Author: ajohnstone

Is world socialism a pipe dream?

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 Will out of this calamity come a better world? The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has shown us something that most of us have known for a long time, there is something wrong with our system. Yet it’s almost like we all have  Stockholm Syndrome, defending a society that lack compassion and that put us all at risk. But we have learned to stand in solidarity with those who are currently deliver essential services— health workers, sanitation workers, people working in shops.



The Socialist Party hope that somehow this global health calamity might lead to a better world. More importantly, after all the misery, we need and must work for a better world. The pandemic has made clear the oneness of the peoples of the world. Seen from space, the Earth has no borders. The spread of the coronavirus is showing us that what we share is much more powerful than what keeps us apart. All people are inescapably interconnected, and the more we can come together to solve our problems, the better off we will all be. One of the side effects of COVID-19 is feeling more compassion for others. Humanity can work together to prevail over this pandemic and discover the folly of battling with each other. The coronavirus demonstrates the mutual global dependencies of the world’s peoples. Its demanding that  resources be redirected for the service of health and peaceful life. The overriding goal must be human security: providing food, water and a clean environment and caring for people. But governments continue to waste the opportunities to create by fueling the destructive arms race. 



We should recognise the value of collective social relationships. We’re brothers and sisters must think and act cooperatively like one family. While the global pandemic has put everyone at risk, the most vulnerable are the elderly, the ill, the unhealthy, the economically distressed, the inadequately housed and the homeless, and the minorities. But none of us is safe. Wealth and power can only confer a certain level of protection. We can now consider the type of society we wish to emerge post-pandemic. Governments favour a return to the status quo, the restoration of the old order that existed for the benefit of a tiny minority. Socialists see the potential for transformations’ that would lead to greater equality and better well-being for the majority. It is our chance to do things differently. Social change is possible. A different world, a different economy can be the future.



We must become one world or prepare ourselves for the end of our civilisation. This virus  threat can be overcome through genuine cooperation and solidarity among all the people of the world. Why not work cooperatively to save humanity from massive global death and economic collapse rather than waging wars and slaughtering one another. The same intensity with which mankind has practiced war through the ages must now be applied to building a peaceful and prosperous planet. We can create a new and better world—but we must fully commit ourselves to it and work for it. We need a mighty movement to transform the World. Can we build a movement of movements?



While our attention is fixed upon the pandemic, the planet continues to warm – polar ice-caps melts, glaciers disappear, forest fires and droughte appear,  seas rise, plant and animal species disappear and people continue to be displaced. Socialists hold a vision of a saner, healthier, and a cooler world.



The real Lord of the Flies

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William Golding’s Lord of the Flies depicts a cynical image of humanity but socialists from all over the world have held a more hopeful view of mankind. 


The real Lord of the Flies is a tale of friendship and loyalty; one that illustrates how much stronger we are if we can lean on each other. There were six of us who had been castaways on ‘Ata an uninhabited island near Tonga for 15 months. The boys were students at a boarding school in Nuku‘alofa, the Tongan capital. Sione, Stephen, Kolo, David, Luke and Mano – all pupils at the strict Catholic boarding school in Nuku‘alofa. The oldest was 16, the youngest 13, and they had one main thing in common: they were bored witless. So they came up with a plan to escape: to Fiji, some 500 miles away, or even all the way to New Zealand. They had decided to steal a fishing boat out one day, only to get caught in a storm. The boys had been given up for dead and funerals held for them.


The boys took little time to prepare for the voyage. Two sacks of bananas, a few coconuts and a small gas burner were all the supplies they packed. It didn’t occur to any of them to bring a map, let alone a compass. They drifted for eight days without food or water. The boys tried catching fish. They managed to collect some rainwater in hollowed-out coconut shells and shared it equally between them, each taking a sip in the morning and another in the evening. On the eighth day, they spied a miracle on the horizon. A small island, to be precise. Not a tropical paradise with waving palm trees and sandy beaches, but a hulking mass of rock, jutting up more than a thousand feet out of the ocean. 


By the tie they were rescued the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination. While the boys in Lord of the Flies come to blows over the fire, those in this real-life version tended their flame so it never went out. The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. 


Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. Their days began and ended with song and prayer. Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat – an instrument Peter has kept all these years – and played it to help lift their spirits. And their spirits needed lifting. All summer long it hardly rained, driving the boys frantic with thirst. They tried constructing a raft in order to leave the island, but it fell apart in the crashing surf.


Stephen slipped one day, fell off a cliff and broke his leg. The other boys picked their way down after him and then helped him back up to the top. They set his leg using sticks and leaves. “Don’t worry,” Sione joked. “We’ll do your work, while you lie there like King Taufa‘ahau Tupou himself!”


They survived initially on fish, coconuts, tame birds (they drank the blood as well as eating the meat); seabird eggs were sucked dry. Later, when they got to the top of the island, they found an ancient volcanic crater, where people had lived a century before. There the boys discovered wild taro, bananas and chickens (which had been reproducing for the 100 years since the last Tongans had left).
They were finally rescued on Sunday 11 September 1966. The local physician later expressed astonishment at their muscled physiques and Stephen’s perfectly healed leg.


While the boys of ‘Ata have been consigned to obscurity, Golding’s book is still widely read.



https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months

Sea-levels to rise higher than projected

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Oceans rising faster than previously thought, according to survey of 100 specialists. Sea-level rise could exceed 1 metre by the end of the century unless global emissions are reduced and could reach as high as 5 metres by 2300.



“A global sea-level rise by several metres would be detrimental for many coastal cities such as Miami, New York, Alexandria, Venice, Bangkok, just to name a few well-known examples. Some may have to be abandoned altogether as they cannot be defended,” said co-author Stefan Rahmstorf, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “Like in the Covid pandemic, timing is critical to prevent devastation. If you wait until you already have a serious problem, then it is too late. Unlike with corona, sea-level rise cannot be stopped for many centuries or even millennia once ice sheets have been destabilised past their tipping points,” Rahmstorf said.



In the worst-case scenario – with rising emissions and global heating of 4.5C above pre-industrial levels – the study estimates the surface of the world’s oceans in 2100 will be between 0.6 and 1.3 metres higher than today, which would potentially engulf areas home to hundreds of millions of people.  If humanity succeeds in cutting carbon dioxide and holding the increase in temperature to 2C, the rise would be a more manageable 0.5 metre.



The figures for both are more pessimistic than those outlined by the UN intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC), which predicts the worst possibility is a 1.1-metre rise by 2100.  The new survey – published in the journal Climate and Atmospheric Science – aggregates the views of 106 specialists, who were chosen because they have published at least six peer-reviewed papers on the subject in major academic journals. As a result, the predictions are more representative of a range of views in the field.



The higher estimates highlight growing concern about the world’s two biggest ice sheets, in Antarctica and Greenland. Satellite data and on-the-ground measurements show these regions are melting faster than most computer models predicted. Many of the scientists said there was now greater understanding of the risks posed by marine ice-cliff instability, which can lead to the collapse of ice shelves.



The study was led by scientists at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore with support from seven research institutions across the world, including Durham University in the UK, Tufts University in the US and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
“Although emissions are reducing this year, this does not mean the build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere will reverse – it will just be slightly slower” the Met Office’s chief CO2 forecaster, Richard Betts, said in a blogpost. “An analogy is filling a bath from a tap – it’s like we are turning down the tap, but because we are not turning off the tap completely, the water level is still rising.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/08/sea-levels-could-rise-more-than-a-metre-by-2100-experts-say

Remembering Kent State

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May 4, 2020 is the 50th anniversary of the massacre at Kent State University when the Ohio National Guard opened fire upon peaceful protesters against America’s military attacks upon Cambodia. Four students dead, nine wounded, one paralyzed for life.



 Miss Allison Krause, 19, Pittsburgh, Pa.; Miss Sandy Lee Scheuer, 20, Youngstown, Ohio; Jeffrey G. Miller, 20, Plainview, N.Y., and William K. Schroeder, 19, Lorain, Ohio.



The invasion of Cambodia and killings at Kent sparked an unprecedented national student strike. Over 400 campuses were shut down and occupied by the students. Millions of people joined street demonstrations demanding an end to the war. 


