A number of the constituent parties of the World Socialist Movement have adopted the ‘One World, One People’ logo, sometimes in a slightly varied form, as their emblem.

The graphic representation shows a woman and a man, depicted as both black and white, hand in hand, in unity and harmony, with the world globe behind them

What it signifies is much more than a mere slogan.

1. No identity politics

Socialism incorporates the liberation of women as part of its project of human emancipation. A political organisation whose object is socialism cannot permit sexism within its membership. For a political party to be credible, it must embody the attitudes, values and practices that it seeks to build in society at large. The World Socialist Movement heartily endorses Eleanor Marx’s position:

“It is a truism, and therefore it is constantly repeated, that no social movement is worth much until it has enlisted the sympathies, aesthetic and practical, of women. The Socialists are constantly preaching this obvious doctrine. They are constantly appealing to women, not on the basis of woman’s rights as against man’s, but of the rights of men, women, and their children of the working classes as against the capitalists. That is the essential difference that marks off the women’s rights movement on the one hand, and the socialist movement of men and women together on the other.” 

2. There is no race except the human race

Socialists hold that the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or nationality. Humanity is one species, so claims of skin tones reflecting ‘superiority’ only reveal ignorance.

President Lyndon Johnson once said, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

3. One family

“We must learn to live together as brothers and sisters or perish as fools and buffoons” Martin Luther King explained, echoing the sentiments of Robert Burns poetic words

“It’s coming yet for a’ that,

That Man to Man, the world o’er,

Shall brothers be for a’ that.”

4. A world with no borders.

Nor any state or government. The world is a “global village”. Each region may have its own unique traditions and distinct customs, but they are part of a greater system of society that is world-wide. Diversity of cultures shall be a celebration of the imagination and inventiveness of humankind.

Socialism cannot be a cooperative oasis in the desert of capitalism, but a global system of society that will replace capitalism.

“The poor have no country, in all lands, they suffer from the same evils, and they, therefore, realise that the barriers put up by the powers that be the more thoroughly to enslave the people must fall’,  stated the International Working Men’s Association.

As Marx emphasised:

“The nationality of the toilers is neither French nor English nor German; it is toil, free slavery, sale of the self. His government is neither French nor English nor German; it is Capital. His native air is neither French nor German nor English; it is the air of the factory. The land which belongs to him is neither French nor English nor German; it is a few feet under the ground.”

 Capitalism always has been, is now, and always will be different competing interests along national, religious and ethnic lines. But all such differences are artificially created.

Only world socialism can finally put an end to this sordid fight for resources that, in order to present a semblance of legitimacy, sings national anthems and salutes flags.

As the Indian author, Arundhati Roy, points out:

“Flags are bits of coloured cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. When independent-thinking people (and here I do not include the corporate media) begin to rally under flags, when writers, painters, musicians, film makers suspend their judgment and blindly yoke their art to the service of the ‘Nation,’ it’s time for all of us to sit up and worry”

The World Socialist Movement does not put forward any detailed blueprints of the future. Our task is to organise and mobilise our fellow-workers for the dismantling of the profit system which robs them of the fruits of their labour. That is our only purpose.

We advocate common ownership, which can be defined as a situation in which no person or group has the right to exclusively control productive resources. When we transfer to all members of the society the power to direct and manage production, there will be no one excluded from the opportunity of controlling and benefiting from  access and use of the means of production. The very concept of property becomes meaningless. We are all members of the same humanity and share an interest in working together to establish a world without frontiers, in which the resources of the planet will be the common heritage of all its peoples and used for the benefit of all. 

The only way to meet the needs of the world’s population is on the basis of ‘from each according to ability, to each according to need’, freed of private ownership by the few and their rule of ‘no profit, no production’, this is the only framework within which problems such as global warming, growing inequality and constant conflicts can be ended for good.

There will be no possibility for any elite group to subject another to subjugation. Men and women can be free to arrange their personal lives according to their individual choice.

We can share with Frederick Douglass, the ex-slave, when he observed:

“…to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason.”

 Oman’s dictator, Sultan Qaboos, who ruled the country for 50 years from 1970 to 2020, was advised by a secret privy council right up until his death last year. Sultan Qaboos wielded absolute power, banning political parties and independent media.

He spent billions of pounds on British weaponry and surveillance equipment to fortify his regime, which is located on a key oil supply route between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Britain has around 90 troops on loan to the Sultan and three GCHQ spy stations are located in Oman. In the last years of his rule, Qaboos also agreed to let Britain build two military bases in the country to project its power in the Middle East.

