Socialist Standard No. 1390 June 2020
June 2020 PDF
Introducing the Socialist Party
Editorial: Socialism hasn’t failed – it’s never been tried Pathfinders: Locked up in lockdown One world or many states? Cooking the Books I: Will capitalism collapse? Wood For the Trees: Responsibility Material World: Guns before healthcare What is Economics? Who gets the surplus we produce? Economics: the Marginalist Fallacy Lesser evil or lose-lose situation? End of an Epoch? Cooking the Books II: Negative prices: how come? Party News – Discord in the Ranks Proper Gander: At The Movies Reviews 50 Years Ago: What about Vietnam? Meetings Rear View Free Lunch June 2020 PDF
US Food Inflation
Inflation in the USA has led to a 2.6% jump in April food prices which was the largest monthly increase in 46 years. Prices for meats, poultry, fish and eggs increased the most, rising 4.3%. Although the 2.9% jump in cereals and bakery products wasn’t as steep, it was still the largest increase the agency has recorded. Dairy and related products, and fruits and vegetables increased by 1.5 percent in April.
April retail prices for boneless pork chops and ham were nearly 6% higher than in March and retail prices for hamburger and sirloin steak were about 4% higher, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported. The price of whole fresh chickens rose by more than 12%. For garlic a 278% price increase from a year ago.
Trey Malone, an agriculture economist and professor at Michigan State University explained, “ We’ve obviously seen this record increase in unemployment filings, and so there are more people who are at risk in that sense that they literally don’t have any employment to secure the money that they would need to buy the food that they traditionally purchase. For the people who are already operating on the margins, these price increases are non-trivial.”
https://apnews.com/54f1efe0afa71b0a939fda91cf917366
April retail prices for boneless pork chops and ham were nearly 6% higher than in March and retail prices for hamburger and sirloin steak were about 4% higher, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported. The price of whole fresh chickens rose by more than 12%. For garlic a 278% price increase from a year ago.
Trey Malone, an agriculture economist and professor at Michigan State University explained, “ We’ve obviously seen this record increase in unemployment filings, and so there are more people who are at risk in that sense that they literally don’t have any employment to secure the money that they would need to buy the food that they traditionally purchase. For the people who are already operating on the margins, these price increases are non-trivial.”
https://apnews.com/54f1efe0afa71b0a939fda91cf917366
UN talks the talk but will nations walk the walk?
Unless global leaders act now, the Secretary-General of the United Nations António Guterres painted a picture of hunger and famine at historic proportions, with some 60 million people pushed into extreme poverty and half the global workforce — 1.6 billion people — left without work, and $8.5 trillion in global output lost.
“Many developing and even middle-income countries are highly vulnerable and already in debt distress – or will soon become so, due to the global recession,” Guterres said.
“Many developing and even middle-income countries are highly vulnerable and already in debt distress – or will soon become so, due to the global recession,” Guterres said.
Dr Donald Kaberuka, Special Envoy from the African Union, warned against the world resorting to an individualistic approach as they reel from the economic collapse of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“After the global financial crisis, every country went back to address their own problems. Global solidarity declined very quickly,” Kaberuka said. “We can’t afford to let this happen this time.”
David Malpass, President of the World Bank Group, pointed out that the COVID-19 pandemic and shutdown of developed economies will result in poverty for 60 million people, highlighting issues such as reduced incomes for migrant workers and a drop in remittance flows.
“Wide spillover from the pandemic and the shutdown in advanced economies hit the poor and vulnerable, women, children, and healthcare workers hardest, deepening the inequality from the lack of development and making the health crisis even worse.”
Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, said. “We know that jobs and businesses in each of our countries depend on the health and stability of economies elsewhere.”
http://www.ipsnews.net/2020/05/covid-19-un-urges-world-leaders-to-act-now-to-avert-unimaginable-devastation/
Jim Crow Didn’t Go Away
Protests against police violence and the killing of George Floyd continue with demands for justice.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez issued a plea to anyone calling for the end of the “unrest” stirred by brutality and oppression to focus on the root causes of poverty, distrust, and violence in American society.
“If you are calling for an end to this unrest… but you are not calling for the end to the conditions that created the unrest, you are a hypocrite,” Ocasio-Cortez said in the post.
Socialists know that isn’t going to happen anytime soon. What is taking place is deja vu from the long history of African-American revolts in the United States. Non-solutions such as body cams and de-escalation training are clearly not the answer. The number of police killings between 2018 and 2019 increased, despite the growing use of body cams by police districts around the country.
AOC goes on to seek a solution for America’s racism and inequality in a policy of reforms.
