[News] CoronaShock: A Virus and the World

[Anti-Imperialist News]

 https://www.thetricontinental.org/dossier-28-coronavirus/ CoronaShock: A
Virus and the World
May 5, 2020

------------------------------
CoronaShock: A Virus and the World
<https://www.thetricontinental.org/dossier-28-coronavirus/>

Español <https://www.thetricontinental.org/es/dossier-28-coronavirus/>
Português <https://www.thetricontinental.org/pt-pt/dossie-28-coronavirus/>
*Dossier n°28*

For this dossier, *CoronaShock: The Virus and the World*, we invited
artists and militants from around the world to contribute visual
reflections made in quarantine to the *CoronaShock Sketchbook*. Just as we
are living the dehumanisation of neoliberalism – characterised by the
flexible and fragmented world of work that makes working while quarantined
possible – our streets and public spaces have also become dehumanised,
largely emptied of their human and economic life. From the exodus of
migrants in Delhi to the plight of precarious women workers in Barcelona
and Kuala Lumpur, the question emerges: what are essential services and who
are the workers who maintain them? From Buenos Aires’s vacated Plaza de
Mayo to the township evictions in South Africa, from the banners hung from
New York City’s fire escapes to the shouts of São Paulo’s *panelaços*
(pot-banging protests), we wonder: what could the shape of mass resistance
could look like under social distancing? The sketches of Cuban medical
brigades and the civic collectivity in China remind us of the vital
importance of human and state-led solidarity in this conjuncture. This
sketchbook provides a snapshot and asks us how we might fill – and humanise
– these emptied and haunted public streets and spaces again; it allows us
to imagine what future is possible for life after coronavirus.

[image: Vikas Thakur_Migrant Labour]

*‘Home’, a distant dream for India’s migrant labourers.*
Delhi, India
Vikas Thakur / Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
<https://www.instagram.com/thetricontinental/>
In India, migrant labourers traveled across the country en masse after the
government declared a lockdown. These are workers who, before the pandemic,
already had to struggle daily for even an ounce of food – then COVID-19 hit.
------------------------------

In December 2019, doctors in Wuhan (China) began to see patients with a
kind of viral pneumonia. By the end of the month, an investigation began
and China’s health authorities sent
<https://peoplesdispatch.org/2020/03/31/growing-xenophobia-against-china-in-the-midst-of-corona-shock/>
out a public warning and notified the World Health Organisation (WHO). The
Chinese authorities isolated a new type of coronavirus on January 7, and
then on January 12 they shared the genetic sequence of the novel
coronavirus for use in developing diagnostic kits. The government, the
Communist Party, and the Chinese public began a major effort to contain its
spread. This mysterious pathogen was a form of coronavirus, which received
the official name of SARS-CoV-2
<https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/technical-guidance/naming-the-coronavirus-disease-(covid-2019)-and-the-virus-that-causes-it>;
unlike other respiratory viruses, this one is able to live both in the nose
and throat – from where it is highly contagious – and in the lungs – where
it is deadly for its host, and for whom it often does not present symptoms
immediately. It has spread rapidly around the world, striking almost every
country, causing lockdowns and quarantines, and therefore having an immense
– and continued – impact on social and economic life. Even as the virus
seems to have been contained in many parts of the world, the return of this
strain and of the other thousands of strains of the coronavirus should be
anticipated. This global pandemic, like the outbreak of cholera in 1832 and
the flu in 1918, will return in cycles.

Country after country has gone into various forms and lengths of lockdowns
as the virus has infected more and more people and killed thousands. As a
result of the quarantines and isolation orders, economic activity has
shuddered to a near halt. The International Labour Organisation released a
report which suggested
<https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/coronavirus/impacts-and-responses/WCMS_739047/lang--en/index.htm>
that 25 million jobs will be lost due to the CoronaShock, and that workers
will lose about $3.4 trillion in income by the end of the year. It could
get worse, as businesses and corporations are taking advantage of
CoronaShock to restructure their operations to become more ‘efficient’ with
less employees. A consequence of long-term unemployment and
underemployment, as well as of uncertainty in the oil market, is that the
global growth rate will likely splutter down to around 1%, as the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) suggests; even this is predicated upon
Chinese growth which – though dented – is expected to increase as the
SARS-CoV-2 seems to have been managed within the country’s borders. Stock
markets from Hang Seng to Wall Street saw significant losses, their already
inflated value collapsing.

