THIS IS A TIME FOR WORKERS TO BECOME PROUD OF THEIR IMPORTANCE AND COLLECTIVE POWER
By Gary Lefley
The list of key workers is interesting for who is not on it: bankers, City traders, hedge fund managers, CEOs, Corporate Managing Directors, majority shareholders, and billionaires! Evidently the country can operate just fine without them.
Generally, those on the list are not on high incomes, are not rewarded financially for the essential contribution they make to the well being of society.
Key workers are identified as such because the country cannot function without them, because the economy and social infrastructure will collapse without their labour, because they keep the country running. Literally, they run the country.
The economy can survive if individual key workers are off sick, but not if they are collectively ill, or collectively unable to work due to children being off school. The system simply cannot continue without them.
These key workers have extraordinary power when exercised collectively.
This power exists not simply if and when labour is withdrawn, though that is very real power, but also when and how it is deployed towards collective objectives.
The balance of political and class forces will be transformed if key workers begin to understand and collectively exercise the power at their finger tips.
Dividing workers, promoting a sense of unimportance, powerlessness and attendant apathy has always been an objective of the establishment media in its drive to maintain the status quo.
Workers becoming proud of their importance and collective power, emboldened by it, and for the general public to become aware of this too, should be a labour movement imperative as we traverse this crisis.
After the demoralisation of the general election result and the subsequent deluge of contemptible classism, the opportunity to raise class consciousness and reconnect it to the politics of socialism is timely.
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- Michel Onfray
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THE MARKET DOES NOT - CANNOT - CARE FOR HUMANITY
By Gary Lefley
According to neoliberalism, the Market is God. Free competition and free movement of capital, goods, services and labour is divine. The neoliberal gurus have insisted that the market is self-correcting and cures all.
Except it doesn’t, and whenever the market begins to crash and threatens the wealth of the capitalist class, the state is called upon to intervene and preserve the system.
So, in 2008 the government gave billions of pounds of taxpayers money to the banks to shore up the catastrophic failure of the banking world - and the market.
Climate breakdown is the clearest example of how the market is simply not fit for the purpose of meeting the needs of humanity.
Today, the spread of COVID-19 has demonstrated once again the utter uselessness of the market to serve and safeguard society. It has also confirmed that capitalism needs the state, relies upon it, and deploys it readily to rescue the system whenever the market falls apart.
As Joseph Stiglitz wrote: “Neoliberal market fundamentalism was always a political doctrine serving certain interests. It was never supported by economic theory. Nor, it should now be clear, is it supported by historical experience. Learning this lesson may be the silver lining in the cloud now hanging over the global economy.” Joseph Stiglitz, Professor of Economics at Columbia University and Nobel Prize winner in Economic Sciences.
Neoliberalism has failed. The collapse of the world economy in 2008, rescued by governmental interventions and multi-billion dollar giveaways of public money, demonstrated that beyond argument. If additional proof were needed, state actions on every continent in response to the Coronavirus pandemic has writ large: state and inter-state planning is a prerequisite for making the world economy fit for purpose.
The question, then, is not whether the state should intervene in the economy, but on whose behalf. Only socialism answers this question, without ambiguity, in favour of the people.
People must be devoted to ideas, fanatics. Willing to sacrifice themselves if they must. And obviously, less words and debates on theory, but more action. As Eduard Limonov said one day: “There is no longer any left or right, there is the system, and the enemies of the system.” While we discuss who had more correct policies, Lenin or Stalin, Castro or Mao – the faceless anti-national system of global bureaucracy rules us, destroys us.
- Sergei Fomchenkov
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‘HERD IMMUNITY’ - A STRATEGY DRIVEN BY CLASS INTERESTS
By Gary Lefley
The U.K. Government’s strategy of developing “herd immunity” to tackle Coronavirus will need almost 40 million Britons to catch the disease, according to the Government’s Chief Scientific Advisor, Patrick Vallance:
“60% is the sort of figure you need to get herd immunity”, he told Sky News.
