An interview with Dmitry Kosmachev, a member of the Minsk Socialist Circle, about the situation in Belarus, the current protests, and where they may lead.

Stephen Shenfield: In the 1990s I made visits to five of the new post-Soviet republics – Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan. I got the impression that the situation for working people in Belarus was relatively tolerable. Only in Belarus did I find no evidence of people engaged in a desperate struggle to survive. The regime was authoritarian but enjoyed wide support. There were no serious ethnic conflicts.

How accurate was my impression? And how has the situation changed since then?

Dmitry Kosmachev: You are quite right. Even today things are better here in Belarus than elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. In Belarus, unlike Russia and other republics, large-scale privatization of factories, land, and farms has not taken place. Soviet-era industry has not been dismantled and is still competitive. Our trucks, tractors, and buses are bought not only by post-Soviet states but also by some Third World countries. We import our dairy products from other former Soviet republics, not from the EU. We even continue to export clothes and shoes to other former Soviet republics, despite the ubiquity of cheap Chinese imports.  

This situation is reflected in our social structure. For one thing, we have preserved a large industrial working class. And with industry remaining in the hands of the state Belarus, unlike Russia and Ukraine, has no ‘oligarchs’ – extremely rich capitalists who influence politics and create their own parties. The levels of crime and corruption are relatively low here, thanks in part to tough measures. The death penalty still exists in Belarus.  

SS: Would you say then that Belarus has a more just society than Russia and Ukraine?

DK: No, the preponderance of state capitalism in Belarus does not make it a welfare state. For example, Russia has more progressive labor legislation than we do. In Russia there are several alternative trade union federations, while Belarus has only one trade union independent of the state. It was created and registered under Lukashenko’s predecessors. In Belarus it is almost impossible to conduct a strike in compliance with the formal requirements of labor law. Russian law requires an employer who wants to dismiss a worker to provide two weeks’ warning and three months’ severance pay, while most Belarusian workers are employed on the basis of short-term – usually annual — labor contracts, so that at the end of the year they can be fired without benefits, simply by not renewing their contract.

There has been partial privatization in Belarus. Fully state-owned enterprises have been transformed into joint-stock companies in which the majority of shares are held by the state and a minority by the director. This gives the director a financial interest in the performance of the enterprise, but he remains dependent on the state and can always be dismissed if deemed disloyal.

SS: How has the political situation changed since the 1990s? 

DK: Lukashenko did have wide support in the 1990s. He did not need to cheat in order to win elections. People were afraid of what was happening in Russia and Ukraine – the destruction of the Soviet-era economy, the instability, the rising crime, the corruption. In Belarus industrial enterprises continued to operate. Crime was low, as I said. 

At that time the opposition did not have wide support. They were nationalist intellectuals with an orientation toward Poland. Nor were they very honest. In fall 2001 the following joke made the rounds:

Who launched the attack on the World Trade Center? The Belarusian opposition, so as not to have to account for grants received from the US government.

In the presidential election of September 2001 Lukashenko inflicted a crushing defeat on the opposition candidate.

But as they say, ‘dripping water wears away the stone.’ There grew up a new generation of young people. They often traveled to Poland and Lithuania – countries that have close historical connections with Belarus – and there they saw a completely different level of freedom. Meanwhile Lukashenko was coming to resemble a Latin American dictator. He started to take his youngest son Nikolai with him everywhere he went. The boy is now 17 years old. This, clearly, is our Kim Jong Un.

The protests that followed Lukashenko’s victory in the presidential election of 2006, influenced by similar protests in Ukraine, showed that by then the opposition had acquired a broader base. Many previously ‘non-political’ students took part. They set up a tent camp on Kalinovsky Square, one of the central squares of Minsk. It stood there two weeks before being brutally broken up by special police.

SS: What led up to the current protests? 

DK: The presidential election of 2020 was carefully prepared. Would-be candidates whom Lukashenko considered serious rivals were barred from standing. Thus he did not allow the registration of Viktor Babariko, former chairman of the board of Belgazprombank (Belarus Gas Industry Bank), which has links to the huge Russian gas company Gazprom. The famous blogger Sergei Tikhanovsky, who also intended to stand, was arrested on farfetched charges.

All the same, Lukashenko needed a sparring partner, a rival whom he would easily defeat. He thought that a woman would be a weak candidate – men would never vote for her – so he allowed the registration of Sergei Tikhanovsky’s wife, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya. But it turned out that voters were fed up with Lukashenko and most were willing to vote for a woman. The president and his team falsified the results. According to the official figures, Lukashenko won with 80% of the vote. But most people were more inclined to believe Tikhanovskaya’s claim that she had won at least 60%. She has now been allowed to go abroad.