Vast amounts of emergency funding were brought together by governments and
by international bodies. Money was accumulated by the United Nation’s
Central Emergency Response Fund ($15 million), the World Bank ($12
billion), and the International Monetary Fund ($1 trillion), and central
banks opened new facilities to lend money to financial institutions and to
companies. The United States Congress passed a bill for an astronomical
$2.2 trillion in emergency funds, vast amounts of it to bolster
corporations. It became very clear that the problem was not illiquidity in
financial markets, which was one of the causes of the 2008-09 financial
crisis, but a concatenation of events: the lack of certainty about the
coronavirus, the rapid decline in oil prices, and the long-term problems of
unemployment and underemployment. The money raised is supposed to deal with
the CoronaShock, but how it will be spent is precisely the issue at hand.
There is a habit in a capitalist society to throw money at banks and at
large corporations. Experience shows us, however, that these entities
seldom use this money to meet key goals of our predicament: to provide
relief for the general public – including the provision of income and jobs
– and to provide a long-term solution to social inequality. That is why
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and the International
Assembly of the Peoples has produced a document, whose 16-points we
reproduce in part 2 of this dossier, that responds to the CoronaShock from
the standpoint of the world’s people.

*CoronaShock: The Virus and the World* will come in three parts. Part 1 is
on the structural features that resulted in our present crisis. Part 2 is
on the 16-point programme from the International Assembly of the Peoples
and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. One of the points in the
programme is for a Universal Basic Income. This is a complex idea that
requires discussion. In Part 3 of our dossier, we provide a brief
introduction to the idea of the Universal Basic Income (UBI) and offer some
critiques of the concept and some ways to sharpen the way we think about it.

[image: Kalia venereo_nunca mas]

*Nunca más* | Never Again
Havana, Cuba
Kalia Venereo / Dominio Cuba <https://www.instagram.com/dominiocuba/>
‘Neoliberal policies that deprive people of the right to health
#NeverAgain’. This piece represents the Cuban doctors who set out to
overcome the pandemic through solidarity. It was created for the
organisation Dominio Cuba in support of the convocation of French
organisations and celebrities for a global social media campaign to promote
a future without neoliberal policies, which deprive people of the right to
health.
------------------------------
*Part 1. **The Austerity Virus*

The global pandemic shows us the clear destructive tendencies of capitalism
in its neoliberal phase. This conjuncture, with the slowdown of economic
activity and the turbulence in the stock markets, has turned neoliberal
capitalist leaders and multilateral institutions into Keynesians – be they
Angela Merkel (Germany) and Emmanuel Macron (France) or the World Bank and
the IMF. Each of them opened windows at their central banks and in their
finance ministries to pour money into the private sector (and to expand
state programmes). On the other hand, it has made radical right-wing
leaders – such as Donald Trump (USA), Narendra Modi (India), Jair Bolsonaro
(Brazil), Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (Turkey), and Viktor Orbán (Hungary) –
tighten their grip on their already obscene programmes, including
xenophobia. For them, it has been far easier to blame China for the virus
than to take responsibility for their own failures to tackle the pandemic,
even after they received ample warning. These leaders of the North Atlantic
states and the institutions they control created the conditions for this
crisis, which has led to an unsustainable social situation for the people
of the world – particularly in the Global South. They treated the crisis as
though it had emerged merely from a confluence of circumstances that could
be entirely explained by the pandemic; headlines announced that the ‘crisis
is provoked by the coronavirus’. This virus – like other such viruses –
raises the fundamental question of human encroachment into forests and the
balance between human civilisation (agriculture and cities) and the wilds.
As Miguel Tinker Salas and Víctor Silverman write in *La Jornada*
<https://www.jornada.com.mx/2020/04/05/opinion/012a1pol>, the virus is the
product of nature, while the crisis is the product of neoliberalism.

However, since the 1970s (and most intensely since the fall of the Berlin
Wall in 1991), the neoliberal globalisation project has shown increasingly
striking levels of dehumanisation – including cuts in public institutions
and austerity towards social policies. This dehumanisation convulsed in a
cycle of crises, often motivated by the turbulence of precarious work, the
unsustainable credit given to people with suppressed incomes in order to
manufacture demand, and the further shift of capital from industry to
finance. The crises that emerged did not come from an upsurge of popular
struggles that challenged capitalism; they came, instead, from the
dehumanised logic of capital in its neoliberal phase. Crises were resolved
through remedies that were often worse than the disease.

The emergence of the novel coronavirus and the crisis that it has caused
reveal the decay of capitalist civilisation. Perhaps the world will not be
the same after the pandemic has been controlled. The eroded neoliberal
state can either be supplanted by a state structure that favours the
neo-fascist project, or by one that builds public institutions and public
action that put the needs of the people over profit. This is a formidable
choice. There is anxiety in sections of the neoliberal bloc that whatever
policies of a social nature are put in place on an emergency basis during
the CoronaShock might become hard to undo; it will take more than inertia
to ensure that any gains made in this period remain in place when the
immediate crisis is over.

