of the social – and gendered – impact of CoronaShock. Our team was motivated by the acute state of deprivation in which billions of people find themselves and how that deprivation morphs basic social bonds towards the hyper-exploitation and oppression of specific parts of the population. The report closes with an eighteen-point list of demands that are a guide for our struggles ahead. We make the case that the capitalist states are controlled by elites who are unable to solve the basic problems of our time such as unemployment, hunger, patriarchal violence, and the under-appreciation, precarity, and invisibility of social reproduction work.

    The texts that we published this year – from our red alerts on the coronavirus to the studies on CoronaShock – seek to orient us towards a rational assessment of these rapid developments, rooted in the world-view of our mass movements of workers, peasants, and the oppressed. We took seriously the view of the World Health Organisation to ground our studies in ‘solidarity, not stigma’. Based on the startlingly low numbers of infections and deaths in countries with a socialist government from Vietnam to Cuba, we studied why these governments were better able to handle the pandemic. We understood that this was because they took a scientific attitude towards the virus, they had a public sector to turn to for the production of necessary equipment and medicines, they were able to rely upon a practice of public action which brought organised groups of people together to provide relief to each other, and they took an internationalist – rather than a racist – approach to the virus which included sharing information, goods, and – in the case of China and Cuba – medical personnel. Because of this, we – alongside other organisations – have joined the campaign for the Nobel Prize for Peace to be given to the Cuban doctors.

    We have assembled a remarkable archive of material on CoronaShock and on the world that it has begun to produce. This includes a provisional ten-point agenda for a post-COVID world, a paper first delivered at a High-Level Conference on the Post-Pandemic Economy, organised by the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA). In the first few months of 2021, we will release a fuller document on the world after Corona.

    CoronaShock and Socialism. Cover image by Ingrid Neves (Brazil), adapted from People’s Medical Publishing House, China, 1977

    CoronaShock and Socialism. Cover image by Ingrid Neves (Brazil), adapted from People’s Medical Publishing House, China, 1977

    On a personal note, I would like to thank the entire team at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research for their resilience during the pandemic, their ability to work at a pace much greater than before, and their good cheer towards each other during this period.

    We swim in the waters of our movements, whose fortitude against the opportunistic and cynical use of the crisis by capitalist governments lifts us up and gives us courage. Last week, the newsletter highlighted the patient and dedicated work done by the young comrades of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in Kerala, who work to build a humane and just society. The same kind of work can be seen amidst the Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil (MST), and it can be seen in the Copper Belt region of Zambia, where the members of the Socialist Party campaign for next year’s presidential election, and in South Africa, where the National Union of Metal Workers (NUMSA) fights to defend workers against retrenchment during the pandemic and where Abahlali baseMjondolo builds confidence and power amongst shack dwellers. We see this great endurance and commitment from our comrades of the Workers’ Party of Tunisia and the Democratic Way of Morocco, who are leading a revitalisation of the Left in the Arabic-speaking regions, and in the great application of the peoples of Bolivia, Cuba, and Venezuela, China, Laos, Nepal, and Vietnam, as they seek to build socialism in poor countries who face a sustained attack against the socialist path. We take strength from our comrades in Argentina, who struggle to consolidate the power of the excluded workers and to build a society beyond patriarchy. We are a movement-driven research institute; we rely upon our movements for everything that we do.

    This article was posted on Thursday, December 31st, 2020 at 7:49am and is filed under COVID-19, Housing/Homelessness, Human Rights, Poverty, Resistance, Socialism, Solidarity, United Nations.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • All the Cannons Will Silently Rust

    Chittaprosad (India), Peace, undated.

    Our year has been eclipsed by the pandemic, the rush of a virus paralysing societies across the world. Some governments offered smarter, more scientific, and humane approaches to the pandemic; many (but not all) of these have been governments with a socialist orientation. Amongst them is the Indian state of Kerala, tucked into the country’s south-west with a population of 35 million and governed by the Left Democratic Front (LDF). Kerala’s Health Minister KK Shailaja was later celebrated as the ‘Coronavirus Slayer’ for her leadership within a government that puts the needs of the population ahead of profit and superstition.