Falsification of the election results triggered an unprecedented outburst of public indignation. 

SS: How do the current protests compare with protests in the past? 

DK: First, they are much more massive. The demonstration in Minsk on October 25 was 100,000 strong, which is quite impressive for a city of two million. There have been separate marches of students and women. 

Second, these protests have occurred throughout the country, even in the smallest towns. Past protests were confined to the capital.

Naturally, such large and nationwide protests have a broader social composition than earlier protests, the participants in which were mostly students, people in the arts, small businesspeople, and workers in the Information Technology sector.

SS: Have the protests been accompanied by strikes? 

DK: In August the opposition managed to organize a quite powerful nationwide strike movement. They tried again at the end of October, after Tikhanovskaya called for a general strike, but this time they failed.  

SS: When you mention ‘the opposition’ I suppose you are referring primarily to the Belarusian Popular Front?

DK: No, no, you remember the Belarusian Popular Front from the 1990s, but today this organization is virtually non-existent. The opposition is now represented by other structures. Since the 90s it has become somewhat less nationalist and more pro-Western and liberal. One of the main points in the economic program of the opposition’s presidential candidate was privatization.  

SS: Is there a significant section of the population that actively supports the regime?

DK: Lukashenko has many supporters, but their support is passive in nature. When he needs people to attend a rally, he summons school teachers, workers for public utilities, and others who depend on the state for their livelihood. 

SS: Should libertarian socialists support the protest movement? What is your opinion?

DK: My opinion is that they should not. Definitely not! Libertarian anti-authoritarian socialists should support neither the dictator nor the liberals. 

Unfortunately, however, there are several other groups of self-styled ‘anti-authoritarian socialists’ who are taking an active part in these protests. This is true of anarchists, the Green Party, and the Belarusian Left Party ‘Just World’ – former ‘communists’ who oppose Lukashenko and adhere to the platform of the Party of the European Left [a coalition of ‘communists’ and ‘social democrats’ in EU countries–SS]. 

A band of four anarchists even tried to start a guerrilla war. They crossed the border from Ukraine illegally with weapons, committed several acts of sabotage, and were arrested while trying to return to Ukraine.     

SS: The political situation in Belarus is developing against the background of the global Covid-19 pandemic. Is there any connection between them? How is the pandemic affecting Belarus?

DK: The number of people diagnosed with Covid-19 in Belarus is 106,000, of whom 91,000 have recovered. About 1,000 have died. For a country with a population of 9.5 million this is not catastrophic. 

Lukashenko has responded to the threat of Covid-19 with much less drastic measures than those adopted in Russia and Ukraine. Throughout the spring and summer no restrictions were imposed on economic activity. On May 9 the authorities even held a national football competition and a military parade to mark the 75th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany. Planes from abroad were allowed to land at the airport, though passengers were required to self-isolate for two weeks, as were people who had been in contact with Covid-19 patients inside the country. 

The relatively weak official response to the pandemic may have contributed to the protests in a small way. Many people have voluntarily limited their contacts and worn masks and gloves as a sort of challenge to the authorities.

SS: Is Russia in any way involved in the situation in Belarus? 

DK: Lukashenko has usually tried to maintain his independence by balancing between Russia and the EU. There is tension in his relationship with Putin. On the eve of the presidential election there was even a scandal with the arrest of Russian mercenaries who — claimed the Belarusian authorities – had come to Minsk to stage an armed coup against Lukashenko. In fact, they were just waiting for a plane to Turkey to fly from there to Africa. At Russian airports almost all foreign flights have been canceled on account of the pandemic, whereas Belarus remains open for flights. 

But when Lukashenko faced mass protests he abandoned anti-Russian rhetoric and ran to Putin for help. And Putin agreed to help. Not, however, by sending troops or special police to suppress protests, but by sending political experts – so-called ‘political technologists’ — to raise the abysmal quality of the regime’s propaganda and improve Lukashenko’s terrible domestic and international image. It is these experts who are to be congratulated for the fact that the propaganda programs of state television channels have become more professional. The hope must be that Lukashenko can learn from the more flexible political system of Putin’s Russia, which provides scope for dissent ‘within the system’ and is more selective in applying repression. 

SS: Are there any countries apart from Russia with which the Belarusian regime has good relations?

DK: Lukashenko considers the Maduro regime in Venezuela an ideological ally. A monument has been erected in Minsk to Simon Bolivar [the anti-colonial leader who is the inspiration for Venezuela’s ‘Bolivarian Revolution’–SS] and one of the city squares has been renamed in his honor. State-owned Belarusian construction companies have built several blocks of apartments in Caracas.  

