Gregor Moder: What is to be done? Philosophical Thinking and Political Action

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMdMsRSxfBk&ab_channel=SimonGros

Jure Simoniti: Hegel and the Opaque Core of History

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYDCLNlZJrI&ab_channel=SimonGros

Class warfare intensifies as labor rights violated around the world

by Systemic Disorder




https://systemicdisorder.wordpress.com/2020/10/07/class-warfare-labor-rights-violated-everywhere/




As bad as conditions have traditionally been for labor worldwide, 2020 has seen conditions deteriorate even more. As in past years, there is not a single country on Earth that fully protects workers’ rights. And although every country continues to violate labor rights, the extent of those violations grows, continuing a sad pattern of class warfare.

The International Trade Union Confederation has issued its annual Global Rights Index, and only 12 countries managed to be listed in the Index’s top ranking, the countries that are merely “sporadic” violators of rights. But those countries are hardly paradises (this is capitalism, after all). One of those dozen, the Netherlands, had no less than seven of its corporations listed among companies violating workers’ rights. Those were not necessarily isolated instances. The report said, “In the Netherlands, unions observed an increasing trend to shift from sectoral agreements to company agreements with the intent of minimising labour costs in return for employability. Companies often used the competitiveness and employability argument with their employees to incite them to accept lower conditions of work at the enterprise level. In addition, companies, including Ryanair, Transavia, Jumbo Supermarkets, Gall & Gall, Action and Lidl supermarkets, tended to circumvent collective bargaining with representative unions.”

If that represents the “best” of conditions for working people, the world is a mighty unfair place. Which it obviously is, given the ever more intense pressure bearing down on working people as the neoliberal era continues to make capitalism ever more miserable for those whose work produces the profits swelling the pockets of industrialists and financiers.

As in past years, the Global Rights Index report divides the world’s countries into five categories with increasing levels of rights violations. They are as follows:

1. Sporadic violations of rights: 12 countries including Germany, Ireland, Norway and Uruguay (green on map above).
2. Repeated violations of rights: 26 countries including Canada, France, Japan and New Zealand (yellow on map).
3. Regular violations of rights: 24 countries including Argentina, Australia, Britain and South Africa (light orange on map).
4. Systematic violations of rights: 41 countries including Chile, Mexico, Nigeria and the United States (dark orange on map).
5. No guarantee of rights: 32 countries including Brazil, China, Colombia and Turkey (red on map).
5+ No guarantee of rights due to breakdown of the rule of law: 9 countries including Libya and Syria (dark red on map).

Hypocritical finger-wagging

Consistent with past years of the Global Rights Index, the United States, which loves to hold itself up as an exemplar of democracy and civil rights, is among the lowest-ranking countries — the U.S. has consistently had a ranking of 4 for “systemic” violations. The International Trade Union Confederation, in supplemental materials discussing U.S. violations, noted that the National Labor Relations Board has made a series of anti-union rulings, including allowing retaliation against striking Wal-Mart workers, while U.S. law permits anti-union discrimination, restricts workers’ rights to form unions of their own choosing, and places severe barriers against union organizing.

The United Kingdom, second only to the U.S. in regular scolding of other countries, is ranked in the middle of the pack, same as a year ago. The report’s discussion of Britain reported “the number of people employed on a stand-by basis, ‘zero-hour contracts.’ at between 200,000 to 250,000 which demonstrates the prevalence of underemployment in the UK. Under these contracts employees have to be available for work but are not guaranteed a minimum number of hours. These contracts create income insecurity for workers and also undermine family life.” Additionally, the report noted multiple barriers to union organizing.

Canada, although ranked higher than Britain or the U.S., is no paradise despite the image its governments like to project. The report noted that in Canada there are many categories of workers, ranging from domestics to professionals, barred from organizing, and there are severe legal restrictions limiting the right to strike.Globally, the report states that violations of workers’ rights are at a seven-year high. Direct attacks on unions highlight the degradation:


“The trends by governments and employers to restrict the rights of workers through violations of collective bargaining and the right to strike, and excluding workers from unions, have been made worse in 2020 by an increase in the number of countries which impede the registration of unions — denying workers both representation and rights. … A new trend identified in 2020 shows a number of scandals over government surveillance of trade union leaders, in an attempt to instil fear and put pressure on independent unions and their members.”