    It is not as if there have been no cases of COVID-19 in Kerala, nor that there have been no deaths; it is rather that the government operated in a measured, swift, and deliberate way to inform the public, to use the government machinery to test the population for COVID-19, to carry out contact tracing, to isolate and treat the infected, and to take all possible measures to flatten the curve. Furthermore, as a result of a long history of organised public action in the state – often led by the communists and social reformers – trade unions, cooperatives, student and youth organisations, women’s organisations, and others operated in a very disciplined way to provide information and relief to the public.

    https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Video-1.mp4

    In early December, Kerala held local body elections across the state. The communists won more seats in these elections than all the seats won by the opposition. The right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which runs the Indian government in Delhi under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and the centre-right Indian National Congress, which is the main opposition in Kerala, ran a vicious campaign against the Left, including harsh personal attacks directed at Kerala’s Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan. The media – controlled almost exclusively by the major private corporations – led the attack on the Left and ignored new initiatives pushed by the Left in this remarkably difficult period.

    For instance, the corporate media ignored the inauguration of thirty-four new public schools for the ‘Centre of Excellence’ project, which resulted in the slow return of children from expensive private schools to the revamped state schools. If they did report the initiatives, such as the building of about 250,000 homes for the working class and the indigent through the ‘Life Mission’, the media focused on mischievous allegations that charity money from the United Arab Emirates had violated foreign exchange regulations. These unfounded attacks shaped the harsh context of these local body elections.

    PP Divya leads a protest in solidarity with Indian farmers.

    PP Divya leads a protest in solidarity with Indian farmers.

    Kerala’s Left went into this election with a series of important advantages. First, over the course of a century of struggle and governance, the communist movement has driven an agenda to improve the living conditions of the people, including by promoting health, education, and housing, and has inculcated a tradition of public action. Second, it was the Left that initiated a people’s planning campaign twenty-five years ago; this process enlivened the local self-government bodies and made them crucial platforms for public action and for the development of the Left alternative. Third, the current Left Democratic Front government has an exemplary record of managing crises that predates the pandemic, such as the catastrophic floods and the outbreak of the Nipah virus, both of which struck the state in 2018. Fourth, the Left’s mass organisations in the state are alert to the needs of the people and are often found working to provide relief, to fight against social indignity, and to fight to expand the rights of people. This was most clearly visible during the pandemic, when student, youth, women’s, workers, and peasant organisations delivered food and medicine to the people, built public washing facilities, and assisted local governments with testing, tracing, and enforcing the quarantine. It was this mass work that provided the best antidote to the virulence of the corporate media.

    It was out of this remarkable mass work that the Left chose its candidates for the local body elections, most of them very young and a large number of them young women leaders from across the state. Below are short impressions of five of these new elected officials.

    Reshma Mariam Roy writes in her diary

    Reshma Mariam Roy writes in her diary

    Reshma Mariam Roy won her seat from the Aruvappulam grama panchayat (local self-government at the village level), which had been represented by the Congress for the past fifteen years. Reshma turned twenty-one, the minimum age to contest these polls, the day before she filed her nomination. She is a member of the Students’ Federation of India (SFI) and of the Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI), both mass organisations of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and a leader in her college union. During the pandemic, Reshma had worked for the ‘helping hand’ programme started by KU Jineesh Kumar, another Left youth leader and the local representative to the state legislature; through the programme, they aid anyone who required it during the lockdown. During her campaign, Reshma kept a diary, in which she noted down the frustrations and demands of the people. She was happy that the Left gave young people the opportunity to run in these elections. ‘If people have a good opinion of me after five years’, she said, ‘that is the real victory’.

