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Action: Support for Medics  fighting Covid-19. Sao Paulo, Brazil. March 22, 2020

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Action: Support for the NHS. Barbican, London, March 26, 2020

*The hypocrisy of the British government.*

With the current state of the global emergency due to the coronavirus pandemic. The British government headed by Boris Johnson has reported certain measures with the supposed aim of helping the British people. 

One of the measures is the distance of 2 meters, this measure is very logical and clear that it would protect the British people if the government implemented other emergency measures and protected the jobs.

We have heard of the British government paying 80% of the wages of workers who want to stay at home, but this is not a reality. The government put this programme in the hands of the companies, which means that the lives of the workers are left in the hands of the employers. If the companies do not authorize the absence, the workers will not receive any salary.

We workers in the UK pay very high taxes, we should not expect alms from the government and much less leave our lives in the hands of the employers, who are known to want their profits more than human beings. That government program should be for all workers without conditions, so people would stay home without having to think about how they are going to pay for food, rent, etc.

Let's keep 2 meters away, but you should go to work and at the same time reduce the train service. How can you keep six feet away if there aren't enough trains? 

In the meantime the airports don't close and the death toll is increasing.I'm sure the government's statistics on Corona Virus cases are much higher than those reported publicly. I felt very bad this week and I called the emergency number 111. Only after 3 days a doctor talked to me and informed me that they are not testing for Coronavirus, they are treating only the most serious patients.

The recent governments of the UK have attacked the NHS mercilessly, they have been slowly dismantling it, now that this global emergency is coming and in that way reduced and without all the resources the health professionals must face this pandemic alone, without the proper protection and equipment.

I call on us to put organised pressure on the government to take real action to protect the jobs of workers in the UK. Give resources to the NHS and stop the hypocrisy of talking too much and doing nothing.

Alberto Durango

 

Anti-Capitalist Politics in the Time of COVID-19. MARCH 19, 2020 / DAVID HARVEY /  [Listen as podcast]

When trying to interpret, understand and analyze the daily flow of news, I tend to locate what is happening against the background of two distinctive but intersecting models of how capitalism works.  The first level is a mapping of the internal contradictions of the circulation and accumulation of capital as money value flows in search of profit through the different “moments” (as Marx calls them) of production, realization (consumption), distribution,  and reinvestment.  This is a model of the capitalist economy as a spiral of endless expansion and growth. It gets pretty complicated as it gets elaborated through, for example, the lenses of geopolitical rivalries, uneven geographical developments, financial institutions, state policies, technological reconfigurations and the ever-changing web of divisions of labour and of social relations. I envision this model as embedded, however, in a broader context of social reproduction (in households and communities), in an on-going and ever-evolving metabolic relation to nature (including the “second nature” of urbanization and the built environment) and all manner of cultural, scientific (knowledge-based), religious and contingent social formations that human populations typically create across space and time.  These latter “moments” incorporate the active expression of human wants, needs and desires, the lust for knowledge and meaning and the evolving quest for fulfillment against a background of changing institutional arrangements, political contestations, ideological confrontations, losses, defeats, frustrations and alienations, all worked out in a world of marked geographical, cultural, social and political diversity.  This second model constitutes, as it were, my working understanding of global capitalism as a distinctive social formation, whereas the first is about the contradictions within the economic engine that powers this social formation along certain pathways of its historical and geographical evolution.

When on 26th of January 2020 I first read of a Corona Virus that was gaining ground in China, I immediately thought of the repercussions for the global dynamics of capital accumulation.  I knew from my studies of the economic model that blockages and disruptions in the continuity of capital flow would result in devaluations and that if devaluations became widespread and deep that would signal the onset of crises.  I was also well aware that China is the second largest economy in the world and that it had effectively bailed out global capitalism in the aftermath of 2007-8, so any hit upon China’s economy was bound to have serious consequences for a global economy that was in any case already in a parlous condition.  The existing model of capital accumulation was, it seemed to me, already in a lot of trouble. Protest movements were occurring almost everywhere (from Santiago to Beirut), many of which were focused on the fact that the dominant economic model was not working well for the mass of the population. This neoliberal model is increasingly resting on fictitious capital and a vast expansion in the money supply and debt creation. It is already facing the problem of insufficient effective demand to realize the values that capital is capable of producing. So how might the dominant economic model, with its sagging legitimacy and delicate health, absorb and survive the inevitable impacts of what might become a pandemic?  The answer depended heavily on how long the disruption might last and spread, for as Marx pointed out, devaluation does not occur because commodities cannot be sold but because they cannot be sold in time.