“If you’re trying to call for the end to unrest, but you don’t believe healthcare is a human right. If you’re afraid to say Black Lives Matter. If you’re too scared to call out police brutality—then you aren’t asking for an to unrest. You are asking for injustice to continue and for your people to continue to endure the violence of poverty, the violence of lack of housing access, the violence of police brutality and not say a damn thing. That’s what you’re asking for. So if you’re out here,” she continued, “asking for an end to unrest, you better be asking for healthcare as a human right, you better be calling for accountability in our policing, you better be supporting community review boards, you better be supporting the end of housing discrimination, you better be standing up to for-profit real estate developers that are intimidating people and trying to evict them from their homes—that’s what you better be calling for. Because if you don’t call for those things and you’re asking for the end of unrest—all you’re asking for is the continuation of quiet oppression.”
Nevertheless, much of what she says makes sense to socialists. Instead of calls for things to simply calm down and “go back to normal,” said Ocasio-Cortez, “let’s create a new world—one where all people are held to the same standard of the rule of law. And one where the justice a person gets for their crimes is not dependent on who they work for or how much money they have, but by the actual deed that was done.” A world like, she concluded, “is what justice looks like.”
However, there’s no greater frustration than working every day to build and inspire others to build a more just, compassionate world, only to be so brutally reminded of how far away that world is.
Harvard University philosophy professor Dr. Cornell West explains “ The history of black people for over 200 and some years in America has been looking at America’s failure. Its capitalist economy could not generate and deliver in such a way that people could live lives of decency. The nation-state, it’s criminal justice system, it’s legal system could not generate protection of rights and liberties. And now our culture, of course is so market-driven—everything for sale, everybody for sale—it can’t deliver the kind of nourishment for soul, for meaning, for purpose.”
West goes on to say, “The system cannot reform itself,” West argued and pointed to a dynamic in which identitarian representation is asked to be a stand in for class equality, shared prosperity, and a functional democracy that actually expresses the will of the people and satisfies the material needs of the working people and the poor. We’ve tried black faces in high places,” he said. “Too often our black politicians, professional class, middle class become too accommodated to the capitalist economy, too accommodated to a militarized nation-state, too accommodated to the market-driven culture of celebrities, status, power, fame, all that superficial stuff that means so much to so many fellow citizens.”
He continues, “You’ve got a neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party…and they really don’t know what to do because all they want to do is show more black faces—show more black faces. But often times those black faces are losing legitimacy, too—because the Black Lives Matter movement emerged under a black president, a black attorney general, and a black Homeland Security, and they couldn’t deliver. So when you talk about the masses of black people—the precious poor and working-class black people, brown, red, yellow, whatever color—they’re the ones left out and they feel so thoroughly powerless, helpless, hopeless—then you get rebellion.”
According to West, the nation faces a choice now between “nonviolent revolution” and continuing the status quo failures. “And by revolution what I mean is the democratic sharing of power, resources, wealth and respect,” he explained. “If we don’t get that kind of sharing, you’re going to get more violent explosions.”
West added, “I thank God people are in the streets. Can you imagine this kind of lynching taking place and people are indifferent? People don’t care? People are callous?” He said “White supremacy is going to be around for a long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long time, don’t be surprised when this happens again. But the question is we must fight,” he concluded.
After more than 300 years of the USA abusing blacks in every way imaginable, of course anger and rage is inevitable. As Martin Luther King Jnr said,” And what you’re seeing in America is those chickens coming home to roost”
When Terrorism Succeeds
Timothy McVeigh, on the fringe of white supremacy blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklohama City in 1995 with a fertilizer bomb. He killed 168 people and wounded hundreds more. The Oklahoma City bombing was the most successful act of terrorism in American history. It led the FBI and other Federal agencies, as well as local law enforcement in many instances, to back off the white supremacists, neo-Nazis and kindred groups, leaving them be unless they did something really egregious.
In the 1990s, Federal agencies like the FBI and Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms were called in to deal with heavily armed white terrorists. A 1992 stand off at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, between gun nut Randy Weaver (whose family was with him) ended in tragedy when FBI snipers took out Weaver and his wife. Weaver had refused to show up for his trial on weapons charges (he had sawed off a shotgun, which is illegal in Idaho). Then the following year the David Koresh splinter of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, was investigated for stockpiling weapons, and a raid left 4 ATF agents and 6 Branch Davidians dead, with many agents wounded. That firefight led to an FBI siege of the compound and ultimately to the deaths of 76 members, including Koresh, in fires that they may have set themselves.
