IV544 - May 2020

Socially-distanced street protests, moves to impeach a president – Latin America has begun to lead the way, not only in the gravity of the Coronavirus crisis, but in the scale and character of the resistance that social movements are mounting.

The uprisings and demonstrations in Minneapolis and other cities including in front of the White House that followed the brutal May 25th killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man by white Minneapolis police officers and the hesitation of local and federal prosecutors to immediately arrest the cops who had been videoed in the act comes on the heels of several other recent and widely reported cases of racist violence. By May 30, demonstrations had spread to scores of cities attended by multiracial protestors many of whom were young, masked and seemingly trying to maintain social distancing as they moved through the streets. Some seemed to have been mobilized by local or national organizations, while others were moved to mobilize by the video images of the killing and protests elsewhere. Floyd’s murder is the latest in a string of cop killings of Black men dating back to at least the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 and even further back to the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police in 1991, one of the first such police beatings captured on film.

Thousands of protesters gathered in Causeway Bay at 1pm today. Again, it was called by online anonymous people. There was no proper organiser. What was more was that this was an illegal march. But thousands arrived at the streets nevertheless.

Several weeks ago, the British and international media reported that “Eastern European” workers are being flown into the UK, and other European countries such as Germany, to perform “vital” work such as picking fruit and vegetables on large industrial farms. This news, however, has fallen on death ears. So far, there has been no wide public recognition of the vitality of their labor. Unlike other essential frontline workers—particularly healthcare staff who have been publicly and politically praised as heroes of our time—there will be no claps for these farm workers. With some media not even mentioning the specific countries of their origin, such as Romania and Bulgaria, in the public discourse, these workers are not even people with nationalities—just bodies flown on charter planes from the poor regions of “Eastern Europe”.

This letter is addressed to all who defend humanity across borders. The Covid-19 pandemic attacks all human beings without regards for nationality, ethnicity, or social class. But the vast majority of the population, those who are not part of the privileged 1 percent, are infinitely more vulnerable. Almost every government in the world has taken health, economic, and political measures to confront this tragedy, but in the absence of a vaccine, social distancing is the most important method for saving lives.

One of the most disturbing phenomena of recent years is the spectacular rise, worldwide, of far right-wing, authoritarian and reactionary governments, in some cases with neo-fascist traits: Shinzo Abe (Japan), Modi (India), Trump (USA), Orban (Hungary) and Bolsonaro (Brazil) are the best known examples. It is not surprising that several of them reacted absurdly to the coronavirus pandemic, dramatically denying or underestimating the danger. This was the case of Trump in the first weeks, and of his English disciple, Boris Johnson, who even proposed to let the whole population become infected with the virus, in order for “herd immunity” to take effect in the entire nation – of course, at the cost of a few hundred thousand deaths. But in the face of the crisis, both had to retreat and in the case of Boris Johnson, he became seriously ill himself.

The Swiss Federal Council reopened the country’s schools on 11 May 2020, in a context of great uncertainty about health and educational conditions. SolidaritéS spoke to Raphaël Ramuz, head of the education sector of the Public Services Union (SSP) in the canton of Vaud.

It’s not been an easy time for anyone on the left in Britain,

The pandemic and the appalling way the #ToxicTories have responded to it are obviously dominating most of our waking – and often sleeping – lives.

A 2018 World Health Organisation (WHO) report noted, with regard to the health system in Morocco, that “the public sector includes 2,689 primary health care centres and 144 hospitals at different levels: local, provincial, regional and tertiary. The total number of hospital beds is 22,146. The private sector is made up of 6,763 private practices and 439 clinics, concentrated in urban areas and in the north on the Atlantic coast… The density is 0.68 doctors and 0.84 nurses and midwives per thousand inhabitants. In addition… investment in the health sector remains low (less than 6% of GDP) and direct household spending high (around 54%)”. We are far from the standard established by the WHO, which stipulates that one doctor is needed for 650 inhabitants and that health should account for 10-12% of the state budget.

Sometimes a significant crisis enables us to see things that often remain hidden or ignored in our everyday lives. Not that women needed to be reminded as they have lived with the situation for all of their lives; however, we are witnessing how essential are the traditional roles of women in the societies in which we live and this is the case irrespective of how developed the capitalist economic system is, or isn’t. The separation between paid and unpaid labour in the home has been laid bare and even more so the societal (and ruling class) perception of the value of that labour has been revealed.