It has emerged that his top advisers included seven current and former heads of MI6 and the U.K. military, a foreign office minister, a British oil executive, the ex-governor of the Bank of England, a special adviser to Princes William and Harry and one of Queen Elizabeth’s closest aides. 

Six of the group are members of the House of Lords. None of them appear to have publicly registered their role on Oman’s privy council. The House of Lords code of conduct requires members to register “all relevant interests.” financial and non-financial. Several of the British privy councillors were involved in deciding Whitehall policy towards Oman whilst secretly conferring with Sultan Qaboos. 

Nabhan al-Hanashi, chairman of the Omani Centre for Human Rights, told Declassified:

 “Qaboos was always trying to pretend that he was an independent ruler, when in fact he was an agent of the British empire.”

Khalfan al-Badwawi, who was arrested and tortured after participating in Arab Spring protests in 2011, said:

 “This is proof that British colonialism never ended. Omanis have long suspected that MI6 treats our country like it’s their back garden. These British privy councillors need to get out of Oman.” Al-Badwawi added: “It shows we are not only fighting the sultan’s regime. If we are complaining of repression or unemployment in Oman, the U.K. has a role in that. The sultan, with his British advisers, looted the wealth of Oman and we don’t have a say on anything.” 

Oman’s privy council only came to light when the diary of millionaire Alan Duncan, a former Conservative MP, was published last week. Duncan secretly attended at least 14 sessions of Oman’s privy council from 2001, including while working for the British government as a foreign minister. Duncan did not declare in any of his parliamentary or ministerial registers of interests, travel, hospitality, gifts or meetings that he had attended Oman’s privy council. Instead, he listed his trips to the country as “strategic seminar[s] with the Government of Oman,” sessions on “inter-governmental relations” or saying he was a “guest of the Government of Oman.” The costs of Duncan’s flights and accommodation, worth thousands of pounds, were paid by the Sultan. Sometimes he received watches, cufflinks or a “traditional Omani coffee pot and incense burner” in reward for his advice. In the early 1990s, Duncan made millions of pounds as an oil trader and advised clients in Oman.  He also entered parliament as an MP in 1992 and since 2000 has visited Oman at least 24 times. Prime Minister David Cameron appointed Duncan as a special envoy to Oman in 2014, a brand-new position.  He was effectively in charge of U.K. relations with Oman and another Gulf dictatorship, Bahrain, due to his strong “personal relationships” with the rulers of those regimes.

Yet in his diary he describes the events explicitly as the “annual Privy Council in Oman, a one-day event at which senior officials from the U.K. give the Sultan privileged briefing on hot topics around the world.”

In 1995, The Sunday Times hinted at the existence of a privy council, describing Sir Erik Bennett as “one of Oman’s (and Britain’s) best-kept secrets: the key figure in a group of elderly former military and intelligence officers who help the Sultan to run his rich, strategically vital country at the mouth of the Gulf.” Bennett had continued advising Sultan Qaboos in some capacity until at least 2012, when the pair attended a lunch at Buckingham Palace with the queen and Foreign Secretary William Hague. 

Stuart Laing, former U.K. ambassador to Oman says, although Bennett was working for Qaboos, the former Air Vice Marshall “was really quite patriotic actually in lots of ways and thought very strongly about British interests” – a comment which again indicates the extraordinary degree of British influence over Oman post-independence.

Former senior MI6 officer Alec McDonald was seconded from MI6 to run the Sultan’s vast internal security service from 1985-93. 

The British Cabal Behind a Gulf Dictatorship – Consortiumnews

 In the United States, more than one-fourth of the population — nearly 90 million people — has been fully vaccinated and supplies are so robust that some states are turning down planned shipments from the federal government.

Honduras has obtained a paltry 59,000 vaccine doses for its 10 million people.

More than one billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered worldwide, according to a tally, with more than half given in just three countries. Some 12 countries have yet to begin vaccinating – seven in Africa (Tanzania, Madagascar, Burkina Faso, Chad, Burundi, Central African Republic and Eritrea.)