The global pandemic has only made conditions worse:


“These threats to workers, our economies and democracy were endemic in workplaces and countries before the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted lives and livelihoods. In many countries, the existing repression of unions and the refusal of governments to respect rights and engage in social dialogue has exposed workers to illness and death and left countries unable to fight the pandemic effectively.”

Class warfare goes on and on and on

Some of the sobering statistics gathered by the International Trade Union Confederation tell a grim story:
85 percent of countries violated the right to strike.
80 percent of countries violated the right to collectively bargain.
Workers were arrested and detained in 61 countries.
Workers experienced violence in 51 countries.

The Confederation, which describes itself as a coalition of “national trade union centres” encompassing 332 affiliated organizations in 163 countries and territories, determines its ratings by checking adherence to a list of 97 standards derived from International Labour Organization conventions. Those 97 standards pertain to civil liberties, the right to establish or join unions, trade union activities, the right to collective bargaining and the right to strike.

The Confederation’s report is one more illustration of the race to the bottom. The International Labour Organization estimates that more than 470 million people worldwide were unemployed, underemployed or “marginally attached to the workforce” in a report issued in January 2020, with 2 billion people (61 percent of the global workforce!) informally employed. That report was issued just before the Covid-19 pandemic took hold, triggering a dramatic economic crash that had been overdue, thanks to the instability of capitalism that regularly causes downturns. Inequality and lower pay are endemic around the world, and the costs of housing, because it is a capitalist commodity, rises far faster than incomes. The continual imposition of austerity on working people contrasts dramatically with the trillions of dollars thrown at financiers and industrialists since the pandemic began.

Capitalism promises nothing but more one-sided class warfare. We’re long past due to try something different.

The Myth of Herd Immunity

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88wSlNELpoc&ab_channel=InstituteforHealthMetricsandEvaluation%28IHME%29

Kyrgyzstan protesters seize gov’t house, free ex-leader Atambayev

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpT-pVa8Kes&ab_channel=AlJazeeraEnglish

Trump escalates political conspiracy despite White House pandemic

Andre Damon, Joseph Kishore



https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/10/07/pers-o07.html

US President Donald Trump spent his first day back in the White House on Tuesday confronting a deepening crisis for his entire administration.

The White House itself has emerged as the principal national hotspot of the pandemic, with the fallout from the September 26 Rose Garden nomination ceremony for Judge Amy Coney Barrett continuing to grow. Late Tuesday night, it was reported that Trump’s fascistic adviser, Stephen Miller, tested positive, following Monday’s announcement that White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany had contracted the virus.

On top of the spread among top White House officials and Trump advisers, almost the entirety of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, including General Mark Milley, the chairman, are now under quarantine after being exposed to Admiral Charles Ray, the vice commandant of the Coast Guard, who has tested positive for COVID-19.

While Trump has returned, many White House offices are empty and will remain so for at least another week. As for Trump himself, while his doctors claim that he “reports no symptoms,” the president has been pumped full of steroids and other drugs, and the illness has far from taken its full course.

Trump’s decision to return to the White House from the Walter Reed Medical Center late Monday night was clearly motivated by deep concerns over the impact of his sickness on his position and political conspiracies.

Unless all the polls are totally wrong, Trump’s political position is deteriorating, and he faces the danger of a substantial defeat at the polls. But this fact does not alter his plans. The more desperate the crisis of the administration, the more Trump calculates that his ability to remain in office depends entirely on his ability to utilize extra-constitutional measures. Such conspiracies cannot be orchestrated from a hospital bed in Walter Reed. Trump requires control over the apparatus of the state.

In relation to his effort to stack the Supreme Court, Trump’s main focus on Tuesday was to demand that Senator Mitch McConnell scrap discussions in Congress over a new stimulus bill in order to focus all his attention on pushing through Barrett’s nomination before November 3.