SS: Please tell us about the Minsk Socialist Circle. 

DK: The Minsk Socialist Circle is a group of 30—40 lecturers and students in the humanities at universities in Minsk. It arose out of an optional course of lectures on the history of socialist thought given at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Belarusian State University in 2017 to mark the centenary of the Russian Revolution. Those of us who started the circle shared a felt need to find a new model of society to restart the socialist project that had been discredited by the Bolsheviks. We hold seminars, public meetings, and discussions with representatives of other left-wing organizations.

SS: So the idea is to make people more aware of non-Bolshevik currents in the history of socialist thought, so that they will distinguish between Bolshevism and socialism as such – and not throw out the baby with the bathwater.  

DK: As Belarus was part of the Russian empire and before that of Poland, its territory was the scene of the activities of many Russian, Polish, and Jewish socialist parties. 

SS: Right. My grandmother, who was from Smorgon in the northwestern corner of Belarus, was in the Jewish Socialist Bund. But what about Belarusian socialists? 

DK: There were Belarusian socialists as well, but fewer of them. And it was also in Belarus that there arose the first anarchist organizations in the Russian Empire. So our country has a rich tradition of socialist thought – a tradition that was never completely eradicated either through the long years of the Soviet Union or under  the Lukashenko dictatorship.

SS: Are you especially inspired by any particular non-Bolshevik tradition? 

DK: Yes, we feel a special affinity with those non-Marxist socialists in the tsarist empire who were known in Russian as narodniki. There is no satisfactory equivalent of this term in English. It comes from the word narod, meaning ‘the people,’ because the narodniki believed in ‘going to the people.’ In the 19th century thousands of educated young people went to the villages to preach the ideals of socialism. Hoping to gain the trust of uneducated peasants, they dressed in simple clothes and arranged to work as rural artisans, doctors, and teachers. It was the narodniki who formed the People’s Will Party and later the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries. 

By the way, Sergei Stepnyak, at whose London funeral William Morris made one of his last speeches, was a narodnik.    

SS: They also committed acts of terror, didn’t they? 

DK: Some did. It was the People’s Will Party that planned and carried out the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. You see, the first attempts to ‘go to the people’ failed. The peasants distrusted the strangers from the cities and turned them in to the police. That led some narodniki in Russia to resort to terrorism. But the narodniki in Belarus never did so. There was a separate Belarusian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, led by a woman teacher – Poluta Bodunova, who died in the Stalinist GULAG. 

In any case, there is no longer such a wide gap between conscious socialists and working people. The tradition of ‘going to the people’ can still serve us as an ethical guide.

SS: How many people do you reach? 

DK: Attendance at our meetings has risen to about a hundred people. And lectures on Marxism or on the history of the socialist movement can attract hundreds of interested young students. True, that is not much by comparison with the crowds of tens or even hundreds of thousands at mass meetings of the liberal opposition. But just a couple of years ago a mere handful of people came to our meetings. 

Now is a good time for socialist propaganda. More and more people are getting disillusioned with the liberal opposition. At the same time, they realize that the Lukashenko regime embodies all the worst features of bureaucratic society in the Soviet era. We do not want to lead people into a new version of the same sort of impasse. That is the focus of heated debates between us and the traditional left parties and groups, who unambiguously associate themselves with the tradition of the Bolsheviks and the Soviet Union. I hope that the ideas of anti-authoritarian socialism will again take root in our country.

SS: Are the members of your circle affected by the current repressions? 

DK: Yes. Lukashenko is demanding that students who have taken part in the protests be expelled from institutions of higher education. Although we have not taken part in the protests, we too are threatened with expulsion. We may also be deprived of access to the premises where we hold our meetings. 

SS: What prospects do you see for Belarus? 

DK: In our opinion, the protests are unlikely to improve the situation in the country. If Lukashenko succeeds in suppressing them, there will be less freedom and more repression. If the liberal opposition manages to overthrow the Lukashenko regime, there will be more political freedom. However, a liberal government will probably pursue a policy of privatization. Europe is still the liberals’ ideal. They do not want to know that capitalism is in a deep systemic crisis and they do not want to learn from what privatization has brought about in Russia and Ukraine.

Privatization will create a new class of powerful and wealthy oligarchs and a new split in society. Industry will be dismantled and asset-stripped. Workers will find themselves out on the street with no chance of employment in accordance with their skills, while productive enterprises are turned into warehouses and shopping malls. Agriculture will also be destroyed. 