The U.S. has also faced criticism that it is not only hoarding its own stockpiles, but also blocking other countries from accessing vaccines, including through its use of the law that gives Washington broad authority to direct private companies to meet the needs of the national defense. The U.S. has used the Defense Production Act to secure vital supplies for the production of vaccine, a move that has blocked the export of some supplies outside the country.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ 2020 annual report also raised eyebrows for a section titled “Combatting malign influences in the Americas,” which said the U.S. had convinced Brazil to not buy the Russian vaccine.

Marco Tulio Medina, coordinator of the COVID-19 committee at the National Autonomous University of Honduras, explained, “There’s a lack of humanism on the part of the rich countries,” he said. “They’re acting in an egotistical way, thinking of themselves and not of the world.”

From scarcity to abundance: US faces calls to share vaccines (apnews.com)

 “No politician, no matter how demagogic or potent or capable they are, is going to be able to change what the market is doing,” – John Kerry

The U.S. is back on climate. Now what? – POLITICO

  The Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine will likely exceed $30 billion in 2021 alone. Pfizer shares its profits with its partner company—which means they are expecting at least $15 billion this year, bumping their total revenue next year to around $60 billion—one quarter of which will be accounted for by the vaccine. These sales will bring in a substantial profit for the company

According to one financial journalist “That would make it the second-highest revenue-generating drug anytime, anywhere.”

 Pfizer has sold very small quantities to the global distribution body Covax and African Union “at cost,” which it claims to be about $6.75 per dose. They’ve sold more than three times the amount to high income countries (1.6 billion) as they have to the rest of the world (560 million), while tiny quantities have been sold to low income countries. The international distribution network Covax has managed to secure a mere 40 million.

In fact, experts have suggested these types of vaccines could cost as little as 60 cents to $2 per dose to make. However, Pfizer is selling to most countries at $19.50 per dose, supposedly a special pandemic price, but clearly one which allows the corporation to make a large profit. It seems clear prices will rise steeply once they decide the pandemic is “over.” A senior executive has suggested $150-175 per dose would be more “normal” pricing for a vaccine of this sort.

Their accounts last year shows that the corporation returned a whopping $8.4 billion to shareholders in dividends and reported a profit of $8.7 billion.

Pfizer and its lobbying body PhRMA were the top spending lobbyists in the US healthcare sector in the last 2 decades. They use the power lobbying gives them to promote and extend their rights of secrecy (‘data exclusivity’) over medical development and their monopoly protection which allows them to charge astronomical prices. They support the US government including higher levels of monopoly protection in new trade deals.

Pfizer and its British distributor hugely hiked the prices of anti-epilepsy drug phenytoin which 48,000 NHS patients relied upon. NHS expenditure on the drug rose from £2 million a year to £50 million in a single year, with the cost of 100mg packs rising from £2.83 to £67.50. Overall, UK wholesalers and pharmacies faced price hikes of between 2,300% and 2,600%.

In 2009, Pfizer was forced to pay $2.3 billion in a set of complex suits which included the company’s illegal marketing of arthritis drug Bextra, as well as giving kickbacks to doctors.

 A whistleblower claimed that sales staff were incentivised to sell Bextra to doctors for medical conditions for which the drug wasn’t approved and at doses up to eight times those recommended.

 “At Pfizer I was expected to increase profits at all costs, even when sales meant endangering lives. I couldn’t do that,” he stated.

 The price of Pfizer’s pneumonia vaccines were 68 times more expensive in 2015 than in 2001. While Pfizer did reduce prices for the lowest income countries, MSF said the cost to vaccinate remained “roughly US$9 for each child to be vaccinated in the poorest countries, and as much as $80 per child for middle-income countries”. 

MSF claimed Pfizer and GSK have earned over $50 billion for the drug, but “Today, 55 million children around the world still do not have access to the pneumonia vaccine, largely due to high prices.”

Opinion | The Pandemic Has Shown Pfizer Is Obsessed With Profits—Not Saving Lives (commondreams.org)

  The Intercept details the “army of lobbyists” Big Pharma has aimed at U.S. lawmakers in order to thwart the global push to lift intellectual property through a waiver at the World Trade Organization.

The first quarter of 2021 reveal that “over 100 lobbyists have been mobilized to contact lawmakers and members of the Biden administration, urging them to oppose a proposed temporary waiver” of patent protections at the WTO.

 Mike McKay, a key fundraiser for House Democrats, now working on retainer for Pfizer, as well as several former staff members to the U.S. Office of Trade Representative, which oversees negotiations with the WTO.