Then there is the matter of the symbolism surrounding Trump himself. His cultivation of a far-right and fascistic movement is highly dependent on his persona—the “great leader,” immune from danger and particularly immune from the coronavirus pandemic, the seriousness of which he has downplayed and continues to downplay. The “leader” cannot be confined to the hospital bed.

Trump’s return to the White House on the Marine One helicopter Monday night, complete with his salute from the White House, was clearly inspired by Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, the 1935 Nazi propaganda film whose opening scenes depict Adolf Hitler descending by airplane and appearing on a balcony.

The commentary among Trump’s supporters in the media sought to present him as a battlefield commander risking his own health and safety alongside the American people. “The reason he didn’t hide from the virus is he didn’t want America to hide from the virus,” Fox News host Greg Gutfeld explained. “If he was going to ask America to get back to work … he was going to do the same thing, he was going to walk out there on that battlefield with you.”

Thus, the catastrophe produced by the “herd immunity” strategy spearheaded by the White House, which has killed more than 200,000 people and has come back to infect the White House itself, is to be turned into an example of Trump’s strength. Trump quickly seized on his own illness as a justification for doing nothing to contain the virus. “Many people every year, sometimes over 100,000, and despite the Vaccine, die from the Flu,” he Tweeted on Tuesday. “Are we going to close down our Country? No, we have learned to live with it, just like we are learning to live with Covid.”

None of this can cloak the deep crisis engulfing the administration. The more desperate the situation becomes, however, the more reckless will be Trump’s actions. His conspiratorial coup plotting continues, and there is still one month before the election. Trump has many tricks up his sleeve, including the possibility of a military provocation, an “October Surprise,” that would be used to rally support in the name of “national unity.”

There is one factor that works in Trump’s favor: the duplicity, spinelessness, and fundamentally reactionary character of the Democratic Party. The Democrats can claim no credit for the crisis of the Trump administration. Rather than exposing his plots, they have done everything they can to stifle mass opposition to Trump’s fascistic conspiracies and cover-up the danger of dictatorship.

The Democrats and their affiliated media responded to the announcement of Trump’s illness—which came only days after the presidential debate in which Trump made an open appeal to fascistic violence—with effusive hopes for a speedy recovery “for the sake of the nation” and “national security,” as the New York Times put it this past Saturday. Trump has answered the Democrats’ prayers to “get well soon” by returning to the White House so that he can resume his preparations to overturn the election results.

The principal fear of the Democratic Party, a party of Wall Street, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies, is that it might say anything that will spark the enormous wellspring of popular opposition that would be directed not only against Trump but the capitalist system.

On Monday night, Biden declared at an NBC Town Hall event that he was sorry for calling Trump a “clown,” declaring that this was too “divisive.” As Trump stokes civil war, Biden’s call is for “unity.”

The Democrats want to keep the escalating crisis within the state apparatus from escaping the confines of the state apparatus itself. In the event of a contested election, their appeal will be to the military as the arbiters of power—itself a concession to the increasingly dictatorial and authoritarian direction of American politics.

However the political crisis within the state apparatus develops over the next month, American democracy is on its death’s door. The serendipitous accident of the White House pandemic cannot restore health to a social and political system that is rotten to the core.

Trump has set into motion a fascistic movement, which has significant support within the state apparatus and the financial oligarchy. The ruling class is implementing a policy that has already led to death on a massive scale. Tens of millions of people face an increasingly desperate situation, confronting mass unemployment, hunger, and homelessness. The economic house of cards on Wall Street, inflated with trillions of dollars in cash from the Federal Reserve, hovers continuously on the brink of collapse. And the pandemic is entering a new and even more dangerous stage.

To the extent that opposition remains subordinated to the Democratic Party, it will provide Trump with the opportunity to recover. If he cannot, the Democrats will come to power with an olive branch in one hand for Trump and the Republicans and a stick in the other to be used against the growing opposition of the working class.

The working class must utilize the next four weeks and beyond to unify and coordinate its struggles against the ruling class’s policy of “herd immunity,” social devastation, war, police violence and authoritarianism into an independent and revolutionary movement for socialism.

Academic promoted by Jacobin to campaign for reopening schools meets with Trump officials

Genevieve Leigh




https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/10/07/jaco-o07.html




In late September, Jacobin magazine, which is affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), published an article promoting the reopening of schools and the removal of other restrictions aimed at combatting the spread of the coronavirus.