[image: Panelaço]

*Fora Bolsonaro!* | Get out, Bolsonaro!
São Paulo, Brazil
Ingrid Neves <https://www.instagram.com/digneves/> / Tricontinental:
Institute for Social Research <https://www.instagram.com/thetricontinental/>
‘Get out Bolsonaro’, ‘get out Fascist’, and ‘not him’ are among the chants
that fill the air during panelaços (protests characterised by the banging
of pots and pans) in Brazil under quarantine. Isolation has not stopped
voices, pots, and noisemakers from uniting against the government of
President Jair Bolsonaro in large urban centres.

The crisis engendered by the global pandemic far exceeds the issue of
health. Beyond the chaos and uncertainty of the present, the question is
posed about whether a new social model and political order are possible in
the near future. In a discussion between the philosophers Slavoj Žižek and
Byung-Chul Han, they posed an idea of the future: will what emerges
resemble some kind of ‘re-founded communism’, or will it develop into a
kind of police state propped up by big data?

There is no *a priori* answer to these questions. The current crisis is
part of a series of accumulated trends that have accelerated over the
previous decades and that have exploded as a result of the global pandemic.
Four structural characteristics of the crisis need to be elaborated:
deepened financialization, the decline of US hegemony, the displacement of
labour by technology and increases in productivity, and the crisis of the
neoliberal state.
*A Wave of Financialization*

What was presented as a way out of the 2008 credit crisis was not a true
exit. The bailout policy for investment banks and large non-financial
companies adopted by the countries of the Eurozone, as well as by the
United States and the United Kingdom, generated a process of global
hyper-liquidity (that is, an over-abundance of dollars). Whenever capital
faces weak profitability, it always prefers speculative fictitious activity
– rushing, for instance, to the stock markets; in the current period, the
quantitative extent of the financial sector relative to the real economy is
stunning, and this is what makes it unique.

There are at several elements that are key to the process of
financialization. The process refers to the ballooning of the financial
sector that has been taking place since the 1980s, with larger volumes of
surplus value created by the productive sector being absorbed into the
financial firms. Immense debt of various kinds is accumulated by households
– notably working-class households – to finance everyday life; this debt is
packaged into securities and bounces around in the giant casino of the
financial world. What we observe is a qualitative shift in economic
activity, so that new crises develop out of the instability of finance in
the realm of circulation alongside the old crises of profitability from
activities of production.

This great abundance of money did not trigger a global process of
productive investments. On the contrary, most of the world’s money once
more ended up adding to sovereign debt and financial assets (including
through re-energized stock buys), causing the process of financialization
to accelerate. New asset bubbles were inflated through such instruments as
government bonds, and finance flew to capitalise companies in the new
technology sectors.

Technology firms have begun to dominate the stock markets, and they have
absorbed a considerable part of the world’s liquidity; this absorption was
generally characterised by the centralisation of capital, especially in US
firms (Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Facebook were the firms that
had the highest valuations). These US technology firms have been
fundamentally challenged by the growth of Chinese technology firms – such
as Huawei. Huawei’s advances in such areas as 5G threaten the US firms’
domination over intellectual property rights claims, which give them the
advantage of monopoly rent over these property rights. The trade war
prosecuted by the United States against China can be understood directly by
the threat that Chinese technology firms pose to powerful US technology
firms.

Both the Global North and the Global South have experienced a rise of
financialization. While finance in the North channelled capital into new
hyper-profitable sectors (such as platform capitalism and technology), in
the South finance took on the dynamic of indebtedness, followed by capital
flight. In 2015, the US Federal Reserve adopted the policy of strengthening
the US dollar by increasing the federal funds rate (the overnight rate that
depository institutions charge each other for loans), which drew in money
from the rest of the world to bolster the US economy. As a result of such
policies, the United States recovered its leading role as the destination
of capital after more than a decade of the ‘emerging markets’ drawing in
global capital. In 2018, the three countries with the highest net capital
inflow were the United States ($258 billion), China ($203 billion), and
Germany ($105 billion). The United States attracted a large part of the
world’s liquidity, largely due to the US Federal Reserve policy of higher
interest rates; this drew capital from the Global South to the Global North.