It is one of the reasons for which the Obama administration did not take resolute action when Cliven Bundy staged a stand-off over his refusal to pay fees for grazing on Federal land. People like Bundy were looking for further ammunition to grow their “sovereign citizen” movement, and a violent crackdown would have helped them. Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer merely complained about the mob that came for her with assault weapons, but did not order them dealt with by law enforcement. The Michigan state legislature actually just shut down to accommodate these white terrorists. But if any of them had been shot by police, you know that it would just have brought more gangs to Lansing and that Trump would have been whipping up the fringe into a lather.
The white supremacists and other far right elements are armed to the teeth. There are about 255 million guns in the US, but something like 75 percent of Americans say they don’t own a gun. So between 22% and 31% of Americans, about 80 to 100 million people, own all the guns. Then 3 percent of the population, some 10 million people, own 100 million guns.
Let me underline that. About 40 percent of all guns in the United States are owned by about 10 million people, some 3 percent of the population. A tiny percentage within that percentage of super-gun-owners are far-right wing extremists, and law enforcement is understandably reluctant to get them het up.
White supremacists, militia movement members, and other fringe groups of the far right may make up 10 percent of the US population. The form a key if unspoken part of the Republican Party and provide the margin for Republicans in many tight congressional races. This is why Sarah Palin and other GOP leaders engage in code-speak, talking about the “patriots,” which sounds inoffensive until you realize about whom exactly she was speaking. Republicans in Congress actually stopped Federal agencies from keeping tabs and good statistics on far right extremism, lest one of their constituencies be upset. Trump is the first major national Republican leader openly to cultivate the far right constituency, but he has plenty of predecessors who did so.
African-Americans are made to look big and menacing by the white media and many political figures, but they are a minority. They are only 12 percent of the population. If you had a gathering of 100 representative Americans, only 12 of them would be of African heritage. They are systematically discriminated against on employment, which keeps them poor. They have only 10 cents for every dollar a white person has. As a disadvantaged minority they are still, despite the supposed end to Jim Crow, subjected to enormous amounts of surveillance and are incarcerated at a rate many times more than whites. It is systematic racism that allows the authorities to treat African-Americans like pariahs and to crack down hard on them if they protest.
In Georgia, Ahmaud Arbery was hunted down and shot dead in broad daylight for being in a white neighborhoo, the wrong place at the wrong time. In Central Park New York, an African-American had the police called out to him by a white woman for telling her to put her dog on a leash. In Minneapolis, George Floyd was slowly killed by a police-officer who presently remains free and uncharged of any crime.
Yet the media is upset that his death has resulted in righteous rage from his community.
adapted from here
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/05/28/top-6-reasons-authorities-are-cracking-down-hard-black-protesters-while-treating
To own the vaccine or not?
The United States and the UK were the only two holdouts in the World Health Assembly from the declaration that vaccines and medicines for COVID-19 should be available as public goods, and not under exclusive patent rights. The United States explicitly disassociated itself from the patent pool call, talking instead of “the critical role that intellectual property plays”—in other words, patents for vaccines and medicines.
All other countries agreed with the Costa Rican proposal in the World Health Assembly that there should be a patent pool for all COVID-19 vaccines and medicines. All countries supported this proposal, barring the United States and its loyal camp follower, the UK. The United States also entered its disagreement on the final WHA resolution, being the lone objector to patent pooling of COVID-19 medicines and vaccines, noting “the critical role that intellectual property plays in incentivizing the development of new and improved health products.”
China and the EU have already agreed that any vaccine developed by them will be regarded as a public good. Even without that, once a medicine or a vaccine is known to be successful, any country with a reasonable scientific infrastructure can replicate the medicine or the vaccine, and manufacture it locally. India in particular has one of the largest generic drug and vaccine manufacturing capacities in the world. What prevents India, or any country for that matter, from manufacturing COVID-19 vaccines or drugs once they are developed—only the empty threat of a failed hegemon on breaking patents?
Most countries have compulsory licensing provisions that will allow them to break patents in case of epidemics or health emergencies. Even the WTO, after a bitter fight, accepted in its Doha Declaration (2001) that countries, in a health emergency, have the right to allow any company to manufacture a patented drug without the patent holder’s permission, and even import it from other countries. Why is it, then, that countries are unable to break patents, even if there are provisions in their laws and in the TRIPS Agreement? The answer is their fear of U.S. sanctions against them. Every year, the U.S. Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) issues a Special 301 Report that it has used to threaten trade sanctions against any country that tries to compulsorily license any patented product.