The article took the form of an interview with two epidemiologists who advocate for the US to follow the so-called “Swedish model” of encouraging large sections of the population to become infected with COVID-19.

On Tuesday, the main individual interviewed by Jacobin in the article, Harvard university professor Martin Kulldorff, met with the Trump administration officials responsible for formulating White House policy in relation to the pandemic.

Kulldorff, along with Oxford professor Sunetra Gupta and Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya, held discussions with Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Scott Atlas. Atlas is a new member of the White House coronavirus task force and an unabashed proponent of removing all restraints on the spread of the virus.
In the meeting, the guest doctors reportedly lent their approval to the policy being pursued by the White House. They advised Azar and Atlas to allow the virus to spread uncontrolled among young, healthy people.

Kulldorff said after the meeting, according to the Hill, “We had a very good discussion. He [Atlas] asked many questions, and we put forth our case to protect the people who are vulnerable, and the idea of trying to do lockdowns to eliminate this disease is not realistic.”

Atlas told the Hill in an email that he supported the position of Kulldorff and the others involved in the meeting. “Their targeted protection of the vulnerable and opening schools and society policy matches the policy of the President and what I have advised.”

That is, the policy promoted by Jacobin magazine matches the policy of the Trump administration.

Atlas also said he supported the recent “Great Barrington Declaration” written by Kulldorff, Bhattacharya and Gupta. The summation of the “declaration” states that “those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal.”

The basic conclusion of the “declaration” amounts to this: Millions of workers’ lives are to be sacrificed in the name of profit. No effort or resources will be allocated to contain the disease or mitigate its impact.

The policy promoted by Kuldorff, Atlas and Jacobin is premised on the claim that the virus does not affect young people and the healthy, which is false. Just a week ago, a nineteen-year-old teenager at Appalachian State University in North Carolina, otherwise in full health, died from neurological complications.

Moreover, the unrestrained spread of the virus among young and middle-aged people will also inevitably lead to the spread of the virus among the elderly, as indeed happened in Sweden.

Already more than 210,000 people have died from the virus in the United States, and more than one million internationally.

Kulldorff has doubled down on his positions in recent days on Twitter. On October 2, he tweeted a section of his interview with Reaction.life: “We don’t close schools because of the annual flu. We don’t ban people from driving cars because there are people who die in car accidents. We let people live normal lives with standard precautions.”

Quoting from an article published in the UK’s Spectator, he tweeted on August 17th: “We should appreciate young adults who help generate herd immunity by living normal lives and keeping society afloat. When people throw misguided complaints at you, falsely claiming that you are endangering others, remember that the opposite is true.”

Kulldorff is essentially encouraging young people to go out and get infected, which is entirely in line with Trump’s policy of “let it rip.”

The coming together of Jacobin magazine with the right-wing policies of Trump is notable but not entirely surprising. Jacobin, along with its co-thinkers in the DSA, functions as a faction of the Democratic Party.

Jacobin is preparing the way for the possibility of a future Biden administration. If Biden becomes president, the editorial board at Jacobin knows full well that nothing fundamental will change about American politics or the ruling class response to the pandemic. Its role is to prepare the way for Biden to embrace the policy of herd immunity by attempting to give it a left veneer.

For all the claims of major differences with the Republicans on social policy, the Democrats and their lead representative, presidential nominee Joe Biden, have made it clear that they support the policy of herd immunity. Biden has done everything in his power to facilitate the reopening of schools and workplaces.

The original article promoting the policy of herd immunity caused consternation among the readers and staff of Jacobin. No doubt some members of the editorial board felt it was perhaps a step too far and would damage whatever credibility they still have with youth and workers who are horrified at the prospect of millions more needless deaths.

However, as the WSWS wrote in its original analysis of the Jacobin article: “Words have meaning. By embracing and openly advocating the policies of the Trump administration, the publishers of Jacobin have made themselves complicit in the administration’s crimes. The millions of working people whose friends and loved ones died needlessly will not forget the words and actions of Jacobin.”