I had long refused the idea of “nature” as outside of and separate from culture, economy and daily life. I take a more dialectical and relational view of the metabolic relation to nature. Capital modifies the environmental conditions of its own reproduction but does so in a context of unintended consequences (like climate change) and against the background of autonomous and independent evolutionary forces that are perpetually re-shaping environmental conditions. There is, from this standpoint, no such thing as a truly natural disaster.  Viruses mutate all of the time to be sure. But the circumstances in which a mutation becomes life-threatening depend on human actions. There are two relevant aspects to this.  First, favorable environmental conditions increase the probability of vigorous mutations. It is, for example, plausible to expect that rapid transformation of habitat and intensive or wayward food supply systems in, for example, the humid sub-tropics may contribute to this.  Such systems exist in many places, including China south of the Yangtse and  SouthEast Asia. Secondly, the conditions that favor rapid transmission through host bodies vary greatly. High density human populations would seem an easy host target.  It is well known that measles epidemics, for example, only flourish in larger urban population centers but rapidly die out in sparsely populated regions. How human beings interact with each other, move around, discipline themselves or forget to wash their hands affects how diseases get transmitted.  In recent times SARS, Bird and Swine Flu appear to have come out of China or SouthEast Asia. China has suffered heavily also from swine fever in the past year, entailing the mass slaughter of pigs and escalating pork prices.  I do not say all this to indict China. There are plenty of other places where environmental risks for viral mutation and diffusion are high. The Spanish Flu of 1918 may have come out of Kansas and Africa may have incubated HIV/AIDS and certainly initiated West Nile and Ebola, while dengue seems to flourish in Latin America.  But the economic and demographic impacts of the spread of the virus depend upon pre-existing cracks and vulnerabilities in the hegemonic economic model.

I was not unduly surprised that COVID-19 was initially found in Wuhan (though whether it originated there is not known). Plainly the local effects would be substantial and given this was a serious production center there would likely be global economic repercussions (though I had no idea of the magnitude).  The big question was how the contagion and diffusion might occur and how long it would last (until a vaccine could be found).  Earlier experience had shown that one of the downsides of increasing globalization is how impossible it is to stop a rapid international diffusion of new diseases. We live in a highly connected world where almost everyone travels. The human networks for potential diffusion are vast and open.  The danger (economic and demographic) was that the disruption would last a year or more.

While there was an immediate downturn in global stock markets when the initial news broke, it was surprisingly followed by a month or more when the markets hit new highs. The news seemed to indicate business as normal everywhere except in China. The belief seemed to be that we were going to experience a re-run of SARS which turned out to be fairly quickly contained and of low global impact even though it had a high death rate and created an unnecessary (in retrospect)  panic in financial markets. When COVID-19 appeared, a dominant reaction was to depict it as a SARS repeat rendering the panic redundant. The fact that the epidemic raged in China, which quickly and ruthlessly moved to contain its impacts also led the rest of the world to erroneously treat the problem as something going on “over there” and therefore out of sight and mind (accompanied by some troubling signs of anti-Chinese xenophobia in certain parts of the world).  The spike which the virus put into the otherwise triumphant China growth story was even greeted with glee in certain circles of the Trump Administration. However, stories of interruptions in global production chains that passed through Wuhan began to circulate. These were largely ignored or treated as problems for particular product lines or corporations (like Apple). Devaluations were local and particular and not systemic. The signs of falling consumer demand were also minimized, even though those corporations, like MacDonalds and Starbucks, that had large operations inside the Chinese domestic market had to close their doors there for a while.  The overlap of the Chinese New Year with the outbreak of the virus masked impacts throughout January. The complacency of this response was badly misplaced.

Initial news of the international spread of the virus was occasional and episodic with a serious outbreak in South Korea and a few other hotspots like Iran.  It was the Italian outbreak, which sparked the first violent reaction.  The stock market crash beginning in mid-February oscillated somewhat but by mid-March had led to a net devaluation of almost 30 percent on stock markets worldwide. The exponential escalation of the infections elicited a range of often incoherent and sometimes panic-stricken responses. President Trump performed an imitation of King Canute in the face of a potential rising tide of illnesses and deaths.  Some of the responses have been passing strange. Having the Federal Reserve lower interest rates in the face of a virus seemed weird, even when it was recognized that the move was meant to alleviate market impacts rather than to stem the progress of the virus.  Public authorities and health care systems were almost everywhere caught short-handed.  Forty years of neoliberalism across North and South America and Europe had left the public totally exposed and ill-prepared to face a public health crisis of this sort, even though previous scares of SARS and Ebola provided abundant warnings as well as cogent lessons as to what would be needed to be done. In many parts of the supposed “civilized” world, local governments and regional/state authorities, which invariably form the front line of defense in public health and safety emergencies of this kind, had been starved of funding thanks to a policy of austerity designed to fund tax cuts and subsidies to the corporations and the rich. Corporatist Big Pharma has little or no interest in non-remunerative research on infectious diseases (such as the whole class of corona viruses that have been well-known since the 1960s).  Big Pharma rarely invests in prevention.  It has little interest in investing in preparedness for a public health crisis. It loves to design cures. The sicker we are the more they earn. Prevention does not contribute to share-holder value.  It might even diminish it.  The business model applied to public health provision eliminated the surplus coping capacities that would be required in an emergency. Prevention was not even an enticing enough field of work to warrant public private partnerships. President Trump had cut the budget of the Center for Disease Control and disbanded the working group on pandemics in the National Security Council in the same spirit as he cut all research funding, including on climate change.  If I wanted to be anthropomorphic and metaphorical about this, I would conclude that COVID-19 is Nature’s revenge for over forty years of Nature’s gross and abusive mistreatment at the hands of a violent and unregulated neo-liberal extractivism. 