Over 58,000 US soldiers died in Vietnam. Over 300,000 were wounded. Over 2,000,000 Vietnamese, Laotians and Kampucheans died under 15,500,000 tons of bombs and millions of gallons of defoliants that devastated an entire part of the planet.

Ten days later, Mississippi state police opened fired into a dormitory at protesting students at Jackson State University that left two dead and many wounded.

On May 11, 1970, in Augusta, Georgia the burned and tortured body of an incarcerated 16-year old black youth was dumped by his jailers at a local hospital. The resulting protest left six African-American men dead.



Covid and Class

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Residents in deprived areas have experienced double the death rates of those in affluent areas, new figures from the Office for National Statistics reveal.



Of the 20,283 Covid-19 registered deaths in England and Wales to 17 April an overwhelming proportion of fatalities were of people from the poorest areas.



  The most deprived area had 55.1 deaths per 100,000 people, more than double (118%) that in the least deprived areas, where the rate was 25.3 deaths.

Jobless and Hungry

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Many families are struggling to put food on the table as the coronavirus lockdown robs them of their income. A report by food bank charities points to an alarming rise in the number of people in need of essential supplies. 

Amie Smith and her partner Marcus were just about getting by before the coronavirus lockdown. Now they have had to give up their zero hours contract jobs and are relying on universal credit payments, food vouchers from the government and the occasional food parcel from local schools. Their biggest daily struggle is finding enough food in the shops for their four children, aged two to 13. 
“We have gone without meals so the children can eat. It isn’t nice when you are feeling hungry and you open the cupboard and there is nothing in there for you.”
The children are entitled to free school meals, which translate into food vouchers during lockdown, but they can’t find anywhere to spend them. Amie says she has about £200 worth of vouchers, but they are mostly for upmarket shops like Marks & Spencer and Waitrose, which are absent in their South London district. Under the current scheme, run by private contractor Endenred, every eligible child is entitled to £15 a week in vouchers. The school or parent must choose a supermarket at which to redeem them, from the following list: Aldi, McColl’s, Morrisons, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, Waitrose and M&S. The government  recognises it may not be convenient for some families to visit one of these shops. It is “working to see if additional supermarkets can be added to this list”. In the meantime, it is advising schools to prepare food parcels for pupils on free meals.
Many families – who may not have children on free school meals – are turning to food banks for essential supplies. This is putting an enormous strain on charities that provide them. A new report by the UK’s biggest food bank network, the Trussell Trust, said it handed out 81% more emergency food parcels in the last two weeks of March, than at the same time last year. People struggling with the amount of income they were receiving from working or benefits was the main reason for the increase, the trust said.
“Like a tidal wave gathering pace, an economic crisis is sweeping towards us, but we don’t all have lifeboats,” said chief executive Emma Revie. 
Sonya Johnson, who runs Ediblelinks, an independent food bank in North Warwickshire, has noticed a big increase in families with previously comfortable incomes seeking help. These new clients tend to be small business owners, or sole traders, such a hairdressers or cafe proprietors. They are waiting for universal credit payments or money from the government’s business loan scheme. The food bank has seen a 20% increase in demand week-on-week since coronavirus took hold.
“There are fresh faces coming through the door,” she said. “People who really don’t want to be here, who have never used a food bank but suddenly find themselves at a point of crisis.” 
Debt charity Christians Against Poverty says one in 10 of its clients live without a bed or mattress, or skip meals on a daily basis. It, and others in the sector, fear coronavirus will mean more people living like this – perhaps for the first time. Payment “holidays” put off, rather than cancel, regular bills such as rent or council tax. There is concern people are simply piling up unmanageable debt for the future.
Trussell Trust, is calling now for a coronavirus emergency income support scheme. They say many families need money urgently, to prevent them being from being “swept into destitution”.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-52455776

Pension Risks

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Pension savers are withdrawing too much from their retirement pots – as figures show record numbers were dipping into their savings earlier this year. 
More than £35 billion has now been withdrawn from pots since new flexibilities were introduced in 2015, figures from HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) show. In the first quarter of 2020, 348,000 people made flexible withdrawals from their pensions – a 23% increase on the same period a year earlier. It was the highest quarterly total since records started in 2015. The average amount withdrawn per person in the first quarter of 2020 was £7,100



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The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) warned that the recent stock market falls could mean some people are permanently worse off in retirement than they had expected to be. The IFS said the recent fall in stock markets has reduced the wealth of those with DC pension pots invested in equities. It warned that if equity prices do not recover, or do not do so by the time people need to draw on the savings they have built up, then people with pensions invested in equities will either need to make do with less in their retirements, delay their retirement, or save more to fill the gap. It said people who are already retired and are drawing down pension savings, rather than taking an annuity, will also be hit – and people making flexible withdrawals from pensions invested in equities will either have to scale back what they take out or see their pension pot permanently reduced as a result of the crisis.