We may then see unfold in Belarus a tragedy similar to what has occurred in Ukraine. The destabilization of society may lead to confrontation between eastern regions connected with Russia and western regions drawn toward the European Union. 

SS: But surely Belarus does not have the sharp cultural and ethnic division between eastern and western regions that characterizes Ukraine?

DK: Belarus has a similar division, even though it is not as sharp. In Grodno, in the west of the country, most people speak Belarusian, while in the east – in Gomel and Vitebsk – as well as in Minsk the main language spoken is Russian. Ukraine represents a worst-case scenario for Belarus. There are grounds to hope that it will be avoided. Unlike the protests against Yanukovych in Ukraine, which were almost all in the western and central parts of the country, the protests here in Belarus are nationwide. There is no counter-movement for Lukashenko or for joining Russia. 

SS: What is the message of the Minsk Socialist Circle to the citizens of Belarus?

DK: In this situation, we can only appeal to people’s reason, remind them of the socialist traditions of our country, and emphasize the need for a system based on social justice, coordination of the interests of all population groups, genuine popular control over public property, and the widest self-government. Our slogan today is: Neither dictatorship nor privatization, but people’s self-government and workers’ self-management!

Taken from the World Socialist Party of the United States Website

http://www.wspus.org/2020/11/whats-going-on-in-belarus/

 At least 100 million people have been forced to flee their homes due to violence, persecution, or other forms of public disorder over the last decade, according to UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency. That’s about one in every 97 people on the planet, roughly one percent of humanity. If such war victims had been given their own state to homestead, it would be the 14th largest nation, population-wise, in the world. According to UNHCR,  fewer war refugees and IDPs are able to rebuild their lives. In the 1990s, an average of 1.5 million refugees were able to return home annually. For the last 10 years, that number has dropped to around 385,000. Today, about 77% of the world’s refugees are trapped in long-term displacement situations thanks to forever wars like the conflict in Afghanistan that is now in its sixth decade.

Yet, these numbers, they’re set to be dwarfed by people displaced by another signature story of our time: climate change. So much worse is yet to come, according to experts.

 A recent forecast suggests that, by the year 2050, the number of people driven from their homes by ecological catastrophes could be 900% greater than the 100 million forced to flee conflicts over the last decade.

Predictions now warn of increasing ecological disasters and resource wars supercharging the already surging phenomenon of global displacement. According to a recent report by the Institute for Economics and Peace, a think tank that produces annual global terrorism and peace indexes, two billion people already face uncertain access to sufficient food — a number set to jump to 3.5 billion by 2050. Another one billion “live in countries that do not have the current resilience to deal with the ecological changes they are expected to face in the future.” The report warns that the global climate crisis may displace as many as 1.2 billion people by 2050.

In 2010, Bassiaka Dao, the president of the confederation of farmers in Burkina Faso, told the United Nations news agency, IRIN, that the impacts of climate change had been noticeable for years and were getting worse. As the decade wore on, rising temperatures and new rainfall patterns — droughts followed by flash floods — increasingly drove farmers from their villages, while desertification swelled the populations of urban centers.

In a report published earlier this year, William Chemaly of the Global Protection Cluster, a network of nongovernmental organizations, international aid groups, and United Nations agencies, noted that in Burkina Faso “climate change is crippling livelihoods, exacerbating food insecurity, and intensifying armed conflict and violent extremism.”

 Burkina Faso can’t deal with the one million people already displaced by conflict. And the world can’t deal with the almost 80 million people already driven from their homes by violence. So how will we cope with 1.2 billion people — nearly the population of China or India — likely to be displaced by climate driven-conflicts, water wars, increasing ecological devastation, and other unnatural disasters in the next 30 years?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/climate-change-future/

 

U.S jails and prisons are being completely ravaged by COVID-19. Crowded quarters, a lack of PPE, inadequate medical care, an aging population, and unsanitary conditions have contributed to an infection rate 5.5 times higher than the already ballooned average in the U.S. 

As of this writing, over 252,000 people in jails and prisons have been infected and at least 1,450 incarcerated people and officers have died from the novel coronavirus. Evidence suggests these figures are underreported, however. (Wisconsin, for example, isn’t releasing any information to the public.)

In response, incarcerated people have shown strong solidarity, coming together to demand baseline safety measures and advocating for their release, only to be met with brutal repression and punishment. According to a new report by Perilous: A Chronicle of Prisoner Unrest on November 13, incarcerated people in the U.S. collectively organized at least 106 COVID-19 related rebellions from March 17 to June 15. Cook County Jail in Chicago, a site with the largest outbreak of any location in the state of Illinois, rebelled on six separate occasions including one uprising and several hunger strikes.