It is perhaps symptomatic that the least neoliberal countries, China and South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, have so far come through the pandemic in better shape than Italy, though Iran will bely this argument as a universal principle.  While there was a lot of evidence that China handled SARS rather badly with a lot of initial dissembling and denial, this time around President Xi quickly moved to mandate transparency both in reporting and testing as did South Korea.  Even so, in China some valuable time was lost (just a few days make all the difference). What was remarkable in China, however, was the confinement of the epidemic to Hubei Province with Wuhan at its center.  The epidemic did not move with the same ferocity to Beijing or to the West or even further South. By the end of March, China announced no new cases in Hubei and Volvo announced it was returning car production to normal when the rest of the global auto industry was shutting down.  The measures taken to confine the virus geographically were comprehensive and restrictive (as they had to be). They would be difficult to replicate elsewhere for political, economic and cultural reasons. Reports coming out of China suggest the treatments and the policies were anything but caring.  Furthermore, China and Singapore deployed their powers of personal surveillance to levels that were invasive and authoritarian. But they seem to have been extremely effective in aggregate, though had the counter actions been set in motion just a few days earlier, models suggest that many deaths might have been avoided. This is important information: in any exponential growth process there is an inflexion point beyond which the rising mass gets totally out of control (note here, once more, the significance of the mass in relation to the rate).  The fact that Trump dawdled for so many weeks will almost certainly prove costly in human lives.

The economic effects are now spiraling out of control across the globe.  The disruptions working through the value chains of corporations and in certain sectors turned out to be more systemic and substantial than was originally thought.  The long-term effect may be to shorten or diversify the supply chains while moving towards less labour intensive forms of production (with enormous implications for employment) and greater reliance on artificial intelligent production systems.  The disruption of production chains entails laying off or furloughing workers, which diminishes final demand, while the demand for raw materials diminishes productive consumption. These impacts on the demand side would in their own right have produced at least a mild recession.

But the biggest vulnerabilities existed elsewhere. The modes of consumerism which exploded after 2007-8 have crashed with devastating consequences. These modes were based on reducing the turnover time of consumption as close as possible to zero.  The flood of investments into such forms of consumerism had everything to do with maximum absorption of exponentially increasing volumes of capital in forms of consumerism that had the shortest possible turnover time. International tourism was emblematic. International visits increased from 800 million to 1.4 billion between 2010 and 2018.  This form of instantaneous “experiential” consumerism required massive infrastructural investments in airports and airlines, hotels and restaurants, theme parks and cultural events, etc.  This site of capital accumulation is now dead in the water, airlines are close to bankruptcy, hotels are empty and mass unemployment in the hospitality industries is imminent. Eating out is not a good idea and restaurants and bars have been closed in many places. Even take-out appears risky.  The vast army of workers in the gig economy or in other forms of precarious work is being laid off with no visible means of support. Events such as cultural festivals, soccer and basketball tournaments, concerts, business and professional conventions and even political gatherings around elections are cancelled. These “event based” forms of experiential consumerism have been closed down. The revenues of local governments have cratered. Universities and schools are closing down.

Much of the cutting edge model of contemporary capitalist consumerism is inoperable under present conditions. The drive towards what Andre Gorz describes as “compensatory consumerism” (in which alienated workers are supposed to recover their spirits through a package holiday on a tropical beach) was blunted.

But contemporary capitalist economies are seventy or even eighty percent driven by consumerism.  Consumer confidence and sentiment has over the past forty years become the key to the mobilization of effective demand and capital has become increasingly demand and needs driven. This source of economic energy has not been subject to wild fluctuations (with a few exceptions such as the Icelandic volcanic eruption that blocked trans-Atlantic flights for a couple of weeks).  But COVID-19 is underpinning not a wild fluctuation but an almighty crash in the heart of the form of consumerism that dominates in the most affluent countries. The spiral form of endless capital accumulation is collapsing inward from one part of the world to every other.  The only thing that can save it is a government funded and inspired mass consumerism conjured out of nothing. This will require socializing the whole of the economy in the USA, for example, without calling it socialism. Whatever else happens, the widespread popular skepticism as to the need for a government armed with wide powers has been put to rest and the difference between good and bad administrations is being more widely acknowledged. Having governments subservient to the interests of the bond-holders and the financiers (as has been the case since 2007-8) is turning out to be a bad idea, even for the financiers.

There is a convenient myth that infectious diseases do not acknowledge class or other social barriers and boundaries. Like many such sayings, there is a certain truth to this.  In the cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century, the transcendence of barriers of class was sufficiently dramatic as to spawn the birth of a public sanitation and health movement (which became professionalized) that has lasted to this day.  Whether this movement was designed to protect everyone or just the upper classes was not always clear. But today the differential class and social effects and impacts tell a different story. The economic and social impacts are filtered through “customary” discriminations that are everywhere in evidence.  To begin with, the workforce that is expected to take care of the mounting numbers of the sick is typically highly gendered, racialized and ethnicized in most parts of the world. It mirrors the class-based work forces to be found in, for example, airports and other logistical sectors.  This “new working class” is in the forefront and bears the brunt of either being the workforce most at risk from contracting the virus through their jobs or of being laid off with no resources because of the economic retrenchment enforced by the virus.  There is, for example, the question of who can work at home and who cannot.  This sharpens the societal divide as does the question of who can afford to isolate or quarantine themselves (with or without pay) in the event of contact or infection.  In exactly the same way that I learned to call the Nicaraguan (1973) and Mexico City (1985) earthquakes “class-quakes” so the progress of COVID-19 exhibits all the characteristics of a class, gendered and racialized pandemic. While efforts at mitigation are conveniently cloaked in the rhetoric that “we are all in this together” the practices, particularly on the part of national governments, suggest more sinister motivations. The contemporary working class in the United States (comprised predominantly of African Americans, Latinx and waged women) faces the ugly choice of contamination in the name of caring and keeping key features of provision (like grocery stores) open or unemployment with no benefits (such as adequate health care).  Salaried personnel (like me) work from home and draw their pay just as before while CEOs fly around in private jets and helicopters.  