The deepening power of finance over society and the economy has led to
three outcomes: the political dependence of economically indebted Southern
countries, the stagnation of the productive sectors of the economy in the
Global North, and the chronic instability of the world system, which puts
the interest of capital before the needs of people. The appearance of the
coronavirus has accelerated this process. China has become central to
global manufacturing; the halt of production in China, and the fall of its
industrial production by 15% (as compared to performance in the previous
year), make it hard to understand how liquidity to the big banks in Global
North is expected to revive not only the global supply chain, but also
aggregate global demand.
*The Acceleration of the Decline of the United States *

Giovanni Arrighi, in *Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First
Century* (2007), considers the increased and accelerated financialization
process to be an indicator of the crisis of US hegemony. The United States
has driven a hybrid war against several non-aligned states (Iran and
Venezuela) in order to gain dominance over China in Eurasia, and it has
used its financial power for this process, as well as to re-establish its
position of eminence over its allies. But this drive marks the weakness of
the unilateralism of Washington.

The health and humanitarian crisis aggravated by this global pandemic has
strengthened the role of China, in particular, as a state capable of
controlling the virus within its borders, and then of using its expertise
and resources to help people suffering beyond its borders. On the other
hand, Trump’s callous attitude towards even his own people – putting ‘care’
for the economy ahead of the humanitarian disaster – made the decline of US
leadership evident as the US failed to lead any kind of response – even
through the typically pliant G20. Whatever the lack of clarity about what
will come in the future – whether we have entered an Asian Century or a
bipolar era or a multipolar period – it is clear that that Western liberal
civilisation has not even been capable of responding to the needs of the
people in its own part of the world.
*Digitalization Against Labour*

The concentration of capital in the technology sector should not go
unnoticed. It raises at least two important debates: first, that it
generates a speculative asset bubble focused on high-tech companies, and
second, that it both expands the influence of global capitalism throughout
the world and allows for the control of data that is in turn used to manage
people. The exponential growth of ‘platform capitalism’ – or economic
activity that is rooted in Internet-based platforms – and of the collection
and analysis of big data produces new logics of consumerism; this is a key
part of what is known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This platform
capitalism shapes and channels consumer needs, produces new forms of
subjectivity, and even intervenes in creating political identities. The
overall creation of individualisation through the atomisation of social
activity creates new ways of being in the world.

The global pandemic, and the lockdown that it has occasioned in large parts
of the world, have been propitious for the development of platform
capitalism. Remote work using the Internet provides a way to continue
working during the quarantine. Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Zoom have made
it possible to work from home, and they have suggested that this is
beneficial for the world’s workers. For example, they suggest that we are
able to use our time more freely, and that we are – through flexible
contracts – able to change jobs with greater frequency. Of course, the idea
of life-long employment for workers under capitalism is now anachronistic,
and flexible work has become the paradigm of this period of neoliberalism.
Among jobs that are possible to carry out remotely, this model also ignores
the increased burden of uncompensated labour – such as caring for children
who are out of school due to the crisis and caring for family members who
are at increasing risk of falling ill, all while working remotely.
Furthermore, the central role played by platform capitalism in the midst of
this lockdown period advances the agenda of neoliberalism – notably the
segmentation of the work force and the fragmentation of workers – further
subordinating the workforce to the unfettered interests of capital.

[image: Essential Workers_NY_BelenMarco]

*Who sustains life?*
New York City, United States
Belén Marco Crespo <https://www.instagram.com/belensianetha/> / The
People’s Forum <https://www.instagram.com/peoplesforumnyc/>
The working class has been facing the systemic crisis of capitalism long
before the outbreak of Covid-19 and it is the working class, still, who
continues to sustain life. Immigrants, informal and low-wage workers, and
women in New York bear the burdens of care work in a time when all of
humanity needs to prioritize care over profit.
*The Crisis of the Neoliberal State*

The neoliberal state system has shown that it is incapable of solving the
problems that its model creates. In 2008, for instance, the neoliberal
state system, led by the United States, hastened to pump enormous amounts
of capital into the financial system, and into particular large
corporations (such as General Motors). This intervention was known as
‘financial Keynesianism’, or state intervention to sustain the architecture
designed by financial firms to promote and benefit the neoliberal project.
The underlying issues – namely the lack of income for billions of people
who live on expensive and unsustainable credit – were not addressed.

In many countries, discredited neoliberal and ‘third way’ (or centrist)
politicians gave way to projects of the far right and neo-fascists. Álvaro
García Linera, the former Vice President of Bolivia, calls this the stage
of capitalism *zombie neoliberalism* – a neoliberal project that favours
hatred and resentment. In the context of this zombie neoliberalism, the
bourgeois state enters into crisis, since it cannot acknowledge – let alone
address – the democratic demands of the people; a ‘state of exception’
prevails, with neo-fascist authoritarianism eclipsing the already frazzled
liberal democratic institutions. Political theorist William Davies uses the
term *punitive neoliberalism* to describe a neoliberalism that responds to
the crisis by deepening its policies of austerity and fiscal rigour and
imposing greater indebtedness, especially in the Global South. In Davies’
words, this leads to ‘a melancholic condition in which governments and
societies unleash hatred and violence upon members of their own
populations’.
------------------------------
*Part 2. **In Light of the Global Pandemic, Focus Attention on the Needs of
the People*