The analysis found that people rose up inside federal and state prisons, jails, juvenile carceral centers, and Immigration Detention Centers in 39 states. Immigrant Detention Centers rebelled most frequently, with 45 separate events. Thirty-tworebellions took place in private prisons (25 of which had contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement), a disproportionate response as less than 9 percent of prisons in the United States are privately operated. Louisiana, with a rich history of work stoppages, rebellions and an indefatigable support infrastructure, was the state with the highest frequency of COVID-19-related prison rebellions. California and Washingtonwere the second and third most rebellious respectively.

Common demands have included that guards wear masks and that departments provide individuals with protective items like soap, masks, and hand sanitizer.

Duncan Tarr, a researcher at Perilous, tells Truthout, “Since corrections departments and ICE contractors are unwilling to prevent the spread of the virus, prisoners and detainees have been taking action themselves to draw attention to the dangerous situation they find themselves in and to resist the system of incarceration that is killing them.”

Despite urgent calls for action from public health scientists in The Lancet, the ACLU and countless other organizations, Democratic and Republican politicians alike, from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, have largely refused to reduce prison populations by any meaningful margin. Instead of mass releases, as the U.S. enters its third wave, many departments’ chosen preventative measures continue to be “lockdowns,” or confining people in their cells for 21 to 23 hours a day. It’s estimated that 300,000 people incarcerated in state and federal prisons are in lockdown or solitary confinement conditions. 

https://truthout.org/articles/report-finds-over-100-rebellions-in-jails-and-prisons-over-covid-conditions/

 

A social media story claims that three thousand people have offered themselves to Nigel Farage (ex-Conservative, ex-European Parliament, ex-UKIP, ex-Brexit) as candidates for presumably local and national elections. The Brexit party is now being turned into the Reform party. It would not be wrong to say that there are many people who are disillusioned with the political parties who dominate the political stage in the UK. Any “success” it achieves, if ever, would be mere crumbs distributed by the capitalist class to keep the workers “happy”. Like a stage magician performing an illusion the reforms sort will turn out to be nothing more than smoke and mirrors.

The following is taken from an editorial from the October 1904 issue of the Socialist Standard. The three thousand, reformists ,and more, would improve their political education considerably by reading this. (The Socialist Party of Great Britain was formed in June, 1904)

“The basis of modern society is, economically, the holding by one section of the community of the means necessary for producing and distributing the means of living of the whole of the community, i.e. the ownership by a class of the whole wealth of society. As against them there is the vast mass of the people owning nothing but their “labour-power,” their power of working.

The worker being compelled to sell this power of working on the labour market, in return for his means of livelihood, has interests diametrically opposed to those of the employer who buys his activity. Hence two classes with conflicting interests, constantly meeting on the labour market, must necessarily engage in a struggle in which each combatant can gain only at the expense of the other. Such a struggle between classes forms a class war.

Economically, the working class are impotent so long as the employing class has possession of political power. Therefore, the class struggle must manifest itself as a political struggle for class supremacy. The working class can only gain their ends by taking possession of the political machine and using it so as to gain their own economic emancipation. This can be done only by themselves, and the struggle in which they must take part to secure this is a class war—the working class against the employing class.

The basis of a Socialist Party in any country must, therefore, be a recognition of the fact that the material interests of the working class are in entire opposition to those of the employing class, that is, the recognition of the class war. Any party which declares that no class war exists rules itself, by virtue of that declaration, out of court as a Socialist party. It is, necessary, therefore, in forming and organising a Socialist party to have a clearly defined class war basis, and in every action of the party to always keep the class-conscious character of the party clearly to the front. Any action tending to obscure this position, any position keeping the class struggle in the background, is a virtual betrayal of Socialist principles, serving only to confuse the issues in the minds of the workers and to make it more difficult for them to understand their class position and the reasons for it, and to see the road which must be followed if they are to achieve their emancipation—serving only, in brief, to retard the development of their class consciousness.