It’s difficult to comprehend, but the Government’s strategy is NOT to prevent us catching Coronavirus. That would involve multiple interventions and drastic distancing measures. Such measures would hit corporate profits, and require massive investment in our health service.
Instead, the Government imagines that the NHS in its current state, with some extortionate out-sourcing to private hospitals, (£2.4m per day on private beds) can cope by allowing Covid 19 to infect 40 million people spread over a period of several months.
“IS THIS A SICK JOKE?”
The application of this strategy, given current fatality rates, would lead to something between 400,000 and 1.5 million deaths - most of them elderly and frail.
Little wonder then that Johnson said this week: “I must level with you, the British public. Many more families are going to lose their loved ones before their time”.
So, in the 21st century, we are reduced to a ‘strategy’ that is not much more than was available 700 years ago when bubonic plague swept across Europe: do the minimum, let it spread and hope that we eventually become immune.
At the centre of this approach is the insistence on keeping schools open until the strategy is embedded. We may expect this to be reversed at some point, to contain the spread at around 60% based on modelling projections. The Government may then pretend to be responding to developments. In reality it will be driven by the needs of big business.
Faiza Shaheen, Director of the CLASS think tank, asks: “Is this a sick joke? Hope for an infection rate of 60% of the population to build herd immunity? What about the hundreds of thousands of dead people in this scenario?”
”COVID-19 MGHT BE BENEFICIAL IN CULLING ELDERLY DEPENDENTS”
The inhumane elite that constitutes this Government is cushioned by conspicuous wealth from the prospect of queuing for a state hospital ICU bed. You have to wonder whether they see this crisis as an opportunity to cull non-productive high maintenance OAPs, cut social costs and relieve the ‘rich man’s tax burden’.
Far-fetched? The Daily Telegraph’s Assistant Editor, Jeremy Warner, wrote in his column: “Not to put too fine a point on it, from an entirely disinterested economic perspective, the COVID-19 might even prove mildly beneficial in the long term by disproportionately culling elderly dependents” (Daily Telegraph, 3/3/20). Is this class war, in its crudest and most vile form?
CORONAVIRUSES REINFECT
In truth, this is not a medical or social strategy at all. There is no scientific evidence that acquiring this virus leads to immunity. Cases of the reinfection of recovered patients have been confirmed in Japan and China. Zhan Qingyuan, Director of Pneumonia Prevention and Treatment at the China-Japan Friendship Hospital, warned in a briefing on 31st January: “For those patients who have been cured, there is a likelihood of a relapse. The antibody will be generated; however, in certain individuals, the antibody cannot last that long.”
Prof Samuel McConkey, Deputy Dean at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, told the Irish Times that he “already expected that [Covid-19] would reinfect people because that is what happens with the previous coronaviruses”.
It seems hard to believe, but in dealing with this crisis, the Government has adopted an approach devoid of any serious medical or scientific value. It’s principal aims are to channel Government spending, wherever possible, into the private sector, to prop up big business and safeguard U.K capital.
We face difficult times. And tragedy. In the absence of meaningful Government intervention, we will need to construct our own local voluntary community care systems. But if the global capitalist economy crashes, as was predicted by macro-economists before this pandemic, we should not wait until 2024 before we organise against this Government.
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Fidel: "Revolution is helping each other, revolution is everyone helping everyone, revolution is understanding each other, revolution is constantly better understanding what our obligations are with everyone else, with the homeland..."
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"We must cultivate and practice the essential socialist values in the family and guide all its members, especially the next generation, to love the Party, the homeland, the people and the Chinese nation. Furthermore, we must actively spread the traditional virtues of the Chinese nation, transmit the idea of respecting the elderly and loving the little ones, maintaining equality between men and women and harmony between husband and wife, managing the home diligently and saving and defend solidarity between neighbours, propose the concepts of loyalty, responsibility, family love, learning and public welfare and encourage people to improve their spiritual world and cultivate a civilised style in the process of seeking family happiness, offer warmth to others and contribute to society."
- Xi Jinping
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