Several trade groups funded by pharmaceutical firms have also focused closely on defeating the generic proposal, new disclosures show. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, and the International Intellectual Property Alliance, which all receive drug company money, have dispatched dozens of lobbyists to oppose the initiative.

‘Utterly Disgusting’: Big Pharma Lobby Blitz Against Vaccine Patent Waivers Denounced | Common Dreams News

 

Tucker Carlson is the latest right-winger who tries to link restricting immigration as a means of protecting the environment.

 “Unrestrained mass immigration has also put a huge strain on the natural world. Just the amount of pollution and litter and destruction that’s generated by the movement of hundreds of thousands of people, unrestrained, across the border. That’s not a small thing to me. But you never hear that. I’ve never heard anybody mention that. And it’s so awful.”

This is a repeat of his earlier claims that immigrants made the United States a “dirtier” country and were polluting the Potomac River.

He blames over-population for damage to the environment.

 “We have about 100 million more people living in the United States now than we had 30 years ago. What does that do to the environment? ”

 

And again

 

“Isn’t crowding your country the fastest way to despoil it, to pollute it, to make it, you know, a place you wouldn’t want to live?”

Needless to say, Carlson makes no mention of the environmental harm of building a huge wall.

It is a misguided belief which continues to be expressed by some parts of the environmental movement today that the root cause of environmental problems is population numbers couched in scientific-sounding terms as carrying capacity. Some eco-activists have become receptive to shutting down the borders, applauding population control and encouraging cuts in foreign aid.

It’s essential to ensure there is no confusion between population control and birth control: population control is the State domination over people’s reproduction while birth control involves individual women’s empowerment over their own bodies. Despite the history of  family control programs violating reproductive and human rights and the fact that there is already in progress a major slowing of global population growth, the focus on population is a mistaken one and leads to misguided action.

Reducing population growth has not had any beneficial effect on the degradation of the environment. Demographic data clearly shows while population growth rates have slowed in many countries and even declined in some, environmental damage continues to worsen. Therefore reducing population growth alone cannot solve global environmental problems. A steady-state economic system is necessary.

The World Socialist Movement has come across those in the environmentalist movement who promote the proposition that climate change is somehow driven by too many people and we have criticized them for inadvertently endorsing a racist eugenic program. Population growth, they argue, is responsible for environmental break-downs. Blaming environmental problems on population pressure is now all too common among environmentalists who still promote the view that population size is the primary cause of environmental problems.  Some right-wing extremists have infiltrated the green movement with attempts to link it to “nature worship”, full of Nazi “blood and soil” symbolism. 

This article in the Guardian  is worth quoting  from.

“…We’re seeing the far right really take up ecological arguments again,” said John Hultgren, a Bennington College environmental politics professor and author of Border Walls Gone Green: Nature and Anti-immigrant Politics in America. “The rise of eco-fascism, I think, is very real…You can be a genuine environmentalist and a genuine xenophobe – the two often do converge,” stated Hultgren.

The Guardian article explains that “…Anti-immigrant ideology has been part and parcel of the whole of American conservationism since the first national park was founded, in part to protect wild yet white-owned nature from Mexicans and Native Americans. National purity and natural purity were inextricably linked. The current rise of eco-minded white supremacy follows a direct line from the powerful attorney, conservationist and eugenicist Madison Grant – a friend of trees, Teddy Roosevelt, and the colonial superiority of white land stewardship…”

“…Environmentalists were hardcore eugenicists. They were as committed to racial thinking as they were to protecting the great redwoods in California,” said Heidi Beirich, intelligence project director at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Richard Spencer advocates for a kind of conservationism in the white nationalist tradition. Right-wing pundit Ann Coulter claimed Americans will have to choose between a “greening or browning” of America. Such claims  provide ‘intellectual’ succor to the mass-murderer, Patrick Crusius, who targeted Hispanics and killed 23 at El Paso in Texas, sharing with the Norwegian mass shooter Anders Breivik and the Australian Brenton Tarrant in New Zealand, the ‘Great Replacement’ racist ideas.

 Eco-xenophobia surfaced in the 1970s as overpopulation and resource depletion was deemed the foremost problem facing the planet. Global population growth was soon conflated with immigration growth. It was a belief that  inspired a network of anti-immigration within the ecology groups.

John Tanton, a local Sierra Club official, founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform to advance the overpopulation as an environmental harm cause. He went on to co-found the Center for Immigration Studies. Tanton, who warned of a “Latin onslaught” that would hurt America’s culture and the land.