Any alliance, either permanent or temporary, with a party which does not recognise the class war is therefore out of the question. For does not every such alliance, whether openly avowed or tacitly understood, make less clear the class opposition which exists between the various political parties? How can we claim to be essentially distinct and, in fact, diametrically opposed to all other political parties, if we can find sufficient common objects to make possible any common ground of working? We think that the teaching of our principles is hindered by every such concession to the anti-class war parties, and is, therefore, opposed to the true interests of Socialism. We, therefore, avow ourselves in hostility to all other political parties, and can have nothing in common with them…

Our next objection lies in the fact that any such dependence upon other political parties for their assistance assumes the maintenance of a majority of members on our legislative bodies who are not class conscious representatives of the working class. So long as that remains the case, so long will the legislature be controlled by middle class men, by capitalists. Every such capitalistically controlled legislature secures the control of the administrative and judicial functions by the capitalists…

We have only to study the legislation of the last half of the nineteenth century to find that each of those phases of the economic legislation of the middle class parties plentifully exist. Wo find that the administration of the law being in the hands of the capitalist class, will be carried on by them in such a way as not to be dangerous to their own class interests…

We have to point out further that sometimes it happens that a reform asked for by the working class can be granted them without any serious danger to the capitalist class. In such cases they make graceful concessions and the working class are usually called upon to hail the party granting such a “concession” as their truest friends…

We are, therefore, forced to rho conclusion that the trying to secure measures for the palliation of the evils of the existing class-governed society is useless. The men in control of the legislative, administrative, and judicial machinery of the community can always dodge any such partial attacks upon their position, can always find loopholes to escape from any concession appearing to endanger their position.

The only thing which will secure the alleviation of our misery and our wage slavery is the propagation of the principles of Socialism and the building up of a class conscious Socialist party, prepared to wrest at the earliest possible moment the whole powers of government from the hands of those who at present control them.

When a strong Socialist party, fighting directly for the establishment of a Socialist regime, and prepared in their progress to secure any advantage which will act as a new vantage ground in their further fight is organised, then the capitalists will be only too ready to offer and to give each and all of those palliatives as a sop to the growing Socialist forces in the country.

We have, therefore, to recognise all the time that it is only possible to secure any real benefit for the people when the people themselves become class conscious, when behind the Socialists in Parliament and on other bodies there stands a solid phalanx of men clear in their knowledge of Socialism and clear in their knowledge that the only way to secure the Socialist Commonwealth of the future is to depend only upon the efforts of themselves and those who have the same class conscious opinions. Therefore we have no palliative programme. The only palliative we shall ever secure is the Socialist Society of the future gained by fighting uncompromisingly at all times and in every season.

The full editorial can found at:

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-futility-of-reform-1904.html

DC

 

Hopes that Congress will pass another pandemic relief package before the end of the year are growing dim. The federal government estimates 10 million people – including 4 million children – will be pushed below the federal poverty line in late 2020 as unemployment benefits are set to expire in December without further relief from Congress.

Federal data shows nearly 11 percent of adults – including up to 14 percent of adults living with children do not have enough to eat.

Nearly 24 million adults — 10.9 percent of the population — report that their household sometimes or often did not have enough to eat in the past week, according to data collected in mid-October. Between 8 and 14 percent of adults with children reported that their kids sometimes or often did not have enough to eat. Compare that to last year, when only 3.7 percent of adults reported their households going hungry during the entire course of 2019. Rates of hunger are much higher among Black and Latino households, where workers are more likely to work in low-income industries that suffered massive job losses due to the pandemic. About 19 percent of Black households and 18 percent of Latinx households reported not having enough food to eat sometimes or often in the past seven days.

 About 1 million people applied for unemployment insurance last week, more than any time during the Great Recession, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Many workers are exhausting their state unemployment benefits as the pandemic drags on – the number of state claims dropped by 436,000 last week – and federal emergency unemployment benefits will expire on December 26 without congressional action. 

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Nearly 80 million adults — about one in three — report not having enough money to cover basic expenses, such as food, rent and medical bills, including 40 percent of households with children. Nearly one in six renters are behind on rent, including 26 percent of Black families and 18 percent of Latinx families, according to the Center’s analysis of federal data.  Attempts by landlords to evict their tenants have been reported across the country.

https://truthout.org/articles/1-in-10-go-hungry-as-trump-and-mcconnell-fixate-on-challenging-election-results/

 Free trade agreements create a “race to the bottom” said Kate Lappin, Regional Secretary for Asia and Pacific, at Public Services International, encouraging governments to compete to have the lowest possible wages and conditions. Instead of signing new rules that favour big business, and harm workers  Lappin said 

The 10 members of ASEAN – Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam – will sign the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) together with five additional countries Australia, China, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea on 15 November.

 India recently withdrew despite spending several years in RCEP negotiations, citing concerns it would not protect its own industries and workers. 

The text of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) agreement is so secretive that even elected representatives have not been allowed to see it, even though it will potentially lock future governments into rules that will limit their abilities to make policies required in times of crisis or to improve access to public services and worker’s rights. Leaked documents have shown that the agreement limits the potential for governments to make policies, including policies to recover from the Covid-19 crisis.  Leaked documents have also shown that it does not mention climate change or make provisions for labour rights, including forced labour or child labour. Many across the region fear that the agreement has been kept secret because it heavily favours large multinational corporations who help draft trade rules, over the local small and medium businesses that are struggling most due to the pandemic.