    Arya Rajendran marches during the campaign

    Arya Rajendran marches during the campaign

    Arya Rajendran, twenty-one years old, is the president of Balasangham, an organisation of a million children that works to promote scientific and secular values in children that was set up on 28 December 1938 in Kalliasseri, Kannur (Kerala); its first president was the young communist (and later chief minister of Kerala for eleven years) E.K. Nayanar. Arya, a member of the SFI, sat for her final college exams at the same time as she campaigned for her seat on the Thiruvananthapuram city council. ‘Local bodies are the nerves of the democratic process of Kerala’, she said. ‘It is important that we have young people committed to the cause of democracy being elected to office. It is through local office that we can make sure that everyone benefits from the Left alternative being developed in the state’.

    PP Divya campaigns in Kannur district>

    PP Divya campaigns in Kannur district

    PP Divya, at thirty-six-year-old, is already a veteran in the communist movement. She is a leader in the DYFI and the All-India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA) and is a district committee member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). She had already been a member of the district panchayat (council) since 2015, but now she has been re-elected and is expected to become the president of the district council. Not only has Divya been a key person in the fight against COVID-19 in her district, but she has led from the front to make basic improvements in daily life there and has led protests in solidarity with the farmers’ revolt that has gripped India.

    Afsal campaigns in Malappuram

    Afsal campaigns in Malappuram

    E. Afsal, like Reshma and Arya, is a leader of the SFI. At age twenty-five, he won from the Mangalam ward of the Malappuram district council. Afsal, Reshma, and Arya walk in the footprints of KV Sudheesh, who was a student leader and an elected office holder of the Kannur district council. On 26 January 1994, Sudheesh was stabbed to death by members of the fascist RSS, which is connected to India’s ruling BJP.

    P. Prameela, who won a landslide at Pilicode, returns to work the next day

    P. Prameela, who won a landslide at Pilicode, returns to work the next day

    Comrade Prameela, who works as an agricultural wage labour, was one of the 58% of women who won seats in this local body election. Prameela is a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), one of the directors of the board of the Kodakkad service co-operative bank, and a leader of AIDWA. She won more than 90% of the votes to take a seat on the Pilicode panchayat.

    In 1976, the communist poet Kadammanitta Ramakrishnan wrote Kannurkkotta, or ‘Kannur Fort’, a poem that reflected his hope that the old can fade away and the youth can bring forth a new world. Ramakrishnan was president of the Purogamana Kala Sahitya Sangham (the progressive writers’ association) and an elected member of the state assembly (his candidacy supported by the Left).

    All the fortresses will become antiques.
    All the cannons will silently rust.
    All the sultans will run away into the dark caves.
    My children, who are not sleep deprived,
    Will witness curiously all these events. 

    They will witness these curiously because they will not be fixated on the past. With names like Reshma, Arya, Divya, and Afsal, they will set aside the cannons and the sultans to construct a democratic world. And we will be walking right beside them.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • We Are Grass. We Grow on Everything

    Dharampal Seel, a senior Kisan Sabha leader from Punjab, uses his Red Flag to push a tear gas canister, 27 November 2020.

    The day of the general strike of farmers and workers, 26 November, is also Constitution Day in India, which marks a great feat of political sovereignty. Article 19 of the Indian Constitution (1950) quite clearly gives Indian citizens the right to ‘freedom of speech and expression’ (1.a), the right to ‘assembly peaceably and without arms’ (1.b), the right to ‘form associations or unions’ (1.c), and the right ‘to move freely throughout the territory of India’ (1.d). In case these articles of the Constitution had been forgotten, the Indian Supreme Court reminded the police in a 2012 court case (Ramlila Maidan Incident vs. Home Secretary) that ‘Citizens have a fundamental right to assembly and peaceful protest, which cannot be taken away by an arbitrary executive or legislative action’. The police barricades, the use of tear gas, and the use of water cannons – infused with the Israeli invention of yeast and baking powder to induce a gagging reflex – violate the letter of the Constitution, something that the farmers yelled to the police forces at each of these confrontations. Despite the cold in northern India, the police soaked the farmers with water and tear gas.