Workforces in most parts of the world have long been socialized to behave as good neoliberal subjects (which means blaming themselves or God if anything goes wrong but never daring to suggest capitalism might be the problem). But even good neoliberal subjects can see that there is something wrong with the way this pandemic is being responded to.

The big question is how long will this go on? It could be more than a year and the longer it goes on the more the devaluation including of the labor force. Unemployment levels will almost certainly rise to levels comparable to the 1930s in the absence of massive state interventions that will have to go against the neoliberal grain. The immediate ramifications for the economy as well as for social daily life are multiple. But they are not all bad.   To the degree that contemporary consumerism was becoming excessive it was verging on what Marx described as “over-consumption and insane consumption, signifying, by its turn to the monstrous and the bizarre, the downfall” of the whole system.  The recklessness of this over-consumption has played a major role in environmental degradation.  The cancellation of airline flights and radical curbing of transportation and movement has had positive consequence with respect to greenhouse gas emissions.  Air quality in Wuhan is much improved as it also is in many US cities. Ecotourist sites will have a time to recover from trampling feet. The swans have returned to the canals of Venice. To the degree that the taste for reckless and senseless overconsumerism is curbed there could be some long-term benefits.  Fewer deaths on Mount Everest could be a good thing. And while no one says it out loud, the demographic bias of the virus may end up affecting age pyramids with long-term effects on social security burdens and the future of the “care industry”.  Daily life will slow down and for some people that will be a blessing. The suggested rules of social distancing could, if the emergency goes on long enough, lead to cultural shifts.  The only form of experiential consumerism that will almost certainly benefit is what I call the “Netflix” economy, which caters to “binge watchers” anyways.

On the economic front responses have been conditioned by the manner of exodus from the crash of 2007-8.  This entailed an ultra loose monetary policy coupled with bailing out the banks supplemented by a dramatic increase in productive consumption by a massive expansion of infrastructural investment in China.  The latter cannot be repeated on the scale required. The bail-out packages set up in 2008 focused on the banks but also entailed the de facto nationalization of General Motors. It is perhaps significant that in the face of worker discontents and collapsing market demand, the three big Detroit auto-companies are closing down at least temporarily. If China cannot repeat its 2007-8 role, then the burden of exiting from the current economic crisis now shifts to the United States and here is the ultimate irony: the only policies that will work, both economically and politically, are far more socialistic than anything that Bernie Sanders might propose and these rescue programs will have to be initiated under the aegis of Donald Trump, presumably under the mask of Making America Great Again. All those Republicans who so viscerally opposed the 2008 bail-out will have to eat crow or defy Donald Trump.  The latter will likely cancel the elections on an emergency basis and declare the origin of an imperial presidency to save capital and the world from riot and revolution.  If the only policies that will work are socialist, then the ruling oligarchy will doubtless move to ensure they be national socialist rather than people socialist.  The task of anti-capitalist politics is to prevent this from happening.

Corona Virus: Can Workers Fight Back Against The Jobs V Health Trap? Angry Workers of the World, March 2020

Well, that all depends. Up until three weeks ago, I had worked for some years in a food factory in Park Royal in west London. This is a massive complex with thousands of workers, made up of three factories and one warehouse producing 80% of the UK’s houmous, as well as ready-meals and chilled foods for all the major supermarkets. The shop-floor workforce is almost 100% migrant and it’s an ageing workforce – the majority were over 50 in my factory and a significant minority over 60. Many have underlying health conditions that come with being poor, doing manual, back-breaking jobs for years, living in overcrowded conditions and having high rates of harmful practices like alcoholism and chewing tobacco (amongst men).

This workforce is now deemed ‘essential’ in the efforts to keep our supermarket shelves full. While you could argue that ready-meals might not actually be ‘essential’ in the sense that we can probably cook our own bloody food now that we have so much time at home – the fact is that supermarket delivery drivers are delivering such meals to elderly and vulnerable people in their homes. This work used to be done by the local council through social services, but the gaps are being filled by supermarkets. But despite the importance of ready-meals, the workforce that produces them are also at a higher risk category when it comes to the effects of Corona virus.

So what can workers in this situation do? They continue going to work, but you would expect that extra precautions be taken. That the two metre distancing on the assembly line would be maintained, that people would be given masks, that breaks are staggered so that the distancing could be achieved in the small canteen. This is not being done.

Ex-workmates have told me that assembly lines are running as usual. Two metre distancing would be extremely difficult to achieve on assembly lines that would only hold 4 or 5 people, when normally up to 25 stand on a single line, if the distancing was adhered to. And in this workplace, speed and getting orders out are priority number one.