“Deep Greens” in the 1980s and 1990s argued that humans were an invasive and destructive species.

Activist David Orton argued that limiting immigration “from a maintenance of biodiversity perspective … has nothing to do with fascists”.

The ecologist Dave Foreman was a co-founder of  Earth First! But his increasingly anti-immigration ideology led to his expulsion.

 Co-founder of Vice magazine and the Proud Boys Gavin McInnes espoused the ecological virtues of population and immigration control.

The eco-xenophobic rhetoric has proliferated and conflate both arguments about population growth and outright racist beliefs.

The prospect of a future mass movement of climate change refugees will feed into these anti-immigrant sentiments and the worsening climate crisis will easily align with anti-immigration activists looking to use environment protection as an excuse to close borders, as doing something about climate crisis.

 We should heed the analysis of Veery Marten, an Earth First! Journal collective member.

“The culprits of this white supremacist violence citing alleged environmental interests are almost always middle class white men who are not lowering their own carbon footprint. It’s not really about consumption, it’s about who’s allowed to consume and gate-keeping these resources…Mainstream environmentalists and the broader left may no longer espouse the benefits of limiting immigration, but many do warn of an impending global refugee crisis worsened by climate change that will in turn pressure societies unable or unwilling to grapple with an influx of new residents…”

 The Pentagon employs more than seven contractors for every one military personnel in Afghanistan.

As of January, more than 18,000 contractors remained in Afghanistan, according to a Defense Department report, when official troop totals had been reduced to 2,500. It reflect the U.S. government’s strategy of outsourcing war to the benefit of private mercenary corporations, and as a means of distancing the war from the public and averting dissent.

One of the biggest mercenary companies is DynCorp International of Falls Church Virginia, which as of 2019 had received over $7 billion in government contracts to train the Afghan army and manage military bases in Afghanistan.

From 2002 to 2013, DynCorp received 69 percent of all State Department funding. Forbes Magazine called it “one of the big winners of the Iraq and Afghan Wars”.

The U.S. has announced intentions to retain at least two military bases in Afghanistan after the official troop drawdown.

Afghans’ mineral wealth according to a 2007 United States Geological Service survey is nearly $1 trillion in mineral deposits, including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold, and critical industrial metals like lithium, which is used in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and cellphones. An internal Pentagon memo stated that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium.”

 The current Afghan government led by Ashraf Ghani’s military is funded by the United States at a cost of around $4 billion per year. This support is going to continue alongside large-scale U.S. foreign aid programs that amount to nearly $1 billion per year.

Biden isn’t ending the Afghanistan War, he’s privatizing it: Special Forces, Pentagon contractors, intelligence operatives will remain | The Grayzone

“The best crime prevention is increased opportunity and reduced poverty. That’s the best way to reduce crime. So there needs to be substantial funding into the infrastructure of our inner cities and our more deprived areas. Why do people get involved in crime and serious crime? It’s because the opportunities to make money elsewhere aren’t there for them.” – Retiring chief constable of Merseyside police, Andy Cooke.

 Tackle poverty and inequality to reduce crime, says police chief | Police | The Guardian

At least 120 asylum seekers are feared dead off the coast of Libya while they were attempting to reach Europe.

Mediterranean rescue hotline Alarm Phone, said,  “The people could have been rescued but all authorities knowingly left them to die at sea.”

The volunteer service claims it was in contact with the boat in distress over 10 hours on 21 April, and repeatedly relayed its GPS position and the dire situation to European and Libyan authorities.  It said all the European authorities rejected responsibility to coordinate the search operation and instead pointed at the Libyan authorities as the “competent” authorities.

“The Libyan coastguard, however, refused to launch or coordinate a rescue operation, leaving the 130 people out in a rough sea for a whole night,” the charity said.

“The lack of an efficient patrolling system is undeniable and unacceptable,” Flavio Di Giacomo, Italy’s spokesman for the UN migration agency, tweeted. “Things need to change.”

 A number of NGO rescue boats are stuck in Italian ports after authorities ordered their seizure. 

Conversations between at least three Libyan senior coastguards and Italian officials, expose the indifference of individuals on the Libyan side to the plight of migrants and to international law and their “uncooperative behaviour” which allegedly resulted in the deaths of hundreds of migrants.

More than 100 asylum seekers feared dead after shipwreck off Libya | Libya | The Guardian