India figures prominently in this report year after year, for daring to issue a compulsory license in 2012 to Natco for nexavar, a cancer drug Bayer was selling for more than $65,000 a year. Marijn Dekkers, the CEO of Bayer, was quoted widely that this was “theft,” and “We did not develop this medicine for Indians… We developed it for Western patients who can afford it.” This leaves unanswered how many people even in the affluent West can afford a $65,000 bill for an illness. But there is no question that a bill of this magnitude is a death sentence for anybody but the super-rich in countries like India. Though a number of other drugs were under also consideration for compulsory licensing at that time, India has not exercised this provision again after receiving U.S. threats.
One issue is now looming large over the COVID-19 pandemic. If we do not address the intellectual property rights issue in this pandemic, we are likely to see a repeat of the AIDS tragedy. People died for 10 years (1994-2004) as patented AIDS medicine was priced at $10,000 to $15,000 for a year’s supply, far beyond their reach. Finally, patent laws in India allowed people to get AIDS medicine at less than a dollar a day, or $350 for a year’s supply. Today, 80 percent of the world’s AIDS medicine comes from India. For big pharma, profits trumped lives, and they will continue to do so, COVID or no COVID, unless we change the world.
It is unlikely that a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 will provide a lifetime immunity like the smallpox vaccine. Unlike AIDS, where the patient numbers were smaller and were unfortunately stigmatized in different ways, COVID-19 is a visible threat for everyone. Any attempt to hold people and governments to ransom on COVID-19 vaccines or medicines could see the collapse of the entire patent edifice of TRIPS that big pharma backed by the United States and major EU countries have built. That is why the more clever in the capitalist world have moved toward a voluntary patent pool for potential COVID-19 medicines and vaccines. A voluntary patent pool means that companies or institutions holding patents on medicines—such as remdesivir—or vaccines would voluntarily hand them over to such a pool. The terms and conditions of such a handover, meaning at concessional rates, or for only for certain regions, are still not clear—leading to criticism that a voluntary patent pool is not a substitute for declaring that all such medicines and vaccines should be declared global public goods during the COVID-19 pandemic.
During the anthrax scare in 2001, the U.S. Secretary of Health issued a threat to Bayer under “eminent domain for patents” for licensing the anthrax-treatment drug ciprofloxacin to other manufacturers. Bayer folded, and agreed to supply the quantity at a price that the U.S. government had set. And without a whimper. Yes, this is the same Bayer that considers India as a “thief” for issuing a compulsory license.
The IMF on Climate Change
Equity markets have generally ignored the increasing number of natural disasters over the past 50 years and tougher rules are needed to make investors aware of the dangers posed by the climate crisis, the International Monetary Fund has said.
Companies should be forced to disclose their exposure to climate risk because a voluntary approach does not go far enough, the IMF said.
The IMF said global temperatures were currently 1.1C above their pre-industrial level and were on course to rise by a total of 3C unless stronger action was taken.
“Climate change induced by this level of warming is, in turn, expected to adversely impact the world’s stock of natural assets, lead to a significant rise in sea level, and increase the frequency and severity of extreme weather event,” the IMF said. “As the frequency and severity of climatic hazards rise, the resultant socioeconomic losses could be significantly higher than in recent history.”
Last year was also marked by a series of severe weather-related events, including flooding in the US and bushfires in Australia, but the IMF said this was part of a trend for the number of disasters to increase “considerably” in the past few decades, from slightly more than 50 in the early 1980s to about 200 since 2000. It noted that Hurricane Kartrin devastated New Orleans in 2005, and Dominica suffered damage amounting to more than twice its GDP when Hurricane Maria struck in 2017.
Even so there had been little indication that investors had become more aware of the potential losses they could face if global temperatures continued to rise, with only a modest impact on stock markets, shares in banks and insurance companies from large disasters. The IMF said. “This suggests that equity investors may not be paying sufficient attention to climate change risks.”
“Of course, strong policy actions to mitigate climate change would reduce greenhouse gas emissions and future physical risk in the first place, conferring benefits to mankind that extend well beyond the realm of financial stability. Yet, from a financial stability perspective, this transition to a lower-carbon economy needs to be carefully managed to avoid abrupt and unanticipated repricing of portfolios and economic dislocation.”
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/may/29/markets-not-paying-attention-to-climate-crisis-imf-warns
The ‘Bolsonarization’ of Bolivia
Last November’s coup removed Bolivian President Evo Morales from power. Since then the world’s media has fallen silent.