The picture above was taken in the canteen this week. There used to be two canteens in this workplace but this was reduced to one without consultation with the workforce. Sometimes it is difficult to even get a seat to eat your lunch. Wholly inadequate at the best of times, but now, even worse. Doesn’t seem to be any distancing measures in place here!

In a similar situation, workers at the Moy Park poultry plant in Northern Ireland walked out briefly this week to protest against the fact that their multinational employer had taken no measures to protect their workers. [1 ] The scenes show a much younger workforce congregating outside, demanding that their safety be put first. Why did that happen there and not at my factory? There are a number of structural constraints that limit the ability of workers to feel confident enough to do this:

1. A culture of bullying. These kinds of low-paid, migrant workplaces are often run through a mix of bullying and stick approaches rather than carrots. One woman, with an existing medical condition, was forced to wee herself twice in the space of six months because she wasn’t given permission to go the loo. Why didn’t she just go? It shows what kind of workplace it is when (women) workers feel they can’t just leave the assembly even in an emergency.

2. People rely on overtime – partly to cover their costs of living in London and partly to meet the visa income thresholds of a minimum of £18,600 a year to get a family member over to the UK. Immigration rules like this only serve to push people into accepting bad pay and conditions, rather than actually limit the numbers coming over. Overtime is paid at time and a half over 40 hours so it’s only by working 50-60 hour weeks that people can actually make enough to money to live. Who stays for overtime is decided arbitrarily by managers so staying in their good books is a good disciplinary tool.

3. Why don’t workers just unionise? Well, surprise surprise, there is a union, GMB, which has an official recognition agreement. However, workers can’t rely on the union who continue to fail the workforce – the union has been recognised for twelve years and workers who have been employed at the company for 20 years earn 16p above the minimum wage. The union supported a skill grading system that divided the workforce, primarily along sex lines. The reps are useless and couldn’t fight their way out of a paper bag. If we rely on these kind of corrupt structures to give confidence to workers, we’ll be waiting a long time…

However bad this all sounds, this situation is not uncommon in many UK workplaces. It usually doesn’t make the headlines because nobody is giving birth in the toilets and you don’t have a villainous and publicly known CEO like Phillip Green or Mike Ashley. Nothing that happens in this workplace is strictly illegal either, so relying on the law is a non-starter. Workers are permanently employed so are only entitled to Statutory Sick Pay if they have symptoms of Corona virus and need to self-isolate. Which is what workers in my factory are increasingly choosing to do, rather than put themselves and their family members at risk.

This lack of shop-floor power that leads a disenfranchised and scared workforce to take individual protective measures over and above collective measures needs to change. Acting on whatever potential the Corona crisis could bring  – in order that workers can start demanding their worth – usually doesn’t occur in a vacuum. How can we expect workers in such a precarious situation (even as permanent employees) to stand up and start raising their voices when there is no culture of experience of standing together and winning?

This is why AngryWorkers’ focus on these kinds of workplaces: a large concentration of workers, but lacking any real structures to start mounting an effective counter-insurgency. Aside from some ‘those poor workers!’ reportage, these kinds of workplaces are often neglected by the left. This is despite their enormous significance for the material survival of society and therefore for the struggle for social emancipation. We should build connections to workers inside these workplaces in order to get an insight into how we can use our potential collective strength to our strategic advantage to build a world beyond capitalism.

The central chapter of our book ‘Class Power on Zero-Hours’ describes the conditions in this complex of factories in west London and provides a detailed account of a six month rank-and-file pay campaign for £1 more for all – the challenges and potentials. Essential reading for all workplace militants and those comrades who want to get their hands dirty.

Check it out!
https://pmpress.org.uk/product/class-power-on-zero-hours/

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Bolsonaro DETONA jornalista após pergunta, fala da Entrevista com Datena e traz novas revelações!

Batata translations from the Jair Bolsonaro speech in the above video

Bolsonaro threatens to sack health minister over coronavirus criticism. Guardian, March 29, 2020 "Experts believe far more people are likely to die. Recent modelling by researchers from Imperial College London suggested Brazil could have more than 1.1 million Covid-19 deaths if no action were taken to control the pandemic; 529,000 if only elderly people were forced to isolate; and 44,200 if drastic measures were implemented."

Sem isolamento e ações contra a Covid-19, Brasil pode ter até 1 milhão de mortes na pandemia, diz estudo. March 27, 2020

Drug gangs in Brazil’s favelas enforce coronavirus lockdown.Financial Times, London. Andres Schipani and Bryan Harris in São Paulo MARCH 27 2020. NOTE* PDF to be made available soon

COVID-19 is finally the monster at the door. Researchers are working night and day to characterize the outbreak but they are faced with three huge challenges.

Originally published:Links International Journal of Social Renewal (March 12, 2020)   

First the continuing shortage or unavailability of test kits has vanquished all hope of containment. Moreover it is preventing accurate estimates of key parameters such as reproduction rate, size of infected population and number of benign infections. The result is a chaos of numbers.

There is, however, more reliable data on the virus’s impact on certain groups in a few countries. It is very scary. Italy and Britain, for example, are reporting a much higher death rate among those over 65. The ‘corona flu’ that Trump waves off is an unprecedented danger to geriatric populations, with a potential death toll in the millions.

Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, NIH image gallery. This transmission electron microscope image shows SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, isolated from a patient in the U.S. Virus particles are shown emerging from the surface of cells cultured in the lab. The spikes on the outer edge of the virus particles give coronaviruses their name, crown-like. Credit: NIAID-RML.

Second, like annual influenzas, this virus is mutating as it courses through populations with different age compositions and acquired immunities. The variety that Americans are most likely to get is already slightly different from that of the original outbreak in Wuhan. Further mutation could be trivial or could alter the current distribution of virulence which ascends with age, with babies and small children showing scant risk of serious infection while octogenarians face mortal danger from viral pneumonia.

Third, even if the virus remains stable and little mutated, its impact on under-65 age cohorts can differ radically in poor countries and amongst high poverty groups. Consider the global experience of the Spanish flu in 1918-19 which is estimated to have killed 1 to 2 per cent of humanity. In contrast to the corona virus, it was most deadly to young adults and this has often been explained as a result of their relatively stronger immune systems which overreacted to infection by unleashing deadly ‘cytokine storms’ against lung cells. The original H1N1 notoriously found a favored niche in army camps and battlefield trenches where it scythed down young soldiers down by the tens of thousands. The collapse of the great German spring offensive of 1918, and thus the outcome of the war, has been attributed to the fact that the Allies, in contrast to their enemy, could replenish their sick armies with newly arrived American troops.

It is rarely appreciated, however, that fully 60 per cent of global mortality occurred in western India where grain exports to Britain and brutal requisitioning practices coincided with a major drought. Resultant food shortages drove millions of poor people to the edge of starvation. They became victims of a sinister synergy between malnutrition, which suppressed their immune response to infection, and rampant bacterial and viral pneumonia. In another case, British-occupied Iran, several years of drought, cholera, and food shortages, followed by a widespread malaria outbreak, preconditioned the death of an estimated fifth of the population.

This history—especially the unknown consequences of interactions with malnutrition and existing infections—should warn us that COVID-19 might take a different and more deadly path in the slums of Africa and South Asia. The danger to the global poor has been almost totally ignored by journalists and Western governments. The only published piece that I’ve seen claims that because the urban population of West Africa is the world’s youngest, the pandemic should have only a mild impact. In light of the 1918 experience, this is a foolish extrapolation. No one knows what will happen over the coming weeks in Lagos, Nairobi, Karachi, or Kolkata. The only certainty is that rich countries and rich classes will focus on saving themselves to the exclusion of international solidarity and medical aid. Walls not vaccines: could there be a more evil template for the future?

A year from now we may look back in admiration at China’s success in containing the pandemic but in horror at the USA’s failure. (I’m making the heroic assumption that China’s declaration of rapidly declining transmission is more or less accurate.) The inability of our institutions to keep Pandora’s Box closed, of course, is hardly a surprise. Since 2000 we’ve repeatedly seen breakdowns in frontline healthcare.

The 2018 flu season, for instance, overwhelmed hospitals across the country, exposing the shocking shortage of hospital beds after twenty years of profit-driven cutbacks of in-patient capacity (the industry’s version of just-in-time inventory management). Private and charity hospital closures and nursing shortages, likewise enforced by market logic, have devastated health services in poorer communities and rural areas, transferring the burden to underfunded public hospitals and VA facilities. ER conditions in such institutions are already unable to cope with seasonal infections, so how will they cope with an imminent overload of critical cases?

We are in the early stages of a medical Katrina. Despite years of warnings about avian flu and other pandemics, inventories of basic emergency equipment such as respirators aren’t sufficient to deal with the expected flood of critical cases. Militant nurses unions in California and other states are making sure that we all understand the grave dangers created by inadequate stockpiles of essential protective supplies like N95 face masks. Even more vulnerable because invisible are the hundreds of thousands of low-wage and overworked homecare workers and nursing home staff.

The nursing home and assisted care industry which warehouses 2.5 million elderly Americans—most of them on Medicare—has long been a national scandal. According to the New York Times, an incredible 380,000 nursing home patients die every year from facilities’ neglect of basic infection control procedures. Many homes—particularly in Southern states—find it cheaper to pay fines for sanitary violations than to hire additional staff and provide them with proper training. Now, as the Seattle example warns, dozens, perhaps hundreds more nursing homes will become coronavirus hotspots and their minimum-wage employees will rationally choose to protect their own families by staying home. In such a case the system could collapse and we shouldn’t expect the National Guard to empty bedpans.

The outbreak has instantly exposed the stark class divide in healthcare: those with good health plans who can also work or teach from home are comfortably isolated provided they follow prudent safeguards. Public employees and other groups of unionized workers with decent coverage will have to make difficult choices between income and protection. Meanwhile millions of low wage service workers, farm employees, uncovered contingent workers, the unemployed and the homeless will be thrown to the wolves. Even if Washington ultimately resolves the testing fiasco and provides adequate numbers of kits, the uninsured will still have to pay doctors or hospitals for administrating the tests. Overall family medical bills will soar at the same time that millions of workers are losing their jobs and their employer-provided insurance. Could there possibly be a stronger, more urgent case in favor of Medicare for All?