The secretive nature of the agreement is  unusual, given that the text was finalised 12 months ago, meaning that it includes no specific updates recognising the extraordinary challenges created byCovid-19 pandemic, said Andrew Dettmer the National President of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union.

 Risa Hontiveros, a Senator from the Philippines, said at a press conference organised by Unions for Trade Justice, “This pandemic has shown us that we should never put the economy before our people.”  

“Even parliaments have no idea what the hell is being signed in the name of the people,” Charles Santiago, a Member of Parliament from Malaysia, said. Santiago described how restrictions imposed by international agreements had already prevented some governments from rolling out mass testing: “even in a pandemic the people are being held hostage by big pharma,” he said.

Che Chariya, a Cambodian garment worker  union leader described the real-world consequences that this type of race to the bottom creates. Garment workers in Cambodia have been particularly hard hit by the suspension of major contracts from multinational firms due to Covid-19. However, Chariya said that for many garment workers, including herself, the challenges pre-dated Covid-19. Chariya worked in a garment factory for 18 years until it closed in 2018. She now works in a sweatshop for a piece rate, losing the factory’s minimum wage and social security benefits, despite still making clothes for the same companies. Since the pandemic, she says the cost of living has increased while the piece rate has gone down.

http://www.ipsnews.net/2020/11/secretive-mega-trade-deal-rules-harm-asias-covid-19-recovery/

 

 Four separate independent monitoring boards, which scrutinise prisons and immigration detention facilities, found that asylum seekers arriving at Dover were being subjected to “inhumane treatment.”

Evidence found that people arriving at Dover were being kept in crowded conditions – with no social distancing – and that serious errors were being included in their documentation. Individuals were moved between detention centres with untreated broken bones, burns and cancer.

 Dame Anne Owers, national chair of the Independent Monitoring Boards (IMBs), said in her evidence that monitors “believe that the cumulative effect of the failings amounts to inhumane treatment of detainees which should be urgently addressed”.

Emma Ginn, director of the charity Medical Justice, which works for the health rights of immigration detainees, said:

 “The relentless deportation charter flights feel like a crusade to quickly get rid of victims of war and persecution without having had their history of trafficking and torture being taken into account.”

Some asylum seekers were put on flights before a vulnerability assessment had been completed. One man, who was on constant suicide watch, poured boiling water on his legs just before the flight and was still put on a plane. Others who attempted suicide were taken to hospital just before their flight, then taken from hospital straight to the flight.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/nov/13/asylum-seekers-crossing-channel-face-inhumane-treatment-observers-say

 

< Part One here

Has Covid 19,  led to an erosion of civil liberties. Or. should that be a further erosion of civil liberties?  Where’s the baseline. Situation Report: Full lockdown in force until December 2nd. Allegedly. Some government ministers have said that this lockdown will end on December second. Others are saying it could be at least Spring 2021 before its lifted. This article doesn’t seek to deny that measures suited to dealing with a pandemic weren’t necessary but is concerned the draconian steps which have been implemented globally and which are doing possibly irreversible damage to the civil liberties which capitalism permits its wage slaves to have.

     Is it an exaggeration to ask whether we are at one minute to midnight where a boot will be stamping on a human face for ever? Will there be no love, no laughter, no art, no literature, no science, no curiosity, no enjoyment, no pleasure?

     Definition of Lockdown. A protocol followed in an emergency that involves confining people in a secure place such as the confinement of prison inmates in cells after a disturbance, or the locking of students and teachers in classrooms after a violent attack. A facility, such as a prison where people considered to be dangerous are locked inside living quarters or otherwise confined. freedictionary.com

      This lockdown will cost the economy one point eight billion pounds a day says a story in the MailOnline of November 2nd. That’s on top of all the money that’s  already been borrowed. Billionaires and corporations are smirking and going “I’m alright Jack!”  There will come a point when government support of the economy will become simply unfeasible. Being a worker in that situation, as opposed to living in a socialist society dealing with a pandemic, will be more than uncomfortable. How many will do the intelligent thing and start educating themselves about the capitalist system and the  only sensible alternative?