David Sturrock, a senior research economist at IFS, said: “The recent fall in the stock market is likely to hit the future retirement incomes of a lot of people. It will also hit many pensioners already relying on defined contribution pensions. Since 2015 they have not had to take an annuity and many are instead drawing down income from their retirement pots. They are likely to be permanently worse off in retirement than they expected even if the stock market returns to where it would have been, and much worse off if it does not.”
Tom Selby, a senior analyst at AJ Bell, said: “Independent research commissioned by AJ Bell suggests one in 10 over-55s have already accelerated plans to access their pension as a result of Covid-19. Anyone going down this route needs to think carefully about the sustainability of their retirement income strategy.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/personalfinance/record-348000-people-withdrew-money-from-pensions-in-first-quarter-of-2020/ar-BB13qcBT?ocid=spartandhp





The Filipino Health Workers

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Health-care systems in developed countries rely heavily on immigrant workers, many from poorer nations—to keep them running. 



 Figures from New American Economy, a research and advocacy organization, show that 16.5 percent of all health-care workers in the United States are immigrants, with even greater representation in specific fields such as home health aid, where nearly 37 percent of workers are immigrants. And perhaps no place has played as large a role in this as the Philippines, which for decades has provided the nurses, porters, and aides who have formed the crucial infrastructure of hospitals, clinics, and other health-care facilities in wealthier parts of the world.



“Without the immigrant population right now serving in health care, the majority of these health-care industries would probably collapse,” Leo-Felix Jurado, the chair of the Nursing Department at William Paterson University, in New Jersey, and executive director of the Philippine Nurses Association of America, said.



The coronavirus outbreak has exposed the fragility and inequity baked into systems and societies around the world, among them the pipeline that has consistently brought health-care workers from poorer countries to richer ones. Even before the pandemic, the Philippines had been suffering from a shortfall of nurses in the tens of thousands. This deficit has been exacerbated by the coronavirus as nurses, as well as leading doctors, have been dying in startling numbers, Oscar Tinio, of the Philippine Medical Association, in Manila, explained. 



 The need is so great that this month the government moved to restrict some nurses from working abroad. And overseas, Filipino nurses have found themselves thrust into medical systems—even those in more developed, and theoretically more capable, countries—that have proved ill-prepared to handle a public-health crisis on the scale of what the coronavirus has brought.



 Six Filipino nurses have died in the U.S. because of complications from COVID-19, according to the Philippines embassy in Washington, D.C. The toll is higher in Britain: Twenty-two Filipino nurses and hospital workers employed by the NHS have died. These numbers are almost certain to rise as countries struggle to bring the pandemic under control.



  “They were invisible pre-COVID,” Jean Encinas-Franco, an assistant political-science professor at the University of the Philippines said of these nurses. Now “they have become collateral damage for governments that are ill-prepared to fight this pandemic.” The praise given in recent weeks often “legitimizes the suffering and sacrifice that they are experiencing abroad,” underpayment, employment scams, and racism in the workplace.



Significantly better pay compared with what they would make at home remains the main driver for many Filipinos to seek nursing employment abroad. Nearly 70,000 nurses migrated from the Philippines for work from 2008 to 2012, government data show, and in 2017, the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute found some 145,800 Filipinos working as registered nurses in the United States. In Britain, just over 18,500 Filipinos work for the National Health Service, according to a parliamentary report published last year. Significant populations of Filipino nurses also work in Gulf states, such as Saudi Arabia, and in Japan, caring for the country’s aging population. Spain this month said it would fast-track Filipino nurses’ entry into its workforce to prop up its strained health-care system.



https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/the-frailty-and-inequality-of-the-global-nurse-pipeline/ar-BB13qwJs?ocid=spartandhp

Thinking Beyond COVID-19

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Nothing in human history is inevitable. We are not living and organising society according to any pre-ordained schemes. We are masters of our own history, not slaves of it. We can do what we choose.