    But this did not stop them, as brave young people jumped on the water cannon trucks and turned off the water, farmers drove their tractors to dismantle the barricades, and the working class and the peasantry fought back against the class war imposed on them by the government. The twelve-point charter of demands put forward by the trade unions is sincere, having captured the sentiments of the people. The demands include the reversal of the anti-worker, anti-farmer laws pushed by the government in September, the reversal of the privatisation of major government enterprises, and immediate relief for the population, which is suffering from economic hardship provoked by the coronavirus recession and years of neoliberal policies. These are simple demands, humane and true; only the hardest hearts turn away from them, responding instead with water cannons and tear gas.

    Amrita Sher-Gil (India), Resting, 1939

    These demands for immediate relief, for social protections for workers, and for agricultural subsidies appeal to workers and peasants around the world. It is demands such as these that provoked the recent protests in Guatemala and that led to the general strike on 26 November in Greece.

    We are now entering a period in this pandemic when more unrest is possible as more people in countries with bourgeois governments get increasingly fed up with the atrocious behaviour of their elites. Report after report shows us that the social divides are getting more and more extreme, a trend that began long before the pandemic but has grown wider and deeper as a consequence of it. It is only natural for farmers and agricultural workers to be agitated. A new report from the Land Inequality Initiative shows that only 1% of the world’s farms operate more than 70% of the world’s farmland, meaning that massive corporate farms dominate the corporate food system and endanger the survival of the 2.5 billion people who rely upon agriculture for their livelihood. Land inequality, when it considers landlessness and land value, is highest in Latin America, South Asia, and parts of Africa (with notable exceptions such as China and Vietnam, which have the ‘lowest levels of inequality’).

    A young man, Avtar Singh Sandhu (1950-1988), read Maxim Gorky’s Mother (1906) in the early 1970s in Punjab, from where many of the farmers and agricultural workers travelled to the barricades around New Delhi. He was very moved by the relationship between Nilovna, a working-class woman, and her son, Pavel, or Pasha. Pasha finds his feet in the socialist movement, brings revolutionary books home, and, slowly, both mother and son are radicalised. When Nilovna asks him about the idea of solidarity, Pasha says, ‘The world is ours! The world is for the workers! For us, there is no nation, no race. For us, there are only comrades and foes’. This idea of solidarity and socialism, Pasha says, ‘warms us like the sun; it is the second sun in the heaven of justice, and this heaven resides in the worker’s heart’. Together, Nilovna and Pasha become revolutionaries. Bertolt Brecht retold this story in his play Mother (1932).

    Avtar Singh Sandhu was so inspired by the novel and the play that he took the name ‘Pash’ as his takhallus, his pen name. Pash became one of the most revolutionary poets of his time, murdered in 1988 by terrorists. I am grass is among the poems he left behind:

    Bam fek do chahe vishwavidyalaya par
    Banaa do hostel ko malbe kaa dher
    Suhaagaa firaa do bhale hi hamari jhopriyon par
    Mujhe kya karoge?
    Main to ghaas hun, har chiz par ugg aauungaa.

    If you wish, throw your bomb at the university.
    Reduce its hostel to a heap of rubble.
    Throw your white phosphorus on our slums.
    What will you do to me?
    I am grass. I grow on everything.

    That’s what the farmers and the workers in India say to their elites, and that is what working people say to elites in their own countries, elites whose concern – even in the pandemic – is to protect their power, their property, and their privileges. But we are grass. We grow on everything.

    In the next week, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research will host two events with The People’s Forum. On 4 December, cultural workers from Venezuela, South Africa, and China/Canada will discuss art making for people’s struggles in times of CoronaShock. The discussion will highlight the Anti-Imperialist Poster Exhibition; the last of the four exhibitions launched today on the concept of the hybrid war includes artwork from 37 artists from 18 countries across the world. You can RSVP here.

    On 8 December, the feminisms working group of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research will discuss the recently launched study, CoronaShock and Patriarchy, and the gendered impact of the pandemic. You can RSVP here.

    This article was posted on Saturday, December 5th, 2020 at 8:59pm and is filed under Activism, Agriculture, India, Labor.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.