But universal coverage is only a first step. It’s disappointing, to say the least, that in the primary debates neither Sanders or Warren has highlighted Big Pharma’s abdication of the research and development of new antibiotics and antivirals. Of the 18 largest pharmaceutical companies, 15 have totally abandoned the field. Heart medicines, addictive tranquilizers and treatments for male impotence are profit leaders, not the defenses against hospital infections, emergent diseases and traditional tropical killers. A universal vaccine for influenza—that is to say, a vaccine that targets the immutable parts of the virus’s surface proteins—has been a possibility for decades but never a profitable priority.

As the antibiotic revolution is rolled back, old diseases will reappear alongside novel infections and hospitals will become charnel houses. Even Trump can opportunistically rail against absurd prescription costs, but we need a bolder vision that looks to break up the drug monopolies and provide for the public production of lifeline medicines. (This used to be the case: during World War Two, the Army enlisted Jonas Salk and other researchers to develop the first flu vaccine.) As I wrote fifteen years ago in my book The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu:

The current pandemic expands the argument: capitalist globalization now appears to be biologically unsustainable in the absence of a truly international public health infrastructure. But such an infrastructure will never exist until peoples’ movements break the power of Big Pharma and for-profit healthcare.

About Mike DavisMike Davis is the author of

 Prisoners of the American Dream (1986), City of Quartz (1990), Late Victorian Holocausts (2001), Planet of Slums (2006) and Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (2007). Davis is a frequent contributor to left publications such as New Left Review (where his excellent article, "Election 2016," is free access), LINKS, and many others. He is past recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award. He lives in San Diego.

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Repórter Record Investigação entra no maior prédio ocupado de São Paulo. March 2017

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Alexandra Favela Beksin Cruz, March 27, 2020

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Inaugural meeting on Friday 27th, 2020, with contributions from Sao Paulo, Medellin, Vienna, Barcelona, Munich, London and elsewhere.

See meetings timeline

INVITE:
VagabundoMeetings #01  27th March 2020

Join us for an online meeting hosted by Batata (Morro do Macaco) with recorded testimony from Alexandra (Villa Nelson Cruz), Nelson (Maua Occupado) and Sheyla (Guaianazes) who will, along with others, give an account of the unfolding situation in Brazil. The meeting will be in two parts with the first, offering up stories, accounts and testimony from those living, working, finding ways to survive ongoing capitalist crisis, now further exacerbated by the impact of Covat-19.  The second part will offer an opportunity to respond with questions and reflections from other people, from other places.

 

This will be an experimental initial meeting with participants joining the conversation from Sao Paulo, Medellín, Vienna, Munich, Barcelona and London (tbc). All going well and if found to be useful, these online meetings can take place on a more regular weekly basis and allow many others to contribute and share their thoughts, concerns and 'activities' in these dark times.

 

Please feel free to invite and forward to others to join us this coming Friday 27th

5.00-5.20: Check-in and 20 mins open period to first gather and introduce themselves and settle in. The host or moderator (Batata/SaoPaulo and Anthony/London) will give a very brief introduction, run through the schedule and answer questions. After which, the meeting will break for 10 mins and move to another room with a new URL forwarded to all attendees.

5.20-6.00: Session 1. 40 minutes. Recorded testimony from Alexandra (Villa Nelson Cruz) and Nelson (Maua Occupado), followed by an account from Sheyla (Guaianazes) moderated by Batata (Morro do Macaco) with support from Patricia (Sao Paolo).

6.20-7.00: Session 2. 40 minutes. Q&A and reflections from other places.  

VagabundoReunião: 1. 27 de março de 2020
Junte-se a nós para uma reunião on-line organizada pela Batata (Morro do Macaco) com testemunhos gravados de Alexandra (Villa Nelson Cruz), Nelson (Mauá Ocupado) e Sheyla (Guaianazes) que, juntamente com outras pessoas, darão conta da situação em andamento. Brasil. A reunião será dividida em duas partes, com a primeira, oferecendo histórias, relatos e testemunhos de quem vive, trabalha e encontra maneiras de sobreviver à crise capitalista em curso, agora ainda mais exacerbada pelo impacto da Covat-19. A segunda parte oferecerá uma oportunidade de responder com perguntas e reflexões de outras pessoas, de outros lugares.

Será uma reunião inicial experimental com os participantes que se juntarão à conversa de São Paulo, Medellín, Viena, Munique, Barcelona e Londres (a confirmar). Tudo indo bem e se for útil, essas reuniões on-line podem ser realizadas semanalmente mais regularmente e permitem que muitas outras contribuam e compartilhem seus pensamentos, análises e ações nesses tempos sombrios.

Sinta-se à vontade para convidar e encaminhar outras pessoas para participar da próxima sexta-feira 27

Agenda de reuniões

5.00-5.20: Check-in e 20 minutos de período aberto para se reunir e se apresentar e depois se estabelecer. O anfitrião ou o moderador (Batata / São Paulo e Anthony / Londres) fará uma breve introdução, percorrerá o cronograma e responderá a perguntas . Depois disso, a reunião será interrompida por 10 minutos e será movida para outra sala com um novo URL encaminhado a todos os participantes.
5.20-6.00: Sessão 1. 40 minutos. Depoimento gravado de Alexandra (Villa Nelson Cruz) e Nelson (Mauá Ocupado), seguido de um relato de Sheyla (Guaianazes) moderado por Batata (Morro dos Macaco) com apoio de Patricia (Cidade de São Paulo).
6.00-6.20: Intervalo. 20 minutos
6.20-7.00: Sessão 2. 40 minutos. Perguntas e respostas e reflexões de outros lugares.