The society we live in produces war. There is a split between the minority who own and control the means of life and the majority of us who produce the wealth. A split, that is. between those who produce but do not possess and those who possess but do not produce. The economic rivalries among the wealth owners over market territories, areas rich in mineral resources and strategic locations on the trade atlas are often fought off the conference tables on the battlefields. Society based on competition and property is a war-producing society.



If humanity makes war to conquer nature then we will be on the losing end of such a conflict. We need to switch soicety to a new mode of living that does not collide with our environment. There is no solution other than ending capitalism entirely. Like any virus capitalism if left intact will mutate and adapt itself to its new conditions. The capitalist system will endeavour to normalise the ever present threat of pandemics. Capitalism faces the paradox of one of its infamous contradictions, an increasing globalisation of the economy alongside and a retreat of nation-states into their own traditional borders to resolve global problems. Some populist politicians are calling for stricter immigration controls while some corporations are railing against protectionist policies. But the people need socialism to assure the safety and flourishing of all our planet’s people.



United Nations’ secretary–general Antonio Guterres told the BBC he’s “disappointed” the world had not come together in a coordinated way to confront the pandemic.He said individual nations pursued their own strategies – and the lack of collective action helped the virus spread. He also bemoaned the failure of the world’s strongest nations to combine what he called power and leadership. That has created much of the dysfunction and fragility, as he put it, in today’s world. He also said there was an opportunity for countries to re–tool their economics in ways that are more environmentally sustainable. He called on governments to withhold emergency financial support from fossil fuel and carbon-intensive companies and to focus instead on green jobs.
The interests of workers and capitalists are diametrically opposed. The idea of nationalism has been supported by the ruling class because it deludes the workers into believing that within one territory. under one flag, they have a united interest with the bosses. Nationalism is divisive among workers and is used to help work up antagonism between workers from different places for them to fight the cause of their masters. It is not “our” country; Itis not our world; it is theirs — the capitalists’. 
Workers of the world have no country. We want a new social system. We do not want to sort out the chaos of capitalism, and futilely try to make the system run smoothly. This system can never work well for us. But it works well for the bosses and that’s why they keep this system going. 
Working people, however, can change the ways things are, if they so wish.



The Real American Health Crisis

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The U.S. Labor Department on Thursday reported that more than 30 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits in the past six weeks as the coronavirus pandemic has spread across the U.S.. More than 3.8 million people filed for unemployment in the last week.


The new numbers mean that one out of five Americans have filed for unemployment in the past six weeks.


“There is no precedent for figures like this in modern American history,” reported the Washington Post.


At the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), director of policy Heidi Shierholz wrote that the CARES Act and subsequent relief packages, including the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), other small business assistance, and one-time $1,200 payments to many Americans, “are not enough” to protect millions of people from financial ruin.



The Economic Policy Institute estimates that 12.7 million of the people who have lost their jobs since early March have also lost their health insurance. 



“The linkage between specific jobs and the availability of health insurance is a prime source of inefficiency and inequity in the U.S. health system,” wrote EPI research director Josh Bivens and economist Ben Zipperer. “It is especially terrifying for workers to lose their health insurance as a result of, and during, an ongoing pandemic…Because the United States is unique among rich countries in tying health insurance benefits to employment, many of the newly unemployed will suddenly face prohibitively costly insurance options.”



 Health insurer Cigna’s profits have sky-rocketed for the first months of 2020 alongside EP



In the hospitality and food services industry, which has lost more than 41% of its workforce so far due to the pandemic, more than 23% of workers have employer-based health coverage. More than 56% of people who work in healthcare and social work have employer-sponsored insurance; that industry lost more than three million workers in recent weeks. In the manufacturing sector, meanwhile, about 69% of workers have health insurance through their employers; manufacturing has also lost about three million workers. 



Promoted by the Socialist Party of Great Britain, 52 Clapham High Street, London, SW4 7UN.

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