     The 1689 Bill of Rights has Cruel and unusual punishment in common law describing punishment that is considered unacceptable due to the suffering, pain, or humiliation it inflicts on the person subjected to the sanction. It can include punishments that are not generally accepted in society. Similar words are to be found in the United States Eighth Amendment to its Constitution. Also the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,  European Convention on Human Rights and more. The Marshall Islands Bill of Rights prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment”, defined as: the death penalty; torture; “inhuman and degrading treatment”; and “excessive fines or deprivations” Wikipedia.

     Jonathan Philip Chadwick Sumption, Lord Sumption, is a former senior judge who sat on the Supreme Court between 2012 and 2018. He gave the Cambridge Freshfields Annual Law Lecture on 27 October “Government by decree: Covid-19 and the Constitution.” https://www.privatelaw.law.cam.ac.uk/press/events/2020/10/cambridge-freshfields-annual-law-lecture-2020

“On 26 August the government introduced by decree an offence of “being involved” in a gathering exceeding thirty people, and empowered any policeman in the land to issue a fixed penalty notice of £10,000. This sum, enough to ruin most people, was far in excess of any fine that would be imposed by a court for such an offence.. it has been used to suppress protests against the government’s coronavirus policies. On 30 August, the police served a £10,000 fixed penalty notice on Mr Piers Corbyn for addressing a rally against masks in Trafalgar Square. The regulations contain an exception for political protest, provided that the organisers have agreed a risk assessment and taken reasonable steps ensure safety.””

The Daily Mail. October 14th., Liverpool gym shut down by armed police. Gym owner fined one thousand pounds.

 Lionel Shriver is an American novelist. In the Spectator, October 17. She expressed her anger at the state sanctioned brutality being used against citizens for not “obeying” the edicts coming down from clueless governments

Examples can be found from across the globe of the heavy handed approach by the agents of the State.

     “In Australia this summer, a young pregnant mother was arrested and handcuffed in front of her children merely for supporting a socially distanced lockdown protest on Facebook, while police confiscated all her household’s laptops and mobile phones. In another infamous YouTube video, an Australian officer clutches a slight young woman viciously around the throat, slams her to the ground, cuffs her hands behind her back and then calls in a clatter of reinforcements — all because she isn’t wearing a face mask. After 2020, ‘liberal’ democracy will never be the same. It’s been summarily demonstrated that civil liberties aren’t worth the paper constitutions are printed on. Rights may be rescinded with no warning and without even the fig leaf of parliamentary approval…”

  “On 26 September the police broke up a demonstration against the government’s measures, whose organisers had agreed a risk assessment and had taken reasonable steps. The police claim to have done this because some of the demonstrators had not acted in accordance with the arrangements made by the organisers. They cleared the square using batons with considerable violence, injuring some 20 people who were guilty of nothing other than attending an apparently lawful protest.”  Jonathan Philip Chadwick Sumption

“The true function of the police is not to be nice to people (in fact, they are actually paid to be suspicious of us all). They exist to protect private property rights — which means to protect the privileged position of the ruling class of capitalism. Which means, further, to perpetuate the inferior, unprivileged position of the working-class. The fact that policemen are themselves workers makes no difference to this. The capitalist class have to get workers to do their dirty work for them. — workers are not only exploited in the interests of their parasitic masters but are also persuaded to tighten their bonds ever tighter about themselves.”Running Commentary” Socialist Standard September 1979

A zeitgeist snapshot of life in the New Normal taken from the Main Stream Media.

Home Secretary Priti Patel will order police to stop protests involving more than TWO people during lockdown. November 3

Police ARREST qualified nurse, 73, trying to take her 97-year-old dementia-hit mother from care home after nine months to be looked after by her family – and put pensioner in patrol car to be sent back. November 4

Priti Patel orders police to get tough on Covid rule-breakers: Home Secretary ramps up enforcement saying those who ‘flout the law’ must not be allowed to ‘endanger the majority’ Priti Patel told police chiefs they must ‘strengthen enforcement’ of Covid rules. November 4

    With the exactness of Bobby Fischer  inexorably taking control of the chess board Lionel Shriver articulates the powers the State has abrogated to itself (The Spectator. October 17th.)

    “We’ve allowed the state to dictate when our businesses close and whether they may open at all. We’ve acceded to national house arrest. We’ve abdicated the right to travel abroad without submitting to punishing self-incarceration, and we’re currently surrendering the right to travel to different regions of our own country. We’ve empowered the police to issue summonses for picnicking in parks or sitting on a bench. We’ve sat idly by while fines for organising a protest against this very oppression rise to a crippling, potentially life-destroying £10,000. We’ve granted government the right to regulate whether we can see our parents, whom we may invite into our homes, and how physically close we may approach another human being outside our household,…. .We walk out of our own front doors only at the government’s sufferance. “

DC