Those with power in the system are the first to design mechanisms to
protect themselves during a crisis. Whenever there is a financial crisis,
for instance, the actual cause of the meltdown is not addressed; what is
hastily put on the table is an enormous financial bailout for those who
provoked the crisis in the first place. As the global pandemic has
unfolded, governments have once more set aside great sums of money for the
interests of capital to protect themselves, as central banks – following
the lead of the US Federal Reserve – cut interest rates to deliver
liquidity to the stock markets so that the wealthy can ensure the health of
their investments, rather than ensuring the health of the people. Resources
of the public, which in this period are rarely turned over for the public
good, are rapidly made available to save the private sector.

States with a socialist orientation (from national governments as in China
to state governments as in Kerala) have mobilised whatever resources they
have available – regardless of economic losses – to contain the pandemic.
The WHO called
<https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-china-joint-mission-on-covid-19-final-report.pdf>
China’s efforts ‘the most ambitious, agile, and aggressive disease
containment effort in history’. Meanwhile, the bourgeois order has utterly
failed to use their considerable resources and has failed to prepare a
rational plan for these resources; the death rates from Italy to the United
States of America have been catastrophic, a political crime against
humanity.

Over the course of the past thirty years since the fall of the USSR and the
weakened condition of the global left, forces of the left have been placed
on the back foot. Governments eager to please the interests of the
billionaire class have cut taxes and enforced austerity, privatised
precious public assets, and deregulated industry and commerce. In the name
of efficiency, the bourgeois state has intensified the class struggle,
attacking labour unions and left organisations, attempting to fragment the
reservoirs of the left. The growth of non-governmental organisations
(NGOs), often backed by the foundations of the plutocracy, undermined the
political left as it turned the attention of people away from the totality
of their problems to single-issue campaigns; someone was interested in
water delivery, someone else in education, but no entity was drawing the
people into a frontal assault on the system as a whole – namely against
capitalism.

A consequence of the weakening of the left in a period of full-front class
struggle and the development of a media onslaught that sold commodities as
dreams is that the left has been forced to engage considerable energy on
short-term struggles. Relief against the regime of austerity came alongside
building struggles against the increased brutality of capitalist production
processes and state violence. Without the left forces playing a role
alongside popular sentiment against the cuts and the violence, the
brutalisation of the labour process, and the impoverishment of the workers,
the impact of neoliberalism and globalisation on the dispossessed and
working class would have been far worse. A weakened left, driven by reality
to focus on the short-term, has nonetheless produced many programmes for a
socialistic approach towards several crises; these programmes have
important elements that require study. Where the left has been in
government, it has experimented with new approaches to the endemic crisis
of capitalism and has sought to mobilise its resources for the social good
and to develop public action to transform society and to advance the class
struggle.

As the global pandemic escalated beyond China’s borders, it became clear
that the societies that had undermined their public institutions would
suffer immeasurably from the virus. The Chinese government has used its
considerable resources to test its population, to establish who the
infected patients had contacted, to treat and monitor patients, to tend to
the needs of the shut-down cities, and to ensure that society did not
suffer unnecessarily from disruptions. From the United States to India to
Brazil, however, the evisceration of public institutions – particularly
public health institutions – has left society vulnerable. The privatisation
of medical colleges has led graduates to the higher paying end of medicine
as a way to pay off their debts, while the privatisation of hospitals has
driven cuts to the surplus or surge capacity; in these hospitals, every bed
and machine is treated as real estate from which to maximise rent
collection. Just-in-time medicine for private gain became the formula.

[image: Tings Chak_East is Red]

*THE EAST IS RED.*
Shanghai, China
Tings Chak <https://www.instagram.com/thingswithouttheh/> / Tricontinental:
Institute for Social Research <https://www.instagram.com/thetricontinental/>
On 4 April at 10am, China held three minutes of silence to commemorate
those who fought and died in the international battle against COVID-19 – it
was the Qingming, the festival for ancestors. The country stopped and the
sounds of sirens, car and ship horns, and the belltower playing ‘The East
is Red’ filled the air.

The failure of the austerity health care system is now clearly visible. So
too is the utter failure to establish institutions to take care of the
vulnerable in times of an emergency, and the universal failure to nurture a
culture of public action that would propel worker organisations and social
groups to help sustain communities in the midst of the crisis. This failure
of the state and of society in countries that have watched neoliberalism
and austerity cannibalise public resources could not be justified by the
wrath of the virus itself; why was it that countries with more robust
states and with a tradition of public action have been able to more
effectively curtail the virus?