Observação: para esta reunião, haverá um intérprete de português / inglês para tradução dupla. Dadas as restrições de tempo, qualquer outra tradução (por exemplo, para espanhol ou outros idiomas) terá que ocorrer em um canal paralelo do WhatsApp.

Um muito obrigado a Batata pelo excelente cartaz / convite acima.

Reunión de Vagabundo: 1. 27 de marzo de 2020
Únase a nosotros para una reunión en línea organizada por Batata (Morro do Macaco) con el testimonio grabado de Alexandra (Villa Nelson Cruz), Nelson (Maua Occupado) y Sheyla (Guaianazes) quienes, junto con otros, darán cuenta de la situación que se desarrolla en Brasil. La reunión se dividirá en dos partes con la primera, ofreciendo historias, relatos y testimonios de aquellos que viven, trabajan y encuentran formas de sobrevivir a la crisis capitalista en curso, ahora exacerbada por el impacto de Covat-19. La segunda parte ofrecerá la oportunidad de responder con preguntas y reflexiones de otras personas, de otros lugares.

Esta será una reunión inicial experimental con participantes que se unirán a la conversación desde Sao Paulo, Medellín, Viena, Munich, Barcelona y Londres (por confirmar). Todo va bien y, si se encuentra que es útil, estas reuniones en línea pueden tener lugar de manera semanal y permitir que muchos otros contribuyan y compartan sus pensamientos, análisis y acciones en estos tiempos oscuros.

Por favor, siéntase libre de invitar y enviar a otros para unirse este próximo viernes 27

Calendario de reuniones

5.00-5.20: Check-in y 20 minutos de período abierto para reunirse primero y presentarse, luego acomodarse. El anfitrión o moderador (Batata / Sao Paulo y Anthony / London) dará una breve introducción, revisará el horario y responderá preguntas . Después de lo cual, la reunión se interrumpirá durante 10 minutos y se trasladará a otra sala con una nueva URL enviada a todos los asistentes.
5.20-6.00: Sesión 1. 40 minutos. Testimonio grabado de Alexandra (Villa Nelson Cruz) y Nelson (Maua Occupado), seguido de un relato de Sheyla (Guaianazes) moderado por Batata (Morro dos Macaco) con el apoyo de Patricia (Ciudad de Sao Paulo).
6.00-6.20: descanso. 20 minutos
6.20-7.00: Sesión 2. 40 minutos. Preguntas y respuestas y reflexiones de otros lugares.

Nota: para esta reunión habrá un intérprete portugués / inglés para traducción dual. Dadas las limitaciones de tiempo, cualquier otra traducción (por ejemplo, al español u otros idiomas) tendrá que realizarse en un canal paralelo de WhatsApp.

Un gran agradecimiento a Batata por el gran póster / invitación anterior.

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Vagabundo 1. Video Recording from Meeting. Part 1. March 27, 2010

Vagabundo 1. Meeting Wiki. March 27, 2010


meeting agenda for the fist session at 17.40 gmt

https://zoom.us/j/389510749 
This is the URL for the next meeting Which will begin at 5.40

Meanwhile Introductions !

Patricia is interpreting to Portuguese and Jake would interpret to Spanish if needed.

James S.- community network activist
Marcos B. - journalist and photographer
John B. - Artist and activist
Ines D. - Artist
Einstein (Alberto)
Anthony D 
Olivia C.
Jake Lagnato - 
Sheyla Maria Alves de Melo - social activist

we ran out of time in that session.. and should now join the other session

Revised meeting time start after connection difficulties

06:00 pm
https://zoom.us/j/460923632 

First we will hear a video testimony from Nelson then hear Sheyla in Brazil. 

overall image is one of abandonment of people by the state. Batata adds more detail. universal payment has begun at 600R after years of campaigning.. now for 3 months but who knows

This payment offers thread of hope for the population but has yet to be ratified in parliament. 

Anthony is so pleased with the service he brought the company!

Einstein will invite two people for next Friday meeting but the proposal is to be more sequenced, scheduled, timely.

important to respond to Nelsons contribution.

John mentions that for so many the concept of self isolation just isn't an option for many many peoples. 

legal sanction of Evengeical church ministries forging into the rainforests are another eugenic tactic of the Bolsonaro government.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/democraciaabierta/bolsonaro-and-brazilian-far-right/

meeting will conclude at 19.30
and bang it did before we had time to say goodbye, goodbye till next time!

Hello James

https://zoom.us/j/291415079 - current meeting

it's hard to get people to collaborate on texts in real time.. but once started realise how useful it is.. building consensus, setting agenda, meeting minutes all run more smoothly and uniformly.

hey!

Hi JAMES, Batata here!

Questions about food provision in Sao Paulo... small shops closures having a significant impact on the poor. 

Evangelical church as a racket. 

J. respons. The heoreos who went out to the frontier. Silvia's attack on Evangelicals

Ok so if you want to set up a quick chat with video try http://chatb.org though it uses more connection the more people get connected as you have to send your video to each one. but no login and less eavesdropping opportunities.

If you have files to share try http://hostb.org