Morales and the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party governed the country for 14 years. Certain negative actions and policies of the MAS government over these years in power contributed to its own crisis of legitimacy in the lead up to the October 2019 elections. In the lead up to the October 20, 2019 election, the MAS and Morales were already mired in a crisis of legitimacy, making them an easier target for the right, which had been consolidating forces and capitalizing off of the errors of the MAS. The issue of fraud during the October 20th elections, which indicated Morales won another term, has been widely debated and investigated. Following the election, protesters against Morales allied with right-wing leader Fernando Camacho and other racist figures, fomenting destabilization and violence in the country in an effort to force Morales out of office. These efforts ultimately created the pretext for a police and military intervention Regardless of the extent or existence of fraud, the Organization of American States strategically threw gasoline on the fire during a critical moment of the October crisis with their early claims of fraud, pushing the country into violence. On November 8, police across the country mutinied against the government, and the military “suggested” Morales step down on November 10. Morales and other MAS leaders were forced to flee or go into hiding. Morales left the country for Mexico.
The Right, having planned for a seizure of the government, took advantage of the power vacuum and entered office with the crucial blessing of the Bolivian armed forces and the US embassy.
Senator Jeanine Áñez declared herself president in front of an empty Congress on November 12. State repression immediately following the coup left dozens dead of unarmed protesters and bystanders dead in Senkata and Sacaba, key areas of resistance to the coup regime. and the government has been throwing political enemies behind bars.
Morales and the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party governed the country for 14 years. Certain negative actions and policies of the MAS government over these years in power contributed to its own crisis of legitimacy in the lead up to the October 2019 elections. In the lead up to the October 20, 2019 election, the MAS and Morales were already mired in a crisis of legitimacy, making them an easier target for the right, which had been consolidating forces and capitalizing off of the errors of the MAS. The issue of fraud during the October 20th elections, which indicated Morales won another term, has been widely debated and investigated. Following the election, protesters against Morales allied with right-wing leader Fernando Camacho and other racist figures, fomenting destabilization and violence in the country in an effort to force Morales out of office. These efforts ultimately created the pretext for a police and military intervention Regardless of the extent or existence of fraud, the Organization of American States strategically threw gasoline on the fire during a critical moment of the October crisis with their early claims of fraud, pushing the country into violence. On November 8, police across the country mutinied against the government, and the military “suggested” Morales step down on November 10. Morales and other MAS leaders were forced to flee or go into hiding. Morales left the country for Mexico.
The Right, having planned for a seizure of the government, took advantage of the power vacuum and entered office with the crucial blessing of the Bolivian armed forces and the US embassy.
Senator Jeanine Áñez declared herself president in front of an empty Congress on November 12. State repression immediately following the coup left dozens dead of unarmed protesters and bystanders dead in Senkata and Sacaba, key areas of resistance to the coup regime. and the government has been throwing political enemies behind bars.
Following Áñez’s seizure of power, Bolivia has endured the worst state violence and political persecution it has seen in decades.
“They’re criminalizing social protest…” Bolivian journalist Fernando Molina explained. “There’s a ‘Bolsonarization’ of Bolivia.”
The Áñez government threatens to roll back major progressive policies of the MAS, as well as victories won in the streets by Bolivia’s broad social, labor, and indigenous movements.
“The coup d’état is not just against the state, the government, but also the social movement organizations,” Aymara feminist activist Adriana Guzmán explained.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/05/28/bibles-barricades-how-right-seized-power-bolivia
Mutual Aid is there for the Asking
Many still cling to the hope that the COVID-19 crisis will transform the use of state power into an altruistic tool acting on behalf of the vulnerable and powerless, rather than view it as an opportunity for governments to harness the state’s intervention to advance the oligarchy’s interests and increase its privileges. Nationalist and populist political leaders are stoking prejudice and xenophobia accusing cunning foreigners of nefarious scheming. Aspiring strongmen politicians are reinforcing divisions while at the same time rewarding their corporate sponsors and donors.
Our message to our fellow-workers is that those who do not own the means of production are nothing but the slaves of those who do. The forces of production long ago reached the point where they could produce the abundance necessary for the change from private ownership into social ownership. The interdependence of society has outgrown local and national bounds and is world wide. The workers of the world must organise politically to dispossess the capitalist class of the means of production and distribution and establish common ownership. The Socialist Party urges our fellow working men and women of all nations and races to join with the World Socialist Movement in order to free society from the tyranny of class rule. Socialism requires an economy developed to the point where production for need supersedes production for profit. Humanity will no longer produce goods to be exchanged for money on the market. It will produce use values distributed to all members of society in order to satisfy their needs
The only real way forward, in the end, is the world socialist cooperative commonwealth.