One of the key achievements of the very rich has been to delegitimise the
idea of state institutions. In the West, the typical attitude has been to
attack the government as an enemy of progress; to shrink government
institutions – except the military – has been the goal. Any country with a
robust government and state structure has been characterised as
‘authoritarian’. But this crisis has shaken that view. Countries with
intact state institutions that have been able to handle the pandemic – such
as China – cannot be easily dismissed as authoritarian; a general
understanding has come that these governments and their state institutions
are instead efficient. It is impossible to make the case any longer that
this sclerotic and hollowed-out bourgeois state form is more efficient than
a system of state institutions that are made efficient by the process of
trial and error.

[image: Mobile]

*Quien sostiene la vida* | Those who sustain life.
Madrid, Spain
Henar Diez Villahoz
The stock exchange is empty, the stock market has plummeted. Solidarity
networks are being organized in neighborhoods as well as a call to defend
public health, which has been collapsed by budget cuts. At the forefront of
this struggle are precarised workers, who continue to go to work in sectors
such as distribution, food provision, and cleaning in order to sustain life.

What we have learned not only from China, but also from Cuba, Venezuela,
and the Indian state of Kerala, is that if a society is organised by
people’s organisations (trade unions, women’s organisations, student
unions, youth organisations, cooperatives), then they have the capacity for
public action. An organised society is one that builds the ability of
people to learn how to act collectively in normal times – even more so in a
crisis. The socialist project is only partly developed through the
institutions of the state; the other part – the most vital part – is for
society to be organised and energised and to be prepared for the everyday
and extraordinary work of social construction.

As the global pandemic grew in scope, Tricontinental: Institute for Social
Research and the International Peoples’ Assembly (IPA), a platform of over
two hundred organisations from almost a hundred countries, opened a
discussion on the crisis and on the most dire and immediate needs for the
global working class. The document that we produced includes a
sixteen-point programme based on the experience of struggle and governance
that has emerged from these movements, unions, and political parties. More
than a debate about each separate policy and point, the programme initiates
a debate about the very nature of how to understand the state and its
institutions.

   1. Immediate suspension of all work, except essential medical and
   logistical personnel and those required to produce and distribute food and
   necessities, without any loss of wages. The state must assume the cost of
   the wages for the period of the quarantine.
   2. Health, food supply, and public safety must be maintained in an
   organised manner. Emergency grain stocks must be immediately released for
   distribution amongst the poor.
   3. Schools must all be suspended.
   4. Immediate socialization of hospitals and medical centres so that they
   do not worry about the profit motive as the crisis unfolds. These medical
   centres must be under the control of the government’s health campaign.
   5. Immediate nationalization of pharmaceutical companies, and immediate
   international cooperation amongst them to find a vaccine and easier testing
   devices. Abolishment of intellectual property in the medical field.
   6. Immediate testing of all people. Immediate mobilization of tests and
   support for medical personnel who are at the frontlines of this pandemic.
   7. Immediate speed-up of production for materials necessary to deal with
   the crisis (testing kits, masks, respirators).
   8. Immediate closure of global financial markets.
   9. Immediate gathering of the finances to prevent the bankruptcy of
   governments.
   10. Immediate cancellation of all non-corporate debt.
   11. Immediate end to all rent and mortgage payments, as well as an end
   to evictions; this includes the immediate provision of adequate housing as
   a basic human right. Decent housing must be a right for all citizens
   guaranteed by the state.
   12. Immediate absorption of all utility payments by the state – water,
   electricity, and internet provided as part of a human right; where these
   utilities are not universally accessible, we call for them to be provided
   with immediate effect.
   13. Immediate end to the unilateral, criminal sanctions regimes and
   economic blockades that impact countries such as Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela
   and prevent them from importing necessary medical supplies.
   14. Urgent support for the peasantry to increase the production of
   healthy food and supply it to the government for direct distribution.
   15. Suspend the dollar as an international currency and request that the
   United Nations urgently call a new international conference to propose a
   common international currency.
   16. Ensure a universal minimum income in every country. This makes it
   possible to guarantee support from the state for millions of families who
   are out of work, working in extremely precarious conditions or
   self-employed. The current capitalist system excludes millions of people
   from formal jobs. The State should provide employment and a dignified life
   for the population. The cost of the Universal Basic Income can be covered
   by defence budgets, in particular the expense of arms and ammunition.

These sixteen points are a charter for discussion and debate to begin to
focus attention towards struggles and policies for a post-capitalist future.

[image: Dani_Plaza de mayo_ver1]

*Madres de la Plaza, el pueblo aún las abraza* | Mothers of the Plaza de
Mayo, the people still embrace you.
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Daniela Ruggeri <https://www.instagram.com/elmargendelahoja/> / Tricontinental:
Institute for Social Research <https://www.instagram.com/thetricontinental/>
The Plaza de Mayo is empty on this 24 March, the Day of Remembrance for
Truth and Justice. For the first time in the history of this march, we
could not take to the streets in support of our comrades who were
disappeared during the dictatorship that began in 1976. On social media and
on our balconies, we hung white handkerchiefs for our Mothers of the Plaza
de Mayo.
------------------------------
*Part 3. **Universal Basic Income*

Over the course of the past half century, it has become clear that the
entire system of employment has broken down. In a modern capitalist
society, some percentage of unemployment is seen as acceptable (it was even
codified into theory as the ‘natural rate of unemployment’); the state
provides various forms of social assistance to compensate for the lack of
wages. Now, as a consequence of the globalisation of labour and the
technology-induced increase in productivity, billions of workers are either
unemployed, underemployed, or in situations of great precariousness (such
as short-term contract workers and day labourers). There are at least 157
million migrant workers out of 258 million international migrants –
according to the International Labour Organisation – who are often excluded
from social security measures; their perilous state is rarely brought up
for discussion. Social inequality has dramatically increased, and oceans of
poverty lap at the doors of the majority of the world’s population.

A percentage of workers – the reserve army of labour – is unemployed even
in the most buoyant phase of capitalism; but, increasingly, as capitalism
faces a long-term crisis of profitability, the majority of workers
experience extreme precariousness. Within the logic of capitalism, these
workers are either being super-exploited, or they have become a surplus
population. Their survival is at the level of desperation.

It is to tackle these problems of poverty and inequality within the social
relations of capitalism that the idea of a ‘Universal Basic Income’
emerged. If capitalists will not use their financial resources to invest in
jobs, then this surplus population will have to earn its living from
elsewhere, such as from the state. This state-sponsored payment is known as
Universal Basic Income (UBI). It is in the 16th point of the declaration
above.

We should be clear about the limitations of the UBI. The UBI would free the
enormous surplus population from unemployment and destitution, but it would
not emancipate people from either the money form or from the power of the
capitalist state. Cash disbursement means that cash would still be needed
to buy essential goods and services, which could otherwise be provided on a
need basis without the exchange of money (public education, as an example,
or public food distribution systems). Part of the attraction of a UBI for
the neoliberal bloc is that they would put cash in the hands of the surplus
population, who would then be able to buy goods and services that they
would otherwise not purchase. The social relations of capitalism are not
threatened by the UBI, which is merely a social welfare scheme within the
norms of the capitalist system. In the context of widespread hunger and
desperation, such a scheme should not be scoffed at, even if it has immense
limitations in scope and implementation.

Over the course of the past several decades, Marxist feminists have
developed powerful theories of social reproduction – namely, the production
and reproduction of labour power. Social reproduction, or the sector of
care that renews human life, is an essential part of social – and economic
– existence. Despite this, it is typically neglected in discussions on
income support and wages.

Analyses of social reproduction seek to explain the linkages between
capitalism’s circuits of accumulation and patriarchal frameworks for the
renewal and reproduction of human labour power. Compensation for those who
do the work of social reproduction – mainly women – is seldom available,
unless the work is itself commodified (such as through maid services, food
production, and delivery services). The reproduction of the working class
is a vital condition for capitalist production, but the reproducers of the
working class are themselves not compensated in a commodified (monetary)
form. The debate about the UBI provoked a discussion about ‘wages for
housework’ and about a UBI that would effectively substitute for wages. The
argument for UBI or an equivalent form of compensation to cover the work of
social reproduction, and to cover the livelihood of those who are disabled
and unwell, is a strong and powerful one. However, as pointed out by
Marxists such as Alexandra Kollontai and Angela Davis, compensation for
care work will not by itself overcome the long history of disparagement of
such work and the patriarchal ideology that upholds it; it will take a
strong anti-patriarchal struggle to break the idea of the gendered division
of labour.

The range of support for UBI is stunning, from socialists to the far right.
Each has a different vision for it, and these differences are important to
catalogue.

   1. Substitution versus supplement. The neoliberal wing (and the far
   right) would accept a UBI if it would substitute for all other social
   welfare programmes. They see the UBI as a substitute for the range of
   policies such as public health, public education, public transportation,
   and public food distribution. By giving cash rather than services, they
   would like to commodify these parts of social life, and then certainly
   privatise them. There is money to be made by selling goods and services to
   the surplus populations. This is also a mechanism to dismantle the social
   security net and privatise it. The socialist argument is that the UBI is
   not a substitute for these schemes, but a supplement to them. These social
   wages – such as public education and public food distribution – must be
   enhanced and properly managed, with the UBI as merely an addition to them
   for other uses, such as leisure.
   2. Means-testing versus universal disbursement. The neoliberal wing
   accepts UBI, but then undermines the spirit of the proposal. It makes the
   case that the UBI should not be universal; everyone, they say, should not
   be paid a basic income. Instead, there should be a means test to ensure
   that only the neediest get access to this payment. A means test defeats the
   entire purpose of a *universal* income, which attempts to promote social
   unity rather than once more fragment the population into the ‘deserving
   poor’ and the ‘undeserving poor’. Any means test defeats the purpose of the
   idea.

There is something particularly odd about providing income support to all
people. Why would income support be given to the very rich? There are
several arguments for a universal outlay of either income or goods:

   1. To avoid the moral problem of having to decide who is the ‘deserving
   poor’ or the ‘needy’. This sets up divides in society and further
   stigmatises those who do receive targeted welfare payments.
   2. To avoid the massive implementation problems created by having this
   moral judgement rest on institutional systems that are not always able to
   make these decisions democratically and are not always able to be efficient
   in the transfer of these funds or these goods, depending on whether the
   ‘income’ comes in cash or in kind.
   3. Would a cash payment to the rich undermine the goals of
   redistribution of wealth? Not at all, because the rich would pay a wealth
   tax to finance such a scheme and their tax burden would far outstrip the
   income support that they would receive.

If the UBI scheme is not a substitute for the social wage, but a supplement
to it, and if the UBI scheme is truly universal, then it has the potential
for being a valuable demand within the capitalist system to alleviate the
suffering of many while continuing to work towards the abolishment of the
capitalist system. If it is a substitute for the social wage and if it is
targeted, then it is no longer a universal basic income, but a dangerous
mechanism to commodify and privatise social benefits and to exacerbate
divisions within the working class.

[image: Kate_Eviction]

*Evict (v.): To forcefully remove people from a property with the support
of the law.*
Johannesburg, South Africa
Kate Janse Van Rensburg / Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party
Despite a moratorium on evictions during South Africa’s Covid-19 national
lockdown, the state continues to displace people, deploying private
security, the military, and the police. Since the end of Apartheid in1994,
the militarised state’s response to the people’s struggle for shelter has
remained intact: apartheid continues.

One of the questions raised about the UBI is how states are expected to pay
for it, and, based on that, what the actual income payment would be per
working-age individual. The neoliberal solution is to shut down other
social programmes, incorporate that money into one corpus, and then make
cash payments from there; this is unacceptable from a socialist standpoint
because it privatises social goods that should be treated as a universal
human right. Instead, a socialist mechanism for payments would rely upon at
least four different sources:

   1. A wealth tax.
   2. The enhancement of the tax jurisdiction and dismantling of tax havens
   and tax shelters.
   3. An increase in taxes on socially undesirable sectors (armaments, for
   example).
   4. An increase in profit taxes.

To ensure that the state will be able to collect this income, which would
otherwise fly off to tax havens, it will need to initiate capital controls.
A UBI scheme that is not implanted as part of a suite of measures to
develop economic sovereignty would merely become unaffordable and therefore
seen as a failure because it would either be inadequate (if unfunded) or
too much of a burden on the existing budget (if there are no new taxes).

The CoronaShock has exacerbated the problems of unemployment,
precariousness, and hunger. What was being considered as a solution to the
recurring crisis of unemployment under capitalism – a UBI – has now become
a measure for the emergency crisis occasioned by the COVID-19 disease. Once
more, neoliberals and the far right are quite happy with a one-time cash
payment to both mollify anger amongst the precariously employed and the
unemployed and to provide money to stimulate demand for stalled businesses;
there is little appetite for a genuine UBI scheme that would put a floor
under the working class.

Certainly, there is grave danger in many parts of the world of the
unemployment crisis imminently becoming a crisis of greater hunger and
famine. Urgent relief measures are of the essence, including cash transfers
and public food distribution; in a time of emergency, all measures must be
utilised to prevent avoidable suffering.

[image: Ezrena Marwan, Labour (2020)]

*Objects and labour*
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Ezrena Marwan <https://www.instagram.com/ez.rena/> / Malaysia Design Archive
<https://www.instagram.com/designarchive/>
A scene of a private hospital in Klang Valley, Malaysia, at the heart of
Covid-19 pandemic. As a preventive measure, Malaysia is under the Movement
Control Order (MCO), which saw spaces shut down and emptied out, except for
frontline workers: healthcare, janitorial, and food delivery workers –
among others.
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